Rafael Cancel Miranda
On March 1, 1954, Cancel Miranda and three other Nationalists (Lolita Lebrón, Andrés Figueroa Cordero, and Irvin Flores Rodríguez) attacked the House of Representatives while it was in session at the United States Capitol building, firing 30 shots and injuring five Congressmen.
[3] Upon learning of the planned protest, however, the colonial Governor of Puerto Rico at the time, General Blanton Winship, who had been appointed by US President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, demanded the immediate withdrawal of the permits.
Leopold Tormes, a member of the Puerto Rico legislature, told reporters how a policeman murdered a nationalist with his bare hands.
[7] The white nurse's uniform of Cancel Miranda's mother was soaked with blood as she crawled over bodies in search of her husband.
After the family returned home, Cancel Miranda committed his first political act in his first grade class in school when he refused to salute the American flag which at the time was mandatory.
[2] As a cadet, Cancel Miranda went to welcome Albizu Campos in December 1947, when the Nationalist Party leader returned from the United States after serving out a ten-year prison sentence – first in the U.S. penitentiary in Atlanta, then in New York – on charges of conspiracy to overthrow the U.S. government and "inciting rebellion" against it.
Following World War II, there was widespread resistance to Washington's attempt to impose English as the main language of instruction in Puerto Rico's schools.
Believing that he was to be drafted by the US Military and that he would once again face a prison term for refusing, Cancel Miranda followed the advice of his wife and his sister Zoraida and went into a self exile in Cuba.
The United States embassy learned about it and demanded that the Prío Socarrás government turn him over along with another Puerto Rican, Reynaldo Trilla, but the Cuban authorities ignored them.
[10] Aracelio Azcuy, a politician of the Civil Damages Office and supporter of Prío Socarrás, used to ask Cancel Miranda to campaign for him, to write his speeches.
In New York, he met fellow Nationalists Lolita Lebrón, a sewing machine operator, Irvin Flores Rodríguez, a furniture factory employee and Andrés Figueroa Cordero, who worked in a butcher shop.
Albizu Campos had been corresponding with 34-year-old Lolita Lebrón from prison and chose a group of nationalists who included Cancel Miranda, Irvin Flores Rodríguez and Andrés Figueroa Cordero to attack locations in Washington, D.C.
[12] Lebrón intended to call attention to Puerto Rico's independence cause, particularly among the Latin American countries participating in the conference.
[14] Cancel Miranda and the other members of the group were the only defense witnesses, as part of Lebrón's testimony she reaffirmed that they "came to die for the liberty of her homeland".
Figueroa Cordero was sent to the federal penitentiary in Atlanta; Lebrón to the women's prison in Alderson, West Virginia; and Flores Rodríguez to Leavenworth, Kansas, where Oscar Collazo, who in 1950 attacked the Blair House in a failed attempt to assassinate US President Harry S. Truman, was incarcerated.
Cancel Miranda, considered to be the primary shooter, received a prison sentence of 85 years and was sent to Alcatraz in the San Francisco Bay.
In 1970, he, Andrés Figueroa Cordero (he was transferred from the federal penitentiary in Atlanta), Irvin Flores Rodríguez and Oscar Collazo organized a prisoners' strike to protest their treatment by the guards.
During his imprisonment, in Leavenworth, a photo from a local newspaper reminded him of one of his Cuban experiences, which allowed him to recognize that a genuine revolution was taking place in that country.
[10] Cancel Miranda was transferred to the Marion Penitentiary, a Federal Bureau of Prisons facility located in Southern Precinct, unincorporated Williamson County, Illinois.
Every September 16, Cancel Miranda would join the Mexican and Chicano prisoners in marking Mexico's independence day with a work stoppage.
An Afro-American prisoner named Ed Johnson wrote to Michael Deutsch, a lawyer, and invited him to visit the Control Unit.
[8][20] In 1979, President Jimmy Carter commuted the sentence of Cancel Miranda, Lolita Lebrón and Irving Flores Rodríguez after they had served 25 years in prison.
[22] President Carter also commuted the sentence of fellow nationalist Oscar Collazo, to time served on September 6, 1979, after spending 29 years in jail.
He continued to carry the cause of independence to other countries and returned occasionally to the United States on speaking tours on behalf of Puerto Rican political prisoners.
Irvin Flores Rodríguez, Lolita Lebrón, and Oscar Collazo were recognized as the embodiment of the directive of their teacher Albizu Campos to exercise valor and sacrifice before representatives of fifty-one countries.
[20] A musical production of his poetry, "Por Las Calles de Mi Patria", was well received in Puerto Rico and the rest of the United States.
