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Teodoro Moscoso and Puerto Rico's Operation Bootstrap. By A. W. Maldonado. (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1997. xiv, 262 pp. $49.95, ISBN 0-8130-1501-4.)
The Puerto Rican journalist A. W. Maldonado presents a most flattering portrayal of Teodoro Moscoso, the engineer of the island's industrialization program in the 1940s and 1950s known as Operation Bootstrap. Moscoso's success earned him appointments as United States ambassador to Venezuela and subsequently coordinator of the Alliance for Progress. But success in these tasks, like success in his final involvement in Puerto Rican politics, evaded Moscoso because of external factors.
The son of Spanish parents who migrated to Puerto Rico, Moscoso was expected to follow his father's footsteps in pharmacy, but idealism directed him into government service. Moscoso maintained that Puerto Rico would never escape...