B6 EZ RE THE WASHINGTON POST.THURSDAy, MARCH 5 , 2020
obituaries
BY HARRISON SMITHEarly in the afternoon of
March 1, 1954, four Puerto Rican
nationalists smuggled pistols in-
side the U.S. Capitol, entered the
visitors’ gallery at the House of
Representatives and opened fire
on the floor below, where more
than 240 members of Congress
were voting on an immigration
bill.
As the attackers shouted slo-
gans supporting Puerto Rican
independence, attempted to un-
furl a Puerto Rican flag and fired
at random, some representatives
believed that firecrackers had
been set off. Speaker Joseph W.
Martin Jr. (R-Mass.) declared the
House in recess, apparently try-
ing to maintain decorum, and
took cover behind a marble pillar
on the rostrum.
In the frantic minutes before
the assailants were overpowered,
they wounded five congressmen,
all of whom survived. So, too, did
the gunmen, the last of whom —
Rafael Cancel Miranda — died
March 2 at 8 9. Alternately labeled
a terrorist and freedom fighter,
he had devoted his life to the
cause of Puerto Rican indepen-
dence and spent a quarter-centu-
ry behind bars before President
Jimmy Carter commuted his sen-
tence.
His death at home in San Juan,
the U.S. territory’s capital, was
reported by the newspaper El
Nuevo Día and confirmed in a
Facebook post by his son Rafael
Cancel Vázquez, who did not cite
a cause.
While Mr. Cancel Miranda fad-
ed from memory in Washington,
where the Capitol is now heavily
fortified with metal detectors and
police officers, he acquired a
near-mythical status in Puerto
Rico. Appearing in his trademark
white guayabera summer shirt,
he became a fixture of political
rallies, wrote books and refused
to apologize for a mass shooting
that Martin once called “the wild-
est scene in the entire history of
Congress.”
In interviews, Mr. Cancel
Miranda and his gun-wielding
associates — Lolita Lebrón, An-
drés Figueroa Cordero and Irvin
Flores Rodríguez — s aid that they
were fighting to free Puerto Ri-
cans from the yoke of American
co lo ni al ism. The island came un-
der U.S. control after the Spanish-
American War and became a
commonwealth in 1952, although
to Mr. Cancel Miranda and many
others it never achieved true self-
determination.
“We never controlled our own
country,” he told the New York
Times in 2016, as the indepen-
dence movement sought to reas-
sert itself in Puerto Rico. Earlier
that year, Congress created a fi-
nancial oversight panel to man-
age the island’s crippling debt,
drawing accusations that “a dic-
tatorship” was deciding its fate
and leading Gov. Alejandro J.
García Padilla to appear before a
United Nations committee,
where he effectively declared that
Puerto Rico was still a U.S. colony.
M r. C ancel Miranda, who stood
more than 6 feet tall but was
known by the diminutive nick-name Pito, was immersed in the
independence movement from a
young age. The son of a business-
man and fiery Nationalist Party
leader, he spent two years in a
Florida prison after refusing to
join the Army and was said to
have listened to radio reports
from behind bars as anti-colonial
revolts rocked Puerto Rico in- Later that year, followers of
Harvard-educated nationalist Pe-
dro Albizu Campos tried to assas-
sinate President Harry S. Tru-
man.
Commonwealth status for the
island soon followed, and in 1953
the United Nations removed
Puerto Rico from its list of “non-
self-governing territories.”
“That’s when the nationalists
said, ‘We have to send a mes-
sage,’ ” Mr. Cancel Miranda told
the Times. “That was the reason
for the attack on Congress.”
The shooting was reportedly
orchestrated by Lebrón, who lat-
er said that she and her fellow
attackers “went to die, not to kill.”
A note found in her purse called
her group’s actions “a cry for
victory in our struggle for inde-
pendence.” Mr. Cancel Miranda,
who was by then living in Brook-
lyn, said that he had made his
peace with death, and assumed
he would never see his children
again after buying a one-way
train ticket to Washington.
After lunching at Union Sta-
tion, he and his fellow assailants
got lost, asked a pedestrian fordirections and eventually made
their way to the Capitol. A securi-
ty guard asked if they were carry-
ing cameras before allowing
them into the House gallery,
where they were seated near a
group of sixth-grade students and
soon began firing Lugers and an
automatic pistol as Lebrón yelled,
“Viva Puerto Rico Libre!”
Roughly 16 shots were fired,
according to a congressional his-
tory, before the attackers were
subdued by a group including
Rep. James E. Van Zandt (R-Pa.),
then handcuffed and dragged be-
fore reporters on the Capitol
steps.
“A f ew g angsters can’t b reak up
the friendship of great nations,”
Martin said the next day, as Puer-to Rico’s governor repudiated the
attack and politicians urged uni-
ty.
All five injured congressmen
returned to the House, and the
assailants received sentences
that threatened to keep them
behind bars until their deaths.
Mr. Cancel Miranda, who said
that most of the wounded “got
hurt by my gun,” was sent to
Alcatraz in San Francisco Bay and
later to prisons in Kansas and
Illinois.
His sentence was commuted in
1979, along with those of Lebrón,
Flores and Oscar Collazo, who
had tried to assassinate Truman.
(Figueroa Cordero had been re-
leased two years earlier after
being diagnosed with terminal
cancer.)
Newspaper accounts suggest-
ed their release was part of a
prisoner swap for CIA agents
jailed in Cuba — the Carter ad-
ministration cited “humane con-
siderations” — and the former
prisoners embarked on a tour
through the United States, ap-
pearing before crowds in Chicago
and New York.
While the popularity of the
nationalist movement dimin-
ished during his prison term, Mr.
Cancel Miranda insisted that he
would continue to back violent
actions in support of indepen-
dence if necessary.
“I’ll work for the revolution
until I die,” he told The Washing-
ton Post after his release, “and if
I’m lucky I may find a little time to
sing to the children.”
Mr. Cancel Miranda was born
in Mayagüez, on Puerto Rico’s
western coast, on July 18, 1930.
His mother died when he was a
child, and his father ran a furni-
ture store while periodically host-
ing Albizu Campos at the family
home. Complete information on
survivors was not immediately
available.
On Facebook, Mr. Cancel
Miranda’s son Rafael recalled
once asking his father how he
managed to get on the train to
Washington, despite knowing he
would probably be killed.
“The love, the love I feel for
you, for your mom, for all Puerto
Ricans,” Mr. Cancel Miranda re-
plied. “Courage is born of love
and I love my people. I am Puerto
Rican and for you I give my life. I
prefer to hug and recite verses,
but if the moment requires bul-
lets, I would do it again.”
[email protected]RAFAEL CANCEL MIRANDA, 89
Last of Puerto Rican nationalists who fired on Congress
ASSOCIATED PRESS
Capitol Police officers hold three of the Puerto Rican nationalists who attacked the House and injured five congressmen: Rafael Cancel
Miranda, center, wearing a necktie; Lolita Lebrón, left; and A ndrés Figueroa Cordero, right, who said they were fighting to free Puerto
Rico from U.S. co l o ni al ism. Mr. Cancel Miranda spent 25 years in prison b efore President Jimmy Carter commuted his sentence in 1979.not been any of those when I was
growing up.... I had never even
considered anything realistic.”
Some of her most popular
books were part of the Bingo
Brown series. “If there is such a
thing as a typical American kid,
Bingo Brown is it,” author Fannie
Flagg wrote in a Times review.
“He is funny and bright and
lovable without being preco-
cious,” while also serving as a
vehicle for “serious themes like
puberty, unwanted pregnancy,
changing roles for men and wom-
en in society, etc.”
Mrs. Byars and her husband
were licensed pilots, and they
lived on what her website de-
scribed as an airstrip. “The bot-
tom floor of their house is a
hangar so they can taxi out and
take off, almost from their front
yard,” reads the description of
their home. “The top floor of the
house? Betsy’s studio!”
Her book “Coast to Coast”
(1 992) was about a girl, Birch,
who flies across the country with
her grandfather in his Piper Cub
plane. Mrs. Byars said that she
and her husband took the same
trip, in a plane just like the
grandfather’s, and that every-
thing her characters experienced
had happened to them.
“Every time I sit down to write
a book, I feel like that character in
the old fairy tale who, in order to
survive, has to spin straw into
gold,” she once told a publication
called the School Librarian.
“What I know about spinning
straw is nil, and I have learned
from hard reality that no little
man in a funny suit is going to
pop out of the woodwork to strike
a deal.”
“We authors write the best we
can, with what skills we have,
what tricks we’ve learned,” she
went on to say, “ and then if we are
lucky, v ery lucky, t he straw actual-
ly will be turned into gold, for a
fleeting moment by the miracu-
lous mind of a child.”
[email protected]BY EMILY LANGERBetsy Byars, the author of “The
Summer of the Swans” and other
prizewinning works of children’s
literature drawn from the real
world, with heroes and heroines
who survive their lonely, some-
times broken existence by caring
for one another, died Feb. 26 at
her home in Seneca, S.C. She was
91.
She had complications from a
fall, said her daughter Nan Byars.
Mrs. Byars wrote more than 60
books for those in-between chil-
dren too young to be called big
and too old to be called small. In
her selection of subject matter,
she abided by the old writer’s
dictum to write what one knows,
which meant no wizards or vam-
pires but also no shortage of fear
or triumph.
“I take some kids and throw
them into a crisis and solve the
crisis,” Mrs. Byars once told the
Mini Page, a syndicated newspa-
per supplement for children, al-
though she might have said with
equal honesty that the children
solve the crises themselves.
Among her best-known works
was “The Summer of the Swans”
(1970), which received the New-
bery Medal for excellence in chil-
dren’s literature. The novel cen-
ters on 14-year-old Sara, who
reports that “the peak of my
whole life so far was in third
grade when I got to be milk
monitor.”
Since their mother’s death, she
and her two siblings — a beautiful
older sister and a younger broth-
er who is intellectually disabled
— h ave lived with an aunt in West
Virginia. Captivated by the swans
at a nearby lake, Sara’s brother,
Charlie, leaves the house one
night and becomes lost in the
woods. In her ultimate act of
devotion, Sara finds Charlie,
proving her mettle not only to the
reader but also to herself.
“Betsy Byars has a gift for
exposing the soul of the lost child
— t he damaged, the alienated, the
unloved,” children’s author Mari-
lyn Kaye wrote in a New York
Times review of another book by
Mrs. Byars, “The Glory Girl”
(1 983).
Like many of Mrs. Byars’s
books, “The Summer of the
Swans” was based at least in part
on real life. As a volunteer tutor,
Mrs. Byars had formed meaning-
ful relationships with children
with intellectual disabilities.
Charlie was “not one of the chil-
dren,” she said in her Newbery
acceptance speech, but “the book
would never have been written if I
had not come to know the chil-
dren I was tutoring.”
Mrs. Byars said that after “The
Summer of the Swans” received
the Newbery, she had to install a
larger mailbox to accommodate
all the letters from young readers
and other inquiries she received.
No work, she reported, elicited
more mail than “The Pinballs”
(1977), a novel about three chil-
dren — Carlie, Thomas J and
Harvey, called “pinballs” for what
seems to be their destiny to
bounce around — who are placed
together in a foster home.
In “The Night Swimmers”
(1980), a young girl, Retta, cares
for her two brothers after their
mother dies and their father
takes to the road as a country
singer. The children seek fun —
but also court mortal danger —
with clandestine nighttime
swims in a wealthier neighbor’s
yard. Mrs. Byars said that the
novel, which received a National
Book Award, was inspired by a
friend who worried about the
neighbor children who let them-
selves into her pool when she was
away.
Mrs. Byars received an Edgar
Award from the Mystery Writers
of America for her novel “Wanted... Mud Blossom” (1991), one of
several books about the Blossom
children, whose mother travels
the rodeo circuit where their fa-
ther was killed by a steer. Mud is
the family dog, and his misadven-
tures were inspired in part by
those of Mrs. Byars’s childhood
dog Mac, who was “wanted” for
the murder of a chicken.
She said the book she most
cherished was “The Midnight
Fox” (1968), about a boy, To mmy,
and the love he develops for a
black fox while spending a lonely
summer on his aunt and uncle’s
farm. It was her first book that
included elements of her life, Mrs.
Byars said, and the first that“turned out the way I had hoped
it would.”
“I sometimes think my books
are like scrapbooks of my l ife,” s he
wrote on her website, “because
almost every incident brings back
a memory.
Betsy Alice Cromer was born in
Charlotte on Aug. 7, 1928. Her
father was a textile executive, and
her mother was a homemaker.
She said she did not aspire to
be a writer when she was growing
up. “I had never even seen one,”she wrote in a memoir, “The
Moon and I” (1991), “but their
photographs looked funny, as if
they’d been taken to a taxidermist
and stuffed.”
“This corpselike look, I figured,
came from sitting alone all day in
a room typing, which couldn’t be
good for you,” she continued. “I
was glad there were people will-
ing to do this. I loved books and
didn’t want them to become ex-
tinct. But I cared too much about
myself and my future to consider
becoming one.”
She set out to follow her older
sister as a math major in college
but, deterred by a calculus class,
instead received a bachelor’s de-
gree in English from what is now
Queens University of Charlotte in
1950.
The same year, she married
Edward Ford Byars. In addition
to her husband, of Seneca, survi-
vors include four children, Laurie
Myers of Augusta, Ga., and Betsy
Duffey of Atlanta, who write to-
gether as the Writing Sisters; Nan
Byars of Charlotte; and Guy Ford
Byars of Cincinnati; nine grand-
children; and nine great-grand-
children.
Mrs. Byars’s earliest published
writings were short articles for
women’s magazines and publica-
tions including the Saturday Eve-
ning Post. She began writing chil-
dren’s literature as her own chil-
dren grew up, and she endured
repeated setbacks before her first
book, “Clementine,” was pub-
li shed in 1962, after being reject-
ed by numerous publishers.
By that time, the Byars family
had moved to Morgantown,
W.Va., where Mrs. Byars’s hus-
band taught at West Virginia
University. She enrolled in a
course about children’s l iterature,
later describing it as “one of the
turning points in my career.”
“For the first time I saw the
realistic children’s novel,” she ob-
served in comments for the
Something About the Author Au-
tobiography Series. “There hadBETSY BYARS. 91
Author’s books provided some solace for any child who’s ever felt alone
FAMILY PHOTO
A mong author Betsy Byars’s best-known works was “The Summer
of the Swans” (1970), which received the Newbery Medal for
excellence in children’s literature.