Culebra and the Navy protests

The U.S. Navy's presence in Culebra began decades before this era, when President Theodore Roosevelt established the Culebra Naval Reservation on June 26, 1903. By 1939, the Navy was using the small Culebra archipelago as an artillery and bombing-practice range, and its use only intensified over time. Naval exercises at Culebra peaked in 1969, supporting fleet preparation for deployments tied to the Vietnam War era, which means that a small Puerto Rican island was absorbing live-fire training tied to a war being fought thousands of miles away.

Residents began organized resistance in 1971, in what became known as the Navy-Culebra protests, led by Rubén Berríos, president of the Puerto Rican Independence Party and a University of Puerto Rico law professor. The protesters built an ecumenical chapel on Flamenco Beach as a physical and symbolic act of resistance, a joint effort led by Catholic bishop Antulio Parrilla Bonilla, a Baptist minister, and a Quaker Action Committee organizer, an unusual interfaith coalition for a protest movement of this scale.

The civil disobedience carried real legal risk. Berríos and other protesters were arrested for illegal entry onto U.S. military territory during the actions they organized, choosing arrest as a deliberate tactic rather than as an accident of circumstance. The strategy worked. The U.S. Navy discontinued its artillery range at Culebra in 1975, and moved all those operations to the neighboring island of Vieques instead, directly setting up the much larger and longer conflict that would consume Vieques over the following decades, covered as this site's closing chapter.

Culebra has not forgotten the fight. The island's municipal seal today includes a laurel cross that references, in its official description, "the civic triumph reached when Culebra obtained the evacuation of the United States Navy," a permanent civic marker of a protest movement that truly won.

Sources: Culebra, Puerto Rico. See Sources. Freeze 2026-08-22.