The attorneys of accused Cleveland kidnapper Ariel Castro announced that their client would plead not guilty today in a case which has drawn attention to the city's large Puerto Rican community. Community leaders continue to express concern that the alleged crimes might be too closely linked in the public mind to the city's growing Hispanic and Puerto Rican minority. Initially attracted to the region in the 1940s for what were then abundant job opportunities in the steel and auto industries, Hispanics account for about 10 percent of the population of a city whose numbers have dipped over the decades from over 1 million at its peak to around 400,000 today.
Since 2000, the Latino population has grown by 30 percent in Cuyahoga County, of which Cleveland is the seat. As of 2011, they had reached over 62,000 in number -- about 77 percent of which is Puerto Rican, though others hail from across the Caribbean, and Central and South America, according to Global Cleveland, a regional economic development organization.
Jose Feliciano, chairman of the Hispanic Roundtable, which works to promote economic development, education and empowerment of the Puerto Rican and Hispanic community in Cleveland, condemned the alleged crimes. "He makes my life and the life of a lot of other people working on these issues harder," he told the Latin Times.
Feliciano said that his group was fighting a potential redistricting of heavily Hispanic Ward 14 and underscored the community's marginalization by pointing out that not a single one of Cleveland's 19 council members were Hispanic, despite the fact that the group makes up 10 percent of the population.
Feliciano also made reference to a reporter who, at the press conference during which authorities announced the charges, asked if Castro, of Puerto Rican descent, was an American citizen. Puerto Ricans have been U.S. citizens since 1917, when President Woodrow Wilson signed the Jones-Shafroth Act, making Puerto Rico a U.S. possession.
At that same conference, city prosecutor Victor Perez took pains to disassociate Cleveland's Puerto Rican community from the alleged crimes.
"As the chief prosecutor for the city of Cleveland, born and raised in Puerto Rico, I want everyone to know that the acts of the defendant in this criminal case are not a reflection of the rest of the Puerto Rican community here or in Puerto Rico," he said then.
Puerto Rican newspaper El Nuevo Dia reported last week that the islands' governor, Alejandro García Padilla, came out strongly against associating the kidnapping with Puerto Rican communities, calling it "offensive."
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