Two more Caribbean authors and a few final cups of coffee and tea; first in Puerto Rico, thence back to Trinidad.

He is best known as a statesman and politician, but Puerto Rico’s first elected governor, Luis Munoz Marin, was also a gifted writer (in English and in Spanish). While his poems were, at best, second rate — “Her hair was as the gold on sunset heights,” yada, yada — his prose could reach exquisitely poetic notes.

I invite my students to have coffee with the former governor. We read his muckraking essay, “The Sad Case of Porto Rico” published in The American Mercury in 1929. It is an impassioned defense of Puerto Rico’s culture and an indictment on U.S. efforts to americanize the island’s economy and the culture of its people.

Munoz Marin uses the transfer of Puerto Rico from Spain to the United States in 1898 — incidentally, the year of his birth — as a watershed to juxtapose an idealized world under Spanish colonial rule and what he deemed an assault on the island’s recently-aquired autonomy: “Regional autonomy had been granted by Spain, and a native Cabinet with a native Premier (he does not name him, but it was his father) ruled the green fields and polychromatic towns.”

The young muckraker held romantic views of the “jibaros,” the predominantly white peasantry of the island’s mountainous interior, who “In the old days … owned a few pigs and chickens, maybe a horse or a cow, some goats, and in some way had the use of a patch of soil.” Peasant men, Munoz Marin nostalgically writes, “tumbled out of hammocks pulling up their trousers for the day, and barefooted women in terribly starched dresses of many colors began preparing strong coffee in iron kettles and serving it steaming in polished cocoanut shells.”

Of course, Munoz Marin drank coffee, patriotically so. He drank it in bohemian cafes in Greenwich Village, in Guayama’s Cafe Paris, where artists and intellectuals congregated, and in the humble, thatch-roofed homes of peasants during his political campaigns in the most remote corners of the interior. He expressed concern about the americanization of the island’s coffee shops, which increasingly looked “like glittering American beaneries.”

In almost every paragraph, Munoz Marin’s prose bursts into flashes of poetry. The island is “a land of beggars and millionaires, of flattering statistics and distressing realities.” There are “many more schools,” he writes with irony and sorrow, “for their hungry children and many more roads for their bare feet.”

Elected governor in 1948, and reelected in 1952, 1956 and 1960, Munoz Marin led the island’s quasi-miraculous processes of modernization, industrialization and urbanization. When he announced his decision not to run again in 1964, amid shouts of disapproval, he said with his characteristic caudillo firmnes, “I am leaving a fortress to return to the trails and bateyes of Puerto Rico … to the mountain sides and the plazas and to the soul of our people.” Years later, in his memoir, Munoz Marin remarked with some regret and a bit of grammatical poetic license: “I have created bourgeoisie. I am lonely of jibaros.”

A couple of final sips; back to tea; back to the English-speaking Caribbean; back to Naipaul’s Trinidad. I invite my students to have tea with another literature Nobel laureate, Derek Walcott from the island of Saint Lucia; an island measuring only 238 square miles; “a small place” as Jamaica Kincaid would call it. But in per-capita terms, Saint Lucia has the largest or second-largest rate (pick your source: Wikipedia or the Guinness Book of World Records) of Nobel Prize winners (2 in 180,000).

In class we read “The Antilles: Fragments of Memory,” Walcott’s 1992 Nobel Prize acceptance speech. Tea with Walcott? Certainly, but it must be of the Darjeeling variety with milk, seasoned with assorted aromatic Indian spices, as we are having it in the predominantly Indian town of Felicity in Trinidad.

“The Antilles” is a poetic philosophical descriptive narrative that takes the reader to Ramleela, a dramatization of the Ramayana, a Hindu epic poem, celebrated in Felicity (population under 20,000). The festival’s center piece is the burning in effigy of a giant Hindu god, which “like the cane burning harvest,” Walcott tells us, “is annually repeated.”

Along the way, Walcott showers readers with an unending cascade of metaphors. In his eyes, flames of fire are the color of saffron; the scarlet ibises that fly above him at dusk are “arrowing flocks”; and to his ears the sound coming out of the festival loudspeakers is “sinuous drumming.”

One day, after a class discussion of Walcott’s speech, a student came up to me, a beaming smile painted on her face: “Professor, I am Trinidadian, from Felicity.” And to think that she had to migrate 1800 miles to central Florida to discover the universality and poetry of her hometown’s Hindu festival.

That is precisely why I read and write, and why I invite my students to have coffee (or tea) with the author.

Luis Martinez-Fernandez is the author of “Revolutionary Cuba: A History” and “Key to the New World: A History of Early Colonial Cuba.” Readers can reach him at LMF_Column@yahoo.com. To find out more about Luis Martinez-Fernandez and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www. creators.com.