Biography
Clemente Soto Vélez was a Puerto Rican poet, journalist and organizer for the Nationalist Party. He helped found the avant-garde Atalaya de los Dioses movement and edited the pro-independence newspaper Armas. He was jailed during the 1934 sugar-workers strike and again in the 1936 federal seditious-conspiracy prosecution of Nationalist leaders. Initially held at La Princesa in San Juan, he was transferred to the federal penitentiary in Atlanta in 1937. He returned to Puerto Rico on parole in 1940 but was arrested again for violating its restrictions and spent a further period in prison, gaining release in 1942. He settled in New York, organized with the American Labor Party and mentored Puerto Rican writers and artists. He died on April 15, 1993.
Page 1 prints a photograph of Erasmo Velasquez, Clemente Soto Velez and Julio H. Velasquez behind bars at San Juan, explicitly identifying them left to right. The caption calls them three of eight Puerto Rican Nationalists convicted in federal court on conspiracy-to-overthrow accusations and says they were lodged there before transfer to mainland federal prisons. It describes their demand for independence from U.S. rule. This provides a contemporaneous jail photograph and location corroboration; the prospective transfer is not treated as a completed transfer date. Existing portraits and the independently documented later Atlanta history are preserved. Source: https://dailyiowan.lib.uiowa.edu/DI/1936/di1936-08-07.pdf
Gerald Meyer’s 2010 Centro Journal study places this defendant among the eight Nationalists sentenced in the 1936 federal conspiracy prosecution. It reports the first jury deadlock on July 14, 1936, October denial of appeal bail and appellate affirmance on February 12, 1937, followed by transfer from San Juan municipal jail to Atlanta. It describes English-only correspondence and restricted family visits in the exile imprisonment. These collective procedural and conditions details do not establish a new arrest, individual gate-release date or completed sentence duration. Source: https://www.redalyc.org/pdf/377/37722223004.pdf#page=9
The chronology credited to Benjamín Torres and Rosa Meneses Albizu names this defendant among the eight Nationalists tried in 1936. It identifies Robert Cooper as presiding judge and A. Cecil Snyder, Marcelino Romaní, Jorge Ortiz Toro, James E. Ruffin and Amos W. W. Woodcock as prosecutors. It distinguishes a first jury that could not agree from a second trial that returned a guilty verdict. The chronology also records the eight prisoners’ transfer to the Atlanta penitentiary on June 7, 1937; that is a transfer within the already recorded imprisonment, not a new first-admission date.
The Daily Iowan, August 7, 1936; relevant page stated in the accompanying profile note.
The Cuban committee’s April 12, 1939 manifesto individually lists him as actually confined at Atlanta. This is contemporary prison-location evidence, not an admission date, a completed sentence or a new arrest. The pamphlet was published in December 1939 and reprints documents of several different dates. The August30 appeal names the three as editors of La Nación Puertorriqueña, La Palabra and Armas respectively. The February27 DOJ reply (PDF48) only promises consideration if an executive-clemency application is made; it grants no pardon or release.
