Biography
Rafael Cancel Miranda was 23 years old at the time of the March 1, 1954 attack on the U.S. House of Representatives, the youngest of the four. He had previously served two years in federal prison for refusing the draft in protest against U.S. colonial rule of Puerto Rico. After the Capitol attack he was sentenced to 84 years in federal prison; he served 25 years and was held at the United States Penitentiary in Leavenworth and at Marion before President Carter commuted his sentence in 1979. He spent the rest of his life as one of the most articulate spokespersons for Puerto Rican independence and prisoner solidarity worldwide.
On March 1, 1954, four members of the Puerto Rican Nationalist Party — Lolita Lebrón, Rafael Cancel Miranda, Andrés Figueroa Cordero, and Irvin Flores Rodríguez — entered the U.S. Capitol, took seats in the visitors' gallery overlooking the House chamber, unfurled a Puerto Rican flag, and opened fire on the Representatives below. Thirty rounds were fired in roughly thirty seconds; five Representatives were wounded but all survived. The attack was timed to draw international attention to the Inter-American Conference of the Organization of American States then opening in Caracas, and to challenge the U.S. claim that Puerto Rico had become a self-governing 'commonwealth.' All four were arrested at the scene, tried in federal court in Washington, D.C. and again in New York for related conspiracy charges, and sentenced to consecutive terms amounting effectively to life in federal prison. President Jimmy Carter commuted Andrés Figueroa Cordero's sentence in October 1977 (he was terminally ill with cancer and died in 1979); Carter commuted the remaining three sentences on September 6, 1979. They returned to Puerto Rico to a crowd estimated at 5,000 at San Juan International Airport.
Workers World describes Rafael Cancel Miranda’s twenty-five years in United States prisons after the 1954 House of Representatives attack. This rounded historical description is not used to replace precise independently sourced custody dates. Workers World, October 5, 2006, vol.48 no.39, original PDF page 11. Source: https://www.workers.org/pdf/2006/ww100506.pdf#page=11
In his November 1991 speech, Cancel Miranda recalled five months of isolation at Leavenworth after a prison strike and eighteen months in Marion’s Control Unit. He attributed those conditions to retaliation for organizing.
In an August 1986 interview, Cancel Miranda recalled arriving at Marion in early 1971 and remaining there until 1979. This was a transfer within his already documented imprisonment.
The grand-jury article names CancelMiranda as one of the Puerto Rican nationalists imprisoned for the1954 House attack and explains the Chicago school bearing his name. This corroborates ongoing imprisonment and defense context, without a new term or exact endpoint.
Dávila Marichal identifies Cancel Miranda among six Mayagüez cadets actually sent to Tallahassee prison for refusal of military service in a prosecution it places in 1948. It gives him an imposed sentence of two years and one day, without exact admission or discharge. The source’s anachronistic Korean War explanation is omitted and the nominal sentence is not counted as completed service.
José Manuel Dávila Marichal, Organizando la revolución: El Ejército Libertador del Partido Nacionalista de Puerto Rico y la insurrección nacionalista de 1950 (Universidad Autónoma de Madrid doctoral thesis, 2020), physical/printed page 370; SHA256 be07767792e7789d4683e0c5787caac280ca95b7f4c93adf2fbfbab5e7a48eb4.
