During the Spanish-American War, U.S. armed forces under the command of General Nelson A. Miles invaded Puerto Rico on July 25, 1898, and took possession of the Island.
Using submarines (“U-boote,” in German) in the Caribbean to attack and stop the flow of war supplies from the Caribbean to the United States and Great Britain, two of Nazi Germany’s enemies, was a strategy to win World War II (1939-1945) put into action by Grand Admiral Karl Döenitz.
The observance of May Day originated in the era when capitalism began to become the dominant socio-economic system in England, in the last third of the 18th century.
The increased speed and size of the merchant ships of the late 19th century allowed the spread in Puerto Rico of a little-remembered pandemic, the bubonic plague.
In 1918, in the midst of a massive mobilization of troops in World War I, an epidemic of influenza AH1N1 began to spread and led to a brief but lethal pandemic.