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Sometimes Hernandez Cruz illustrates the United States' tense relationships with its Caribbean neighbors from the American point of view, as frustrated gringos try to navigate terrains that work by different rules than theirs. In "Problems with Colonialism," a poem included in the "Islandis: The Age of Seashells" section of Hernandez Cruz's Rhythm, Content, and Flavor: New and Selected Poems (1988), a North American dirty with tropicsinduced diarrhea finds his toilet paper stolen as he sits in the blacked-out darkness of his San Juan hotel room. Frustrated and spiteful, the tourist decides to use what he thinks is a hotel blanket to clean himself, only to find when the lights come back on that he has soiled his own white shirt that he had left on the bed. While the scatology of the scene might drive some readers to reject the poem for what they perceive as simple, crass irony, the piece's larger implied statement seems difficult to dismiss-for good or ill, through colonial rule the United States has bound its future to Puerto Rico's at some fundamental level. Any underhandedness toward its colonies will surely undermine the United States itself, and Hernandez Cruz's poetry offers a powerful reminder of this link.