The Obama Administration is struggling to find a cost effective way to shift Guantanamo Bay detainees to prisons on the U.S. mainland. Meanwhile, Puerto Rico is struggling through an unprecedented fiscal and economic crisis. These two problems could create a unique policy opportunity: to save federal taxpayer dollars and boost the Puerto Rican economy, move the detainees to the Commonwealth rather than to the mainland U.S.

A lot has been said about the debt of more than $70 billion Puerto Rico owes to  investors, but how much does Washington owe us for obligating us to use the United States Merchant Marine for a century, the most expensive and inefficient in the world? The most conservative figures show an annual additional cost of some $500 million for using the Merchant Marine to transport our food.

Oscar López Rivera has served 34 years in US prisons for seditious conspiracy - in other words, for his commitment to the independence of Puerto Rico - though he wasn't convicted of hurting or killing anyone. Since 1898, when the US militarily invaded and occupied Puerto Rico, there hasn't been a single decade in which there hasn't been an independentista imprisoned. But it is unusual that López Rivera has served so many years - longer by far than any other Puerto Rican independentista in history, longer than his codefendants, longer than offenders convicted of violence and longer than the 27 years served by the world's most renowned political prisoner, Nelson Mandela.

It used to be the Free Associated State of Puerto Rico was touted as the Showcase of Progress and Democracy in the Caribbean as a result of its accelerated industrialization, the development of its infrastructure, education and health systems and a constitutional system of government in the 1950s and 60s.