AGUADILLA, Puerto Rico (AP) -- Blinking in the midday glare of the Caribbean sun, Puerto Rican independence fighter Edwin Cortes has the hesitant way of a man who has fallen asleep for 16 years and awakened to a different world.
Everything has changed since he went to prison on sedition charges in 1983. His hair, once jet-black, has absorbed the gray of a half-dozen prison cells. His brother has become a paraplegic. The 6-year-old daughter he left behind now teaches grade school in Phoenix.And the struggle that he once waged in secret, building bombs in Chicago safehouses and planning jailbreaks for fellow guerrillas, has thrust this former high school counselor into the dual roles of hero and pariah.
"There's a lot of adjustment I've got to do," Cortes, 44, said in an interview just days after his release from prison.
Cars paraded along the seaside boulevard that runs past his family's home in northwestern Aguadilla. One slowed down, and a stranger popped her head out. "Welcome!" she shouted. Cortes waved shyly.
President Clinton infuriated U.S. law enforcement officials and many in Congress by pardoning Cortes and other members of the Armed Forces for National Liberation. The Puerto Rican independence group was blamed for 130 U.S. bomb attacks in the 1970s and 1980s that killed six people and wounded dozens.
To qualify for clemency, all agreed to renounce violence. That didn't satisfy Congress, which voted overwhelmingly to censure Clinton.
With much bombast, several congressional committees plan hearings on the president's clemency decision. Leaders across the board are accusing Clinton of being soft on terrorism.
"They're just trying to get political mileage out of us," sighed Cortes. "Believe me, we paid more than enough."
Like other nationalists, Cortes wants the United States to grant independence to Puerto Rico, which it seized from Spain during the Spanish-American War.
The island's 4 million residents are U.S. citizens and serve in the military. They receive billions in federal funds but don't pay federal taxes. They cannot vote for president and have no vote in Congress.
A Chicago native, Cortes came upon the independence movement in the 1970s. Like other Puerto Rican radicals in the United States, Cortes said he became a nationalist after suffering anti-Hispanic racism.
He traces his "independentista" leanings to a high school teacher who told him she would teach no Puerto Rican history because the island -- settled five centuries ago by the Spanish and centuries before that by Taino Indians -- had no history.
"I'll never forget that," Cortes said. "It made me so mad. When I graduated, I gave her a Puerto Rican flag and a Puerto Rican history book."
As a teenager, Cortes and his older brother, Julio, joined the movement to free five Puerto Rican nationalists who had been imprisoned for a shooting attack on the U.S. House of Representatives and trying to kill President Harry Truman in the 1950s. They were pardoned in 1979.
After graduating from the University of Illinois in 1979 with a degree in political science, Cortes became a high school counselor and his pro-independence work became more clandestine.
In Chicago and New York, the Armed Forces, known as the FALN, was bombing department stores, banks, military offices, restaurants, a Holiday Inn, a post office and other government buildings. The group's most famous attack was a 1975 explosion in Fraunces Tavern, a historic restaurant in New York's Greenwich Village, that killed four people and injured 60.
Cortes will not say whether he was a member of the FALN, but he says he knew the other members and calls them colleagues.
He will not say whether the FBI was right when it accused him and other members of planning to spring nationalists Oscar Lopez and Luis Rivera out of prison in the early 1980s. But he admits he would have tried. "We felt at that time we had an obligation to free them from prison," he said.
And he will not say if he was involved in any bombings. But he admits that the FBI videotaped him making a bomb in a safe house, allegedly to attack an Army recruiting center and Marine training facility on July 4, 1983. He and two other nationalists were arrested with guns, blasting caps and 26 pounds of dynamite.
Asked if he was sorry for the deaths and injuries, Cortes was quiet for a moment.
"In all national liberation struggles, some people have been injured, and we have regretted that," he said. "I have made a promise to renounce violence, and I'm going to stand by it."
Cortes spent 16 years in federal prisons. Visits by his wife, Alva, and two children were bittersweet. Julio, his brother, was injured in a car crash while coming to visit and is now confined to a wheelchair.
Freed on Sept. 11, Cortes and eight other nationalists chose to live in Puerto Rico. "I don't think I could take living up there," Cortes said.
But a normal life could be elusive in Aguadilla, where limestone cliffs and mild sea breezes offer little shelter from political storms.
Activists working to force the U.S. Navy out of a controversial training ground in Puerto Rico want them to join that cause as well. Cortes says he is willing.
"I'm going to keep working for the things that I've always believed in," he said. "But it's going to be peacefully and democratically."
Another passing car honked its horn in greeting. This time, Cortes straightened and smiled.
"Thanks!" he called out.