On January 2, 1949, Luis Muñoz Marín became Puerto Rico’s first independently-elected governor. Puerto Rico had been governed by Spain for more than three centuries before it was annexed to the United States in 1898. For the next fifty years, its governor was appointed by America’s president. In 1946, President Harry S. Truman appointed the island’s first full-time Puerto Rican governor – Jesús T. Piñero.