The campaign to free Puerto Rican nationalist Oscar López Rivera, a political prisoner confined in a US federal penitentiary since 1981, has dominated various sectors of Puerto Rican activism for the last decade. The 34 Mujeres Por Oscar has been a fixture at Union Squre Park and other locations around New York for years, and when the Supreme Court legalized gay marriage in 2015, posters of Oscar festooned with a rainbow-pride flag around San Juan were ubiquitous.

So when President Obama announced on Tuesday that he was commuting López Rivera’s sentence and permitting his release in May, it set off an outpouring of emotion on the island and the many urban centers where the diaspora lives.

The jubilation over López Rivera’s commutation — not a pardon, but a curtailing of his sentence —  has cut across all political tendencies in Puerto Rico, from the socialist left to the Green-ish Independence Party to the centrist Popular Democratic Party to the increasingly hard-right Statehood Party.