This Was a Dream I Had

Letter from Puerto Rico

Mural, Aibonito. Photo by the author.

Esto fue un sueño que yo tuve Ella se ve bonita aunque a vece' le vaya mal En los ojos una sonrisa aguantándose llorar La espuma de sus orilla' parecieran de champán Son alcohol pa' las herida' pa' la tristeza bailar Son alcohol pa' las herida' porque hay mucho que sanar En el verde monte adentro aún se puede respirar Las nubes están más cerca, con Dios se puede hablar Se oye al jíbaro llorando, otro más que se marchó No quería irse pa' Orlando, pero el corrupto lo echó…

(This was a dream I had She looks pretty even though sometimes things go wrong for her A smile in her eyes holding back her tears The foam on her shores looks like champagne They are alcohol for the wounds to dance to sadness They are alcohol for the wounds because there is much to heal In the green mountains you can still breathe The clouds are closer, you can talk to God You hear the jíbaro crying, another one who left He didn't want to leave for Orlando, but the corrupt threw him out…)

- Bad Bunny, “Lo que le pasó a Hawaii”

I walked under the moonlight in Viejo San Juan for the first time in over three years last Saturday night, as the partiers spilled out of the establishments on Calle San Sebastián, a bomba collective boomed and twirled in the Plaza de Armas and the streets cats lazed along the Callejon del Hospital, where I used to feed them when I lived there.

Along with Haiti and Paris, Puerto Rico has probably been the place in the world that holds the most special place in my heart, and whose beauty and struggle somehow bring up a welter of both intense joy and pleasure and deep sadness that is hard to describe. I first visited the island in 2010 en route to Dominica, amid a romantic breakup that had me really down and felt very perked up by the swirl of hedonistic fun I found in the lanes of Viejo San Juan, where I stayed in a now-shuttered hotel. I had some family history on the island, as well, with my paternal grandparents having lived in the western city of Mayagüez for several years in the 1970s before moving to Sunset Park, Brooklyn after years in Argentina. Lancaster, the small city where I grew up in Pennsylvania, had a large Puerto Rican community (it would expand in the years since) as did Brooklyn, where I lived for the second half of the 1990s. 

I returned in the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Maria in 2017, to find an island devastated and largely abandoned by the federal government, then under the malign sway of Donald Trump’s presidency (and now Trump is back again and far worse than before). In the mountain town of Aibonito, I experienced one of the most touching moments of this period, when a Puerto Rican photographer I was working with and I found ourselves at a restaurant in a lovely old converted colonial building and watched as a band played and the crowd sang along passionately with the lyrics of “Preciosa,” a song made famous by the singer Marc Anthony. Recounting the island’s many charms, from its beaches to its fragrant flowers, it ends with the emotional refrain, Yo te quiero, Puerto Rico (I love you, Puerto Rico).

I returned several times after that to research my book, When the Sky Fell: Hurricane Maria and the United States in Puerto Rico. In 2019, I moved down to Puerto Rico, and lived in Viejo San Juan, where I witnessed firsthand the tumultuous explosion of the verano borciua, where protesters successfully demanded the resignation of then-governor Ricardo Rosselló after the leak of hundreds of pages of misogynistic, homophobic chats between Rosselló and his confidantes where Rosselló and advisors were observed mocking the island’s citizens and their suffering. In the midst of the political upheaval, I also reported on the displacement of my neighbors thanks to the arrival from the U.S. mainland of both cryptocurrency speculators and beneficiaries of a piece of local legislation known as Act 60, which represented a folding up of two previous measures - Act 20, which sought to promote export services on the island via tax credits and tax exemptions, and Act 22, which exempts high-net-worth individuals from local taxes on all passive income provided they reside in Puerto Rico for at least 168 days per year. Despite the laws theoretically being designed to encourage beneficiaries to invest in the local economy, a report from the Centro de Periodismo Investigativo (ICP) found that the majority of Act 22 grantees “barely create jobs and represent a minimal impact on the local economy,” with many of the entities that are created consisting of “small financial advisory, investment management or real estate companies, headquartered in residences and apartments.” A strange kind of quasi-apartheid began to take shape, with moneyed English-speaking mainlanders sequestering themselves in monolingual bubbles in places like San Juan, Dorado and Rincón as the island’s economy became ever-more precarious for local people to negotiate. Thousands left for the mainland United States.

During this period, I strolled the walls of the old city in the morning with my beagle Max as the Caribbean tumbled below us, and then at night as the wind chimes echoed from the balconies on the breeze. I was lucky to travel the island - to the Afro-Puerto Rican heartland of Loíza for their Festival de Bomba, over to the rainforest gateway of Luquillo, down to Naguabo with its evocative malecón, through the mountains of the cordillera central to Lares….Though stereotyping people with positive qualities can sometimes be as onerous as defaming them with negative ones, in all my travels across the island, despite my accented Spanish, I was never treated with anything other than warmth and hospitality and camaraderie by the people I interacted with. Having zero interest in profiteering from the place and zero skill to do so even if I wanted to,  I was somewhat reminded of the monologue of John Cusack’s character in the movie Say Anything, where he tells his paramour’s father “I don't want to sell anything, buy anything, or process anything as a career. I don't want to sell anything bought or processed, or buy anything sold or processed, or process anything sold, bought, or processed, or repair anything sold, bought, or processed. You know, as a career, I don't want to do that.” For me, I just wanted to live and write in Puerto Rico, to be in the heart of the Caribbean, to feed the stray animals and to be away from what the author Henry Miller referred to as the “air-conditioned nightmare” of the mainland United States.

I was in Puerto Rico through hurricanes and blackouts, the 6.4 magnitude January 2020 earthquake which briefly knocked out power across the island and devastated some communities in its southern reaches and the coronavirus pandemic. When I was forced to move back to the mainland, unable to find any housing on the island that I could afford, I did so with two street cats in tow that I had plucked off the cobblestones in various states of distress. They slumber a few feet away from me as I write these lines.

Mural along San Juan's Calle Loíza. Photo by the author.

Coming back from Baltimore last week, the warm air felt like caresses on my skin the moment I left the airport. Despite the dramatic overthrow of Rosselló in 2019, the island at a practical level has remained more or less firmly in the grip of ​​the Partido Nuevo Progresista (PNP), which favours Puerto Rico becoming a U.S. state, he was a member of and which, as a political entity, is a strange, stitched-together Frankenstein’s monster encompassing both relatively liberal Democrats and right-wing Republicans. In last November’s elections, the PNP’s Jenniffer González-Colón, who previously served as Puerto Rico’s non-voting representative in the U.S. Congress, “won” the governorship with 41.22% of the vote (Puerto Rican elections are winner take all in the first round with no runoffs). Juan Dalmau, the candidate for the pro-independence Partido Independentista Puertorriqueño (PIP), came in second, with 30.81%, more than doubling his share in the 2020 elections, which he came in forth with 13.54%, and representing an extraordinary turn of fortunes for a pro-independence gubernatorial candidate, a political current whose politicians have historically gained a single digit share of the vote in the contest. The once-dominant Partido Popular Democrático (PPD), which favours a continuation of Puerto Rico’s neo-colonial relationship with the United States, meanwhile, has seen its share of the vote fall from 38.82% in 2016 to 31.67% in 2020 to a mere 21.47% in its third place finish this year. A political alliance between the PIP and a newer political party, the Movimiento Victoria Ciudadana (MVC), meanwhile, ended in disappointment for the latter, where it lost seats in Puerto Rico’s legislature, now solidly dominated by the PNP.  

González-Colón’s start in office has not been particularly auspicious. During her political career, González-Colón has gone from being a Trump-supporting politico to claiming her support for Trump ended after the 6 January 2021 assault on the U.S. Capitol to now claiming that Trump “deserves” a statue in his honour in front of Puerto Rico’s legislature. One of González’s first acts after taking office was to order Waldemar Quiles, the head of Puerto Rico’s Departamento de Recursos Naturales y Ambientales (DRNA) to cancel an investigation into alleged violations of environmental protections centered on a construction project undertaken by her in-laws on the island’s southwestern coast.

[As González-Colón entered office, Trump’s U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents have been busy raiding largely Dominican barrios of San Juan, picking up people with no criminal records who pose no threat to the communities in which they live.]

“To be born Puerto Rican is to be born fighting,” a friend of mine, a Puerto Rican journalist, told me as we sipped coffee in the courtyard of her place in Viejo San Juan, and so it seems. While visiting the island, I had the honor of giving a presentation on Haiti as part of the Conferencias Caribeñas series sponsored by the Instituto de Estudios del Caribe at the Universidad de Puerto Rico (UPR) in Río Piedras, and in the course of doing so it was impossible to ignore the convulsions affecting the island’s most important center of higher education.

Last month, UPR’s now-outgoing president, Dr. Luis A. Ferrao, suggested eliminating a range of programmes, 64 in total, at the school due to what he said was low-enrollment, a move that was met with uproar from staff and students. [Ferrao subsequently announced that he is resigning as university president effective 15 February.]

As reported by the ICP, it was suggested that Ferrao’s moves to cut programmes came at the behest of the Financial Oversight and Management Board (FOMB), referred to locally as la junta, the entity created by the 2016 Puerto Rico Oversight, Management, and Economic Stability Act (PROMESA) with the power to restructure the $70 billion debt that had stalked the island for years. In the ensuing near-decade of its existence, the FOMB, unelected and unaccountable to the people of Puerto Rico, has exercised a near-total control over the island’s finances. The FOMB approves the government of Puerto Rico’s budget every year, and the university can only gain access to the millions of dollars held in reserve for it by complying with the junta’s “requirements for academic innovation”  and “operational and financial sustainability.”

[In the past, the FOMB’s member have included such characters the Trump-appointed reactionary Justin Peterson, a managing partner at the Washington, D.C. public relations firm DCI, who, in his first act as a member of the border, ran away from a public meeting because he viewed the entity as not doing the bidding of bondholders to his satisfaction.]

In just the last eight years, UPR has lost nearly half of the money allocated to it by the Puerto Rican government due to adjustments imposed by the FOMB, falling from an allocation of $911 million in 2017 to  $441 million for fiscal year 2023-24. A recent study revealed that one in four students at UPR’s main campus experienced food insecurity in the last year, while  62% survived on less than $500 a month, and 9% suffered from homelessness. It is little wonder, then, that one priest leader told attendees that “the time has come to get out of our comfort zone, we have to defend the University of Puerto Rico. The University is the only solution to the problems our country faces, that is why we are here, that is why we call on all sectors to come here.”

[I have to say that, after my presentation there - at which a surprisingly large number of UPR students attended - I was very pleased by the thoughtful and nuanced questions they asked about Haiti, their neighbor to the west, its history and its current situation.]

In addition to the struggle at the university, Puerto Rico’s politicians have also turned their attentions towards the island’s Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña (ICP), an entity created in 1955 and tasked with promoting and preserving the island's culture and which safeguards tens of thousands of works of art and archaeological pieces.

Last month, after four PNP legislators submitted a measure designed to repeal the law creating the ICP, Puerto Rico’s senate president, the PNP’s Thomas Rivera Schatz, filed a measure that seeks to transfer the functions of the ICP to the Departamento de Desarrollo Económico y Comercio (DDEC),, asking it one point if any senator knew of “any achievements of the ICP.”

In a statement, the ICP’s Executive Director, Carlos Ruiz Cortés, noted that the Institute “has been, since its creation, the guardian of our cultural and artistic heritage, and the creator of the cultural public policy that we know and have enjoyed for the past seven decades. The mere possibility of transferring these functions to another entity, focused solely on economic development, puts at risk the preservation of our rich history and cultural heritage.” The island’s wider cultural sector also voiced its opposition to such a plainly mercenary proposal, deriding it as “disastrous” and “absurd” and with the artist Rafael Trelles writing that the legislation combined “hatred against Puerto Rican culture with opportunism and the desire to hand over the buildings of Viejo San Juan to hotel developers so that they can profit from our historical heritage.”

[More than any other single individual,  Rivera Schatz perhaps represents the crystallization of all that is wrong with Puerto Rico’s political culture and politicians. With a habit of lapsing into casual racism, he is known to be an avid collector of expensive antique cars, with his collection estimated to be worth at least $500,000, though many believe that to be an underestimation. More than a decade ago, Rivera Schatz’s chief aid in the senate, José “Pepín” Gómez Zaldo, was arrested as part of a federal operation in the southern city of Ponce focusing on the use of permits for businesses maintained by the heads of a local drug gang via which proceeds from the sale and distribution of cocaine was laundered. Before his own arrest in April 2011 for running a cocaine distribution centre located in a business next to his parents’ home, Rivera Schatz’s brother-in-law, Alfonso Urbina, bragged to undercover agents about his relationship to the senator and said simply “Call Tommy” when the cuffs were slapped on him. Urbina would subsequently plead guilty and be sentenced to six years in prison.]

On top of all of this, the residents of Viejo San Juan are trying to fend off a scheme by the U.S. Department of the Interior’s National Park Service (NPS) - which oversees the Castillo San Felipe del Morro, the Spanish colonial military fortification that greets visitors to the neighborhood - to trap and remove the cats that live along the Paseo del Morro path around the fort. The felines, which laze on rocks and in the undergrowth along the path frequently feature in tourist’s photos of their visits to the island and thus one of the main arguments of the NPS - that these sweet cats are somehow disturbing tourists - is a complete lie. The NPS - from its perch in Washington, DC - lecturing Puerto Ricans about what is and isn’t the appropriate “cultural landscape” for their island also hasn’t sat well. The cats were - and are - as much part of Viejo San Juan as the cobblestones themselves. 

All of of this is why somehow for me the beauty of the island is also mixed with some sense of heartbreak. Eating breakfast (a bocadilo and a café colada from El Mesón ) in the little park along Calle Caleta under a chorus of tropical birdsong as the sounds of Sunday service from the Catedral Basílica Metropolitana de San Juan Bautista float out and then walking down through the Puerta de San Juan to gaze across the blue-green waters of the bay towards Cataño, wondering how long the felines purring around you have left. Driving out to Piñones, the series of beaches to the east of San Juan, where one passes kiosks selling alcapurrias (a kind of Puerto Rican fritter) and ice cold beer and seeing the tumbling surf and wondering how long these simple pleasures will last. Hiking through the Cañón de San Cristóbal outside of Aibonito and marveling at the series of micro-climates one passes through and the seemingly endless vistas of hills where one can almost feel the jibaro spirit on the breeze.

Let it all last a little while longer.

It was a beautiful trip, tinged with poignancy, as is life so often in Puerto Rico these days. Thanks for everything you have given me over the years, Borinquen. I hope have contributed something to you with my writing, too, and I hope that I see you again. And always remember that you are not alone.

xo

MD

Hills outside of Aibonito. Photo by the author.