No doubt about it, Puerto Rico is the Canary in the Coal Mine. Puerto
Ricans are being used as test animals in a project that the mega
corporations believe will sweep the planet.
Carl Jarvis
On 3/21/18, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Puerto Ricans and Ultrarich "Puertopians" Are Locked in a Pitched Struggle
Over How to Remake the Island
By Naomi Klein, The Intercept
21 March 18
Puerto Ricans and Ultrarich “Puertopians” Are Locked in a Pitched Struggle
Over How to Remake the Island
Like everywhere else in Puerto Rico, the small mountain city of Adjuntas
was
plunged into total darkness by Hurricane Maria. When residents left their
homes to take stock of the damage, they found themselves not only without
power and water, but also totally cut off from the rest of the island.
Every
single road was blocked, either by mounds of mud washed down from the
surrounding peaks, or by fallen trees and branches. Yet amid this
devastation, there was one bright spot.
Solar Oasis
Just off the main square, a large, pink colonial-style house had light
shining through every window. It glowed like a beacon in the terrifying
darkness.
The pink house was Casa Pueblo, a community and ecology center with deep
roots in this part of the island. Twenty years ago, its founders, a family
of scientists and engineers, installed solar panels on the center’s roof, a
move that seemed rather hippy-dippy at the time. Somehow, those panels
(upgraded over the years) managed to survive Maria’s hurricane-force winds
and falling debris. Which meant that in a sea of post-storm darkness, Casa
Pueblo had the only sustained power for miles around.
And like moths to a flame, people from all over the hills of Adjuntas made
their way to the warm and welcoming light.
Already a community hub before the storm, the pink house rapidly
transformed
into a nerve center for self-organized relief efforts. It would be weeks
before the Federal Emergency Management Agency or any other agency would
arrive with significant aid, so people flocked to Casa Pueblo to collect
food, water, tarps, and chainsaws — and draw on its priceless power supply
to charge up their electronics. Most critically, Casa Pueblo became a kind
of makeshift field hospital, its airy rooms crowded with elderly people who
needed to plug in oxygen machines.
Thanks also to those solar panels, Casa Pueblo’s radio station was able to
continue broadcasting, making it the community’s sole source of information
when downed power lines and cell towers had knocked out everything else.
Twenty years after those panels were first installed, rooftop solar power
didn’t look frivolous at all — in fact, it looked like the best hope for
survival in a future sure to bring more Maria-sized weather shocks.
Visiting Casa Pueblo on a recent trip to the island was something of a
vertiginous experience — a bit like stepping through a portal into another
world, a parallel Puerto Rico where everything worked and the mood brimmed
with optimism.
It was particularly jarring because I had spent much of the day on the
heavily industrialized southern coast, talking with people suffering some
of
the cruellest impacts of Hurricane Maria. Not only had their low-lying
neighborhoods been inundated, but they also feared the storm had stirred up
toxic materials from nearby fossil fuel-burning power plants and
agricultural testing sites they could not hope to assess. Compounding these
risks — and despite living adjacent to two of the island’s largest
electricity plants — many still were living in the dark.
The situation had felt unremittingly bleak, made worse by the stifling
heat.
But after driving up into the mountains and arriving at Casa Pueblo, the
mood shifted instantly. Wide open doors welcomed us, as well as freshly
brewed organic coffee from the center’s own community-managed plantation.
Overhead, an air-clearing downpour drummed down on those precious solar
panels.
Arturo Massol-Deyá, a bearded biologist and president of Casa Pueblo’s
board
of directors, took me on a brief tour of the facility: the radio station, a
solar-powered cinema opened since the storm, a butterfly garden, a store
selling local crafts and their wildly popular brand of coffee. He also
guided me through the framed pictures on the wall — massive crowds of
people
protesting open-pit mining (a pitched battle Casa Pueblo helped win);
images
from their forest school where they do outdoor education; scenes from a
protest in Washington, D.C., against a proposed gas pipeline through these
mountains (another win). The community center was a strange hybrid of
ecotourism lodge and revolutionary cell.
Settling into a wooden rocking chair, Massol-Deyá said that Maria had
changed his sense of what’s possible on the island. For years, he
explained,
he had pushed for the archipelago to get far more of its power from
renewables. He had long warned of the risks associated with Puerto Rico’s
overwhelming dependence on imported fossil fuels and centralized power
generation: One big storm, he had cautioned, could knock out the whole grid
— especially after decades of laying off skilled electrical workers and
letting maintenance lapse.
Now everyone whose homes went dark understood those risks, just as the
people in Adjuntas could all look to a brightly lit Casa Pueblo and
immediately grasp the advantages of solar energy, produced right where it
is
consumed. As Massol-Deyá put it: “Our quality of life was good before,
because we were running with solar power. And after the hurricane, our
quality of life is good as well. … This was an energy oasis for the
community.”
It’s hard to imagine an energy system more vulnerable to climate
change-amplified shocks than Puerto Rico’s. The island gets an astonishing
98 percent of its electricity from fossil fuels. But since it has no
domestic supply of oil, gas, or coal, all of these fuels are imported by
ship. They are then transported to a handful of hulking power plants by
truck and pipeline. Next, the electricity those plants generate is
transmitted across huge distances through above-ground wires and an
underwater cable that connects the island of Vieques to the main island.
The
whole behemoth is monstrously expensive, resulting in electricity prices
that are nearly twice the U.S. average.
And just as environmentalists like Massol-Deyá had warned, Maria caused
devastating ruptures within every tentacle of Puerto Rico’s energy system:
The Port of San Juan, which receives so much of the imported fuel, was
thrown into crisis, and some 10,000 shipping containers full of much-needed
supplies piled up on the docks, waiting to be delivered. Many truck drivers
couldn’t make it to the port, either because of obstructed roads, or
because
they were struggling to get their own families out of danger. With diesel
in
short supply across the island, some just couldn’t find the fuel to drive.
The lines at gas stations stretched out by the mile. Half of the island’s
stations were out of commission altogether. The mountain of supplies stuck
at the port grew ever larger.
Meanwhile, the cable connecting Vieques was so damaged it has yet to be
repaired six months later. And the power lines carrying electricity from
the
plants were down all over the archipelago. Literally nothing about the
system worked.
This broad collapse, Massol-Deyá explained, was now helping him make the
case for a sweeping and rapid shift to renewable energy. Because in a
future
that is sure to include more weather shocks, getting energy from sources
that don’t require sprawling transportation networks is just common sense.
And Puerto Rico, though poor in fossil fuels, is drenched in sun, lashed by
wind, and surrounded by waves.
Renewable energy is by no means immune to storm damage. At some Puerto
Rican
wind farms, turbine blades snapped off in Maria’s high winds (seemingly
because they were improperly positioned), just as some poorly secured solar
panels took flight. This vulnerability is partly why Casa Pueblo and many
others emphasize the micro-grid model for renewables. Rather than relying
on
a few huge solar and wind farms, with power then carried over long and
vulnerable transmission lines, smaller, community-based systems would
generate power where it is consumed. If the larger grid sustains damage,
these communities can simply disconnect from it and keep drawing from their
micro-grids.
This decentralized model doesn’t eliminate risk, but it would make the kind
of total power outage that Puerto Ricans suffered for months — and which
hundreds of thousands are suffering still — a thing of the past. Whoever’s
solar panels survive the next storm would, like Casa Pueblo, be up and
running the next day. And “solar panels are easy to replace,” Massol-Deyá
pointed out — unlike power lines and pipelines.
In part to spread the gospel of renewables, in the weeks after the storm,
Casa Pueblo handed out 14,000 solar lanterns — little square boxes that
recharge when left outside during the day, providing a much-needed pool of
light by night. More recently, the community center has managed to
distribute a large shipment of full-sized solar-powered refrigerators, a
game-changer for households in the interior that still don’t have power.
Casa Pueblo has also kicked off #50ConSol, a campaign calling for 50
percent
of Puerto Rico’s power to come from the sun. They have been installing
solar
panels on dozens of homes and businesses in Adjuntas, including, most
recently, a barbershop. “Now we have houses asking us for support,”
Massol-Deyá said — a marked shift from those days not so long ago when Casa
Pueblo’s solar panels looked like eco-luxury items. “We’re going to do
whatever is at reach to change that landscape and to tell the people of
Puerto Rico that a different future is possible.”
Several Puerto Ricans I spoke with casually referred to Maria as “our
teacher.” Because amid the storm’s convulsions, people didn’t just discover
what didn’t work (pretty much everything). They also learned very quickly
about a few things that worked surprisingly well. Up in Adjuntas, it was
solar power. Elsewhere, it was small organic farms that used traditional
farming methods that were better able to stand up to the floods and wind.
And in every case, deep community relationships, as well as strong ties to
the Puerto Rican diaspora, successfully delivered lifesaving aid when the
government failed and failed again.
Casa Pueblo was founded 38 years ago by Arturo’s father, Alexis
Massol-González, who was awarded the prestigious Goldman Prize for
environmental leadership in 2002. Massol-González shares his son’s belief
that Maria has opened up a window of possibility, one that could yield a
fundamental shift to a healthier and more democratic economy — not just for
electricity, but also for food, water, and other necessities of life. “We
are looking to transform the energy system. Our goal is to adopt a solar
energy system and leave behind oil, natural gas, and carbon,” he said,
“which are highly polluting.”
His message particularly resonates 45 miles to the southeast, in the
coastal
community of Jobos Bay, near Salinas. This is one of the areas coping with
a
slew of environmental toxins, much of it stemming from antiquated fossil
fuel-burning power plants. As in Adjuntas, residents here have seized on
the
post-Maria electricity failures to advance solar power, through a project
called Coquí Solar. Working with local academics, they have developed a
plan
that would not only produce enough energy to meet their needs, but would
also keep the profits and jobs in the community as well. Nelson Santos
Torres, one of Coquí Solar’s organizers, told me they are insisting on
solar
skills training “so that community youth can participate in the
installation,” giving them a reason to stay on the island.
When I visited the area, Mónica Flores, a graduate student in environmental
sciences at the University of Puerto Rico who has been working with
communities on renewable energy projects, told me that truly democratic
resource management is the island’s best hope. People need to have a sense,
she said, that “this is our energy. This is our water, and this is how we
manage it because we believe in this process, and we respect our culture,
our nature, everything that is supporting us.”
Six months into the rolling disaster set off by Maria, dozens of grassroots
organizations are coming together to advance precisely this vision: a
reimagined Puerto Rico run by its people in their interests. Like Casa
Pueblo, in the myriad dysfunctions and injustices the storm so vividly
exposed, they see an opportunity to tackle the root causes that turned a
weather disaster into a human catastrophe. Among them: the island’s extreme
dependence on imported fuel and food; the unpayable and possibly illegal
debt that has been used to impose wave after wave of austerity that gravely
weakened the island’s defenses; and the 130-year-old colonial relationship
with a U.S. government that has always discounted the lives of Puerto
Rico’s
black and brown people.
If Maria is a teacher, this emerging movement argues, the storm’s
overarching lesson is that now is not the moment for reconstruction of what
was, but rather for transformation into what could be. “Everything we
consume comes from abroad and our profits are exported,” said
Massol-González, his hair now white after decades of struggle. It’s a
system
that leaves debt and austerity behind, both of which made Puerto Rico
exponentially more vulnerable to Maria’s blows.
But, he said with a mischievous smile, “we look at crisis as an opportunity
to change.”
Massol-González and his allies know well that they are not alone in seeing
opportunity in the post-Maria moment. There is also another, very different
version of how Puerto Rico should be radically remade after the storm, and
it is being aggressively advanced by Gov. Ricardo Rosselló in meetings with
bankers, real estate developers, cryptocurrency traders, and, of course,
the
Financial Oversight and Management Board, an unelected seven-member body
that exerts ultimate control over Puerto Rico’s economy.
For this powerful group, the lesson that Maria carried was not about the
perils of economic dependency or austerity in times of climate disruption.
The real problem, they argue, was the public ownership of Puerto Rico’s
infrastructure, which lacked the proper free-market incentives. Rather than
transforming that infrastructure so that it truly serves the public
interest, they argue for selling it off at fire-sale prices to private
players.
This is just one part of a sweeping vision that sees Puerto Rico
transforming itself into a “visitor economy,” one with a radically
downsized
state and many fewer Puerto Ricans living on the island. In their place
would be tens of thousands of “high-net-worth individuals” from Europe,
Asia, and the U.S. mainland, lured to permanently relocate by a cornucopia
of tax breaks and the promise of living a five-star resort lifestyle inside
fully privatized enclaves, year-round.
In a sense, both are utopian projects — the vision of Puerto Rico in which
the wealth of the island is carefully and democratically managed by its
people, and the libertarian project some are calling “Puertopia” that is
being conjured up in the ballrooms of luxury hotels in San Juan and New
York
City. One dream is grounded in a desire for people to exercise collective
sovereignty over their land, energy, food, and water; the other in a desire
for a small elite to secede from the reach of government altogether,
liberated to accumulate unlimited private profit.
As I traveled throughout Puerto Rico, from sustainable farms and schools in
the central mountain region, to the former U.S. Navy base on Vieques, to a
legendary mutual aid center on the east coast, to former sugar
plantations-turned-solar farms in the south, I found these very different
visions of the future sprinting to advance their respective projects before
the window of opportunity opened up by the storm begins to close.
At the core of this battle is a very simple question: Who is Puerto Rico
for? Is it for Puerto Ricans, or is it for outsiders? And after a
collective
trauma like Hurricane Maria, who has a right to decide?
Invasion of the Puertopians
Earlier this month, in San Juan’s ornate Condado Vanderbilt Hotel, the
dream
of Puerto Rico as a for-profit utopia was on full display. From March 14 to
16, the hotel played host to Puerto Crypto, a three-day “immersive” pitch
for blockchain and cryptocurrencies with a special focus on why Puerto Rico
will “be the epicenter of this multitrillion-dollar market.”
Among the speakers was Yaron Brook, chair of the Ayn Rand Institute, who
presented on “How Deregulation and Blockchain Can Make Puerto Rico the Hong
Kong of the Caribbean.” Last year, Brook announced that he had personally
relocated from California to Puerto Rico, where he claims he went from
paying 55 percent of his income in taxes to less than 4 percent.
Elsewhere on the island, hundreds of thousands of Puerto Ricans were still
living by flashlight, many were still dependent on FEMA for food aid, and
the island’s main mental health hotline was still overwhelmed with callers.
But inside the sold-out Vanderbilt conference, there was little space for
that kind of downer news. Instead, the 800 attendees — fresh from a choice
between “sunrise yoga and meditation” and “morning surf” — heard from top
officials like Department of Economic Development and Commerce Secretary
Manuel Laboy Rivera about all the things Puerto Rico is doing to turn
itself
into the ultimate playground for newly minted cryptocurrency millionaires
and billionaires.
It’s a pitch the Puerto Rican government has been making to the private jet
set for a few years now, though until recently it was geared mainly to the
financial sector, Silicon Valley, and others capable of working wherever
they can access data. The pitch goes like this: You don’t have to
relinquish
your U.S. citizenship or even technically leave the United States to escape
its tax laws, regulations, or the cold Wall Street winters. You just have
to
move your company’s address to Puerto Rico and enjoy a stunningly low 4
percent corporate tax rate — a fraction of what corporations pay even after
Donald Trump’s recent tax cut. Any dividends paid by a Puerto Rico-based
company to Puerto Rican residents are also tax-free, thanks to a law passed
in 2012 called Act 20.
Conference attendees also learned that if they move their own residency to
Puerto Rico, they will not only be able to surf every single morning, but
also win vast personal tax advantages. Thanks to a clause in the federal
tax
code, U.S. citizens who move to Puerto Rico can avoid paying federal income
tax on any income earned in Puerto Rico. And thanks to another local law,
Act 22, they can also cash in on a slew of tax breaks and total tax waivers
that includes paying zero capital gains tax and zero tax on interest and
dividends sourced to Puerto Rico. And much more — all part of a desperate
bid to attract capital to an island that is functionally bankrupt.
To quote billionaire hedge fund magnate John Paulson, owner of the hotel in
which Puerto Crypto took place, “You can essentially minimize your taxes in
a way that you can’t do anywhere else in the world.” (Or, as the tax
dodger’s website Premier Offshore put it: “All the other tax havens might
as
well just close down. … Puerto Rico just hit it out of the park … did the
best set ever and dropped the mic.”)
With just a 3 1/2-hour commute from New York City to San Juan (or less,
depending on the private jet), all it takes to get in on this scheme is
agreeing to spend 183 days of the year in Puerto Rico — in other words,
winter. Puerto Rican residents, it’s worth noting, are not only excluded
from these programs, but they also pay very high local taxes.
Manuel Laboy used the conference to announce the creation of a new advisory
council to attract blockchain businesses to the island. And he extolled the
lifestyle bonuses that awaited attendees if they followed the
self-described
“Puertopians” who have already taken the plunge. As Laboy told The
Intercept, for the 500 to 1,000 high-net-worth individuals who relocated
since the tax holidays were introduced five years ago — many of them opting
for gated communities with their own private schools — it’s all about
“living in a tropical island, with great people, with great weather, with
great piña coladas.” And why not? “You’re gonna be, like, in this endless
vacation in a tropical place, where you’re actually working. That
combination, I think, is very powerful.”
The official slogan of this new Puerto Rico? “Paradise Performs.” To
underscore the point, conference attendees were invited to a
“Cryptocurrency
Honey Party,” with pollen-themed drinks and snacks, and a chance to hang
out
with Ingrid Suarez, Miss Teen Panama 2013 and upcoming contestant on
“Caribbean’s Next Top Model.”
Mining cryptocurrencies is one of the fastest growing sources of greenhouse
gas emissions on the planet, with the industry’s energy consumption rising
by the week. Bitcoin alone currently consumes roughly the same amount of
energy per year as Israel, according to the Bitcoin Energy Consumption
Index. The city of Plattsburgh, New York, recently adopted a temporary ban
on cryptocurrency mining after local electricity rates suddenly soared.
Many
of the crypto companies currently relocating to Puerto Rico would
presumably
do their currency mining elsewhere. Still, the idea of turning an island
that cannot keep the lights on for its own people into “the epicenter of
this multitrillion-dollar market” rooted in the most wasteful possible use
of energy is a bizarre one and is raising mounting concerns of
“crypto-colonialism.”
In part to allay these fears, Puerto Crypto made a last-minute name change
to the less imperial “Blockchain Unbound,” though it didn’t stick.
Moreover,
for some in the crypto crowd, the appeal of relocating to Puerto Rico goes
well beyond Laboy’s version of paradise. Post-Maria, with land selling for
even cheaper, public assets being auctioned at fire-sale prices, and
billions in federal disaster funds flowing to contractors, some distinctly
more grandiose dreams for the island have begun to surface. Now rather than
simply shopping for mansions in resort communities, the Puertopians are
looking to buy a piece of land large enough to start their very own city —
complete with airport, yacht port, and passports, all run on virtual
currencies.
Some call it “Sol,” others call it “Crypto Land,” and it even seems to have
its own religion: an unruly hodgepodge of Ayn Randian wealth supremacy,
philanthrocapitalist noblesse oblige, Burning Man pseudo-spirituality, and
half-remembered scenes from watching “Avatar” while high. Brock Pierce, the
child actor turned crypto-entrepreneur who serves as the movement’s de
facto
guru, is known for dropping New Age aphorisms like, “A billionaire is
someone who has positively impacted the lives of a billion people.” Out on
a
real estate expedition scouting locations for Crypto Land, he reportedly
crawled into the “bosom” of a Ceiba tree, a magnificent species sacred in
many indigenous cultures, and “kissed an old man’s feet.”
But make no mistake — the true religion here is tax avoidance. As one young
crypto-trader recently told his YouTube audience, before moving to Puerto
Rico in time to make the tax-filing deadline, “I had to actually look it up
on the map.” (He subsequently admitted to some “culture shock” upon
learning
that Puerto Ricans spoke Spanish, but instructed viewers thinking of
following his lead to put a “Google translator app on your phone and you’re
good to go.”)
The conviction that taxation is a form of theft is not a novel one among
men
who imagine themselves to be self-made. Still, there is something about
rapidly becoming rich from money that you literally created — or “mined” —
yourself that lends an especially large dose of self-righteousness to the
decision to give nothing back. As Reeve Collins, a 42-year-old Puertopian,
told the New York Times, “This is the first time in human history anyone
other than kings or governments or gods can create their own money.” So who
is the government to take any of it from them?
As a breed, the Puertopians, in their flip-flops and surfer shorts, are a
sort of slacker cousin to the Seasteaders, a movement of wealthy
libertarians who have been plotting for years to escape the government’s
grip by starting their own city-states on artificial islands. Anybody who
doesn’t like being taxed or regulated will simply be able to, as the
Seasteading manifesto states, “vote with your boat.”
For those harboring these Randian secessionist fantasies, Puerto Rico is a
much lighter lift. When it comes to taxing and regulating the wealthy, its
current government has surrendered with unmatched enthusiasm. And there’s
no
need to go to the trouble of building your own islands on elaborate
floating
platforms — as one Puerto Crypto session put it, Puerto Rico is poised to
be
transformed into a “crypto-island.”
Sure, unlike the empty city-states Seasteaders fantasize about, real-world
Puerto Rico is densely habited with living, breathing Puerto Ricans. But
FEMA and the governor’s office have been doing their best to take care of
that too. Though there has been no reliable effort to track migration flows
since Hurricane Maria, some 200,000 people have reportedly left the island,
many of them with federal help.
This exodus was first presented as a temporary emergency measure, but it
has
since become apparent that the depopulation is intended to be permanent.
The
Puerto Rican governor’s office predicts that over the next five years, the
island’s population will experience a “cumulative decline” of nearly 20
percent.
The Puertopians know all this has been hard on locals, but they insist that
their presence will be a blessing for the devastated island. Brock Pierce
argues (without offering any specifics), that crypto-money is going to help
finance Puerto Rican reconstruction and entrepreneurship, including in
local
agriculture and energy. The enormous brain drain currently flowing out of
Puerto Rico, he says, is now being offset with a “brain gain,” thanks to
him
and his tax-dodging friends. At a Puerto Rico investment conference, Pierce
observed philosophically that “it’s in these moments where we experience
our
greatest loss that we have our biggest opportunity to sort of restart and
upgrade.”
Gov. Rosselló himself seems to agree. In February, he told a business
audience in New York that Maria had created a “blank canvas” on which
investors could paint their very own dream world.
An Island Weary of Outside Experiments
The dream of the blank canvas, a safe place to test one’s boldest ideas,
has
a long and bitter history in Puerto Rico. Throughout its long colonial
history, the archipelago has continuously served as a living laboratory for
prototypes that would later be exported around the globe. There were the
notorious experiments in population control that, by the mid-1960s,
resulted
in the coercive sterilization of more than one-third of Puerto Rican women.
Many dangerous drugs have been tested in Puerto Rico over the years,
including a high-risk version of the birth control pill containing a dosage
of hormones four times greater than the version that ultimately entered the
U.S. market.
Vieques — more than two-thirds of which used to be a U.S. Navy facility
where Marines practiced ground warfare and completed their gun training —
was a testing ground for everything from Agent Orange to depleted uranium
to
napalm. To this day, agribusiness giants like Monsanto and Syngenta use the
southern coast of Puerto Rico as a sprawling testing ground for thousands
of
trials of genetically modified seeds, mostly corn and soy.
Many Puerto Rican economists also make a compelling case that the island
invented the whole model of the special economic zone. In the ’50s and
’60s,
well before the free-trade era swept the globe, U.S. manufacturers took
advantage of Puerto Rico’s low-wage workforce and special tax exemptions to
relocate light manufacturing to the island, effectively road testing the
model of offshored labor and maquiladora-style factories while still
technically staying within U.S. borders.
The list could go on and on. The appeal of Puerto Rico for these
experiments
was a combination of the geographical control offered by an island and
straight-up racism. Juan E. Rosario, a longtime community organizer and
environmentalist who told me that his own mother was a Thalidomide test
subject, put it like this: “It’s an island, isolated, with a lot of
nonvaluable people. Expendable people. For many years, we have been used as
guinea pigs for U.S. experiments.”
These experiments have left indelible scars on Puerto Rico’s land and
people. They are visible in the shells of factories that were abandoned
when
U.S. manufacturers got access to even cheaper wages and laxer regulations
in
Mexico and then China after the North American Free Trade Agreement was
signed and the World Trade Organization was created. The scars are etched
too in the explosive materials, uncleared munitions, and diverse cocktail
of
military pollutants that will take decades to flush from Vieques’s
ecosystem, as well as in the small island’s ongoing health crisis. And they
are there in the swaths of land all over the archipelago that are so
contaminated that the Environmental Protection Agency has classified 18 of
them as Superfund sites, with all the local health impacts that shadow such
toxicity.
The deepest scars may be even harder to see. Colonialism itself is a social
experiment, a multilayered system of explicit and implicit controls
designed
to strip colonized peoples of their culture, confidence, and power. With
tools ranging from the brute military and police aggression used to put
down
strikes and rebellions, to a law that once banned the Puerto Rican flag, to
the dictates handed down today by the unelected fiscal control board,
residents of these islands have been living under that web of controls for
centuries.
On my first day on the island, at a meeting of trade union leaders at the
University of Puerto Rico, Rosario spoke passionately about the
psychological impact of this unending experiment. He said that at such a
high-stakes moment — when so many outsiders are descending wielding their
own plans and their own big dreams — “we need to know where are we heading.
We need to know where is our ultimate goal. We need to know what paradise
looks like.” And not the kind of paradise that “performs” for currency
traders with a surfing hobby, but that actually works for the majority of
Puerto Ricans.
The problem, he went on, is that “people in Puerto Rico are very fearful of
thinking about the Big Thing. We are not supposed to be dreaming; we are
not
supposed to be thinking about even governing ourselves. We don’t have that
tradition of looking at the big picture.” This, he said, is colonialism’s
most bitter legacy.
The belittling message at the core of the colonial experiment has been
reinforced in countless ways by the official responses (and nonresponses)
to
Hurricane Maria. Time after humiliating time, Puerto Ricans have been sent
that familiar message about their relative worth and ultimate
disposability.
And nothing has done more to confirm this status than the fact that no
level
of government has seen fit to count the dead in any kind of credible way,
as
if lost Puerto Rican lives are of so little consequence that there is no
need to document their mass extinguishment. As of this writing, the
official
count of how many people died as a result of Hurricane Maria remains at 64,
though a thorough investigation by Puerto Rico’s Center for Investigative
Journalism and the New York Times put the real number at well over 1,000.
Puerto Rico’s governor has announced that an independent probe will
re-examine the official numbers.
But there is a flipside to these painful revelations. Puerto Ricans now
know, beyond any shadow of a doubt, that there is no government that has
their interests at heart, not in the governor’s mansion, not on the
unelected fiscal control board (which many Puerto Ricans welcomed at first,
convinced it would root out corruption), and certainly not in Washington,
where the current president’s idea of aid and comfort was to hurl paper
towels into a crowd. That means that if there is to be a grand new
experiment in Puerto Rico, one genuinely in the interest of its people,
then
Puerto Ricans themselves will have to be the ones to dream it up and fight
for it — “from the bottom to the top,” as Casa Pueblo founder Alexis
Massol-González told me.
He is convinced that his people are up to the task. And ironically, this is
in part thanks to Maria. Precisely because the official response to the
hurricane has been so lacking, Puerto Ricans on the island and in the
diaspora have been forced to organize themselves on a stunning scale. Casa
Pueblo is just one example among many. With next to no resources,
communities have set up massive communal kitchens, raised large sums of
money, coordinated and distributed supplies, cleared streets, and rebuilt
schools. In some communities, they have even gotten the electricity
reconnected with the help of retired electrical workers.
They shouldn’t have had to do all this. Puerto Ricans pay taxes — the IRS
collects some $3.5 billion from the island annually — to help fund FEMA and
the military, which are supposed to protect U.S. citizens during states of
emergency. But one result of being forced to save themselves is that many
communities have discovered a depth of strength and capacity they did not
know they possessed.
Now this confidence is rapidly spilling over into the political arena and
with it, an appetite among a growing number of Puerto Rican groups and
individuals to do precisely what Juan E. Rosario said has been so difficult
in the past: come up with their own big ideas, their own dreams of an
island
paradise that performs for them.
“Welcome to Magic Land”
Those were the words that greeted me at a bustling public school and
organic
farm carved into the hillside in Puerto Rico’s spectacular central mountain
region, a place known for its towering waterfalls, crystal natural pools,
and electric green peaks.
After driving for an hour and a half through communities still badly
battered by the hurricane, the scene did feel strangely enchanted. There
were smiling children harvesting a crop of beans and wandering through
stands of sunflowers. There were young men and women sawing lumber and
busily erecting several new structures, stopping periodically to share
ideas
about how to get the farm working to maximum potential. And in a region
where many are still relying on inadequate government food aid, there were
older women preparing mountains of vegetables and fish for a sumptuous
communal meal.
The mood was so upbeat and the efficiency so undeniable that I had a
feeling
similar to the one I had at Casa Pueblo — as if I had stepped through a
portal to that parallel Puerto Rico, a place where both the ecological and
economic lessons of Hurricane Maria were being powerfully heeded.
“We do agro-ecological farming,” Dalma Cartagena told me, pointing to the
rows of spinach, kale, cilantro, and much more. “Kids from third grade to
eighth grade do this work, this beautiful work.”
Cartagena — a trained agronomist with braided gray curls and a yogic smile
—
is most passionate about how farming has helped her students overcome the
trauma of a storm that was so ferocious, it felt as if the natural world
had
turned against them. Running her fingers through a stand of medicinal
flowers, she said, “After Maria, we encourage the students to touch the
plants and let the plants touch them because that’s a way of healing the
pain and anger.”
When students watch plants grow that they planted from seeds, it’s a
reminder that despite all of the damage inflicted by the storm, “You are
part of something that is always protecting you.” The apparent rupture
between themselves and the land begins to heal.
Eighteen years ago, Cartagena took charge of this farm in the municipality
of Orocovis as part of the Puerto Rico Education Department’s embattled
“agriculture education program.” Connected by a short pathway to a large
local middle school, Escuela Segunda Unidad Botijas I, students spend part
of each day on the farm, listening to Cartagena explain everything from the
nitrogen cycle to composting. Dressed in neat school uniforms complemented
with mud-caked rubber boots, they also learn the practical skills of
“agro-ecology,” a term referring to a combination of traditional farming
methods that promotes resilience and protects biodiversity, a rejection of
pesticides and other toxins, and a commitment to rebuilding social
relationships between farmers and local communities.
Each grade tends to their own crops from seed to harvest. Some of what they
grow is served in the school cafeteria, some is sold at market, and most
goes home with the students.
Concentrating through heavy, black-framed glasses as she shelled a pile of
beans, 13-year-old Brítany Berríos Torres explained, “My mom can make them,
or she can give them to my grandmother so she can stop worrying about ‘What
am I going to cook my daughters?’” With so much need on the island, doing
this work, Torres said, “I feel as if we are throwing a rope to humanity.”
All of this makes this public school’s farm a relative anomaly in Puerto
Rico. As a legacy of the slave plantation economy first established under
Spanish rule, much of the island’s agriculture is industrial scale, with
many crops grown for export or testing purposes. Roughly 85 percent of the
food Puerto Ricans actually eat is imported.
With her unique school, which the government has tried to shut down several
times, Cartagena is determined to prove that this dependency on outsiders
is
not only unnecessary, but a kind of folly. By using farming techniques and
carefully preserved seed varieties adapted to the region, she is convinced
that Puerto Ricans can feed themselves with healthy food grown in their own
fertile soil — as long as there is sufficient land available for a new and
existing generation of farmers with the knowledge to do the work.
This lesson of self-sufficiency took on very practical urgency after
Hurricane Maria. Just as the upheaval revealed the perils of Puerto Rico’s
import-addicted and highly centralized energy system, it also unmasked the
extraordinary vulnerability of its food supply. All over the island,
industrial-scale farms growing mono-crops of banana, plantains, papaya,
coffee, and corn looked like they had been flattened with a scythe.
According to Puerto Rico’s Department of Agriculture, more than 80 percent
of the island’s crops were completely wiped out in the storm, a $2 billion
blow to the economy.
“A lot of conventional farmers right now are starving, even though they
have
[an] amazing amount of land,” Katia Avilés, an environmental geographer and
agro-ecological farming advocate, told me. “They didn’t have anything to
harvest because they had followed the Department of Agriculture’s
instructions” and literally bet the farm on a single, vulnerable cash crop.
Food imports, meanwhile, were in no better shape. The Port of San Juan was
in chaos, with shipping containers filled with desperately needed food and
fuel sitting unopened. For weeks, the shelves at many supermarkets were
virtually empty. Remote areas like Orocovis fared the worst: stranded
because of blocked roads and insufficient fuel, it took over a week or more
for food aid to arrive. And when it came, it was often shockingly
inadequate: military-style rations and FEMA’s now notorious boxes filled
with Skittles, processed meats, and Cheez-It crackers.
On Cartagena’s small farm, however, there was nutritious food to share. The
storm had knocked down the greenhouse and her outdoor classroom, and the
wind had claimed the bananas. But many of the crops the students had
planted
were fine: the tomatillos, the root vegetables — pretty much everything
that
grows low to the earth or underneath it.
“We never closed the farm. We stayed here working,” Cartagena said,
“cleaning up and doing the compost, the way we could.” Within days,
students
began crossing the mountains by foot to help out, carrying food home to
their families. They planted flowers to try to lure back the bees.
There was other help too. On the day I visited, the land was crowded with
about 30 farmers who had traveled from across the United States, Central
America, Canada, and Puerto Rico to help Cartagena and her students rebuild
and replant. The visitors were part of a wave of international “brigades”
that had been going from farm to farm rebuilding chicken coops,
greenhouses,
and other outdoor structures, as well as replanting crops, an ambitious
effort organized by Puerto Rico’s Organización Boricuá de Agricultura
Ecológica, the U.S.-based Climate Justice Alliance, and the global network
of peasants and small farmers, Via Campesina.
Jesús Vázquez, an environmental justice advocate, food sovereignty activist
and local coordinator of the brigades, told me that Cartagena’s experience
was not unique. In the days after Maria, farmers and community members
helped one another across the island. And those rare estates that still
used
traditional methods— including planting a diversity of crops and using
trees
and grasses with long roots to prevent landslides and erosion — had some of
the only fresh food on the island.
Yucca, taro, sweet potato, yam, and several other root vegetables are
nutrient-rich staples of the Puerto Rican diet, and because they grow
underground, where the high winds couldn’t touch them, most were almost
entirely protected from storm damage. “Some farmers were harvesting food a
day after the hurricane,” Vázquez recalled. Within a few weeks, they had
hundreds of pounds of food to sell or distribute in their communities.
Avilés, Vázquez, and Cartagena all work with Organización Boricuá, a
network
of farmers who use these traditional Puerto Rican methods, passing them
down
through the generations, “campesino to campesino,” as Avilés put it. But
after decades of U.S. government policy that equated campesino life with
underdevelopment and set Puerto Rico up as a captive market for U.S.
imports, all that remains, Avilés said, are “islands” of these
agro-ecological farms scattered through the archipelago’s three inhabited
islands.
For 28 years, Organización Boricuá has been connecting those farming
islands
to one another, advocating for their interests and publicly making the case
that agro-ecology should form the basis for Puerto Rico’s food system,
capable of providing “adequate, affordable, nutritious, and culturally
appropriate food” for the entire population, Vázquez explained. The group
has also been warning about the dangers of chokepoints in Puerto Rico’s
highly centralized system, with almost all of its food imports shipping out
of a single port in Jacksonville, Florida (which itself was slammed by
Hurricane Irma last September), and roughly 90 percent of the food arriving
at one entry point: the Port of San Juan. “We’ve always been saying within
our movement that that’s a problem because of climate change,” Vázquez told
me. After all, if something happens to the port, “then we’ll be doomed.”
Given the strength of the corporate agricultural lobbies they were up
against, getting these kinds of messages through to the public has been an
uphill battle. Their opponents painted them as backward relics, while
imports and fast food were modernization incarnate. But Maria, which was
powerful enough to rearrange local geology, has changed the political
topography as well.
Overnight, everyone could see just how dangerous it was for this fertile
island to have lost control over its agricultural system, along with so
much
else. “We didn’t have food, we didn’t have water, we didn’t have
electricity, we didn’t have anything,” Avilés recalled. But in communities
that still had local farms, people could also see that agro-ecology was not
some quaint relic of the past, but a crucial tool for surviving a rocky
future.
Now Organización Boricuá is joining with many others who have been
constructing their own “islands” of self-sufficiency — not just farms, but
also solar powered oases like Casa Pueblo, as well as mutual aid centers
and
groups of educators and economists with plans for how Puerto Ricans can
confront international capital and remake their economy and public
institutions. Together, this network of grassroots Puerto Rican movements
is
laying out a plan for a new Puerto Rico, one in which residents play a
greater role in shaping their own destinies than they have at any time
since
the island was colonized by Spain in 1493. “It’s just one fight,” Katia
Alverés said, “which is, how do we make sure that we have a just recovery
and that for the future, we’re not going to fall as hard as we did this
time?”
And there will be a next time. I spoke with Elizabeth Yeampierre, executive
director of UPROSE, Brooklyn’s oldest Latino community-based organization,
who was also in Puerto Rico as part of the climate justice brigades. She
was
preoccupied with the knowledge that hurricane season would begin again in
just a few months. “It’s impossible to talk about what happened in Puerto
Rico without talking about climate change,” which, by causing oceans to
warm
and sea levels to rise, is sure to bring more record-breaking storms. “It
would be foolish for us to think that this is the last storm, that there
aren’t going to be other recurring extreme weather events.”
She also said that Puerto Ricans — by drawing on long-protected indigenous
knowledge about what seeds and tree species can survive extreme events, as
well as the kind of energy and sturdy social structures that can withstand
these shocks — are creating a model not just for the island, but for the
world. A way to “start really thinking about how you prepare for the fact
that climate change is here.”
But if Puerto Rico’s people’s movements are going to have a chance to
provide this kind of global leadership, they will need to move fast.
Because
they aren’t the only ones with radical plans about how the island should
transform after Maria.
Shock-After-Shock-After-Shock Doctrine
The day before I walked through that portal in Orocovis, Gov. Ricardo
Rosselló delivered a televised address from behind his desk, flanked by the
flags of the United States and Puerto Rico. “While overcoming adversity, we
also find great opportunities to build a new Puerto Rico,” he announced.
The
first step was to be the immediate privatization of the Puerto Rico
Electric
Power Authority, known as PREPA, one of the largest public power providers
in the United States and, despite its billions of dollars in debt, the one
that brings in the most revenue.
“We will sell PREPA’s assets to the companies that will transform the power
generation system into a modern, efficient, and less costly system for our
people,” Rosselló said.
It turned out to be the first shot in a machine-gun loaded with such
announcements. Two days later, the slick, TV-friendly young governor
unveiled his long-awaited “fiscal plan,” which included closing more than
300 schools and shutting down more than two-thirds of the island
government’s executive-branch entities, going from a total of 115 to just
35. As Kate Aronoff reported for The Intercept, this “amounts to a
deconstruction of the island’s administrative state” (so it’s no surprise
that Rosselló has many admirers in Trump’s Washington).
A week after that, the governor went on television again and unveiled a
plan
to crack open the education system to privately run charter schools and
private school vouchers — moves Puerto Rico’s teachers and parents have
successfully resisted several times before.
This is a phenomenon I have called the “shock doctrine,” and it is playing
out in Puerto Rico in the most naked form seen since New Orleans’s public
school system and much of its low-income housing were dismantled in the
immediate aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, while the city was still largely
empty of its residents. And Puerto Rico’s education secretary, the former
management consultant Julia Keleher, makes no secret of where she is
drawing
inspiration from. One month after Maria, she tweeted that New Orleans
should
be a “point of reference,” and “we should not underestimate the damage or
the opportunity to create new, better schools.”
Central to a shock doctrine strategy is speed — pushing a flurry of radical
changes through so quickly it’s virtually impossible to keep up. So, for
instance, while most of the meager media attention has focused on
Rosselló’s
privatization plans, an equally significant attack on regulations and
independent oversight — laid out in his fiscal plan — has gone largely
under
the radar.
And the process is far from complete. There is a great deal of talk about
more privatizations to come: highways, bridges, ports, ferries, water
systems, national parks, and other conservation areas. Manuel Laboy, Puerto
Rico’s secretary of economic development and commerce, told The Intercept
that electricity is just the beginning. “We do expect that similar things
will happen in other infrastructure sectors. It could be full
privatization;
it could be a true P3 [public-private partnerships] model.”
Despite the radical nature of these plans, the response from Puerto Rican
society has been somewhat muted. No large-scale protests greeted the first
wave of Rosselló’s rapid-fire announcements. No strikes in response to his
plans to radically contract the state and roll back pensions. No uprisings
against the Puertopians flooding into the island to build their libertarian
dream state.
Yet Puerto Rico has a deep history of popular resistance and some very
radical trade unions. So what is going on? The first thing to understand is
that Puerto Ricans are not experiencing one extreme dose of the shock
doctrine, but two or even three of them, all layered on top of one another
—
a new and terrifying hybridization of the strategy that makes it
particularly challenging to resist.
Many Puerto Ricans told me that the latest chapter in this story really
begins in 2006, when the tax breaks that had been used to attract U.S.
manufacturers to the island were allowed to expire, prompting a devastating
wave of capital flight (and demonstrating just how precarious it is to
build
a development policy based on tax giveaways). This was such a deep shock to
the island’s economy that in May 2006, much of the government, including
all
the public schools, was temporarily shut down. That was the first punch.
The
second came when the global financial system melted down less than two
years
later, dramatically deepening a crisis already well underway.
Broke and desperate, the Puerto Rican government turned to borrowing, in
part by using its special tax status to issue municipal bonds that were
exempt from city, state, and federal taxes. It also purchased high-risk
capital appreciation bonds, which will eventually rack up interest rates
ranging from 785 to 1,000 percent. Thanks in large part to these kinds of
predatory financial instruments, borrowed under conditions that many
experts
argue were illegal under the Puerto Rican Constitution, the island’s debt
exploded. According to data compiled by lawyer Armando Pintado,
debt-service
payments, including interest and other profits paid to the banking
industry,
increased fivefold between 2001 and 2014, with a particularly marked spike
in 2008. Yet another shock to the island’s economy.
And so, in an all-too-familiar story, an atmosphere of crisis was exploited
to force severe austerity on a desperate people. In 2009, Puerto Rico’s
governor passed a law declaring an economic “state of emergency” and used
it
to lay off more than 17,000 public sector workers and strip negotiated
benefits and raises from many more — this at a time when unemployment was
already 15 percent. As has been the case everywhere — these policies have
been imposed in recent years from the U.K. to Greece — it didn’t bring the
island back to growth and health. It pushed it deeper into joblessness,
recession, and bankruptcy.
It was in this context that in 2016, Congress took the drastic measure of
passing the PROMESA law that put Puerto Rico’s finances under the control
of
a newly created Financial Oversight and Management Board, a seven-person
body appointed by the U.S. president, six of whom appear not to live on the
island. The board, which is essentially charged with overseeing the
liquidation of Puerto Rico’s assets to maximize debt repayments and
approving all major economic decisions, is known in Puerto Rico as “La
Junta.” For many, the name is a commentary on the fact that the board
represents a kind of financial coup d’état: Puerto Ricans — unable to vote
for president or Congress but forced to live under U.S. laws — already
lacked basic democratic rights. By giving the fiscal board the power to
reject decisions made by Puerto Rico’s elected territorial representatives,
they were now losing the weak rights they had won, marking a return to
unmasked colonial rule.
Unsurprisingly, the fiscal control board promptly placed Puerto Rico on an
even more wrenching austerity diet. It demanded deep cuts to pensions and
public services, including health care, as well as a laundry list of
privatizations. The school system was particularly hard-hit in this period.
Between 2010 and 2017, roughly 340 public schools were shut down; arts and
physical education programs were virtually eliminated in many elementary
schools; and the board announced plans to slash the University of Puerto
Rico’s budget in half.
Yarimar Bonilla, a Rutgers University associate professor who had been
conducting a major research project on Puerto Rico’s debt crisis before
Maria hit, told me there is no way to understand the post-Maria shock
doctrine strategy without recognizing that Puerto Ricans “were already in a
state of shock and severe economic policies were already being applied
here.
The government had already been whittled down and people’s expectations for
the government had already been very much whittled down.” By early 2017,
she
pointed out, parts of San Juan looked very much like they had been hit by a
hurricane — windows were broken, buildings were boarded up. But it wasn’t
high winds that did it; it was debt and austerity.
Perhaps the most relevant part of this story, however, is that by 2017,
Puerto Ricans were resisting this shock doctrine strategy with organization
and militancy. There had been resistance at earlier stages, including a
general strike in 2009. But in the months before Maria struck, Puerto Rico
saw some of the strongest and most unified opposition in the island’s
history.
A popular movement calling for an independent audit of the debt was quickly
gaining ground, spurred by the conviction that if its causes were closely
examined, as much as 60 percent of the more than $70 billion Puerto Rico
supposedly owes would be found to have been accumulated in violation of the
island’s constitution and is therefore illegal. And if a large part of the
debt is illegal, not only would it need to be erased, the fiscal control
board would need to be dismantled, and debt could no longer be used as a
cudgel with which to impose austerity and further weaken democracy.
According to Eva Prados, spokesperson for the Citizens Front for the Audit
of the Debt, in the year before Hurricane Maria, 150,000 Puerto Ricans
added
their names to a call to audit the debt, and thousands participated in
vigils calling for “light and truth.”
And then there was the mounting revolt against austerity. Last spring,
students at the University of Puerto Rico’s 11 campuses staged a historic
strike that lasted more than two months, protesting plans to raise tuition
while their school’s budget was being slashed, as well as the broader
austerity agenda. A faculty group launched a major lawsuit against the
fiscal control board alleging that the deep cuts to the university were an
illegal attack on an essential service. Then, on May 1, 2017, many of
Puerto
Rico’s labor and social movements converged into one angry cry, when
roughly
100,000 people took to the streets to demand an end to austerity and an
audit of the debt — by some estimates, the second-largest protest in Puerto
Rico’s history.
It was clear that this movement had authorities worried. After several
banks
were vandalized, the state launched an intense crackdown against the key
organizations involved in the May 1 anti-austerity mobilization,
threatening
them with costly lawsuits and jailing several activists.
In this atmosphere of heated resistance, with many calling for Rosselló’s
resignation, several of the more draconian plans seemed to stall. The cuts
to the university were in question, as were some of the bigger-ticket
privatizations. The secretary of education, meanwhile, had been forced to
scale back the number of planned public school closures. Not every battle
was won, but it was clear that there would be no all-out shock
doctrine-style makeover of Puerto Rico without a fight.
Then came Maria, and all those same rejected policies came roaring back
with
Category 5 ferocity.
Desperation, Distraction, Despair, and Disappearance
The jury is still out as to whether this latest attempt at the
shock-after-shock doctrine approach will actually work. If it does, it will
not be because Puerto Ricans suddenly overwhelmingly approve of these
policies. It will be because the tremendous impact of the storm has
disassembled life for millions of people, making the reconstitution of the
pre-storm, anti-austerity coalition a herculean challenge.
It’s helpful to break the extreme state of shock that is being exploited
into four categories: desperation, distraction, despair, and disappearance.
Desperation because the relief and reconstruction efforts have been so
sluggish, so inept, and so apparently corrupt that they have understandably
instilled a sense in many that nothing could be worse than the status quo.
This is particularly true for electricity. Even among those that have had
their power restored, many are experiencing regular blackouts. They are
also
hearing daily threats from their governor that the whole island could wind
up back in the dark again at any point because PREPA is so broke that it
can’t pay the bills; in some parts of the island, water is being rationed
for similar reasons. It’s circumstances like these that make the prospect
of
privatization more palatable. With the status quo so untenable, anything at
all can seem like an improvement.
Related to this is distraction: Daily life in Puerto Rico remains an
immense
struggle. There are repairs to be done to damaged homes, and byzantine,
time-devouring bureaucracies to navigate to help pay for them. For those
who
still don’t have electricity or water, there are the interminable lineups
required to receive aid. Many workplaces still remain closed, making paying
the bills yet another huge logistical hurdle, if it’s possible at all. Add
all this together and for many Puerto Ricans, the mechanics of survival can
take up every waking hour — a state of distraction not very conducive to
political engagement.
For many, the burdens of survival have been so onerous, and future
prospects
seemingly so bleak, that a deep despair has set in — indeed it is reaching
epidemic proportions. Callers making credible threats to take their own
lives overwhelmed the island’s 24-hour mental health hotline in the months
after the hurricane. According to a government report, more than 3,000
people who called the line between November 2017 and January 2018 reported
having already attempted suicide — a 246 percent increase over the previous
year.
For Yarimar Bonilla, these figures represent not just the impacts of Maria,
devastating as they have been, but rather the cumulative effects of many
compounding blows. “Puerto Ricans had already undergone a huge amount of
trauma due to the colonial relationship to the United States,” most
recently
during the debt crisis. Then came the storm, which literally ripped the lid
off the agony that so many households had been quietly enduring. With
cameras poking into homes that had their roofs torn apart, Puerto Ricans
found themselves looking into one another’s lives, and they saw not just
storm damage, but also punishing poverty, untreated illness, and social
isolation. As Bonilla put it, “There’s a real sorrow here in a place that
used to be known for its joy.”
Today, she says, there may not be rioting in the streets, but that should
not be confused with consent. The apparent passivity is at least partly the
result of so much pain being directed inward.
The same desperate circumstances have forced hundreds of thousands of
Puerto
Ricans to make the wrenching decision to simply disappear from the island.
They vanish daily onto planes headed for Florida and New York and elsewhere
in the mainland United States. Many of them have had the direct help of
FEMA, which built what the agency called
an “air bridge,” airlifting people off the island and boarding others onto
cruise ships. Once on the mainland, they were provided with funds to stay
in
hotels (supports set to expire on March 20).
Bonilla says this approach was a political choice — much as it was a choice
to fly and bus the residents of New Orleans to distant states after
Hurricane Katrina, often offering no way to return, a process that
permanently changed the demographics of the city. “Instead of helping
people
here, providing shelters here, bringing more generator power to the places
that need them, getting the electric system up and running, they’re
encouraging people to leave instead.”
There are several reasons why evacuation may have been heavily favored by
Washington and the governor’s office. The disappearance of so many people
in
such a short time, Bonilla explained, “operates as a political escape
valve,
so right now you don’t have people protesting in the streets because a lot
of the people who are really desperate for medical care or who had real
needs where they couldn’t live without electricity have just left.”
The exodus also conveniently helps create the “blank canvas” that the
governor has bragged about to would-be investors. Elizabeth Yeampierre
helped welcome and support many of her fellow Puerto Ricans when they
arrived in the United States. But when I spoke with her on the island, she
said that her “biggest fear” is that the evacuation will be a prelude to a
massive land grab. “What they want is our land, and they just don’t want
our
people in it.”
Many Puerto Ricans I spoke with are similarly convinced that there is more
than incompetence behind the various ways they are being pushed to the
limits of endurance.
As has been extensively reported since the storm hit, the relief and
reconstruction efforts have been a nonstop procession of almost impossibly
disastrous decisions. A key contract to supply 30 million meals went to an
Atlanta company with a record of failure and a staff of one (only 50,000
meals were delivered before the contract was canceled). Desperately needed
relief supplies sat for weeks in storage, both in San Juan and Florida,
where some became rat-infested. Materials key to rebuilding the electrical
grid also sat in warehouses for unknown reasons. Whitefish Energy, a
Montana-based firm with ties to Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke, had just two
full-time staff when it landed a $300 million contract to help rebuild the
electricity grid (the contract has since been canceled).
Then there were the common-sense measures that were simply ignored. As many
pointed out, the Trump administration could have swiftly sent in the USNS
Comfort, a massive floating hospital, to ease the strain on failing health
care facilities. Instead, the ship was sent in late, sat nearly empty for
weeks, and then was ordered withdrawn in November, with power still out on
half of the island. Similarly, instead of relying on two-bit contractors
like Whitefish, or notorious profiteers like Fluor, which has cashed in on
disasters from post-invasion Iraq to post-Katrina New Orleans, PREPA could
have requested that other state electrical utilities send workers to Puerto
Rico and help with the rebuilding — its right as a member of the American
Public Power Association. But it waited more than a month before putting in
the request.
Each one of these decisions, even when they were ultimately reversed, set
recovery efforts back further. Is this all a masterful conspiracy to make
sure Puerto Ricans are too desperate, distracted, and despairing to resist
Wall Street’s bitter economic medicine? I don’t believe it’s anything that
coordinated. Much of this is simply what happens when you bleed the public
sphere for decades, laying off competent workers and neglecting basic
maintenance. Run-of-the-mill corruption and cronyism are no doubt at work
as
well.
But it’s also true that many governments have deployed a starve-then-sell
strategy when it comes to public services: cut health
care/transit/education
to the bone until people are so disillusioned and desperate that they are
willing to try anything, including selling off those services altogether.
And if Rosselló and the Trump administration have seemed remarkably
unconcerned about the nonstop relief and reconstruction screw-ups, the
attitude may be at least partly informed by an understanding that the worse
things get, the stronger the case for privatization becomes.
Mónica Flores, the University of Puerto Rico graduate student researching
renewable energy, said the whole experience has been like watching a car
wreck in slow motion. Like so many others, Flores said it felt impossible
to
take on these systemic issues when you have lost your home, when you are
living out of your car, when you are going to friends’ houses to shower.
“You’re trying not to fall apart … and people are immobilized because
they’re scared, because they’re lost, because they’re just trying to
survive.”
Many Puerto Ricans point out that the promises of lower prices and greater
efficiency that would flow from privatizing basic services are contradicted
by their own experiences. Private telephone companies have provided poor
service in many parts of the archipelago, and a water and sewage system
sale
in the ’90s proved so economically and environmentally disastrous, it had
to
be reversed less than a decade later. Many fear this experience will be
repeated — that if PREPA is privatized, the Puerto Rican government will
lose an important source of revenue, while getting stiffed with the
utility’s multibillion-dollar debt. They also fear that electricity rates
will stay high, and that poor and remote regions where people are less able
to pay could well lose access to the grid altogether.
Even so, the governor’s pitch has proved persuasive for some because
privatization is not presented as one possible solution to a dire
humanitarian crisis, but as the only one. As Casa Pueblo and Coquí Solar
are
attempting to show, this is far from the truth. There are other models —
implemented successfully in countries like Denmark and Germany — that would
greatly improve Puerto Rico’s broken and dirty state-run utility, while
keeping power and wealth in the hands of Puerto Ricans. But advancing such
democratic models requires the political participation of a population that
has a lot of other things on its plate right now.
There is reason to hope, however, that a post-Maria shock-resistance may be
starting to take root. Mercedes Martínez, the indomitable head of the
Federation of Puerto Rican Teachers, has spent the months since the storm
crisscrossing the island, warning parents and educators that the plan to
radically downsize and privatize the school system relies upon their
fatigue
and trauma.
While visiting a still-closed school in Humacao, in the eastern region, she
told a local teacher that the government “knows we’re made of flesh and
bones — they know that human beings get worn out and discouraged.” But, she
insisted, if people understand that it is a strategy, they can defeat it.
“Our job is to motivate people to know that it’s possible to resist things
as long as we believe in ourselves.” This was more than a pep talk: In the
few months after Maria, the secretary of education attempted to keep dozens
of schools from reopening, claiming they were unsafe. The teachers feared
it
was a prelude to closing the schools for good.
Again and again, parents and teachers — who had, in many cases, repaired
the
buildings themselves — successfully fought to protect their local schools.
“They occupied the schools, reopened them without permission; parents
blocked the streets,” Martínez recalled. As a result, more than 25 schools
were reopened that the government had tried to close for good after the
storm.
That’s why Martínez is convinced that no matter what is written in the
governor’s fiscal plan and no matter what privatization laws have been
introduced, it is still possible for Puerto Ricans to successful resist the
shock doctrine. Especially if the pre-storm coalitions rebuild and expand.
On March 19, teachers across Puerto Rico held a one-day walkout to protest
the plans to shrink and privatize the island’s school system, the first
major political demonstration since Maria. And talk of a full-blown strike
is growing louder.
I asked Martínez if her members feared taking action that would disrupt the
lives of families that have already been through so much. She was
unequivocal. “Absolutely not. Our feeling is, how can the government add
more pain to children’s lives by shutting down their schools, taking away
their teachers, and setting up a privatized system that favors those who
already have the most?”
The Islands of Sovereignty Converge
On my last day in Puerto Rico, we climbed another mountain and stepped
through yet another portal. I was traveling with Sofía Gallisá Muriente, a
Puerto Rican artist I had first met in the Rockaways in the aftermath of
Superstorm Sandy, where she had been part of the grassroots relief effort
known as Occupy Sandy.
We’d been scaling treacherously narrow roads on the east coast of the
island, taking various wrong turns because many signs were still down,
looking for the community center in the village of Mariana. Finally, we
asked a man on the side of the road for directions. “You mean the
breadfruit
festival? It’s right up there.”
We found ourselves in a clearing with hundreds of people from across the
archipelago, gathered on folding chairs under a large, white tent. From up
here, looking down the valley to the sea, we could see precisely where
Maria
first made landfall.
As the roadside confusion suggested, this was indeed the site of an annual
festival that celebrates a large, starchy, and nutritious fruit, one that
attracts hundreds of people for food and music to this village in the
municipality of Humacao every year. But after the area was left without
food
aid for 10 days, only to get boxes filled with Skittles, the festival’s
kitchen facilities were harnessed for a different use: Women who usually do
the cooking for the festival came together, pooled whatever food they could
find, and made hot, healthy meals for about 400 people a day. Day after
day.
Week after week. Month after month. They are doing it still.
Renamed the Proyecto de Apoyo Mutuo Mariana (the Mutual Aid Project of
Mariana), the center has become a symbol of the miracles Puerto Ricans have
been quietly pulling off while their governments fail them. In addition to
the communal kitchen, which brought the neighborhood together around meals,
the project started organizing brigades to go out and clear debris. Next,
they set up programing for kids, since the schools were still closed.
Christine Nieves, a dynamic thinker who left a post at Florida State
University’s business school to move back to the island a year before the
storm, is one of the forces behind this project. She and her partner,
musician Luis Rodríguez Sánchez, used their contacts off-island to turn the
community center into a functioning hub, with solar panels and backup
batteries, a Wi-Fi network, water filters, and rainwater cisterns.
Since Mariana still doesn’t have power or water, the mutual aid center at
the top of the mountain has become yet another energy oasis, the only place
to plug in electronics and medical equipment. The next stage for the
project, Nieves told me, is to extend solar power to other buildings in the
community in a micro-grid.
The biggest challenge, she said, has been helping people to see that they
don’t need to wait for others to solve problems — everyone has something
they can contribute now. They might not have food or water, she went on,
but
people know how to do things. “You know electricity? Actually, we have a
problem that you can help us with. You know plumbing?” That’s a skill they
can put to use, too.
This process of discovering the latent potential in the community has been
like “opening your eyes and all of a sudden seeing ‘Oh wait, we’re humans
and there’s other ways of relating to each other [now that] the system has
stopped,’” Nieves said.
I came here to see this remarkable project, but also because on this day,
Proyecto de Apoyo Mutuo Mariana was hosting several hundred organizers and
intellectuals from across Puerto Rico, as well as a couple dozen visitors
from the United States and Central America. Convened by PAReS, a collective
of University of Puerto Rico faculty members involved in the anti-austerity
struggle, the meeting had been billed as a gathering of organizations and
movements “against disaster capitalism and for other worlds.”
It was the first time movements had gathered across such a broad spectrum
since Maria changed everything. And many observed that it was the first
chance they had had in months to step back, take stock, and strategize. “We
organized the gathering in this post-Maria moment to be able to look at
each
other, talk, and see if we could come together at this crossroads to create
a different future,” Mariolga Reyes-Cruz, a PAReS collective member and a
contingent faculty at the Río Piedras campus, told me.
People gathered here from all the parallel worlds I visited during my time
in Puerto Rico, all the islands hidden away in these islands. I saw farmers
from Organización Boricuá, determined to show that given the right
supports,
they can feed their own people without relying on imports; solar warriors
from Casa Pueblo and Coquí Solar, who have seized the moment to push a
rapid
transition to locally controlled renewables; teachers who have organized
their communities to keep their schools open. And tired and muddy members
of
the solidarity brigades that had come to help rebuild.
Key leaders from last year’s surge of anti-austerity activism were here too
— organizers from the student strike, the lawyers and economists calling
for
an audit of Puerto Rico’s debt, trade union leaders and academics who had
been researching alternatives for Puerto Rico’s economy for a long time.
After a brief welcome, the organizers assigned discussion themes before
breaking everyone up into smaller groups spread out in clusters on the
mountaintop. Snippets of conversations floated up from these working
groups:
“We need reinvention not reconstruction” … “We can’t just defend the public
as if it’s inherently good” … “We need a moratorium on any attempt to
fast-track private schools” … “A just recovery means not just responding to
the disaster, but to the underlying causes of the disaster.”
Surveying the scene, Christine Nieves told me that that it felt like “a
dream come true that we didn’t know we had.” She added, “I think we’re
going
to look back to this moment” — when such a wide diversity of groups, most
of
whom did not know each other before the storm, all came together “in this
beautiful, open space, wondering how do we create an alternative and
building toward an alternative” — and realize that this was the moment when
things shifted from despair to possibility.
As the groups reconvened to share their findings, it was possible to detect
an emerging synthesis — or at least, a better understanding of how the
various fronts on which Puerto Ricans are fighting fit into a larger whole.
The debt must be audited because by calling its legality into question, the
case to abolish the anti-democratic fiscal control board, and all of its
endless demands for “structural reforms,” grows stronger. And that’s
crucial
because Puerto Ricans can’t exercise their sovereignty if they are subject
to the whims of a body they had no hand in electing.
For generations, the struggle for national sovereignty has defined politics
in Puerto Rico: Who favors independence from Washington? Who wants to
become
the 51st state, with full democratic rights? Who defends the status quo? So
it seems significant that as discussions unfolded in Mariana, a broader
definition of freedom emerged. I heard talk of “multiple sovereignties” —
food sovereignty, liberated from dependence on imports and agribusiness
giants; energy sovereignty, liberated from fossil fuels and controlled by
communities. And perhaps housing, water, and education sovereignty as well.
What also seemed to be growing was an understanding that this decentralized
model is even more important in the context of climate change, where
islands
like this one will be buffeted by many more extreme events capable of
severing centralized systems of all kinds, from communication networks to
electricity grids to agricultural supply chains.
The day ended with shared food cooked in the community kitchen: rice and
beans, mashed taro, stewed cod, home-brewed rum flavored with every fruit
in
the island’s rainbow. Next came live trovador music and dancing until long
after dark. As volunteers helped clean up the kitchen, an elderly neighbor
arrived to quietly plug in his oxygen machine and have a chat with friends.
Watching this mass meeting segue seamlessly into a party, I was reminded of
Yarimar Bonilla’s observation that amid Puerto Rico’s epidemic of despair,
“the people who seem to be doing the best are those who are helping others,
those who are involved in community efforts.” That was certainly true here.
And it was true, too, of the young people I met in Orocovis, bursting with
pride about how they were able to bring food home to their families.
It makes sense that helping would have this healing effect. To live through
a profound trauma like Maria is to know the most extreme form of
helplessness. For what felt like an eternity, families were unable to reach
one another to find out if their loved ones were alive or dead; parents
were
unable to protect their children from harm. It stands to reason that the
best cure for helplessness is … helping, being a participant, rather than a
spectator, in the recovery of your home, community, and land.
This is why the shock doctrine, as a political strategy, is more than just
cynical and opportunist — “it’s cruel,” as Mónica Flores said to me through
tears. By forcing people to watch as their shared resources are sold out
from under them, unable to stop it because they are too busy trying to
survive, the disaster capitalists who have descended on Puerto Rico are
reinforcing the most traumatizing part of the disaster they are there to
exploit: the sense of helplessness.
Race Against Time
Earlier in the day in Mariana, one speaker had described the challenge they
faced as a kind of race between “the speed of movements and the speed of
capital.”
Capital is fast. Unencumbered by democratic norms, the governor and the
fiscal control board can whip up their plan to radically downsize and
auction off the territory in a matter of weeks — even faster, in fact,
because their plans were fully developed during the debt crisis. All they
had to do was dust them off and repackage them as hurricane relief, then
release their fiats. Hedge fund managers and crypto-traders can similarly
decide to relocate and build their “Puertopia” on a whim, with no one to
consult but their accountants and lawyers.
Which is why the “Paradise Performs” version of Puerto Rico is moving along
at such a rapid clip. For instance, I interviewed Keith St. Clair, a
fast-talking Brit who moved to the island to take advantage of the tax
breaks and began investing in hotels. He told me that he had met with the
governor shortly after Maria. “And I said, ‘I’m gonna double down, I’m
gonna
triple down, I’m gonna quadruple down, because I believe in Puerto Rico.’”
Looking out at the virtually empty Isla Verde Beach in front of one of his
San Juan hotels (“a 90 percent tax-exempt property”), he predicted, “This
could be Miami, South Beach. … That’s what we are trying to create.”
The grassroots groups here in Mariana are entirely unconvinced that
becoming
a fly-in bedroom community for tax-dodging plutocrats represents any kind
of
serious economic development strategy. And they fear that if this
post-disaster gold rush is allowed to continue unchecked, it will foreclose
the very different versions of paradise they are daring to imagine for
their
island.
Land is scarce in Puerto Rico, especially prime farmland. If it all gets
snapped up for more office towers, malls, hotels, golf courses, and
mansions, there will only be scraps left for sustainable farms and
renewable
energy projects. And if infrastructure spending is poured into toll-road
highways, high-priced ferries, and airports, there similarly won’t be
anything left for public transit and a local food system. Moreover, if
energy privatization goes ahead, it could become prohibitively costly for
local communities to pursue the solar and wind micro-grid model. After all,
private utility companies from Nevada to Florida have successfully
pressured
their state governments to put up roadblocks to renewables, since a market
in which your customers are also your competitors (able to generate their
own power and sell it back to the grid) is distinctly less profitable.
Rosselló’s fiscal plan already floats the idea of a new tax that would
penalize communities that set up their own renewable micro-grids.
All of these are fateful choices. Manuel Laboy, Puerto Rico’s secretary of
economic development, said that the decisions made in this window “are
going
to basically set the principles and the conditions for the next 50 years.”
The trouble is that movements, unlike capital, tend to move slowly. This is
particularly true of movements that exist to deepen democracy and allow
ordinary people to define their goals and grab the reins of history.
It’s a very good thing, then, that Puerto Ricans are not beginning to build
this movement for self-determination from scratch. Indeed, they have been
preparing for this moment for generations, from the height of the
independence struggle to the successful battle to kick the U.S. Navy out of
Vieques, to the anti-austerity and anti-debt coalition that peaked in the
months before Maria.
And Puerto Ricans have also been building their future world in miniature,
on those islands of sovereignty hidden throughout the territory. Now, in
Mariana, those islands have found each other, forming their own parallel
political archipelago.
Elizabeth Yeampierre, who attended the Mariana summit, believes that
despite
all the devastation being visited on Puerto Rico, her people have the
fortitude for the battles ahead. “I see a level of resistance and support
that I didn’t imagine was going to be possible,” she said. “And it reminds
me that these are the descendants of colonization and slavery, and they are
strong.”
In the weeks after I left the island, the 60 groups represented in Mariana
solidified into a political bloc that they named JunteGente (the People
Together) and have had meetings all over the archipelago. Inspired by
different models around the world, they have begun drafting a people’s
platform, one that will unite their various causes into a common vision for
a radically transformed Puerto Rico. It is grounded in an unabashed
insistence that despite centuries of attacks on their sovereignty, the
Puerto Rican people are the only ones who have the right to dream up their
collective future.
And so, six months after Maria revealed so much that didn’t work and a few
important things that did, Puerto Rico finds itself locked in a battle of
utopias. The Puertopians dream of a radical withdrawal from society into
their privatized enclaves. The groups that gathered in Mariana dream of a
society with far deeper commitments and engagement — with each other,
within
communities, and with the natural systems whose health is a prerequisite
for
any kind of safe future. In a very real sense, it’s a battle between
sovereignty for the many versus secession for the few.
For now, these diametrically opposed versions of utopia are advancing in
their own parallel worlds, at their own speeds — one on the back of shocks,
the other in spite of them. But both are gaining power fast, and in the
high-stakes months and years to come, collision is inevitable.
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