HOME | ACERCA | NACIONAL | LOCAL | MUNDIAL | DOCUMENTOS | CONTACTOS | ANTERIORES

MUNDIAL

Let PUERTO RICO be free

By Jaquira Díaz
The Atlantic
September 20, 2022

In 2017, as summer ends, when news anchors first mention the oncoming Hurricane Irma, the people go to the big-box store or the Econo supermarket just a few minutes from home. They try to stock up, but by the time they arrive, the lines are long and most of the shops are running low. They get what they can: some food, a few gallons of water, a portable gas-powered hot plate in case they lose power. They refill their prescriptions and then fill the gas tank after waiting in an hours-long line at the Puma station.

When Irma moves north of Puerto Rico and across the Caribbean, it brings heavy rains, flooding, power outages. And then, two weeks later, Hurricane María approaches the archipelago. On September 20, the storm makes landfall, knocking out the electrical grid and leaving the entire population in the dark. It passes through Yabucoa and Humacao and Comerío, and the water levels in Río de la Plata begin to rise. Flash floods destroy many of the houses. Roads and bridges collapse.

The days following María bring only more misery, and there is a general understanding that everyone is up against something bigger than a storm. People lose family members. They desperately hunt for drinking water, collecting it from wells and natural springs and any other source they can find. They endure President Donald Trump, who spends the weekend after the storm at a golf tournament, tweeting that his critics in Puerto Rico are “politically motivated ingrates.” They watch him toss paper towels at hurricane survivors when he finally does visit, in early October—a performance before the world, meant as a humiliation. Eventually he will propose trading Puerto Rico for Greenland.

As the days become weeks, there is more rain; there are more floods. People live without power for months. They watch that same president deny that many people have died, even as thousands never come home. The people work with their neighbors to secure blue tarps onto roofs. Every day, more tarps go up, house after house. When people stand on a terrace watching the town below, they see an ocean of blue-covered houses. They clear debris from the road. They shovel mud out of their living rooms, their kitchens, their bedrooms, their bathrooms. They try to salvage family pictures, wedding albums, birth certificates. The storm carried so much away, dropped other people’s things inside their homes. In a bedroom is someone else’s desk lamp, a neighbor’s charcoal grill. All over the sloped back garden: children’s clothing, toys, shingles from a nearby roof. People clear fallen trees, bamboo, garbage. They clean and clean, but the job never stops. They wait for FEMA. They wait for FEMA.

For months, they live in survival mode, dealing with an archipelago-­wide mental-health crisis, a shortage of drinking water, delayed or unavailable medical services. They endure obstacles created by the U.S. government. The military arrives, the National Guard mobilizes, but the Trump administration blocks access to more than $20 billion in hurricane-relief aid and recovery funding. María, the people learn, is the deadliest hurricane to hit Puerto Rico since 1899, but nobody can agree on the true death toll. The official count, announced in December, is 64, but a study the following year by The New England Journal of Medicine finds a fair estimate to be more than 5,000.

Nine months after María, people still have no electricity. They stop waiting for FEMA. Instead, they look to their neighbors. They take care of one another. This is how it has always been. Every day, it becomes more and more obvious that the current government structure—Puerto Rico as a de facto colony of the United States, despite the official language referring to it as a “commonwealth”—is a failure. There is no benevolent American savior coming to help Puerto Rico. Every day, people see that there is only them, doing everything for themselves. Every day, more of them come to understand that Puerto Rico has always stood on its own. This is why I believe that independence, not statehood, is the path we must pursue.

Oscar
every year, no matter where I’m living, I visit family in Puerto Rico. Sometimes I spend whole summers there, sweating my ass off, driving up and down narrow mountain roads, splitting my time among San Lorenzo and San Juan and Humacao and Comerío. After a couple of weeks in the mountains, of days walking the cobblestone streets, feeding flea-bitten satos with wagging tails, mosquitoes leaving galaxies of red down my arms and legs, the coquis singing me to sleep at night, I start to feel more like myself, like the woman I’m supposed to be. Soon, I can’t remember what life is like without roosters screaming in the early morning, the neighbor’s donkey braying, wild parrots flying overhead, the peacocks train-rattling down the hill.

Last year, on my first trip back since the corona­virus pandemic began, I visited my Tío David, a Catholic priest. When Hurricane María hit, my uncle lived in Comerío, a mountain town about an hour south of San Juan, near the center of the main island. He was based in the church there. Our family lost contact with him when the power and cellphone service went down. I spent six weeks listening for his name on walkie-talkie apps, reading lists of survivors, texting and emailing and calling, until finally one day I found him and heard his voice again. He didn’t leave Comerío, even as I sent supplies and begged him to fly to Ohio, where I lived at the time. “There’s too much work to do here,” he told me. “People need help.”