Post Maria Puerto Rico

La isla de los ratones
June 2017/June 2018

I’ve been digesting how to describe what I saw when I was in Puerto Rico this time around.  My first visit to the island since Maria was 9 months after the disastrous storm crossed it.  If Puerto Rico were the United States, the storm entered through Florida and came out through Washington State.  Think about that for a second.  The island is only 100 miles by 35 so that means there was not an area that went untouched by the storm. 

However, my hometown sits where California sits so it suffered less than most. It’s hardly something to celebrate when to get there you must drive across the island and see the blue tarps.  Lots of things are different while at the same time – everything is the same.  It is hard to put into words when you drive by the spot where you held your rehearsal dinner and it is no longer there.  Swallowed by the ocean, or a blown away by the wind.  When you fly into San Juan it looks the way it always looks: beautiful.  The ocean, the green, the forts… and then you fly over Carolina and you see the blue tarps.  And then you realize it is hurricane season and it has been nine months but those people still only have a tarp for a roof.  It breaks you heart.

The flip side of it is that you find new restaurants.  Places you never went to before because you were attached to the place next door.  New places, because there has been some new places popping up from people who see a need and rise to meet it, and others who take advantage of the government incentives to rebuild.  You talk to people about what they have been through and there are the teary eyed stories of the fear they went through, but you laugh at the jokes about “eso se lo llevó Maria” (Maria took that); a punchline we now share for anything that no longer is and so we always blame the storm.  You laugh because it’s funny and it is so idiosyncratically Boricua: let’s bulldoze this area we always wanted to but couldn’t because of some environmental group and blame it on the storm. People are so strong.  

Michael and I drove to a mountain town to visit a customer of ours.  They have been our customer for two or three years and we wanted to go see them and see how they were.  Now, the greenhouse industry is made up of hardworking, salt of the earth kind of folks no matter where you go, even in Puerto Rico.  We went to see their operation and listened to their stories of the storm.  They lost every roof and with it their whole crop  of poinsettias.  The staff of twenty six had to be cut down to six. Fifty one days without a sale or a prayer of any money coming in.  “We went through a hard time” she said to me sadly.  I don’t really know her, but I do.  I do because I know where she comes from and I know what she is trying to do.  I know how hard it is to run a business, and I know how fragile our business is.  I cannot even imagine what she must have gone through.  Her father is in his sixties and he is a farmer, a business man, and a straight shooter.  Tells me he had to dig out of his own pocket to rebuild because the insurance still hasn’t paid.  “Contractors are making out like bandits around here.”  One of his daughters told me the only good she can see from all of this is the push for more sustainable agriculture.  There’s a big local push for it.

When you drive through you see the balance of the tropical flora trying to recover against what can only be described as a massive haircut.  There have been a lot more cases of allergies and respiratory issues this year.  Correlation is not causation, but when there is such a massive cutback of trees I expect this is the result of it.  They lost a big portion of their natural filters; it makes sense that the air is not as clean.  But they are coming back.  It is heartwarming to see a tree almost completely gone starting to flower bright red.  Sort of like when you see a flower growing in a crack of a sidewalk. 

Mostly I wanted to see for myself what everything looked like now.  I wanted to witness for myself what my people went through.  You see the joy of life in them.  I listened to my friends recount their stories of Maria.  How the RN spent three weeks in the hospital she works in with her 12 year old daughter.  It was a safe place to pass the storm, plus she knew she was needed there.  However, they were basically trapped there, unable to go home and see for themselves what their home looked like for their own safety.  I listened to the tales of the weeks and months without power or water, the hatred of the sound of generators in the middle of the night.  One lady in the mountains told me her sister in law had just gotten her power back the other day.  Nine months to the day from when the storm hit.  It’s nice to know they are still working on it.  We saw power lines still down and streetlights that still do not work.  We saw a portion of the road that had a mini landslide and it looked terrifying. 

El puente de piedra - not even Maria can knock it down. Fragile, but still standing - just like my people.

As I sat around the dinner table at THE BEST restaurant on the island as far as we are concerned (very rustic and we are so happy it is still there!) sharing drinks and a meal with my high school besties, I realized this storm was our 9/11.  That for the next ten years whenever people met for the first time and shared their stories the “where were you when Maria hit?” question would always be asked.  I imagine what I felt for those weeks after the storm not knowing the fate of my loved ones was just like what New Yorkers felt.  Yulín our Giuliani.   Loved by some, called an opportunist politician by others. 

When 9/11 happened I lived on an Army base is Germany, and I witness the spirit of “we are all New Yorkers” even in Germany and France, where everyone hurt with NYC.  I was honestly touched, as someone born in that great city with so many ties to it; I could feel the love and the support.  Sadly, most people have forgotten about Puerto Rico and María.  That tiny island in the Caribbean doesn’t matter much to the world at large.  It matters to me.  And as a member of the Puerto Rican diaspora it is my job to make sure you reading this don’t forget about us.  Or the thousands who died and the government still has not bothered to count.  I try to imagine over 4,000 American citizens dead anywhere else and no one caring, and it is unimaginable.  I mean, the population of Puerto Rico is only 3.4 million.  I’m too pretty for math so someone else is going to have to figure the percentages for me. 

I guess Maria should have been a Bin Laden or something.  Maybe then we would all be Puerto Ricans like we were all New Yorkers.