<html>
<head>
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">
</head>
<body text="#000000" bgcolor="#FFFFFF">
<div class="container font-size5 content-width3">
<div class="header reader-header" style="display: block;"> <font
size="-2"><a class="domain reader-domain"
href="https://theintercept.com/2018/03/20/puerto-rico-hurricane-maria-recovery/">https://theintercept.com/2018/03/20/puerto-rico-hurricane-maria-recovery/</a></font>
<h1 class="reader-title">In the Rubble of Hurricane Maria,
Puerto Ricans and Ultrarich “Puertopians” Are Locked in a
Pitched Struggle Over How to Remake the Island</h1>
<div class="credits reader-credits">Naomi Klein - March 20, 2018<br>
</div>
</div>
<hr>
<div class="content">
<div class="moz-reader-content line-height4" style="display:
block;">
<div id="readability-page-1" class="page">
<div>
<div>
<p>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.<br>
</p>
<h3>A Solar Oasis</h3>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>And like moths to a flame, people from all over the
hills of Adjuntas made their way to the warm and
welcoming light.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p style="display: inline;" class="readability-styled">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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.”</p>
<p>It’s hard to imagine an energy system more vulnerable
to climate change-amplified shocks than Puerto Rico’s.
The island gets an astonishing <a
href="https://www.eia.gov/state/print.php?sid=RQ">98</a>
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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.”</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.”</p>
<p>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 <a
href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0025326X10002493">toxins</a>,
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.</p>
<p>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.”</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>But, he said with a mischievous smile, “we look at
crisis as an opportunity to change.”</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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?</p>
<h3>Invasion of the Puertopians</h3>
<p>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.”</p>
<p>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 <a
href="https://www.theblaze.com/podcasts/heres-why-this-theblaze-contributor-is-leaving-the-us-and-it-has-to-do-with-taxes">claims</a>
he went from paying 55 percent of his income in taxes
to less than 4 percent.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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 <a
href="http://businessinpuertorico.com/en/profit/individual-investors">slew</a>
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 <a
href="https://www.forbes.com/forbes/welcome/?toURL=https://www.forbes.com/sites/laurengensler/2015/02/11/puerto-rico-new-age-tax-haven/&refURL=https://www.google.ca/&referrer=https://www.google.ca/">much
more</a> — all part of a desperate bid to attract
capital to an island that is functionally bankrupt.</p>
<p>To <a
href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=4&v=oueuFOssfVc">quote</a>
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 <a
href="http://premieroffshore.com/changes-puerto-ricos-act-20-act-22/">put</a>s
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.”)</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.”</p>
<p>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.”</p>
<p>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 <a
href="https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption">Bitcoin
Energy Consumption Index</a>. The city of
Plattsburgh, New York, recently adopted a temporary <a
href="https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/8xk4qv/bitcoin-ban-plattsburgh-coinmint-mining">ban</a>
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.”</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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 <a
href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/02/technology/cryptocurrency-puerto-rico.html">reportedly</a>
crawled into the “bosom” of a Ceiba tree, a
magnificent species sacred in many indigenous
cultures, and “kissed an old man’s feet.”</p>
<p>But make no mistake — the true religion here is tax
avoidance. As one young crypto-trader recently <a
href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-OV1C4gFFVE&t=2s">told</a>
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 <a
href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cJCWpLJm3ew">admitted</a>
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.”)</p>
<p>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?</p>
<p>As a breed, the Puertopians, in their flip-flops and
surfer shorts, are a sort of slacker cousin to the <a
href="https://www.seasteading.org/">Seasteaders</a>,
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.”</p>
<p>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.”</p>
<p>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 <a
href="https://mobile.nytimes.com/2018/03/05/business/puerto-rico-business-maria.html?referer=https://www.google.com/">reportedly
left</a> the island, many of them with federal help.</p>
<p>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 <a
href="http://www.aafaf.pr.gov/assets/newfiscalplanforpr-01-24-18.pdf">decline</a>”
of nearly 20 percent.</p>
<p>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 <a
href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8VQrKcj2pjw">observed</a>
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.”</p>
<p>Gov. Rosselló himself seems to agree. In February, he
told a business audience in <a
href="https://www.ft.com/content/8b16e158-1421-11e8-9376-4a6390addb44">New
York</a> that Maria had created a “blank canvas” on
which investors could paint their very own dream
world.</p>
<h3>An Island Weary of Outside Experiments</h3>
<p>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 <a
href="https://stanford.edu/group/womenscourage/cgi-bin/blogs/familyplanning/2008/10/23/forced-sterilization-in-puerto-rico/">notorious</a>
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.</p>
<p>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 <a
href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2009/06/23/puerto-rico-biotech-island/">trials</a>
of genetically modified seeds, mostly corn and soy.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.”</p>
<p>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 <a
href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/09/vieques-invisible-health-crisis/498428/">health
crisis</a>. 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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 <a
href="http://periodismoinvestigativo.com/2017/12/nearly-1000-more-people-died-in-puerto-rico-after-hurricane-maria/">investigation</a>
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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<h3>“Welcome to Magic Land”</h3>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>“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.”</p>
<p>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.”</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.”</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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 extraordinarily 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 <a
href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/24/us/puerto-rico-hurricane-maria-agriculture-.html">flattened</a>
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.</p>
<p>“A lot of conventional farmers right now are
starving, even though they have 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.</p>
<p>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 <a
href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/10/24/why-fema-sent-junk-food-to-puerto-rican-hurricane-survivors/?utm_term=.7aec4d3a5c23">notorious</a>
boxes filled with Skittles, processed meats, and
Cheez-It crackers.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>“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.</p>
<p>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 “<a
href="https://foodfirst.org/puerto-rican-ecofarms-after-maria-bouncing-back-with-a-little-help-from-our-friends/">brigades</a>”
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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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 <a
href="https://www.elnuevodia.com/english/english/nota/crisisinsuppliesbecameevident-2381010/">single
port</a> in Jacksonville, Florida (which itself was
<a
href="https://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/hurricane-irma/irma-s-storm-surge-swallows-jacksonville-record-floods-n800331">slammed</a>
by Hurricane Irma last September), and roughly <a
href="https://www.elnuevodia.com/noticias/locales/nota/foodsecurityatrisk-1218930/">90
percent</a> 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.”</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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?”</p>
<p>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.”</p>
<p>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.”</p>
<p>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.</p>
<h3>Shock-After-Shock-After-Shock Doctrine</h3>
<p>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.</p>
<p>“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.</p>
<p>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 <a
href="https://theintercept.com/2018/02/03/puerto-rico-debt-fiscal-plan/">reported</a>
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).</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.”</p>
<p>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 <a
href="https://fair.org/home/media-ignoring-puerto-ricos-shock-doctrine-makeover/">meager</a>
media attention has focused on Rosselló’s
privatization plans, an equally significant attack on
regulations and independent oversight — laid out in
his <a
href="http://www.aafaf.pr.gov/assets/newfiscalplanforpr-01-24-18.pdf">fiscal
plan</a> — has gone largely under the radar.</p>
<p>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.”</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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 <a
href="https://www.scribd.com/document/357673061/Broken-Promises">785
to 1,000 percent</a>. Thanks in large part to these
kinds of <a
href="https://www.democracynow.org/2016/7/15/puerto_ricos_payday_loans_nearly_islands">predatory</a>
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.</p>
<p>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 “<a
href="https://nacla.org/article/puerto-rico-crisis-government-workers-battle-neoliberal-reform">state
of emergency</a>” 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 <a
href="https://oemmndcbldboiebfnladdacbdfmadadm/content/web/viewer.html?file=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.researchgate.net%2Fprofile%2FJose_Caraballo_Cueto%2Fpublication%2F309736965_From_deindustrialization_to_unsustainable_debt_The_Case_of_Puerto_Rico%252">Greece</a>
— it didn’t bring the island back to growth and
health. It pushed it deeper into joblessness,
recession, and bankruptcy.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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 <a
href="http://caribbeanbusiness.com/congress-asked-to-include-audit-in-puerto-ricos-debt-cancellation-bill/">call</a>
to audit the debt, and thousands participated in
vigils calling for “<a
href="https://www.scribd.com/article/345808396/Puerto-Ricans-Hold-A-Vigil-For-Light-And-Truth-To-Demand-An-Audit-Of-Public-Debt">light
and truth</a>.”</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>Then came Maria, and all those same rejected policies
came roaring back with Category 5 ferocity.</p>
<h3>Desperation, Distraction, Despair, and Disappearance</h3>
<p>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.</p>
<p>It’s helpful to break the extreme state of shock that
is being exploited into four categories: desperation,
distraction, despair, and disappearance.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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 <a
href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/13/us/puerto-rico-hurricane-maria-mental-health.html">overwhelmed</a>
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 <a
href="https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/2/21/17032168/puerto-rico-suicide-hotline-hurricane-maria">246
percent</a> increase over the previous year.</p>
<p>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.”</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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<br>
an “<a
href="https://earther.com/femas-preps-air-bridge-to-bring-puerto-rican-hurricane-1820304959">air
bridge</a>,” 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).</p>
<p>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.”</p>
<p>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.”</p>
<p>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.”</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>It’s helpful to break the extreme state of shock that
is being exploited into four categories: desperation,
distraction, despair, and disappearance.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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 <a
href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/06/us/fema-contract-puerto-rico.html?smid=tw-share">30
million meals</a> 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 <a
href="http://www.orlandosentinel.com/news/breaking-news/os-fema-prfaa-puerto-rico-rat-invasion-20180206-story.html">rat-infested</a>.
Materials key to rebuilding the electrical grid also
sat in <a
href="https://theintercept.com/2018/01/16/puerto-rico-utility-workers-charge-that-federal-government-is-hoarding-reconstruction-supplies/">warehouses</a>
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).</p>
<p>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 <a
href="https://www.truthexam.com/2017/11/trump-withdraws-naval-hospital-ship-from-puerto-rico-during-intense-time-of-need-with-no-warning/">withdrawn</a>
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.</p>
<p>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 <a
href="http://www.noticel.com/economia/puerto-rico-como-estado-quotclientelarquot-que-alienta-la-corrupcin/621109613">cronyism</a>
are no doubt at work as well.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.”</p>
<p>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 <a
href="https://www.citizen.org/puerto-rico-guinea-pig-water-privatization">disastrous</a>,
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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>“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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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?”</p>
<h3>The Islands of Sovereignty Converge</h3>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.”</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>Renamed the Proyecto de Apoyo Mutuo Mariana (the
Mutual Aid Project of Mariana), the center has become
a <a
href="https://www.buzzfeed.com/mollycrabapple/how-one-small-town-in-puerto-rico-found-food-and-community?utm_term=.mam2BxBQw#.ofG7gVgD1">symbol</a>
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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.”</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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 <em>causes</em> of the
disaster.”</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<h3>Race Against Time</h3>
<p>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.”</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.”</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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 <a
href="http://sincomillas.com/rossello-considera-poner-un-impuesto-al-sol/?noredirect=1#noredirect">penalize</a>
communities that set up their own renewable
micro-grids.</p>
<p>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.”</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.”</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p class="caption"><br>
</p>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
<div> </div>
</div>
<div class="moz-signature">-- <br>
Freedom Archives
522 Valencia Street
San Francisco, CA 94110
415 863.9977
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://freedomarchives.org/">https://freedomarchives.org/</a>
</div>
</body>
</html>