Let Puerto Rico Be Free
Photographs by Christopher Gregory-Rivera
In 2017, as summer ends, when news anchors first mention the oncoming Hurricane Irma, the people go to the big-box store or the Econo supermarket just a few minutes from home. They try to stock up, but by the time they arrive, the lines are long and most of the shops are running low. They get what they can: some food, a few gallons of water, a portable gas-powered hot plate in case they lose power. They refill their prescriptions and then fill the gas tank after waiting in an hours-long line at the Puma station.
When Irma moves north of Puerto Rico and across the Caribbean, it brings heavy rains, flooding, power outages. And then, two weeks later, Hurricane María approaches the archipelago. On September 20, the storm makes landfall, knocking out the electrical grid and leaving the entire population in the dark. It passes through Yabucoa and Humacao and Comerío, and the water levels in Río de la Plata begin to rise. Flash floods destroy many of the houses. Roads and bridges collapse.
[Read: Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands brace for Hurricane Irma]
The days following María bring only more misery, and there is a general understanding that everyone is up against something bigger than a storm. People lose family members. They desperately hunt for drinking water, collecting it from wells and natural springs and any other source they can find. They endure President Donald Trump, who spends the weekend after the storm at a golf tournament, tweeting that his critics in Puerto Rico are “politically motivated ingrates.” They watch him toss paper towels at hurricane survivors when he finally does visit, in early October—a performance before the world, meant as a humiliation. Eventually he will propose trading Puerto Rico for Greenland.
As the days become weeks, there is more rain; there are more floods. People live without power for months. They watch that same president deny that many people have died, even as thousands never come home. The people work with their neighbors to secure blue tarps onto roofs. Every day, more tarps go up, house after house. When people stand on a terrace watching the town below, they see an ocean of blue-covered houses. They clear debris from the road. They shovel mud out of their living rooms, their kitchens, their bedrooms, their bathrooms. They try to salvage family pictures, wedding albums, birth certificates. The storm carried so much away, dropped other people’s things inside their homes. In a bedroom is someone else’s desk lamp, a neighbor’s charcoal grill. All over the sloped back garden: children’s clothing, toys, shingles from a nearby roof. People clear fallen trees, bamboo, garbage. They clean and clean, but the job never stops. They wait for FEMA. They wait for FEMA.
For months, they live in survival mode, dealing with an archipelago-wide mental-health crisis, a shortage of drinking water, delayed or unavailable medical services. They endure obstacles created by the U.S. government. The military arrives, the National Guard mobilizes, but the Trump administration blocks access to more than $20 billion in hurricane-relief aid and recovery funding. María, the people learn, is the deadliest hurricane to hit Puerto Rico since 1899, but nobody can agree on the true death toll. The official count, announced in December, is 64, but a study the following year by The New England Journal of Medicine finds a fair estimate to be more than 5,000.
[Photos of Puerto Rico after Hurricane Mar]ia
Nine months after María, people still have no electricity. They stop waiting for FEMA. Instead, they look to their neighbors. They take care of one another. This is how it has always been. Every day, it becomes more and more obvious that the current government structure—Puerto Rico as a de facto colony of the United States, despite the official language referring to, doing everything for themselves. Every day, more of them come to understand that Puerto Rico has always stood on its own. This is why I believe that independence, not statehood, is the path we must pursue.
