Hurricane Irma left Puerto Rico battered, but standing. Then along came Maria — not the patron saint of mercy, but the hurricane — with the knockout blow.
Puerto Rico-born Kathy Vellon knows that hurricanes are a part of island life.
“People are used to hunkering down during storms; we know that’s part of living on an island,” says the 35-year-old Vellon, who lives in Middleton. “When Maria was coming, they still didn’t have relief from Irma, because it was going to Texas and Florida, and then the Bahamas.”
Vellon has family who stuck out the storm. However, Maria’s destruction was so complete that it took three days before signs of life appeared on Facebook.
“There’s nothing left,” Vellon says. “My aunt said it’s like the apocalypse — there’s no TV, no news, just people outside cleaning up; people collecting water off the side of a mountain; it’s 100 degrees, and it’s very humid.”
Maria was the strongest hurricane in over 100 years to directly hit Puerto Rico, making landfall on Sept. 20, with sustained winds of 155 mph. With a radius 20 miles larger than the island, the storm ravaged Puerto Rico in total darkness as it hovered low like an alien spacecraft.
The destruction could not have come at a worse time. Saddled with $72 billion in debt, and facing economic collapse, Puerto Rico is on life support.
The debt is likely to be an ongoing concern. According to a Sept. 27 article in The Intercept, just three of Puerto Rico’s 51 known creditors have donated to a disaster relief charity. None support debt forgiveness. On Tuesday, President Donald Trump vowed to wipe out the debt, but his staff later dismissed that idea.
As disaster relief efforts ramped up in other hurricane-battered states, Puerto Rico was left without the bare necessities.
“There is no electricity or water,” wrote Vellon’s uncle, Orlando in an Oct. 3 email to the family. “We live in a secluded place and that lends itself to criminals [and] mischief. We are starving and thirsty.”
In many ways, Puerto Rico remains as much an experiment of imperialist ambition as it was when Christopher Columbus arrived in 1493. Native inhabitants were enslaved and forced to mine the gold to finance Spain’s continued expansion.
By the time America squeezed Spain from the Western Hemisphere in 1898, the rich port’s indigenous population had been completely wiped out.
In June 2016, Congress passed the Puerto Rico Oversight, Management, and Economic Stability Act (PROMESA), establishing a Fiscal Control Board to bring the island’s economic crisis under control. La Junta, as it’s known on the island, has a broad range of powers that have drawn concern that austerity measures will be imposed, adding to the current desperation.
Kathy Vellon’s brother Manuel, 39, is a former organizer with Service Employees International Union in the states who doubts the board will put people before profits. The Madison resident fears Wall Street — which holds most of the territory’s debt — intends to plunder the island’s natural resources.
Before Congress voted on PROMESA, Manuel met with U.S. Rep. Mark Pocan (D-Madison) to ask that he vote against the bill.
“I told him, ‘If you vote for this, you’re taking away democracy from the hands of the people and putting it into the hands of the Wall Street boys,” says Manuel.
Nevertheless, Pocan (like many Democrats) voted for PROMESA, a decision he stands by. Providing immediate assistance to ease the debt crisis was more important than Puerto Rico’s autonomy, Pocan explains via email.
“When Congress voted on PROMESA, the situation was so dire that we were told that hospitals couldn’t order medicine more than 24 hours out and patients could not be medevacked,” Pocan writes.
Excuses, Manuel says.
“My grandfather was a stand-up man,” he says. “He fought against Hitler; he understood what it meant to fight against Hitler and to do what needed to be done for the rights of Puerto Ricans, and he was willing to give up his life.”
He thinks for a moment, then sighs.
“At the end of the day, we have a broken political system that is not tending to the needs of human beings,” he continues. “The mayor of San Juan had to beg for help because there is no other option. Her hands are tied. The governor’s hands are tied. It’s Wall Street that governs Puerto Rico.”
On Sept. 30, 10 days after Maria’s landfall, the Vellons’ aunt sent street-level dispatches from a barrio just south of San Juan. Everybody was in the streets clearing debris by hand. With rain in the forecast, they feared more mudslides.
That same day, President Donald Trump berated Puerto Ricans and San Juan Mayor Carmen Yulin Cruz. Cruz had accused the White House of misleading the public by claiming federal relief efforts were going well. “We’re dying here,” she tearfully announced at a press conference.
The next morning, as millions continued clearing the wreckage of their storm-ravaged lives, Trump tapped out his first tweet of the day.
“The mayor of San Juan, who was very complimentary only a few days ago, has now been told by the Democrats that you must be nasty to Trump,” he wrote. “Such poor leadership ability by the Mayor of San Juan, and others in Puerto Rico, who are not able to get their workers to help.”
For the next 11 hours, Trump scolded Cruz in several tweets.
Around the time Trump tweeted that 10,000 federal workers were on the island “doing a fantastic job” and went on to blame fake news for reporting otherwise, members of the Vellon family around San Juan and farther south in Cubuy wrote that they hadn’t seen any sign of FEMA.
Vellon and her family have pooled money to send their relatives, but with the government and banking systems crippled, currency isn’t circulating, rendering Walmart cash transfers and ATMs useless. Even if cash were flowing, consumer protections would likely prevent many cash transfers from going through.
“People don’t have ID cards, debit cards, birth certificates,” Kathy Vellon says. “When I say they lost everything, I mean, it is everything.”
Manuel Vellon wants to make his ancestral home great again. “Let’s rebuild the entire Caribbean, because it’s not just Puerto Rico, but it’s the Virgin Islands, Barbuda, Antigua — totally wiped out,” he says. “If we forgive debt, rebuild infrastructure, let’s use the sun, the wind, the ocean, let’s make Puerto Rico the shining star of the Caribbean.”
But, Puerto Ricans’ prospects of self-determination may be more out-of-reach thanks to PROMESA. The bill reasserted America’s absolute authority over the island.
Kathy and Manuel’s father, who lost two uncles to the Korean War, and was himself disabled after being wounded in Vietnam, says that when he moved his family stateside 31 years ago, banks and employers would ask for his passport or green card. His children are often asked for the same documents.
“It’s unfortunate that a disaster like this has to happen for people to realize that we’re Americans,” says the elder Manuel Vellon. “Puerto Ricans have done a lot for this country.”
On Oct. 3, Donald Trump visited the storm-ravaged island, a move Kathy’s family says brought the relief effort around San Juan to a standstill. There is no more gasoline left to run the generators, they report.
If Trump was on a mission of mercy, it was hard to tell. Reuters reported that he tossed rolls of paper towels into a church crowd. He later visited a family at their home, assuring them: “We’re going to help you out. Have a good time.”