The Battle For Paradise

by Naomi Klein

The island gets an astonishing 98 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.

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 opportunities 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.

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. 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.

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?

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.

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.”

Gov. Rosselló himself seems to agree. In February 2018, he told a business audience in New York that Maria had created a “blank canvas” on which investors could paint their very own dream world.

There were the notorious 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 drugs that ultimately entered the U.S. market.

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.

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.

As of this writing, the official count of how many people died as a result of Hurricane Maria remains at 64, though a thorough investigation by Puerto Rico’s Center for Investigative Journalism and the New York Times put the real number at well over 1,000.

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.

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.

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Roughly 85 percent of the food Puerto Ricans actually eat is imported.

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.

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.

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.

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.”

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. 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.