After Hurricane Maria made landfall on Puerto Rico, my family in the United States watched and read reports about the slow trickle of aid to people in need on the island. We knew that if food and water weren’t getting to big cities like San Juan and Bayamon fast enough, the situation in Loíza, the small municipality of less than thirty thousand where we come from, was likely to be worse. An uncle in Miami, Jon Piñeiro, decided, like many other Puerto Ricans in the wake of the storm, that he would make a trip to the island to bring supplies and generators to our family himself. “You should come too,” he texted me. Another uncle from Tampa, David Lanzo, whose daughters I kept in close contact with during the storm, decided to join. So did a cousin in Massachusetts, Rafael Lanzo, whose parents still live on the island.
We pooled money together, reached out to friends, and started a Generosity fund-raising page. By the time we secured a flight to Puerto Rico, after three delays and rebookings, we had collected enough money and supplies to bring help for the larger community in Loíza. We shipped two boxes of supplies ahead of our trip, and, the night before the flight, we filled more with diapers, canned food, medicine, batteries, flashlights, mosquito repellent, and tampons. We weighed each one to make sure that it was under the airline’s weight restriction (for cargo heavier than fifty pounds, the prices increase dramatically). Boxes of water were too heavy to ship, so we packed individual bottles and half cases into our luggage when we could, and put together one hundred-pound box of water, which would cost two hundred and twenty-five dollars to take. That’s two dollars and sixty cents a bottle—better than the three dollars my cousin in Loíza said people were charging on the streets. We took a break from packing to watch the viral video of San Juan’s mayor, Carmen Yulín Cruz, standing at a podium with a grave look on her face and raising a white flag to the rest of the world. She criticized the federal government’s slow response to a crisis that has left over three million American citizens lacking access to basic needs like clean water and electricity. “We’re dying here,” she said. We read President Trump’s tweets in response, saying that Cruz had been persuaded by Democrats to treat him “nasty.”
At Miami International Airport the next morning, we showed up with nine boxes of supplies and five generators. We spent close to three thousand dollars on cargo charges, then boarded a flight full of passengers on similar missions to get necessities into the hands of loved ones. As we headed down the aisle to our seats, David helped a woman whose knees buckled as she tried to lift a carry-on bag with canned food into the overhead compartment. When we neared Puerto Rico, people craned their necks toward the windows. I asked Jon, who had the window seat, what it looked like. “So far, not too bad,” he said.
I had the same thought as we walked through the San Juan terminal. The A.C. was on, the toilets flushed, and the gift shop was open and selling flags and rum and coffee—provided you could pay in cash. But by the time we reached the baggage-claim area the air had turned hot and thick, and filled with the stench of sweating bodies. We waited for close to an hour before the conveyor belt sputtered out one bag. It made three rounds, then the machine died again. The rest of the bags piled up at the entrance of the belt, and Rafael jumped up and pulled out bag after bag, handing it to the person behind him and creating a human conveyor belt. When there was no luggage left and our boxes still hadn’t appeared, we asked a tired attendant to look up our cargo’s status. Then the power in the entire airport died and the worker threw up his hands. He’d call us the following day, he said.
As we drove a rented minivan to my cousin Marivette’s house, in the nearby town of Canovanas, we passed a toppled water tank. A Burger King sign was splayed across the parking lot. As the sun set, the only lights that came on were from cars on the road and on the shoulders of the highway, where passengers parked to look for a cell-phone signal.
Marivette and her family sat in lawn chairs outside her small one-story home. Part of her covered patio had been blown off by the storm. She said that her family was sleeping on mats laid out in the portion that remained covered, because the interior of the house was too hot. I caught up with my nine-year-old cousin Yahed. In August of 2016, we’d gone to the beach together in Piñones and he’d showed off his rapping skills and bragged about how popular he was at school. He had less to say this time. Mostly, he and his two teen-age sisters looked bored. They hadn’t been to school since Hurricane Irma, and had spent most of their time since then holed up inside. Before I left, he told me he’d persuaded his mother to drape a blanket across the front, street-facing gate of the patio at night, so that he could have more privacy as he slept. “I woke up the other morning and saw the neighbor across the street staring at me,” he said.
On the drive to Loíza, we saw downed power lines and posts on the sides of the road, spilled one after another like dominoes. The sidewalks and yards of homes were strewn with pieces of aluminum, chair limbs, moldy sofas, and tree branches. A gas station had a pump missing and a roof like a crumpled paper ball. We stopped at my cousin Denisse’s house to deliver food and water, and she told us about the conditions at the local school where she works as a social worker. It had been turned into a shelter, she said, and the only food that people were receiving was cans of salchichas, or sausage, and a few crackers. There was no water for the toilets to flush, and people were beginning to develop skin diseases.
That night, we crashed at the house of my great-aunt Dora Correa, a small, spectacled woman with a puffy afro, and her wiry husband, Rafael Lanzo, Sr., known as Rafi. Rafi will turn seventy soon, but he still prides himself on doing pushups, pull-ups, and sit-ups every morning, and he spends hours in his back yard tending to a garden and a trove of rabbits he raises. Maria killed ten of his rabbits, and left only a papaya tree standing in his garden. During the storm, the winds ripped out Dora and Rafi’s bedroom window, and as Rafi tried to close the bedroom door behind him a gust of wind shut it on his finger and sliced off the tip of his thumb. He showed me the piece of flesh swimming in a pill bottle full of alcohol. “Some crazy shit, right?” he said.
The next morning, we drove to Loíza to meet with the mayor, Julia M. Nazario, and ask her how we could most effectively continue to send supplies in the coming weeks and months. Nazario, a petite woman with a voice like a sing-song lullaby, has earned accolades for cleaning up a town that had been plagued for decades by corrupt leadership and crime. I have fond memories of childhood summers in Loíza, when I was off from school in the Bronx, riding horses, watching cousins fish crabs out of the water with their hands, and getting teased for the stilted, gringo Spanish that came out of my mouth. But I also remember nights pierced by gunshots, and the funerals for two uncles who were murdered as a result of drug-related violence. Since Nazario took office, in 2016, the town has seen a steep decline in homicides, from over forty in 2010 to six so far this year. A mural next to her modest two-story office bears a town slogan she coined: Loíza Renace, or Loíza Reborn.
It had been more than two weeks since Maria hit, and almost a month since Irma first wiped out power across much of Puerto Rico, but Nazario told us that she had yet to receive the satellite phone she’d been promised from FEMA. Lacking the ability to make calls, she’d instead been driving thirty minutes into San Juan to ask for supplies or report emergencies. When we told her that she could keep the satellite phone we’d brought with us, her eyes filled with tears. She introduced us to her Director of Federal Programs, Luis Daniel Pizarro, and we followed him to his office, past a small lobby inside the town hall full of people charging phones and waiting to speak with officials. We asked Pizarro what Loíza’s most pressing needs were. Water and mosquito repellent, he said. We asked whether he was getting these items from the government. He said only minimal amounts. “Let’s just say it is clear that we are not a priority,” he added.
Later that day, we drove to the airport, hoping to retrieve the boxes and generators that hadn’t arrived the day before. On our way out of town, we saw people congregating around the Tau Center, a school serving Loíza’s at-risk youth, which opened in 2014 with the support of the Puerto Rican pop star Ricky Martin and his charity foundation. Martin, a native of San Juan, was there amidst the crowd, handing out supplies to the community. “It looks like they nuked us,” he said later, in an interview with Ellen DeGeneres, speaking about what he’s saw during his visit.
At the airport, we discovered that only eight of our nine boxes had arrived, and none of our generators. We waited in line to speak to a representative, and watched a man in front of us throw a fit because his generator hadn’t arrived, either. When it was our turn, the representative told us to visit a nearby cargo hangar. There, a long line of people waited as tired employees retrieved generators and boxes from a warehouse filled with pallets of shipments. An attendant told us that supplies for FEMA had been sitting in a nearby hangar for close to a week, because the agency’s own central warehouse for supplies was too full.
Five hours later, tired and hungry, we learned that our generators and remaining box had never arrived in San Juan. They were still sitting on a ramp in Miami. Feeling defeated, we went back to Dora and Rafi’s house, and made arrangements with Rafael, who would stay behind to help deliver the rest of the cargo whenever it arrived. The next morning, before our flight home, we emptied the boxes we did have and split items into separate bags for more than ten family members. We set aside one box for a nearby pastor with a church of three hundred members, and two boxes for the mayor to distribute. As we were divvying things up on the patio, a man walking by asked if we had size-7 Pampers for his baby. We didn’t, but we gave him a flashlight, canned tuna and spaghetti, bottles of water, and instant oatmeal.
Around 10 A.M., we headed back to the airport, where we found the wing for flights leaving Puerto Rico packed with families who were carrying piles of bags and pets crammed in holders, headed for states like Florida, New York, California, and Pennsylvania. The line inched along as the counter attendants processed each of us by calling a representative in the United States with a record locator, confirming the passenger’s identity, and writing a boarding pass by hand. My attendant listed an incorrect last name on my pass the first time around, and T.S.A. stopped me from passing through security until I had it fixed.
As I waited at my gate, I stared at a long line of elderly passengers in wheelchairs, waiting to be loaded on the plane. Almost a quarter of Puerto Rico’s population is over sixty-five years old, and fewer than half of the country’s hospitals have been able to operate since the storm. “I’ve never seen anything like that in my life, and I travel a lot,” a woman standing next to me said, looking at the line of wheelchairs. She was a professor from the University of Puerto Rico, on her way to Washington, D.C., for a conference. She had walked four miles to get to the airport because President Trump had landed in Puerto Rico that day, and the roads in and out of the airport had been jammed. Later, my plane sat on the tarmac for thirty minutes, waiting for Trump to depart. When I landed in Miami and had a phone signal again, I saw that he’d spent his short time on the island touring a wealthy suburb of San Juan that was largely spared by Maria, practicing his jump shot as he tossed paper towels into a crowd, and telling Puerto Ricans that they should feel lucky the island avoided a “real catastrophe.” “Sixteen versus literally thousands of people,” he said. “You can be very proud.”
By the time I was home in my apartment, in Miami, the count of storm-related deaths in Puerto Rico had grown from sixteen to thirty-four. As the central government makes more contact with smaller, secluded municipalities like Loíza, more deaths will almost certainly be added to that tally. More than ninety per cent of the island will remain without power for the foreseeable future; currently, only half of the residents have clean running water. Gas stations are only accepting cash, which will become increasingly hard to come by as employers remain closed or only able to pay their workers part time. The seventy-billion-dollar debt that Puerto Rico owes to the United States will continue to grow. One of the island’s largest sources of revenue, tourism, will continue to suffer.
Puerto Ricans are a resilient people, and our diasporic community in the United States is doing its part to raise funds, charter planes and boats, write songs, and help provide relief however we can. There is a phrase, un invento, that Puerto Ricans use to describe our knack for getting out of jams using only creativity and the limited resources at our disposal. What can’t be un invento, though, is rebuilding and reviving an economically depressed island that has been battered by two of the strongest hurricanes it has faced in a century. That job will require the same resources, brain power, and forward-thinking solutions that the U.S. government will bring to Houston and Florida in the coming months and years. Allowing Puerto Ricans, who fight in our wars and pay taxes, to make do with what they have, and with what their loved ones outside can bring them, won’t be nearly enough.
The day after I landed back home in Miami, our generators arrived in San Juan, and Rafael was able to deliver them. On Saturday, I spoke to Denisse, who had arrived in New York City the night before. She’d booked a trip to visit my mother in the Bronx weeks before she ever thought her life would be upended by hurricanes. The generators back home in Puerto Rico were making life easier, she told me. They were powering fans through the night and allowing everyone to charge their cell phones and remain in contact. But the future remained uncertain.
Denisse said that she’d already made arrangements for her two daughters to go with her sister Juliann and Juliann’s five-month-old son to Tampa later this month, to stay with the women’s father, who lives in Miami. They’ll be joined in November by Marivette and her children. Marivette told me that her job at the nonprofit school where she works had been reduced to twenty hours a week; in three weeks, when funds run out, she will stop being paid, and the school will likely shut down. “I have a family to provide for and a mortgage to pay,” Marivette said. “There are no options that will allow me to stay.”
Denisse is one of the lucky few still receiving regular pay, because she works for the Department of Education. She has car payments to keep up with and is unsure how fast she would be able to find a job in the United States. But she told me that, if by December things are still as bad as they are now, she will likely leave, too. “I have mixed feelings,” she said. “I don’t want to leave my island, but I know the recovery will be very slow. The uncertainty of not knowing when things will get better is very hard to live with.”
