A Surreal Life on the Precipice in Puerto Rico

8/8/2016

Swimming pools pop up in slums,horses graze in schoolhouses, and public housing tenants pay negativerent on an island whose government

It’s official: America now has a failed state within its borders, just the way Europe has Greece.

America’s biggest unincorporated territory, Puerto Rico, effectively ran out of cash this summer and has stopped paying its debts. Now, Congress is putting together an oversight board to call the shots until the island gets back on its feet.

The similarities with Greece are uncanny: a sunny vacation paradise that suddenly goes bust, a huge debt taken out in a currency — the euro, the dollar — that’s too strong for the local economy. Both crises have elicited long debates about what went wrong, whose fault it was and how to respond. Austerity? A bailout? Something else?

While the debates drag on, things get worse on the ground.

In Washington, Puerto Rico’s woes are often described in terms of a “humanitarian crisis” — a phrase that evokes famine, war, skeletal children and shellshocked refugees arriving by the boatload. But that is not what you see in Puerto Rico. What you see is a perplexing panorama of contradictions.

There are fully stocked supermarkets and vacant houses. Gleaming commuter trains rolling past boarded-up storefronts. Patriots who denounce Yankee imperialism and shop at Walmart. Twelve percent unemployment and no one to pick the coffee crop. Teenagers dancing in sequined prom dresses while the homeless sleep outside on the sidewalk. It is America, beneath a surreal veneer.

You don’t see the devastation on view in Detroit in the depths of that city’s historic bankruptcy — but Puerto Rico’s debt is, in fact, much bigger than Detroit’s. Frightened people are leaving for the mainland, but there are still those who hope that federal oversight will bring change, and give them a reason to stay. Already, some are even coming back.

“This is an amazing place,” said José Rojas, 23, who was 6 when his parents left small-town Puerto Rico to seek work in Ohio. Now he’s back, sitting on his family’s porch at the top of a hill overlooking one of the island’s coastal cities, catching the breeze and communing with friends on social media. Sure, the house is cramped and sometimes the power and water cut out. But things are better here, he said. His family can grow its own food year-round, and keep hens for fresh eggs. On a clear day, he can see the ocean.

“I’m stuck here now, but that’s just because I don’t have a car,” he said. “A lot of the kids here were raised before there was even a road. The houses were all built of wood then. Now they’re made of cement.” A concrete house can ride out a hurricane.

Others are less upbeat. No one knows yet how intrusive federal oversight will be. Some expect a destructive clash of cultures. A majority of the seven-member board will be Republican; Puerto Rico’s current government is aligned with the Democrats. Will things get worse before they get better? How much worse? Will they ever get better?

Even if they aren’t struggling with joblessness, most Puerto Ricans are struggling with a gnawing fear of the unknown, said Miguel A. Soto-Class, president of the Center for a New Economy, a research institute in San Juan.

Every day, he said, he gets calls and texts from people asking him what’s going to happen and how to prepare. He doesn’t know. The situation has no precedent.

For months, he said, he has had the phrase “Dancing to the Precipice” in the back of his mind. It’s the title of a book about life at Versailles before the French Revolution. But to him, it captures the feelings of foreboding and powerlessness that seemingly everybody in Puerto Rico is dealing with now.

“We’re dancing toward a precipice because we don’t know what else to do,” he said. “There’s a lot of this in Puerto Rico.”

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