Washington Set Puerto Rico Up for Disaster
Loretta Lohman
Washington Set Puerto Rico Up for Disaster
By HECTOR FIGUEROA
It’s been more than a week since I’ve had any word in New York from my 93-year-old father in Puerto Rico. He lives in Coamo, a town in the path of the worst storm to hit the island since 1928. My experience has been shared by millions of Puerto Ricans in the diaspora since Hurricane Maria wreaked its havoc on Sept. 20.
The so-called natural disaster wiped out the deteriorating infrastructure of the entire commonwealth, destroying homes and roads, and leaving Puerto Rico without electricity. Estimates are that it will take months to make the grid fully functional again. The loss of communications has meant no news at all from the more remote communities like Coamo, which is also my hometown.
This wasn’t just nature’s work. Another type of storm had been pounding the island long before last week. With no real representation in Washington, Puerto Rico has always been subject to the whims of stateside politicians unaccountable to the island’s people. More than half a century ago, tax breaks lured industry from the mainland to Puerto Rico, but in recent decades those advantages were yanked back. That set the stage for vulture hedge funds to swoop into the vacuum, but left hospitals, schools, electrical and communications grids too underfunded and fragile to weather a Category 4 hurricane.
The immediate cause of the humanitarian crisis we’re witnessing now was a one-two punch by Hurricanes Irma and Maria. But the seeds for it were sown by a public debt crisis that has made life harder and harder for Puerto Ricans in recent years. The island tried to meet draconian debt payments by making disastrous cuts to public services. Those measures pushed Puerto Ricans out of work and into poverty. By 2015, 46.1 percent of the population was living under the poverty line, including about 60 percent of the island’s children. The governor at the time, Alejandro García Padilla, declared the debt unpayable and began defaulting on debt payments.
The cruelly named Promesa law (“promesa” means “promise” in Spanish) passed by Congress last year was supposed to resolve the debt crisis and right Puerto Rico’s economy. But any meaningful recovery for Puerto Rican families remains a distant hope. The commonwealth’s tight budget has made life on the island impossible for hundreds of thousands of families. They migrated to the mainland; in Central Florida, they were arriving daily by the hundreds before hurricane season.
Then came Hurricanes Irma and Maria. Immediate needs on the island include search and rescue, getting communications back up and clearing roads to get goods and help to people who need it. Beyond that, though, Puerto Rico needs Congress to help it recover from the devastation wrought by economic strategies that have failed the island for decades.
Congress and the Trump administration cannot hide behind the Financial Oversight Board created by Promesa — a semi-colonial entity that in effect controls Puerto Rico’s future. To undo the damage done by years of neglect and abuse by corporations that strip-mined profits out of Puerto Rico with federal blessing, Congress must act to create conditions for a sustainable economy.
That plan must begin with the collapsing health system. Puerto Rico is in urgent need of the $295 million in Medicaid funding that Congress approved in the spring, and additional funds to rebuild a system that is putting some of the country’s sickest, poorest and most vulnerable citizens at risk. Congress must also make an exception to the Jones Act for this and future emergencies, so that ships with supplies can go directly to the island instead of being forced to make port in the mainland United States first. And whatever emergency assistance the Federal Emergency Management Agency sends must come with no strings attached.
It’s time we faced facts about Puerto Rico’s debt: as former Governor Padilla said, it’s unpayable. The only thing Promesa has done for the people of Puerto Rico is put a temporary stay on claims from bondholders and other creditors. Even as he acknowledged the disaster, President Trump reminded people on Monday that the island, “which was already suffering from broken infrastructure and massive debt, is in deep trouble.”
It would be immoral to insist that before Puerto Ricans can rebuild their homes, hospitals, schools and roads, they must pay back this onerous debt. Instead, repayment must be postponed, maybe even eliminated. The banks that have benefited from the debt must take their own losses and let people come first.
Already, the vultures have been circling. Even as Maria hit Puerto Rico, hedge fund creditors were filing motions in court to further their claims to be repaid — sparing no thought for need for rescue, recovery and rebuilding in the coming months.
A good model for recovery and moving forward is the Marshall Plan, which Washington passed into law after World War II to help rebuild the economies of Western Europe, restoring confidence and prosperity for generations.
In the past few years, Puerto Ricans like me across the United States have come together to support our families still on the island, and to demand an end to the cuts that have made life harder and harder for our parents, our brothers and sisters. We will send help to them and our communities, but we must also defend them in the States, by resisting any measures from Washington that will make matters worse.
As the president of a union that represents thousands of Puerto Ricans along the East Coast — from Boston to New York to Florida — I will push our congressional representatives to extend the moratorium on the debt service and create a comprehensive plan to get the island back on its feet.
In the past, terrible storms like the one in 1928 set Puerto Rico back. I hope we can use this opportunity to make changes that will leave the island more resilient.
As I await news from my family, I think about the long road back to normality ahead of us. And I hope our fellow Americans will stand in solidarity with us and demand lasting relief from the crisis we face today.
All we really need, like the tropical forests crippled by the storm, is an opportunity to grow again, in a sustainable and more equitable way.
Hector Figueroa is president of Local 32BJ of the Service Employees International Union.
Loretta Lohman
In the Virgin Islands, Hurricane Maria Drowned What Irma Didn’t Destroy
As islanders wait for doctors, medicine, fuel and manpower to rebuild, the economic toll from the storms is only starting to come to light.
CRUZ BAY, V.I. — Even before two Category 5 hurricanes struck the United States Virgin Islands with punishing fury this month, the notion of paradise here was already about as brittle as a sand dollar.
The local treasury had barely enough cash to keep the government funded for three days. Its debt had grown so large that Wall Street stopped lending it money. The unemployment rate was more than twice the national average.
The one-two punch of Hurricane Irma and Hurricane Maria 14 days later was especially cruel. In many places across the three major islands of this American territory, the second storm drowned what the first couldn’t destroy, ravaging what was once one of the Caribbean’s most idyllic landscapes.
“Maria broke our spirit,” said Ian Samuel of St. John, who lost parts of the upstairs of his house to Irma’s wind and his downstairs to two and a half feet of water from Maria. “I was in a pretty bad car wreck. And it’s like that — when you get out of the car and you’re trying to figure out what’s happening.”
The governor, Kenneth E. Mapp, said he expects that the hospitals on St. Thomas and St. Croix, the most populated islands, will have to be torn down and rebuilt. In St. Thomas, not far from where cruise ships have long unloaded vacationers, tarps and trash cans now collect dripping water from the ceiling of the emergency room, which has to evacuate any critical patients to the mainland.
On St. Croix, one of the few working cell towers went down after someone stole the generator powering it. The authorities had to ease the strict curfew after bodies started piling up at the morgue because people could not stay out long enough to bury those who had passed away of natural causes since the storms.
On St. John, the smallest and most remote of the islands, water and wind reduced beachfront hotel rooms to rubble. A landslide blocked the one road that connects the island from east to west, leaving just enough room for cars to pass but not an ambulance.
So many public school buildings have been compromised on the three islands that students cannot go back to class. And the wind has stripped the trees of all their leaves, leaving the once lush tropical forests looking as if they were set afire with napalm.
The 103,000 people who live in these islands are at the end of a long supply chain of relief that depends heavily on the ports in neighboring Puerto Rico — now crippled by Maria and unable to meet the needs of its own people.
And as Virgin Islanders wait for doctors, medicine, fuel and manpower to rebuild the flattened communications and power grid, the economic toll from the storms is only starting to come to light.
“The economy evaporated pretty much overnight,” said Clint Gaskins, the owner of Longboard, a restaurant on the island of St. John where the only customers these days are the locals who stop by twice a day to pick up meals provided by the Red Cross.
Across the island, the picture is grim: The two largest resorts will not be able to open until next year, if not longer; owners of the restaurants and bars that came away unscathed wonder who will be left for them to serve; and residents who are suddenly without jobs are leaving en masse for the mainland.
“And you’ve got a nearly bankrupt government,” Mr. Gaskins added. “I don’t know how they get out of this.”
The troubles in Puerto Rico are far better known. That island is facing a humanitarian catastrophe following the flooding and destruction from Maria. A debt crisis has left the government so badly strained that it effectively declared bankruptcy in May.
But on a per-capita basis, the often out-of-sight, out-of-mind Virgin Islands carry more debt than Puerto Rico. Wall Street analysts have warned that the territory may be unable to pay back the nearly $2 billion it owes creditors and keep up with billions more in payments it is required to make into a pension system that is projected to be insolvent in less than six years.
“We believe there is a large chance they will default,” said David Hitchcock, an analyst with Standard & Poor’s, which has said it plans to withdraw its ratings of the Virgin Islands — already at a level considered junk by investors — by October because the government has stopped providing it with basic information on its cash flow and financial outlook.
Governor Mapp said in an interview this week that the territory had already made its bond payment due next month and was not in danger of default or bankruptcy, which would have to be authorized by Congress, similar to what happened with Puerto Rico. He said his administration has been working with Wall Street to try to borrow additional funding, but no deals have come together yet.
“I’m not an economist, so I don’t want to sort of say to you it’s going to be all fine. It’s not going to be all fine,” Mr. Mapp said. The government — the territory’s largest employer — had been able to pay its employees since the hurricanes and would do so again this week, he said. But beyond that, he offered no guarantees. His priority, he said, was making sure critically ill patients got out of the two damaged hospitals.
He asked that Washington remember “the forgotten Americans” in the territories. “We are no different than Americans anywhere else,” he said.
Tourism is not only the livelihood for many Virgin Islanders, it provides a third of the local gross domestic product — a revenue stream the local government cannot afford to live without.
A vicious cycle of financial mismanagement, combined with other factors like the loss of one-tenth of the islands’ population since 2008, were hampering the Virgin Islands even as the rest of the country bounced back from the Great Recession.
Basic government functions have suffered neglect for years. The government has shortchanged the hospitals of the funding they are supposed to receive. And that has caused the hospitals to fall behind on payments to entities like the local water and power authority, which has raised rates so high on customers that they pay three times as much as the average in the states. Compounding the financial stress, the federal government caps the amount of money it provides the territories for Medicaid.
“I’m so at a loss right now and really trying to hold it together because we were on the brink before this, in terms of our finances,” Representative Stacey Plaskett, the Virgin Islands delegate to Congress, said in an interview. Ms. Plaskett, like other territorial delegates, cannot vote.
After Irma hit three weeks ago, aid was slow to trickle into St. Thomas and St. John. When military, law enforcement and emergency medical workers finally did begin to settle in, they were forced to pull out as Maria approached, taking the semblance of safety and order they brought with them.
“What it did was send everybody back into shock,” James Smith of St. Thomas, a ferry operator, said of Maria. Many people like him shared a similar reaction now that a week has passed: While the initial shock has worn off, the trauma lingers. “I hear my shutters rattle at night, and I get excited,” Mr. Smith added.
One of the businesses hit badly by the storm was the marine industry. Harbors are littered with ferries that capsized or were washed ashore, leaving fewer vessels to carry supplies back and forth. Masts from sunken sailboats jut out of the water. Charter boats, a big economic driver, lie on beaches, their hulls ripped open.
Reinforcing the sense of despair, St. Croix was hit especially hard by Maria after being spared the worst of Irma’s ferocity. And what had been a staging ground there for relief operations for St. Thomas and St. John was suddenly thrown into a state of emergency.
A week after Maria blew through, the recovery efforts were still lumbering to get off the ground. Power lines sit in tangled piles on the side of the road. Some droop down from broken poles and slap the windshields of cars as they pass by. Houses have been knocked from their foundations and rest precariously on steep hillsides. Piles of garbage grow larger and more fetid by the day, rotting in the tropical sun.
And help from the local and federal government can be hard to come by. When the public clinic on St. John ran out of essential medicines like tetanus shots and did not have doctors and nurses to relieve its overtaxed staff, it was a private individual, Tom Secunda, a co-founder of Bloomberg L.P., who flew them in on a company jet and ferried them to St. John while the federal government kept the ports closed. The company has also donated generators and sent staff to help with recovery logistics.
With no commercial air traffic allowed in or out of the St. Thomas airport, evacuations are being left to wealthy individuals with ties to the islands, including Mr. Secunda and Kenny Chesney, the country singer, who chartered a plane usually used by Nascar to get people and their pets out on Tuesday.
Even as relief begins to flow, residents understand that normalcy will not return for months, if not years.
Kimmeiqua Mahoney sat in what was left of her apartment in a public housing development in the Tutu section of St. Thomas this week, kneading dough for johnny cakes as her fiancé fried them in a pan heated with chunks of broken drywall — his improvisation for charcoal. Ms. Mahoney has two weeks until she is supposed to give birth to her third child, a girl.
She rubbed her belly and looked outside at where there used to be a wall. She said she had no idea where she would live or work after she has her baby. Her job as a warehouse supervisor at a nearby resort is gone. And she has no idea if the housing stipend the government is offering her will cover her expenses. She cannot access her bank account because she has no internet. Neither do the grocery stores, which cannot process her food stamps.
“Already the island was short on jobs,” she said. “Right now we’re just filing for unemployment because it’s the only thing we can do.”
