A slow start in helping Puerto Rico
Puerto Rico has collapsed and is fast becoming a catastrophe. The most powerful storm to strike Puerto Rico in almost a century ravaged the island last week, knocking out all electricity, causing flash floods and mudslides throughout the island, and compounding the misery caused by Hurricane Irma only two weeks ago. By the end of this week, nearly half of Puerto Rico’s 3.5 million people had no drinking water and communications were down all over the island. All this was happening against Puerto Rico’s extended bankruptcy and debt crisis.
There is plenty of blame to go round, beginning with Mother Nature and the brute force of Hurricane Maria, with winds of more than 150 mph. There are also the ugly facts that the U.S. island dependency in the Caribbean has long been near bankruptcy with a weak and failing physical infrastructure, the latter cruelly exposed by the hurricane. Still, despite America’s good intentions, there is no getting around the fact that the U.S. was slow off the mark to help its own people, and the island now faces an enormous humanitarian crisis.
Federal assistance was admirably fast and efficient in Texas and Florida, also struck, only days earlier, by powerful hurricanes. To those who say the main problem is that Puerto Rico is an island, difficult to help, one could say so is Hawaii; in the latter case, a series of islands. Would help have been days late in coming in the case of Honolulu, so much farther from the U.S. mainland than Puerto Rico? I think not. San Juan simply doesn’t count as much, though the residents of Puerto Rico are as American as Hawaiians, even if our brothers and sisters in the Caribbean can’t vote. Hawaii is a state, with elected senators and members of the House of Representatives. Puerto Rico is not. The voices of the people of Hawaii count; those of Puerto Rico don’t.
There is no denying the fact that America’s press and television have failed to give Puerto Rico the attention it deserved in the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Maria. Nor did President Donald Trump, who, we are led to believe, gets all his news from cable television. The extent of the devastation went largely, though not entirely, unreported for several days following the storm.
Then Trump went into campaign mode, if he ever left it, to say how he loved the Puerto Rican people (“I grew up in New York, so I know Puerto Ricans, some are my friends”) and the emergency aid program was going well. In fact, emergency aid was bogged down in bureaucratic squabbles, with some 9,000 aid trucks filled with supplies marooned on the docks of San Juan because there were no drivers.
Moreover, while there are myriad rules and regulations governing the delivery of aid during emergencies, those rules were waived by the White House when it came to Texas and Florida. They were not waived in the case of Puerto Rico, nor did Trump show any intention of quickly lifting them. He mentioned how the shipping companies were opposed to lifting the rules, especially the Jones Act from the 1920s, which calls for only American ships to deliver goods, except when no American ships are available. He eventually granted the waiver, but not quickly, as had happened with the previous storms.
Trump seemed more sympathetic to the pleas of the shipping companies than to those of the Puerto Ricans, who, of course, cannot vote or deliver the large campaign donations that big business, including the shipping industry, hands over every four years. So much for the president’s selfdeclared love of the Puerto Rican people.
Puerto Rico is not alone in this crisis. The American Virgin Islands, which we bought from Denmark a century ago, were also badly hit, as were the British Virgin Islands, Turks and Caicos, St. Martin, Dominica, Anguilla, Barbuda and others. A great natural calamity has struck the Caribbean, and it will take many years to recover. Barbuda is now uninhabitable. Some islands are independent, others British, French and Dutch dependencies.
Our main responsibility, of course, is the commonwealth of Puerto Rico. We face a growing humanitarian crisis that must be closely monitored. So far, we have got off to a slow start. But at least a start has been made.
Bill Stewart writes about current affairs from Santa Fe. He is a former U.S. Foreign Service officer and worked as a correspondent for Time magazine.