![]() She called out FEMA and parried the fusillade from Trump. As awful as this has been, it’s an opportunity.” In her baseball cap and glasses, Cruz has been at the vortex of the political storm that followed the meteorological one. “If we’re going to rebuild and reconstruct, it has to be for the right reasons,” says Cruz, the San Juan mayor. Six in 10 residents rely on public assistance. But in terms of income, it would displace Mississippi as the poorest of the poor. If Puerto Rico were a state, it would rank in area right around Connecticut, the nation’s richest. Police who landed here found people without food or water. ![]() The desperate message ‘HELP’ is seen on the lawn of a home near Utuado in early October. Gerardo Majero cleans his fridge in Morovis on Oct. But it was wind at the back of those urging both sides, supplicant island and historical master, to escape a shared history. Speaking of the territory’s $72 billion debt, the President said, “We’re going to have to wipe that out.” He offered no details, and a recovery package is only just taking shape in Congress. Trump himself provided the first evidence of the transformation during his trip. Yet senior Puerto Rican officials reckon that, along with sea cows, the storm can also produce a fresh start. It’s possible the storm will underscore the message many Puerto Ricans have already absorbed: that a population of brown-skinned, Spanish-speaking Americans counts for less. The Climate Impact Lab estimates that the storm could knock back per capita economic output by 21% over the next 15 years. For a decade, people have been leaving in historic numbers more Puerto Ricans now live on the mainland than on the island, and Maria will accelerate the exodus. Bankrupt but unable to escape its debts, its position at landfall was as fragile as the electrical grid that a year ago collapsed entirely on its own. What ends up being done, and how, is an especially momentous question for Puerto Rico because of how broken the island was even before the storm. 1, 11 days after the storm ripped off his roof. “Everything, I lost everything,” said Diego Rivera, in the poor San Juan neighborhood directly below the Spanish battlements that are the symbol of Puerto Rico. Sheila Sustache, 37, hugs her aunt Yasmin Morales Torres, 41, after seeing the damage to their houses in Yabucoa on Sept. 3, he opened what was intended as a healing visit by observing, “You’ve thrown our budget a little out of whack.” In between, he lambasted San Juan Mayor Carmen Yulín Cruz-“such poor leadership … they want everything to be done for them”-after she relayed Puerto Ricans’ complaints that aid was not reaching them.Ī man makes a fire after sunset in San Isidro, outside San Juan, on Sept. 25 by tweeting about the island’s financial debts. But faced with far worse damage in Puerto Rico, he assumed the role of put-upon overseer. To the victims of Harvey, Trump contributed $1 million from his personal fortune. 20 landfall, what President Trump most conspicuously doled out to the victims was tart advice followed by angry remonstration. And when the devastation finally came home to the White House, almost a week after Maria’s Sept. The federal government’s response was markedly slower and less attentive to Puerto Rico after Maria than to Texas after Harvey and Florida after Irma. The inequity became more pronounced with the passing of each muggy day in the storm’s aftermath. Yet the storm somehow managed to reinforce one thing: the historically paternalistic relationship between mainland and island. Research by the Climate Impact Lab suggests that no larger area has been hit so comprehensively anywhere in the world in the past 60 years. Maria could be the most destructive Atlantic storm on record. territory that might be best understood as America’s Last Colony. ![]() It’s not a routine sight in San Juan, and it was a rare uplifting one in a catalog of all the storm had laid bare: nearly every branch of every tree, with the interiors of homes opened like dollhouses-and, not least, the lopsided dynamic between Washington and the U.S. Ten days after Hurricane Maria roared across Puerto Rico, joggers circling the capital’s Condado lagoon were delighted by the sight of manatees, the gentle herbivores that sailors once mistook for mermaids. Andres Kudacki for TIMEīy Karl VicK | Photographs by Andres Kudacki for TIME Wilmair Flores, 55, poses on a bed at her house in Barranquitas on Oct. Desperation and resilience in hurricane-battered Puerto Rico
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