Tag Archives: puerto-rican

A romance novel about Hurricane Maria exists. Here’s why.

by LucretiRickel Posted on August 15, 2019

Nothing puts a damper on one’s romantic life like a Category 5 hurricane. That’s just one of the obstacles faced by 20-year-old former sex worker Dolores “Dulce” Garcia, the sugar daddy-dealing protagonist of the new book Side Chick Nation. As she tries to outrun her past by going from Miami to the Caribbean, she ultimately lands in Puerto Rico just in time for Hurricane Maria.

Climate change and colonialism don’t typically make for a sexy beach read, but Side Chick Nation, the fourth installment in UC Berkeley lecturer Aya de León’s Justice Hustlers feminist heist series, attempts to do just that — weaving action and romance into the vivid backdrop of Puerto Rico’s stilting recovery from Hurricane Maria.

Dulce, the titular “side chick,” is a world-weary pragmatist; she answers the call from a past sugar daddy looking to, well, “reconnect,” all while lying to Zavier, the man with whom she has actually fallen for after just a few dates. After Hurricane Irma slows the flow of sugar daddies in Puerto Rico to a trickle, she finds herself sleeping in a storage unit in San Juan, waiting for the next storm — Maria — to hit.

In the aftermath of the hurricane, she serves as a witness to both the heartbreaking reality of climate change and the exploitation that can ensue. She notes the international businessmen who flock to the island to manipulate the destruction for their own financial gain, making shady use of relief funds and devastating the island even more. De León draws parallels between Dulce’s experience as a “side chick” and Puerto Rico’s relationship with the mainland, which cheerfully exploits the U.S. territory in good times but abandons it when it is in need.

For me, as a Puerto Rican transplant who has reported on Puerto Rico’s recovery after Maria, I was intrigued by the novel’s premise. I talked with de León, who teaches creative writing at UC Berkeley, about Side Chick Nation and why she chose popular fiction as a means to get folks riled up about the climate crisis.

The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Image courtesy of Aya de León

Q.Why did you write this book? What do you hope readers get out of it?

A. The biggest takeaway that I really want for everyone has to do with Hurricane Maria and the crisis of climate and colonialism in Puerto Rico. I’m hoping people feel that intersection at a level of empathy. Part of what I was thinking of when I was writing was, in the future when this book comes out, the hurricane will have receded from the headlines and yet the humanitarian crisis in Puerto Rico will be ongoing. I just wanted to make sure that folks could connect to these human stories, this unprecedented level of this devastation at this intersection.

Something that was also super important to me for this book is [to reach] an audience that includes young women of color. I really like the idea of young women of color thinking of themselves as activists around issues like the climate. Being a part of the Puerto Rican diaspora and watching the island get hit made it clear to me that climate change is the top political priority. Climate is something that affects everybody and affects people of color even more. The perception of environmentalism is that it’s a white movement — and that’s not actually true. So I wanted to push back on that.

Q.Where did you get the idea to set the fourth installment of your Justice Hustlers series in a post-Maria Puerto Rico?

A. I was writing another book at the time. I had outlined it and started to work on it. Then, the hurricane hit and I was like, “Oh my god, I have to write about the hurricane!” It occurred to me that the biggest platform that I have was this Justice Hustlers series. I wasn’t sure how to make it make sense with the rest of the series, but I remembered one character from a previous book — Dulce. One of the things I was reading at the time was Salvage the Bones, a novel about Hurricane Katrina. It made me think: what does it mean for the audience to know what’s gonna happen while the characters don’t know?

Q.You went to Puerto Rico to research this book. What was that like?

A. I had not been back to Puerto Rico for a decade. I visited in 2018 about a year after Hurricane Maria hit. It was really intense to be back. One of the things that was so profound is that the whole island has signs of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. There was some sort of emotional chill because people had been deeply impacted in a lot of ways.

I mostly was in San Juan where things looked more or less back to normal. Still, stores were closed and traffic lights were knocked out — and that was almost a year later! I rented a car and drove around the interior of the island, where I saw lots of FEMA tarps blue roofs. I definitely got a sense of the devastation. That was key for me — to just go and just bear witness. It was less about information and more about being present with the community.

Q.The book deals with a lot of really intense issues like colonialism and disaster capitalists while also telling this gripping, feminist romance storyline. Do you think popular fiction in general, might be the way to get people to understand the complex relationship between disparity and climate crisis?

A. I think popular fiction and fiction, in general, has always played that role. It’s hard to empathize with a historical event, but it’s easy to empathize with an individual. And that’s what I wanted — for people to connect. What does it mean to have your homeland devastated, your people devastated? Ultimately, I’m writing romantic suspense but I’m thinking of suspenseful situations that relate to big political situations — like Hurricane María.

Q. Can you tell me about the challenges of writing about disaster?

A. I just had to cry a lot. I had to grieve a lot. And I had to hold off feelings like being unworthy or unable or not up to the task. Here we have this thing that changed the Puerto Rican people, and here I am, this sort of west coast, mixed-heritage diaspora Puerto Rican who is like the second generation born in the U.S. How could I possibly be the person to write this book? Ultimately it’s just the reality of the disaster. Maybe I’m not the right person, but I’m the person with a book contract and I can’t write about anything else.

The hurricane changed stuff for everyone in the diaspora. We have to show up, and what I have to bring to the table is a book that is a popular fiction approach. This may be the story for people that aren’t gonna read Naomi Klein’s Battle for Paradise — although I hope everybody will read that too! I wanted the message to get to the places where I already had a platform. I can’t imagine having written about anything else. This is the story of my people right now.

More:  

A romance novel about Hurricane Maria exists. Here’s why.

Posted in Accent, alo, Everyone, FF, GE, LG, ONA, Paradise, Ultima, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on A romance novel about Hurricane Maria exists. Here’s why.

Economic uncertainty already hung over the heads of Puerto Rico’s children. Then came Maria.

by EarthaDarbonne Posted on September 28, 2018

More than a year has passed since Hurricane Maria pummeled Puerto Rico, but Bethlyn Avilez and her family are still grappling with the irrevocable upheaval. Avilez lives in the central Puerto Rican municipality of Ciales with her husband and her two young boys, 9-year-old Xarquier and 4-year-old Xanier.

After the storm’s 155 mph winds and intense rainfall had torn through the island, causing a nearby bridge to collapse and a nearby river to rise, the family swam to a neighbor’s house. When the swollen river completely submerged their home, Xarquier intently watched the drastic devastation unfold from his neighbor’s window.

“He saw his things floating — his toys, his clothes, everything,” Avilez told Grist in her native Spanish. When the family finally trekked to its home two days after the storm had passed, Xarquier grasped the full scope of the wreckage.

Dear reader, like what you see here?

Keep Grist’s green journalism humming along by supporting us with a donation today. All donations made between now and September 29 will be matched dollar-for-dollar.

  

“He told me all he felt was sadness — that he’d lost everything, that things weren’t the same,” Avilez added.

That sentiment hangs over the Avilez family today. A new normal has yet to arrive. Avilez estimates it took three to four months for Xarquier to return to school — and finding supplies and clothes was a struggle since many stores were either closed or inaccessible. The family is still living in Avilez’s parents house while its works on finding a new home to start from scratch.

As part of the “Maria Generation,” stories like that of Avilez’s children are not unique. Long before the hurricane, economic uncertainty had shaped the experience of Puerto Rican youth: The territory already had the highest percentage of childhood poverty in the nation, at 57 percent. (Compare that to slightly more than 15 percent nationwide.)

Now, preliminary findings from a study out this week reveal that increased economic hardship following Maria, coupled with inadequate access to health and education, is further affecting the wellbeing and development of young people.

The study involved interviews with more than 700 Puerto Rican households with children under 18 years of age between July and September of 2018. Researchers used a three-pronged approach: looking at the extent to which economics, health, and education had levied deep-seeded impacts on children.

The findings are pretty grim. Following Maria’s onslaught on the island, about a third of households surveyed had reduced incomes due to loss of employment and reduced work hours. Low-income families suffered disproportionately by this erosion of income. According to the study, they reported difficulty paying utilities, buying food, and clothing.

Children, especially impoverished youth, are struggling in Maria’s wake. The study reveals that 44 percent of minors exhibited new behaviors after the hurricane — with 23 percent of that group experiencing anxiety. Children under 5 years old went an average of 92 days without attending preschool, while children between 5 and 17 years old are estimated to have spent an average of 78 days away from school. Further, 3 out of 10 children with disabilities that require medication for treatment had difficulty obtaining it after the hurricane.

“This study shows that families with children, who were facing significant challenges before the hurricane, are facing even more bleak conditions today,” said Anitza Cox, director of analysis and social policy at Estudios Técnicos, the firm that helped administer the survey. “This type of economic insecurity is what has led to families leaving in droves over the last decade, and what will continue to drive it if comprehensive policies are not put into place immediately.”

Indeed, more than 30 percent of households surveyed indicated that they are very likely or likely to move due to Hurricane Maria. In Florida alone, 200,000 Puerto Ricans arrived within the first two months after the storm made landfall.

Avilez considered being part of the subsequent mass migration, but ultimately felt that she needed to face this newfound reality head-on.

“If I had left, I’d be running away,” she told Grist. “I wanted to be brave. And so, we started over.”

This article is from: 

Economic uncertainty already hung over the heads of Puerto Rico’s children. Then came Maria.

Posted in alo, Anchor, FF, GE, LG, ONA, Radius, Ultima, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Economic uncertainty already hung over the heads of Puerto Rico’s children. Then came Maria.

Homesick and strapped for cash, Hurricane Maria survivors grapple with life in Miami

by AdamBrackman1 Posted on June 2, 2018

This story was originally published by HuffPost and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

“Christmas,” Mariner Ostolaza said mournfully, like it’s the name of a loved one who died too young. “Do you know what a Christmas is in Puerto Rico?”

She sets her coffee down, freeing her hands to gesticulate pizzazz, and answers her own question. It starts on Thanksgiving and it ends in mid-January with Fiestas de la Calle de San Sebastián, a street festival.

“It’s three months of partying, drinking, and freaking good-ass music,” she said, sighing. “Being here, it was sad. My family over here is already Americanized, so they don’t do the same parties or the same traditions we have over there.”

The 28-year-old fled to Florida’s largest city in October after Hurricane Maria inundated Levittown, the middle-class San Juan suburb where she lived in a one-story home with her grandmother and great-grandmother. She agonized over the decision to leave.

The night the floodwaters came, just hours after the winds and rain subsided, she watched swarms of cockroaches and rats engulf entire lampposts as they scurried to drier heights — a nightmarish, almost Biblical omen. She had believed she might die as she navigated her packed 2005 Toyota Corolla through streets that had become fecal rivers.

She spent the next week wading through sewage, air-drying clothes and old love letters, and chasing evasive bouts of sleep in the sticky nights without air conditioning. Then, one morning while she waited in line for gasoline at 4 a.m., service blinked onto her phone for a moment, and she got a text from her aunt in Miami. A family friend working at Royal Caribbean secured spots for Ostolaza and her grandmothers on a cruise ship leaving San Juan the next morning.

“I didn’t want to come,” she said. But her job was less secure than it once was, since the hotel where she worked didn’t know when it would welcome tourists again. And her uncle, and — once she finished weeping — her mother, convinced Ostolaza leaving was the only choice. The next day, she joined her grandmothers, who were depending on her to be their English translator, and boarded the ship. She arrived in Miami on Oct. 3, her dad’s birthday, the first one she’d ever missed.

Nearly nine months later, Ostolaza feels stuck in a city with expensive housing, limited jobs and — the weather and plentitude of Spanish speakers aside — few resemblances to her island. Puerto Rico remains in shambles and without reliable electricity. Federal authorities have yet to even determine the final death toll from the storm, though Harvard University researchers this week pegged the number at 4,645 — 70 times the official tally and nearly three times higher than Hurricane Katrina in 2005. On Friday, a new hurricane season begins.

Roughly 136,000 Puerto Ricans fled to the mainland United States in the months after the storm. That figure, based on school enrollments as of last February, is expected to surge well above 200,000 when states release new data in September. Almost half of them stayed in Florida.

But few are settled. Ostolaza got a job waiting tables at a Puerto Rican restaurant in Kendall, south of Miami, but she still lives rent-free with her aunt and uncle. She is debating when, or whether, to go back, wondering if remaining in Miami, with its increasingly flood-prone streets and heedless waterfront construction, is any less delusional than returning to Puerto Rico in an era of rising seas and warming temperatures.

‘Miami can barely handle the people who live there now’

Ostolaza’s predicament demonstrates policymakers’ failure to prepare for sudden influxes of migrants fleeing the kind of extreme weather that is becoming more frequent as climate change worsens, scientists say. Her reality also highlights a more subtle effect of displacement, a quiet epidemic of homesickness and depression, particularly among Americans with as unique a culture as Puerto Ricans.

The problem threatens to become much worse in South Florida. Caribbean nations that neighbor Puerto Rico are particularly at risk, and not just from sea-level rise. Since the early 1980s, countries like Jamaica, Haiti, and St. Lucia began adopting neoliberal economic reforms pushed by the U.S. and the International Monetary Fund. These policies devastated agriculture on the islands, as study after study shows, forcing them to rely on imported food and bottled water, and revolve their entire economies around tourism.

“The only thing that keeps the entire Caribbean economy from completely collapsing is tourism,” said Jesse Michael Keenan, an expert in climate migration at Harvard University.

Like in Puerto Rico, where the island’s $70 billion public debt has strangled the local economy, financial hardship already makes many in the Caribbean eager to leave. When extreme weather ravages infrastructure and makes it difficult to import and distribute products, countries are thrown into chaos, and South Florida is the closest entry point to safety in the U.S.

Puerto Ricans heading to Orlando after Hurricane Maria.Pedro Portal / Miami Herald / TNS via Getty Images

“Miami can barely handle the people who live there now,” Keenan said. “It’s hard to imagine a future where they could handle much more influx from the Caribbean.”

Hurricane Maria became the deadliest disaster in modern U.S. history, not because it was a Category 5 storm, but due to the failure to provide emergency relief quickly enough, if at all. The Harvard survey found that the number of deaths soared in the months after the storm as a result of the interruption of medical care. About 14.4 percent of households reported losing access to medications, 9.5 percent said the widespread blackouts left respiratory equipment useless, 8.1 percent said nearby medical facilities remained closed, and 6.1 percent said there were no doctors at those clinics. Nearly 9 percent of households in remote, mountainous areas could not reach emergency services by phone.

In the weeks after the hurricane made landfall, food and medicine stayed packed in shipping containers as the Federal Emergency Management Agency struggled to find ways to distribute the much-needed goods around the storm-ravaged island. (The agency insisted they were retail goods, not aid.) Companies contracted by the agency failed to deliver millions of meals to hungry Puerto Ricans. Federal contractors hired to rebuild the island’s crippled electricity grid became the subject of corruption allegations. At one point, the company Whitefish Energy Holdings suspended work on power lines until Puerto Rico’s bankrupt electric utility paid up. Last month, Puerto Rico plunged into darkness yet again after an excavator working too close to a fallen transmission tower got too close to a high-voltage line.

The Trump administration, after some debate, tweaked welfare rules to allow Puerto Ricans to buy prepared meals with food stamps. But the White House refused to offer aid money to Puerto Rico in January, insisting the island undergo means testing that determined it was too rich to qualify for the funding, despite the poverty rate surging from 44.3 percent to 52.3 percent after the storm.

As the administration continues to ignore and marginalize scientists whose research warns that climate change is making the frequency, strength, and speed of hurricanes more cataclysmic, mismanaged relief efforts could well become a permanent fixture.

The federal government’s bungled response to the storm extended to the states that took in displaced Puerto Ricans. It took FEMA more than a month to activate a transitional housing program for displaced survivors. The agency planned to discontinue paying for Puerto Ricans to live in hotels in April. But after state and local officials scrambled to shore up funding to keep the Puerto Ricans housed, FEMA reversed its decision and approved a request to extend a transitional housing program to 1,700 Maria survivors. But that program expires on June 30 and FEMA has no plans to extend it again.

FEMA spokesperson Lenisha Smith said the agency was working “closely with survivors of Hurricane Maria from Puerto Rico, including those in Florida, on finding more permeant housing solutions.”

Finding permanent housing has been a struggle, particularly in Florida.

“They don’t have the money for renting any house that they can afford in Florida,” said Angel Marcial, a bishop with churches in Orlando, the top destination for Puerto Ricans in Florida. “Many of them don’t have enough money for the down payments or the deposit, even what they receive monthly is not enough for a monthly rent.”

But in Orlando, at least, the Puerto Rican community is filled with more recent arrivals and is close-knit, making it easier to access community services.

Miami, the second-strongest magnet for Puerto Ricans and almost twice Orlando’s size, is a bit tougher. The cost of living there is 10 percent higher, according to Expatistan, a site that compares living expenses between cities.

Puerto Ricans also don’t have central hubs in the city, like the Cuban and Haitian communities do. They’ve instead dispersed as the neighborhood once known as Little San Juan undergoes rapid gentrification. Land prices in Wynwood, a neighborhood just north of downtown, quintupled between 2012 and 2016, according to real estate data cited by The Real Deal. Lease rates more than doubled. For many, the neighborhood has become too expensive for natives, let alone newcomers.

Andrea Ruiz-Sorrentini, a University of Miami researcher studying how Puerto Ricans displaced by Hurricane Maria are adapting to Miami, said evacuees despaired over the dearth of go-to cultural locations in the city.

“There is not a renowned hub in Miami to go and experience what it is to be Puerto Rican,” she said, sitting in a rec room of a Puerto Rican cultural center in the Roberto Clemente Park, one of the last prominent emblems of Wynwood’s Puerto Rican heritage. “Yes, Wynwood exists, but in recent years it hasn’t been the same.”

In October, Florida became the only state to enter into a host-state agreement with FEMA, and Republican Governor Rick Scott began urging federal officials to fund relief efforts. In January, nearly four months after the hurricane, the federal government granted Florida $13 million to help displaced Puerto Ricans find jobs. In response, Scott unveiled a new $1 million employment effort with the Puerto Rican Chamber of Commerce and Ana G. Mendez University the next month.

Rick Scott speaks about the influx of Puerto Rico residents.Joe Burbank / Orlando Sentinel / TNS via Getty Images

Fewer than a quarter of the 20 actions a Scott spokesperson listed the administration as taking in response to Hurricane Maria dealt directly with displaced evacuees.

Florida’s stringent rules for accessing public services make the situation for poor displaced Puerto Ricans even more dire. Scott worked closely with the Trump administration to roll back rules that expanded Medicaid protections.

“That’s emblematic of Florida’s conservative approach to social services in general,” said Edwin Meléndez, an economist and the director of Hunter College’s Center for Puerto Rican Studies. “That means the community infrastructure, the nonprofits that provide services and the privatization of government leaves services not even comparable to those in the Northeast, where other Puerto Rican communities exist.”

‘These displaced Puerto Ricans will be climate voters’

The state’s cutbacks in welfare spending mirror its reluctance to spend money to prepare for climate change, despite facing some of the greatest risks from rising seas and extreme weather. Scott, who has long denied the science behind climate change, insisted during his reelection campaign in 2014 that his administration spent $350 million on sea-level-rise mitigation efforts. PolitiFact, the Florida-based fact-checking service, declared the claim “mostly false,” noting that the governor’s office included in that figure $100 million in sewer infrastructure that had nothing to do with sea-level rise. As recently as last year, conservationists accused Scott of ignoring global warming and pushing an Orwellian erasure of the words “climate change” from public documents.

The influx of new voters from Puerto Rico could tilt the Florida electorate against representatives who deny climate change.

Eight in 10 Latinos think global warming is happening, including nearly nine in 10 Spanish-speaking Latinos, according to 2017 survey data from the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication. Sixty percent said they would vote for a candidate for public office because of their position on climate change, and 51 percent said they would join a campaign to convince elected officials to act on global warming. That number jumps to 61 percent among Spanish-speaking Latinos.

In Florida, where Latinos make up 16.4 percent of registered voters, polling by the Environmental Voter Project found the average Latino voter to be almost 10 percent more likely to care about climate change than the average non-Hispanic white voter. The group identified 514,691 Latinos who are already registered to vote and would be highly like to list “climate change or other environmental issues” as one of their top political priorities, and that doesn’t even count newly arrived Puerto Ricans with firsthand experience of the kind of storm scientists forecast to become more common as the planet warms.

The Harvard study found that the median age of Puerto Ricans who left after Hurricane Maria was 25, placing them in the millennial age group that tends to favor policy solutions to climate change.

“In short, every bit of data tells us that these displaced Puerto Ricans will be climate voters, and any candidate who ignores them (and their priorities) could easily lose the election because of it,” Nathaniel Stinnett, executive director of the Environmental Voter Project, said in an email.

That may be fueling some Florida Republicans’ concerns about newly registered Puerto Rican voters. John Ward, a candidate in the GOP primary for Florida’s 6th Congressional District, drew criticism last week for saying displaced Puerto Ricans should not be allowed to register to vote in Florida.

“I don’t think they should be allowed to register to vote,” he said in a video uploaded to YouTube by a Republican rival. “It’s not lost on me that, I think, the Democrat Party’s really hoping that they can change the voting registers in a lot of counties and districts, and I don’t think they should be allowed to do that.”

That hasn’t stopped people like Ostolaza. She registered to vote in Miami almost immediately after arriving in the city. She doesn’t know whom she plans to vote for in Florida’s Senate election this year, in which Scott is the Republican frontrunner to challenge Democratic incumbent Bill Nelson.

But she said she couldn’t vote for someone who rejects scientists’ warnings about climate change.

“Not after living through what I did, and seeing everything,” she said. “We’re the ones who suffer more.”

The next day, at Isla Del Encanto, the restaurant where she works, Ostolaza took an order for alcapurrias. On her way to the kitchen, she wisped by a large blue and white sign that read: Boricua Vota.

Source article – 

Homesick and strapped for cash, Hurricane Maria survivors grapple with life in Miami

Posted in alo, ALPHA, Anchor, FF, G & F, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, PUR, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Homesick and strapped for cash, Hurricane Maria survivors grapple with life in Miami

Marco Rubio Turns His Back on Puerto Rico, at His Own Peril

by Tabatha0432 Posted on January 14, 2016

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

In early September, Hillary Clinton and Marco Rubio campaigned in San Juan, the Puerto Rican capital, on the same day—a nod to the island’s importance in the November presidential election, thanks to a surging population of Puerto Ricans in Florida, the mother of all swing states. But the two candidates came bearing very different visions for how the island territory should cope with its severe debt crisis. At a roundtable event, Clinton backed bankruptcy reforms that would spare the island from the worst ravages of austerity at the cost of profits for its Wall Street creditors. “You can’t fix your economy through austerity,” she said. At his own rally across the city, Rubio took Wall Street’s side. The Associated Press reported that Rubio, speaking in Spanish, “railed against giving Puerto Rico bankruptcy protection.”

Rubio wasn’t always a vocal opponent of bankruptcy protections for Puerto Rico. And his current stance is one that, should he become the Republican nominee, would be hard to explain to the hundreds of thousands of Puerto Rican voters in Florida.

Puerto Rico is currently embroiled in dire financial troubles. The island is $72 billion in debt. In August, Puerto Rico began missing payments to its lenders. Last week, it defaulted on $174 million in payments to creditors. Meanwhile, the island’s economy is floundering, with unemployment at 12 percent. The governor, Democrat Alejandro García Padilla, has repeatedly requested that Congress grant cities and public utilities in Puerto Rico access to Chapter 9 bankruptcy, which would give them the same tools to restructure debt that are available in the 50 states.

Like residents of the District of Columbia, Puerto Ricans lack full congressional representation. The island’s lone representative in Congress is Pedro Pierluisi, who is not allowed a vote on the final passage of legislation even though, as he likes to point out, he represents more people than any other member of the House of Representatives. Since the island doesn’t send anyone to the Senate, Pierluisi has to court friends on the other side of the Capitol to push for Puerto Rico’s interests. “My natural allies in the Senate are the senators who have a significant Puerto Rican presence in their states,” Pierluisi says, ticking off New York’s Chuck Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand and Florida’s Bill Nelson and Rubio as his usual Senate partners.

Typically, Rubio has backed Pierluisi’s proposals, he says. In 2013, for example, Rubio introduced in the Senate Pierluisi’s bill to allow Puerto Rico to receive funds to implement electronic medical records.

But that alliance crumbled when Pierluisi asked for help with the island’s debt crisis. “He has supported us on other areas,” Pierluisi says of Rubio. “But not on Chapter 9.”

Democrats approached Rubio’s office earlier this year about co-sponsoring a Chapter 9 bill in the Senate, and they were initially hopeful that he’d sign on when his office didn’t offer any policy objections, according to a Democratic aide in the Senate. But as the process dragged on, Rubio backed away without offering any alternatives or trying to find a compromise. “They ultimately didn’t have substantive issues with what we were talking about but couldn’t commit,” the aide said.

Last month, the New York Times detailed how Sen. Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut had initially tried to woo Rubio to join the Democrats’ bill, only for Rubio to back away just three weeks after a fundraiser with a hedge fund founder who had a stake in Puerto Rico’s debt. In November, Fusion reported that six hedge fund executives who hold Puerto Rican debt have donated to Rubio’s presidential campaign.

While perhaps good for his presidential fundraising, Rubio’s decision to back away from bankruptcy protections for the island could haunt him. The same economic turmoil that created the conflict between the island’s government and Wall Street has also spurred the biggest migration of Puerto Ricans to the US mainland since the 1950s and 1960s. Back then, Puerto Ricans headed mainly for New York and New Jersey. This time, about a third of Puerto Ricans coming to the mainland are landing in Florida, an important swing state in this year’s presidential race.

Today, there are more Puerto Ricans living on the US mainland (5.1 million) than in Puerto Rico (3.5 million). As the US economy rebounded from the Great Recession but the island’s economy remained stagnant, migration to the mainland accelerated. Today, there are about 1 million Puerto Ricans in Florida—likely at least 100,000 more than in 2012, although exact figures are hard to come by. That increase is greater than President Barack Obama’s 73,000-vote margin of victory in Florida in 2012.

The Puerto Rican vote in Florida is mostly Democratic, although there are opportunities for Republicans to make inroads into the community. Obama won 77 percent of the Puerto Rican vote in Florida in 2008 and 84 percent in 2012. But it wasn’t too long ago that Jeb Bush won the backing of a majority of Puerto Ricans in his 2002 gubernatorial race, by diligently courting their votes. (Bush, incidentally, supports both Puerto Rican statehood and bankruptcy protections.) In 2010, Rubio significantly outperformed both John McCain’s 2008 campaign and Mitt Romney’s 2012 campaign among Puerto Rican voters. If he is the nominee in November, Rubio will have a built-in advantage with Puerto Ricans due to “the Hispanic heritage he brings, the ability to speak the language, and the fact that he’s from Florida,” says Fernand Amandi, a Democratic pollster in Florida.

The newest arrivals from Puerto Rico represent an even bigger opportunity for Republicans. Unlike those who have lived in Florida for years and have forged a connection with the Democratic Party, newcomers don’t strongly identify with either party. (On the island, political divisions are centered on disagreements over Puerto Rico’s status as a territory rather than the left-right breakdown that defines the parties on the mainland.) What they do feel is a connection to the island, its economic distress, and the livelihoods of their family members who remain there.

“In Puerto Rico they can’t vote, but we can here,” says Betsy Franceschini, a Hispanic outreach director in Florida for the Puerto Rico Federal Affairs Administration, an arm of the island government that works as a liaison to the federal and state governments. “We want to make sure that whatever candidate we support will stand by our community and stand by during this crisis.”

“We will not forget,” Franceschini adds, “especially in November.”

Maurice Ferré, a former Democratic mayor of Miami who was born in Puerto Rico, believes that US policy toward the island will be more important in the 2016 elections than ever before. “Everyone has family in Puerto Rico, and they’re all being affected by this,” he says. “Pensions are now in doubt, health services are now in question…They’re cutting the police, they’re cutting education.”

Thanks to Florida’s presence among the handful of key swing states that candidates will have to jockey over this fall, small issues like this can take on an outsize importance—even deciding the outcome of the election.

“When you have a state as close as Florida potentially could be, and a lot of people anticipate to be, every segment of the electorate has an overmagnified sense of importance,” says Amandi, the pollster. “If anything, the newer arrivals from Puerto Rico that don’t have as much of a cultural history with either of the two parties here, you might say, are more important because they are potentially up for grabs. And some of these single issues, especially as it relates to the island, could very well be a litmus test issue.” Amandi estimates these recent arrivals in Florida, from the latest migration wave over the past decade, could number around 200,000.

So do the math: In Florida, that means potentially as many as 200,000 up-for-grab voters in a state that could, in a close election, be decided by a few thousand votes.

“The Republicans cannot afford to ignore the Puerto Rican electorate because if they do, they will lose Florida,” says Amandi, noting that the GOP nominee doesn’t need to win a majority of Puerto Ricans, but rather needs to surpass McCain and Romney’s poor showings—as Rubio did in 2010. This time around, Amandi says, Rubio is “going to have to explain to Puerto Rican voters why he is against bankruptcy protections.”

Puerto Rican leaders are already showing their anger at Rubio’s decision to back away from bankruptcy. During a December trip to Washington to lobby for bankruptcy protection, the island’s governor warned that Puerto Ricans in Florida would remember Rubio’s decision not to support bankruptcy come November. “They will be here on Election Day,” he said.

Excerpt from – 

Marco Rubio Turns His Back on Puerto Rico, at His Own Peril

Posted in Anchor, Everyone, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, PUR, Radius, Ultima, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Marco Rubio Turns His Back on Puerto Rico, at His Own Peril

Puerto Rico Is Doomed, and It’s Our Fault

by BrentLeschen Posted on July 17, 2015

Mother Jones

Greece may have overcome a major hurdle in fixing its economy this week, but Puerto Rico faces a more complicated obstacle to managing its crippling debt: its murky status as a US territory.

“If Puerto Rico were a state, there wouldn’t be any question about it,” Jeffrey Farrow, a former adviser on Puerto Rico policy to President Bill Clinton, said of the island’s mounting debt crisis. “If it were a nation, it wouldn’t have to worry about US federal rules, and then it could try to develop its own economy.”

But Puerto Rico is neither a state nor a country. It’s technically a commonwealth, a status given to it in 1950 by the US government, which allowed it to draft a constitution and elect its own officials. But even its commonwealth status is unique. Virginia, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and Kentucky are all commonwealths, but they have the full power of states. That’s not the case for this island of 3.6 million, which is, essentially, a colony, subject to the full control of the US Congress. The nature of its relationship with the federal government has left it with few options as it grapples with $72 billion in outstanding obligations that its governor, Alejandro García Padilla, says is “not payable.”

Pedro Pierluisi, Puerto Rico’s non-voting representative in US Congress, called for Puerto Rican statehood in a recent New York Times op-ed. “Puerto Rico is not a sovereign country in a monetary union with the United States. From a constitutional perspective, Puerto Rico belongs to the United States,” he wrote. “It is disheartening to see many self-styled progressives, who otherwise speak eloquently about the importance of voting rights, go silent on this subject when it comes to Puerto Rico.”

The island’s high unemployment, poverty, and low household income, Pierluisi argued, result partly from poor local policy decisions, but the inequity it faces under federal law is a much bigger factor. Even though they are legally American citizens by birth, Puerto Ricans on the island can’t vote for president and have no voting representative in Congress. They pay Medicare taxes but Medicaid funding is capped for them. They are not covered by many provisions of the Affordable Care Act and are not eligible to claim the earned-income tax credit. Excessive borrowing, Pierluisi wrote, is in many ways due to these realities.

“It is little wonder, then, that Puerto Rico is in recession, has excessive debt and is bleeding population,” he wrote.

Pierluisi introduced a bill in February that would allow Puerto Rico’s cities and state-owned businesses to seek Chapter 9 bankruptcy protection in the same way that some US cities that have done, most recently Detroit. The bill has no co-sponsors and is stuck in a House subcommittee. The chair of the committee, Rep. Tom Marino (R-Pa.), has said that “Puerto Rico must make serious, timely, and demonstrable steps towards righting its fiscal ship before anything moves legislatively.” Sens. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) and Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) plan to introduce similar legislation for debt relief, according to Politico, but it’s unclear when that might happen.

The crisis pits Puerto Rico’s creditors—including hedge funds, large US banks, and smaller investors—against the island’s public workers, with each side trying to avoid absorbing the inevitable losses. A July 14 report from the Puerto Rican investigative journalism outlet Centro de Periodismo—reprinted in English via Latino Rebels—suggests that since 2013, hedge funds have been particularly active in trying to manipulate the debt crisis to their advantage.

The report points out that hedge funds, some of which were also involved in both the Greek fiasco and an ongoing debt crisis in Argentina, have been lobbying Puerto Rican officials in an effort to reduce their losses as much as possible. The hedge funds have reached out to various past and current government officials—including former Puerto Rico Gov. Luis Fortuño, former Secretary of State Kenneth McClintock, and Pedro Pierluisi, the island’s non-voting representative in Congress—in hopes of preventing wide-scale restructuring of Puerto Rico’s debt.

The issue has worked its way into the presidential campaign, with Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, and Jeb Bush all voicing support for Puerto Rico to have the same bankruptcy options as US states. “We’re not talking about a bailout,” Clinton said in a statement last week. “We’re talking about a fair shot at success.” Sanders issued a statement the same day, saying, “We also should recognize that the reason Puerto Rico has such unsustainable debt has everything to do with the policies of austerity and the greed of large financial institutions.”

Bush is the only Republican to touch the issue so far in the campaign, saying, “Puerto Rico should be given the same rights as the states.”

About 5 million Puerto Ricans live in the 50 US states and can vote in national elections. Maurice Ferré, a Puerto Rican who served six terms as the mayor of Miami, said there are 4,000 to 5,000 Puerto Ricans moving to Florida every month, and noted that they are a pivotal voting bloc in Florida.

McClintock, Puerto Rico’s secretary of state from 2009 to 2013 and president of its Senate from 2005 to 2008, agreed. “Puerto Ricans are the swing voters in the swing region of a swing state,” McClintock said. “So, come March of next year, the presidential primaries in Florida will be very important in terms of what is done with Puerto Rico in the future.”

But McClintock said there are things Congress could do right now to help Puerto Rico. It could change the repayment terms on money paid by the island to the US government for various project overruns, and adjust the way Puerto Ricans are treated under federal programs like Medicare. Or the government could steer more federal procurement dollars toward the island’s struggling economy.

“That’s not a bailout,” McClintock says. “It’s simply giving more federal procurement to Puerto Rico.” But that’s difficult to achieve, he says, without voting members of Congress.

McClintock and Fortuño, among others, have said that much of the island’s debt is payable. Fortuño, who lost his seat to Garcia Padilla in the 2012 election, told Mother Jones that he had “no idea” why the new governor would claim the island’s debts are unpayable. “From a strictly financial point of view, the information is incorrect,” he said, “and the message it sends to the marketplace is terrible.”

Without any intervention, Puerto Rico could default on some of its debts and cause massive turmoil in the US municipal bond market, which affects retirement funds, pensions, and other investments. It could also spur lawsuits against the Puerto Rican and US governments that could take years to work out.

Farrow, the former Clinton adviser, says the governor’s calls for debt relief could help propel legislative relief or Congress could enact other short-term policy fixes, but neither will offer a permanent fix of the underlying problem.

“Puerto Rico can be a state or a nation and can develop a successful economy under either one,” he says, “but right now its current political status makes no sense.”

Taken from:

Puerto Rico Is Doomed, and It’s Our Fault

Posted in Anchor, Citizen, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, PUR, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Puerto Rico Is Doomed, and It’s Our Fault