6

Bringing Out the Dead

At night, Old San Juan, for so long the nexus of the island’s joie de vivre and filled with locals and tourists partying, mingling, and flirting until the wee hours, was mournfully silent and still. Its stores were shuttered and all but a handful of restaurants and bars were closed. The street cats that had lived for generations off the generosity of local residents trotted its darkened lanes and sat watchfully on its colonial steps, their forms cast by moonglow in arabesque shadows on the walls and pavements.

Shortly after the storm, I found myself sitting in Old San Juan one night with my friend Keiko Niccolini. She was on the island working with the US nonprofit Feeding America and the New York City-based food rescue organization City Harvest to facilitate a food donation organized by Mostafiz ShahMohammed, an old college friend of ours who ran a Manhattan private investment firm. I was staying at the Casablanca, one of the few hotels functioning in Old San Juan, and we sat and talked over pizza and wine at the Pirilo restaurant, which seemed to be virtually the only place open in the neighborhood. With the private sector and local actors once again delegated to fill in for a largely absent federal government, Niccolini told me that she had found the Banco de Alimentos de Puerto Rico, Feeding America’s local partner, “very efficient.” She had driven to Aguadilla, on the island’s western edge, and back that day, seeing devastation along the entire route. The restaurant was filled with relief workers—most of them, as I had found in Yabucoa, from nongovernmental organizations—blowing off steam. Afterward we walked the streets, passing windows and doors that were shattered and through which the wind sighed mournfully, the warm air still caressing in spite of the melancholy.

Many shuttered stores bore handwritten notes expressing a variation of the phrase, A todos nuestros clientes, por el momento estamos cerrados. Se levanta! (To all our clients, for the moment we are closed. Rise up!) At the Centro de Estudios Avanzados de Puerto Rico y el Caribe, another handwritten note listed the curtailed hours of operation. On one door, someone had scrawled, Mas amor por favor (more love please). We drank rum at a tiny bar that was able to function thanks to a small generator it had set up, which was roaring in the middle of the street. We wondered to each other what the human cost of what we were seeing would be.

The question of how many people died in Puerto Rico as a result of Hurricane Maria and the federal government’s arctic-hearted inaction in its wake was one that would be debated, often bitterly, for some time. Anyone who saw the island in the storm’s wake knew that the initial reported total of sixteen dead was preposterous. But how many did die? And who was to blame?

I met Cynthia García Coll, a psychologist and visiting professor at the Universidad de Puerto Rico, at a Starbucks in Hato Rey months after the storm. I had to thread my way there carefully as all the streetlights outside were still not functioning, leading San Juan’s drivers, adventurous risk-­takers in normal times, to make the streets of the capital where one could pick up a decent clip of speed a muted demolition derby of near-misses and frazzled nerves.

García Coll had ridden the storm out in her condo in Dorado, about thirty minutes west of San Juan, and when she was finally able to go outside, she was stunned by the devastation.

“Everything that we took for granted was gone. No water, no electricity, no fresh food,” she told me, as we sat, lounge jazz playing over the sound system, looking out at a rush of sun-blasted traffic outside.

What keeps us together as human beings are routines, and those routines were gone, compounded by the uncertainty of not being able to communicate with your family here or in the United States. Basic needs took huge amounts of time. You would stand in line for gasoline for six hours. You would stand at a bank for two and half hours to get a little bit of money—because they wouldn’t give you much—so you could buy ice and food, which was also very limited. Long lines under the sun, then blackout at night. The mosquitos were awful, people couldn’t sleep because it was so hot and full of mosquitos.

Like others, she was appalled even more by the aftermath than by the hurricane. “The lack of response was worse than the hurricane,” she told me.

The first helicopter I saw here was six weeks after the storm. If there had been immediate response, it would have been a completely different story. What Maria did, no one was protected. People who had diabetes and renal patients and those who had cancer just died and died and died.

Among those who died were some of the citizens of the town of Isabela, which clung to the northwest corner of the island and before the storm had been so replete with flowers that it was called el Jardín del Noroeste (the Garden of the Northwest). Jaclyn De Jesús, a native of Isabela, had been studying for her PhD in clinical psychology at Carlos Albizu University and had ridden out the storm in San Juan. She returned to her hometown two days after Maria struck. The drive, normally a ninety-minute trip, took her eight hours as she traversed the debris-strewn roads. Once there, she found some of the town’s elderly and infirm residents completely cut off and waiting for death.

“Most of the old people had family living outside Puerto Rico, living in the States,” De Jesús told me months later, as she was packing up and preparing to move to California, like so many Puerto Ricans, forced by economic reality to leave her beloved island.

They had had nobody. You would go into a house and find them. In one house, a woman was bedridden and her husband was trying to care for her. They were waiting for days with no way of contacting anyone, for someone to help them. The entire community came together and tried to lend a hand, but we found at least two people who had died, and we had to bury them in their backyards because there was nowhere else to take them. And as far as I know, they’re still there.449

Another one of those claimed by the storm, although from a completely different milieu, was the San Juan artist Heriberto González. One of the pioneers of digital art on the island since the 1980s, Gonzáles, with his distinctive long hair and beard, had for years been a fixture in the galleries, bars, and streets of Old San Juan. He played music in the Puerto Rican folk genre, designed album covers, and even authored a book of science fiction tales, Selene: relatos fantahistóricos y otros cuentos lunares (Selene: Fantastic Tales and Other Lunar Stories), in 2005. Even before the storm, González watched as more and more of his fellow creative souls were forced to leave the island and seek sustenance on the mainland, gradually whittling down his social circle. With an inquisitive mind that was meticulous and scientific in nature (perhaps his most famous digital work, Homenaje al Cosmos, consisted of a formula where each pixel was created as per a specific mathematical equation), in the years before the storm González grew ever more isolated in his studio-cum-home on Calle Luna, where he nursed an infirm father who eventually died and fought his own battle with liver cancer, perhaps the result of years of heavy drinking. When the storm came, at sixty-seven years old, he was hanging on by a thread, a thread that Maria then snapped in half.

“He had gotten to the age when you hope to continue selling your work and, because of the situation on the island, that just wasn’t possible,” his friend, the artist Teo Freytes, told me. “He was very depressed and not really taking care of himself, and after the storm the medical system collapsed and he just didn’t survive.”450

A death of neglect under the vise that had been tightening around the island even before the storm, the story of Heriberto González was one that would be written many times on the island in the wake of the tempest.

In the central mountains, the situation was much the same. In Utuado, which had served as the nexus for Pedro Albizu Campos’s failed 1950 putsch, Victor Díaz ran a small pharmacy off the town square, the kind of place that served as a hub for local life in the mountain towns of the island.

“We had seen Hurricane Georges [in 1998] and things kept going,” he told me as we drove through Utuado’s darkened streets one night. “But with Maria, everything stopped. Everything.”

The home Diaz shared with his wife, Carmen, was not far from the pharmacy, and boasted a collection of several hundred vinyl LPs of Puerto Rican music that were, miraculously, relatively unscathed. The same could not be said for the wider town and its populace.

“We didn’t have electricity for two months, but we had a generator so I was able to start serving people a week after the storm,” Díaz told me. “I had to go to San Juan almost every day to get merchandise because no one was bringing it. It was chaos. You had to wait from one day to the other, or go to Arecibo or Manatí, looking for gas. At least five of my customers died in the wake of the storm.”

So much had collided to twist the knife into the wound of the island’s misery. In Lajas, on the southern coast and an easy morning’s drive from Utuado, the first FEMA shipment—two hundred boxes of food and 786 twenty-four packs of water for a town of twenty-five thousand people—arrived more than a week after Maria hit. In the interim, one hundred people, many of them old or infirm, had died in the area during the three days immediately after the storm, twice the typical rate.451 In March, six months after the hurricane, one hundred thousand people still lacked electricity. Wood and cement poles still teetered dangerously over roads, occasionally falling and killing passerby, as they did with a couple in their sixties in the west of the island that month.452

And then there was plain and simple despair.

By early October 2017, a troubling trend had begun to reveal itself. From San Juan to Aguadilla, there appeared to be a marked uptick in suicides, though not yet quite enough to declare a pattern. Men and women, young and old—the anguish appeared not to discriminate.453 Between November and January, the number of suicides on the island tripled from what it had been the previous year. Between September and December, ninety-six people took their own lives. The emotional distress line of the island’s Department of Health had received 1,002 calls from those who were thinking about attempting suicide in December alone, nearly eight hundred more than the previous year.454 Over a single weekend, a security guard, a policeman, a Justice Department employee, and three others all killed themselves.455

As I strolled the central plaza of Guayama several months after the storm, I found it ringing with memorials to the fallen dead. From Puerto Rican soldiers who died fighting in US wars such as World War II and the Korean War, to soldiers from the mainland such as those from Fourth Ohio Volunteer Infantry “who lost their lives in the performance of their duty in the war with Spain,” as the plaque reads, the tributes stood as mute sentinels before the palm-lined square in front of the mayor’s office. It was there that I met Rosa Miranda Agosto, a deceptively cheery woman who was the executive director of the Movimiento Evitemos el Suicidio (Let’s Avoid Suicide Movement), and we spoke about another kind of war being fought.

“Unfortunately, the way things happened after Hurricane Maria really intensified the incidences of suicide,” Miranda Agosto said, referring to the 21 percent increase in people taking their own lives in the wake of the storm and noting that Aguadilla had been particularly hard hit. She was giving out pamphlets on how to recognize signs of suicide and prevent it, and was joined by about fifty other participants also wearing orange T-shirts (the color of suicide prevention and awareness), as well as Guayama’s mayor, Eduardo Cintrón, and Puerto Rican senator Evelyn Vázquez.

“The hospital had no electricity at all for fifty-three days,” Cintrón, of the pro-commonwealth PPD, told me. “It took us a very long time to even approach any normalcy and, honestly, we are still trying.”

A December 2017 data analysis by the New York Times suggested the death toll could be as high as 1,052.456 Following that report, the Rosselló administration announced that it was commissioning a study from George Washington University’s Milken Institute School of Public Health to ascertain the full measure of storm-linked mortality.457 By August 2018, Puerto Rico’s government would acknowledge, via a report posted quietly on the website of the Puerto Rico Public–Private Partnerships Authority and without any public fanfare, that it believed the total deaths to be 1,427, more than twenty times the original death toll. The report said that the island’s government had known of the increased death count since June.458 When the report commissioned by the Rosselló administration was finally published that same month, it concluded that the total number of deaths due to Hurricane Maria and its aftermath was 2,975.459 A study conducted by researchers at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and published in the New England Journal of Medicine in May 2018 concluded that there were “4,645 excess deaths” between September 20 and December 31, 2017 (a median number between 793 and 8,498 possible deaths during that period), and cautioned that “this number is likely to be an underestimate because of survivor bias,”460 with people concentrating on those who made it through the tragedy rather than those who had not.

And the US president’s response? After the hurricane, whether pursuing a program of separating immigrant families from their children at the US-Mexico border—a policy called “torture” by Amnesty International—461 attacking the American press by labeling its members, with Stalinesque phrasing, as “enemies of the people”;462 or palling around with North Korea’s genocidal dictator Kim Jong-un in Singapore;463 it was clear his attention was elsewhere, and the lives of the people on the island meant little to him.

Well into 2018, Trump would continue to use false claims to dispute the hurricane’s death toll, referencing both Hurricane Maria and Hurricane Irma and claiming on Twitter: “three thousand people did not die in the two hurricanes that hit Puerto Rico. When I left the Island, AFTER the storm had hit, they had anywhere from six to eighteen deaths. As time went by it did not go up by much.”464 He would go on to accuse the death toll as having been “done by the Democrats in order to make me look as bad as possible when I was successfully raising Billions of Dollars to help rebuild Puerto Rico. If a person died for any reason, like old age, just add them onto the list.”465 When Trump’s lie elicited the predictable outrage, White House spokesman Hogan Gidley issued a statement railing against “the liberal media and the mayor of San Juan.”466

In Puerto Rico, the response to Trump’s statements was, not surprisingly, one of fury. Leo Cotte, the former mayor of the southern town of Lajas, whose own father had died in the wake of the storm when the oxygen he depended on ran out, said Trump’s statements showed “total ignorance of what happened in Puerto Rico during Hurricane Maria” and “a great lack of respect.”467 Rosselló said during an interview with MSNBC that “the victims and the people of Puerto Rico should not have their pain questioned, these are certainly statements that are wrong.” Yulín Cruz said the statement showed “a lack of respect for our reality and our pain . . . Three thousand people died on his watch and his inability to grasp that makes him dangerous.” On the mainland US, there was also widespread criticism, with Florida’s Republican Representative Ileana Ros-Lehtinen asking, “What kind of mind twists that statistic into, ‘Oh, fake news is trying to hurt my image?’ How can you be so self-centered and try to distort the truth so much? It’s mind-boggling.”468

According to a subsequent study by the London-based journal BMJ Global Health, public data demonstrated convincingly that there was a marked disparity in the time it took victims of Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico to receive assistance as opposed to those on the mainland US—most notably Florida and Texas—who were affected by hurricanes during the same season, one that did “not align with storm severity or prevention and recovery needs.” The difference in response created “serious consequences for acute and long-term health and recovery efforts,” the journal concluded.469

Among such struggle, though, some traditions persisted.

After the storm, Nydia and I were driving east along the coast from San Juan and passed the rolling blue-green surf splashing timelessly on the shore on our left and the beach cabanas and little food shacks of Piñones selling alcapurria fritters on our right. We were heading to Loíza, the bastion of the island’s Afro-Caribbean culture. Traversing the swollen Río Grande de Loíza, the words with which the poet Julia de Burgos had memorialized in perhaps her greatest poem came to mind:

¡Río Grande de Loíza! . . . Río grande. Llanto grande.

El más grande de todos nuestros llantos isleños,

si no fuera más grande el que de mi se sale

por los ojos del alma para mi esclavo pueblo.

(Rio Grande de Loiza! . . . Great river. Great flood of tears.

The greatest of all our island’s tears

save those greater that come from the eyes

up of my soul for my enslaved people.)470

Loíza itself was a ramshackle place, low-slung and spread out over several wards. Every year in July, the town held a festival during which it exploded with color, complete with music, distinctive cuisine, and people donning costumes featuring máscaras de vejigante—colorful masks based on characters from Puerto Rican folklore. It was in bomba, the music that plantation owners had viewed with such suspicion during slavery times, that Loíza’s heart beat the strongest, and I was trying to search out the Ayala family, the genre’s foremost proponents on the island.

No amount of cultural ebullience, however, had prepared Loíza for Hurricane Maria. Some three thousand homes, half of its total, were all or partially destroyed during the storm,471 and the city’s electricity grid was leveled. In the weeks and months after the storm, Loíza, whose cultural vibrancy had often been matched by its economic poverty, found itself fighting for survival.

“We’re giving food, water, baby food, diapers, and all the necessities that people need here,” José Martorell, who worked with La Estrella, a chain of restaurants that delivered comida criolla, low-cost Puerto Rican and Cuban food, told me when I found him distributing food to hundreds of people in Loíza’s central plaza. Half a dozen Puerto Rican businesses and organizations had organized a distribution of vital items. “In San Juan, we’re the fortunate ones that have generators and water, and we needed to give back to the community.”472

Alongside him was Frankie Colón of the Fundación Caritas Alegres, a nonprofit organization that in normal times provided assistance to children and families with limited resources to meet their health, education, and housing needs.

“We Puerto Ricans are very strong people, but no one was prepared for a hurricane like this,” Colón told me. “There is so much to do. It’s not going to be a one-week effort. It’s going to be years to come of people working together. We can help each other.”

Nydia and I found the Ayala family’s patriarch, Raúl Ayala, an Afro-Puerto Rican man with close-cropped salt-and-pepper hair and a mustache, in his darkened home. An unseen dog barked incessantly nearby, and he suggested we retire to the family compound to talk, where things might be a little more peaceful.

Ayala’s father had been the legendary Cástor Ayala Fuentes, who, in 1959, founded the Ballet Folklórico Hermanos Ayala, the first group to bring the rhythms and dance of bomba to Puerto Rico’s television screens on the Telemundo program Show Time.

“This is the only town on the island where a majority of residents are of African descent,” he told me as we sat in the courtyard of his half-destroyed family home, his sister and a handful of other relatives looking on. The building’s roof was gone and water was still pooling on its floors from a recent rain.

“Things are slowly getting better, and we’re getting up little by little. But we still have problems. . . . It’s imperative to reestablish electricity so things can function. Lots of companies remain closed, and people who don’t work don’t have salaries, so it’s a domino effect.”

The walls of the structure still radiated a vivid Caribbean orange and green despite the damage, and there were two small flags, one US and one Puerto Rican, fluttering over the scene of destruction. Ayala told me he felt it was imperative that he and his family carry on their tradition.

“In the cultural life of Puerto Rico,” he told me. “Loíza is the town that really represents the African traditions.”

As we were getting ready to leave, Nydia began snapping some shots of the family and I and suggested that we pose for one. With all of us standing on the veranda, Ayala, still smiling, reached over and plucked out the American flag from its place so that only the Puerto Rican flag remained.


449 Jaclyn De Jesús, in discussion with author, May 2019.

450 Teo Freytes, in discussion with author, May 2019.

451 Molly Hennessy-Fiske, “In one Puerto Rican nursing home, a struggle to get power and keep patients alive,” Los Angeles Times, October 1, 2017, https://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-puerto-rico-healthcare-20170930-story.html.

452 Danica Coto, “Needs go unmet 6 months after Maria hit Puerto Rico,” Associated Press, March 20, 2018, https://www.apnews.com/de367742d0c440de85e4b6cb107973d4.

453 Marga Parés Arroyo, “Suben los suicidios,” El Nuevo Día, October 3, 2017, https://www.elnuevodia.com/noticias/locales/nota/subenlossuicidios -2362565/.

454 Alex Figueroa Cancel, “Aumentan los suicidios en el 2017,” El Nuevo Día, February 20, 2018, https://www.elnuevodia.com/noticias/seguridad/nota/aumentanlossuicidiosenel2017-2400243/.

455 “Seis suicidios este fin de semana,” Primera Hora, September 10, 2018, https://www.primerahora.com/noticias/puerto-rico/nota/seissuicidiosestefindesemana-1301555/.

456 Frances Robles et al., “Official Toll in Puerto Rico: 64. Actual Deaths May Be 1,052,” New York Times, December 9, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/12/08/us/puerto-rico-hurricane-maria-death-toll.html.

457 Frances Robles, “Puerto Rican Government Acknowledges Hurricane Death Toll of 1,427,” New York Times, August 9, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/ 2018/08/09/us/puerto-rico-death-toll-maria.html.

458 Transformation and Innovation in the Wake of Devastation: An Economic and Disaster Recovery Plan for Puerto Rico (San Juan, PR: Government of Puerto Rico, August 2018).

459 Milken Institute of Public Health in collaboration with University of Puerto Rico Graduate School of Public Health, Ascertainment of the Estimated Excess Mortality from Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico (Washington, DC: George Washington University, August 2018).

460 Natasha Kishore, et al., “Mortality in Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria,” New England Journal of Medicine, no. 379 (July 12, 2018): 162–170.

461 Amnesty International, “USA: Policy of Separating Children from Parents is Nothing Short of Torture,” June 18, 2018, https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2018/06/usa-family-separation-torture/.

462 Mark Follman, “Trump’s ‘Enemy of the People’ Rhetoric Is Endangering Journalists’ Lives,” Mother Jones, September 13, 2018, https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2018/09/trump-enemy-of-the-people-media-threats/.

463 Adam Taylor, “The North Korean Human Rights Issue Stalking the Singapore Summit,” Washington Post, June 11, 2018, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2018/06/11/the-north-korean-human-rights-issue-stalking-the-singapore-summit/.

464 Betsy Klein and Meagan Vazquez, “Trump Falsely Claims Nearly 3,000 Americans in Puerto Rico ‘Did Not Die’,” CNN, September 14, 2018, https://www.cnn.com/2018/09/13/politics/trump-puerto-rico-death-toll/index.html.

465 Jordan Fabian, “Trump Says Puerto Rico Death Toll Inflated by Democrats,” The Hill, September 13, 2018, https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/406446-trump-questions-death-toll-of-hurricane-in-puerto-rico.

466 Klein and Vazquez, “Trump Falsely Claims.”

467 Mabel M. Figueroa Pérez, “Familiares de víctimas fatales del huracán se sienten ofendidos por expresiones de Trump,” El Nuevo Día, September 14, 2018, https://www.elnuevodia.com/noticias/locales/nota/familiaresdevictimasfatalesdelhuracansesientenofendidosporexpresionesdetrump-2447149/.

468 John Wagner and Joel Achenbach, “Trump is Rebuked after Questioning Number of Deaths Attributed to Hurricane Maria,” Washington Post, September 13, 2018, https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-questions-number-of-deaths-attributed-to-hurricane-maria-falsely-says-democrats-created-a-higher-count-to-make-him-look-bad/2018/09/13/9519308a-b73b-11e8-a7b5-adaaa5b2a57f_story.html.

469 Charley E Willison et al., “Quantifying Inequities in US Federal Response to Hurricane Disaster in Texas and Florida Compared with Puerto Rico,” BMJ Global Health 4, no.1 (January 2019), https://gh.bmj.com/content/4/1/e001191.

470 Julia de Burgos, “Rio Grande de Loíza,” Song of the Simple Truth: The Complete Poems of Julia de Burgos (Willimantic, CT: Curbstone Press, 1997): 8.

471 “‘If anyone can hear us … help’ Puerto Rico’s mayors describe widespread devastation from Hurricane Maria,” Washington Post, September 23, 2017.

472 José Martorell, in discussion with author, October 2017.