by Jose Andres
That afternoon we returned to our food suppliers, José Santiago, to pick up ingredients for the next day. We spent more than five times what we shelled out the day before: $26,000. We were growing, and growing quickly.
We weren’t the only ones to step up our operations that day. Back in Washington, D.C., President Trump held his first meeting to coordinate the response in Puerto Rico, in the Situation Room inside the West Wing basement. The reports from the island were so bad that later in the day the White House added a Cabinet-level meeting on the disaster. The Pentagon ramped up its efforts, sending the hospital ship USNS Comfort, as well as several transport planes full of heavy-duty trucks to help with the recovery. Perhaps the most important resources were on the planes carrying equipment to help restore operations at the airport and establish satellite communications.10 Both U.S. senators for Florida—Republican Marco Rubio and Democrat Bill Nelson—wrote to the president asking him to “leverage all available resources” to respond to the hurricane, especially the U.S. military. “Our brave men and women in uniform are well equipped, trained and tempered to handle the dire situation in Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands,” they wrote.11 Their letter was proof—if anyone needed it—that the military was not, in fact, deploying all its resources to respond to this overwhelming disaster on U.S. soil.
It was now six days after Maria made landfall, and Trump called the Puerto Rico governor for just the second time since the hurricane.12
The situation on the ground remained dire. According to the Pentagon, 44 percent of the island was without drinking water in the tropical heat. Just eleven of the island’s sixty-nine hospitals had any fuel or power. As for the power grid, it was almost nonexistent: 80 percent of the transmission network and fully 100 percent of the distribution network was damaged. The island was flatlining.13
That night we picked up some avocados for ourselves on the way back to the hotel. One single restaurant in the neighborhood had kept its lights on: a beer and burger joint across the street, called The Place. The manager of the restaurant had been smart enough to do a special deal with Sam’s Club before the hurricane swept in, because the supermarket was worried its ground beef would go bad after what they expected would be a long power blackout. So they sold their vast supply of beef at a steep discount to The Place. Everyone on the island was desperate for cooked meat at this point, so the lines for their burgers were insanely long.
I took my avocados to the hotel kitchen on the penthouse floor, but it was closed and the cook tried to kick me out. I would do the same if a stranger came into my kitchen. I asked her if I could make myself a salad, but she was worried I would cut myself with the knife. I always respect the kitchens of other chefs, but I assured her I had a bit of experience with kitchen knives. We ate my avocados in the bar area, and served many more to the relief workers and hotel staff who were alongside us. The best friendships often start with a simple plate of food, accompanied by a drink or two, like my favorite Caribbean cocktail: the rum sour, my sweet taste of heaven back in Haiti.
In the bar were several federal law enforcement officers, whose agency initials I didn’t recognize: HSI. Homeland Security Investigations was a relatively new security force merging several groups when the Homeland Security department was created after the 9/11 attacks. HSI was part of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, known for deporting undocumented immigrants. In contrast, HSI normally chased after human smugglers, child traffickers, and drugs and arms dealers. But here they were checking on the safety and security of government officials in the middle of the disaster. When everything else breaks down, HSI’s special agents travel into the most difficult places to make sure that the federal government’s employees and families are safe and ready to get back to work.
They looked ready for a war zone. Even in the penthouse bar of a luxury hotel, they were wearing flak jackets and carrying sidearms. Maybe I’ve watched too many movies, but I have always loved the idea of special agents. And in this crisis, the sight of a well-trained force in uniform looked to me like a welcome relief after seeing so little organized response to the hurricane on the ground. I started talking to the agents to understand their mission and see if there was some way we could work together.
My wife had asked me before I left for Puerto Rico if I could track down a missing eighty-year-old relative of one of her best friends. He was somewhere on the western side of the island, in Añasco, where there were no communications. I was trying to drive there myself, but everyone told me I was crazy to consider such a trip. The HSI agents said this was the kind of work they were doing across the island, as they investigated the state of law and order on the island. They took the relative’s name and address—and the phone number, in case it worked—and promised to get one of their patrols to help, as they continued to drive across Puerto Rico.
These disaster zones create some strange connections as talented and creative people gather to restart their lives. That evening, I got stopped in the hotel lobby by a chef who recognized me. He was gathering supplies to help the recovery effort in some part of the Virgin Islands. I later figured out he was working for Google’s Larry Page, who owns an entire island called Eustatia. His nearest neighbor is Virgin’s Richard Branson, who lives on Necker Island. Those places, blessed with such wealthy owners, were hit even harder than Puerto Rico, with no easy way to reestablish their supply chains.
THE NEXT DAY WE MET EARLY AT JOSÉ ENRIQUE’S RESTAURANT TO MOVE the operation into high gear. My team was already searching for fuel and food supplies, and we were having more success with the food than anything else. It was clear that access to food was not the challenge on Puerto Rico, despite the conventional wisdom that the island was too remote or too stricken to feed itself. The real issue was distribution, and communication was at the heart of that. Ricardo and Ginny were already reaching out to the media, especially radio shows, to tell people what we were doing. But I was cautious. As much as I love the media, it was important to be realistic.
“Be careful,” I told Ginny. “We don’t want to say too much and create false expectations. Let’s go day by day in terms of the number of people we can serve.”
Nate and Ricardo drove two Jeeps to our food supplier to fill up with the day’s ingredients, as well as a thousand aluminum serving dishes, but they called me up sounding frustrated.
“They are shutting us down,” Ricardo said.
“Why?” I asked.
“Because we’ve spent the $50,000 line of credit already.”
I called up Santiago to give him hell. “I want thirty-one days,” I said. “I am a businessman.” He backed down because he knew we would become his biggest customer in no time. And because we were all—Santiago included—helping to feed the people of Puerto Rico. It’s an old saying but it’s still true: Where there’s money, there will always be food.
I started looking for the greatest areas of need. Through a Puerto Rican friend living in Paris, Daya Fernandez, I was given the number of her uncle, who was a doctor at the biggest medical center on the island: the University of Puerto Rico’s hospital, known as Carolina.
The crisis at the island’s hospitals was as severe as you could imagine. At the Carolina, as at the main Centro Medico hospital, the hurricane had inflicted enough roof damage to flood the wards below. The generators were old and unreliable, meaning what little power they had would cut in and out. Air-conditioning, ventilators, operating theaters were all limping along. The result, among sick people in tropical heat, was predictable. If they were injured in the floods, or already sick before the hurricane, their chances of survival were now much, much lower. At the Centro Medico, one of the hospital’s three generators was down. When they asked the federal government for a replacement, they were turned down because the Army Corps of Engineers said they weren’t considered “a critical need.” They already had two generators, after all.14 Local mayors were telling the media that people were dying because of the lack of power, and warning that the hospita
ls were at capacity. Some doctors were just telling people to get out of Puerto Rico. “If you are sick in Puerto Rico,” said one surgeon at the cardiovascular center in San Juan, “the best thing is to get on a plane and abandon the island.”15 At this point, the official death count of just 16 people seemed like wishful thinking. There were credible reports that the hospital morgues were at capacity, including at the hospitals that were closed (which was 70 percent of the island’s medical centers), and at the hospitals that were cut off from normal communications.16
The stress on the hospital staff, as well as the patients, was huge. How could you keep a hospital clean in these conditions, when the temperature would spike in the humid heat? With all the struggles they faced—the hurricane damage and lack of power—the staff had no time or resources to feed themselves. It was hard to believe that no one was thinking about taking care of the essential people caring for the Americans in greatest need. They could hardly disappear for a lunch hour to find something to eat in the neighborhood. Even if they could, there were no restaurants open or food trucks on the street.
“We have 400 employees and they haven’t eaten here for the last week,” Dr. Carlos Fernandez Sifre told me. “They are working overtime and nobody has money or electricity. The ATMs don’t work and the markets are empty.”
Immediately I realized we needed to identify the most important groups to feed. They needed to know we were ready to help. I promised to send the hospital two hundred meals that afternoon and made sure we told everyone on social media what we were doing.
Our press and social media operations were not some vanity project. It was vital to tell the people of Puerto Rico that we could help, and that the world cared. And you never knew how they might hear the message. After all, I only heard about the hospital via a friend in Paris. The local media—Univision, Telemundo, and local radio stations—started to come to us and we were happy to provide information. We desperately needed to get the word out. I handed my phone to Nate with a simple order: “Tweet.” I was too busy growing and running the food operations to focus on social media through the day, so Nate became our eyes and ears on the world. He frowned and looked worried, but he knew what I wanted to say and when I wanted to say it.
That morning was the first time we had our cooking lines all fired up. Manolo was making a huge quantity of rice and chicken in giant paella dishes outside. Inside we were cranking out hundreds of sandwiches with cheese and ham. And our favorite, sancocho, was the mainstay of the central kitchen itself. The problem we now faced was that we were quickly running out of the basic tools of the job: big stockpots, knives and cutting boards, and aluminum trays to transport and serve the food.
We used most of our trays to take the meals to the hospital, filling up the back of the Jeep with hot food and bottles of water, as well as fresh grapes and apples, and a pot full of sancocho. Finding the hospital was a challenge in itself, with all the street closures and fallen poles. When we arrived, the staff was so grateful they asked us if we needed anything in return. We assured them we would be back again tomorrow, and for as long as they needed feeding. We shook hands to say they could rely on us.
While we were at the hospital, I caught a glimpse of the depths of the disaster after the hurricane had passed through. I saw one dead body on my brief visit, and three more on later hospital visits, which was about as many as I had seen in my whole life before Maria. My parents were both nurses, and I thought I was used to seeing the worst in intensive care and the emergency room. But this seemed wholly out of line with the official story, that the death toll was only a dozen or so Puerto Ricans. If the numbers of victims were so low, how could I have seen one-fourth of all the corpses on my own trips to the island’s hospitals? The numbers just didn’t add up. It was already clear to me that this was a deadly serious humanitarian crisis. It was also an untold disaster, hidden from view and lied about by our public officials. My mission was to help my fellow American citizens, and to tell their story to a world that was living in the dark.
Back at the restaurant, our cooking operation was busy enough to fill up our first round of food trucks, which were our secret weapons. Instead of asking people to come to us, the food trucks could find the communities in greatest need: the people who had no gas or cars to drive to us, or were simply too old, too sick or too busy to travel. Nobody thinks about food trucks because they are still considered an informal or unserious part of the food distribution business. To me, they were ideal for our mission: a moving kitchen, perfect for storing and distributing food across large distances. Further, the trucks were simply available: after the storm they weren’t doing their normal runs, because their usual customers were no longer able to work and nobody was going to stand on the street, waiting for a tasty lunch at a great price.
We stocked up one food truck, which normally sold Chinese food under the name Yummy Dumplings, with 250 meals to deliver in the El Gandul quarter of Santurce. The neighborhood is poor and known for its social problems, but its name—like so much else on the island—comes from a forgotten history of its food. The gandul is the pigeon pea, which used to grow there in large quantities. Now there were many reports that the entire neighborhood lacked food and water.
An hour later we were serving sancocho at the restaurant, to a street that seemed to fill with more people every day. Among the people who just showed up: the inhabitants of the municipality of Caguas, a town in the mountains about thirty minutes south of San Juan. They said they needed 650 meals for a home for the elderly, and we were happy to help with our first giant paella pans, filled with rice and chicken. The news of our food relief was traveling farther, and with it, so was the food.
As we expanded, we needed more capacity to support the rapidly growing kitchen. For more space, we rented the car park opposite the restaurant, paying the owner as if the place was permanently full of cars. With help from the restaurant association, the island’s secretary of agriculture, and the first lady’s office, we took delivery of a giant refrigerator truck that we could park outside the restaurant. José Enrique’s walk-in fridge had too little power and space for what we needed, and this huge trailer was a vital foundation for what we planned to build. The challenge was getting our hands on enough fuel, but José said we didn’t need to worry. We started feeding the local police station, and they gave us diesel in return. For now, we were doing fine for fuel.
That evening we drove to Univision radio to talk to the popular host Jay Fonseca. Even in times of crisis, you expect to find a handful of working organizations: a government headquarters, perhaps a supermarket or two, and the news media. But we couldn’t believe what we saw at Univision: a giant satellite dish lying crumpled in the middle of the road like a toy thrown from a passing car. There was no security in sight and no obvious way into the building. It took me twenty minutes to find a side door that was open.
Radio proved to be our best friend. Ginny had been interviewed on the radio that day and was asked a simple question: How could people tell us they needed food? We didn’t have a great answer to that, so Ginny just answered honestly. “Call me,” she said, handing out her number on the air. After that, her phone never stopped ringing with orders.
That day we prepared 4,000 meals. We doubled our sandwiches from the day before, from 500 to 1,000, and we grew even faster with the hot meals, going from 2,000 to 3,000. It was a big step up, and it was a sharp contrast to what we saw from the officials in government, who had so many more resources at their disposal.
IT WAS EIGHT DAYS AFTER MARIA MADE LANDFALL, AND THREE DAYS after I arrived in Puerto Rico. It felt to me like we were still just discovering the true impact of the hurricane: who needed help and where they were. So many places, like the hospitals, were in desperate need. Our goal was to cook 5,000 meals but the system was straining at the seams. Our orders and deliveries were patchy. If we had enough bread, we didn’t have enough cheese for the sandwiches. If we had enough rice, we didn’t have enough aluminum trays to delive
r the hot meals. There was lots of activity but it was hot, sweaty and frustrating.
Since we were already at capacity at José Enrique’s restaurant, there was only one solution: open more kitchens. That’s what we did at Mesa 364, a restaurant across San Juan run by chef Enrique Piñeiro, an intimate, high-end place at the forefront of contemporary Puerto Rican cooking. He partnered with a volunteer group called Mano a Mano, which brought families together by establishing contact with missing relatives. The group was set up by Lulu Puras, who also knew my Parisian friend Daya. Lulu normally ran an interior design store, but realized quickly that she had a new mission. “People are suffering too much,” she said. “How are they going to order a lamp or a rug?” So she closed her store and told her customers it was an emergency. As they traveled across the island, Mano a Mano could deliver food and water, at the same time as they reassured people about their loved ones. We sent them supplies of chicken and rice to help meet our targets, which now included both the major hospitals—the Centro Medico and the Carolina—as well as several homes for the elderly, known as egidas.
That afternoon, we met with our first media from the mainland: the intrepid Bill Weir from CNN. Bill had ventured farther than anyone across Puerto Rico, renting a plane to travel to the forgotten island of Vieques, where there was little police presence. The airport was strewn with planes ripped apart by the hurricane, and the roads were barely passable with cables dangling overhead. In the center of the small island’s main town, he showed Puerto Ricans in tears as they used a satellite phone to ask relatives to send food and water. Former politicians told him they were living in a war zone and pleaded for marshal law to be imposed so they could move around at dark, rather than live in a no-go area.
