by Jose Andres
Within a generation, disaster relief was so big and so dispersed that it needed to be reorganized. By the 1960s, disaster relief was spread across many federal departments, and that overlap led to the Disaster Relief Act in 1974, and the creation of the Federal Emergency Management Agency five years later. A decade after that, the Stafford Act tried to bring more order and financial discipline to disaster relief. But it also added layers of red tape to an already confused and confusing system.
The political debates around disaster relief are still with us today. How much should the federal government lead, and how much should be left to local officials or private charity? Where do you draw the line between the victims of a natural disaster and those who are suffering from chronic poverty? Should there be limitless funding for disaster relief or does that spending need to be offset by difficult cuts to other budgets? Is all the red tape an excuse for inaction or a necessary safeguard against abuse? In Puerto Rico, these unanswered questions made it much harder to deal with the biggest natural disaster to strike American citizens since the Dust Bowl.
MY FIRST EXPERIENCE OF AN AMERICAN NATURAL DISASTER CAME AFTER Hurricane Sandy in 2012. I arrived in New York the day after the storm passed through, and I spent my time watching and learning. I was officially a partner of the Red Cross, and proudly carried a Red Cross identity card. But as I watched the food relief in the battered Rockaways, on Long Island, I quickly learned that the Red Cross didn’t prepare the food. That was the work of a group of very organized church volunteers, who came with huge supplies, cooking trailers and support vehicles. I watched them as they cooked a simple meal of mashed potatoes with chicken tenders and gravy, and found the process fascinating. I couldn’t believe I had never heard of the food relief work of the Southern Baptist Convention.
The Southern Baptists are the key to feeding Americans in a crisis: they supply 90 percent of the hot food delivered by the Red Cross and the Salvation Army in any natural disaster in the United States.13 They do so without directly getting any federal funds, relying on church funding instead. They also avoid paying for the ingredients, which come from the Red Cross. For the last fifty years, starting with Hurricane Beulah in Texas, the Southern Baptists have jumped into disaster zones. That includes international disasters such as the 1973 earthquake in Nicaragua and the 1974 hurricane in Honduras. It was Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans that demonstrated how effective they had become: 21,000 volunteers served 14.6 million meals over 7 months, and purified 21,600 gallons of water. That in turn led to a big spike in the number of volunteers trained for the next disaster.14
Disaster operations are central to the Southern Baptists’ mission: through disaster relief, they say, they can be “the hands and feet of Jesus to people seeking hope during a time of crisis.”15 The results have been incredibly impressive: a trained volunteer workforce of more than sixty thousand. But the trend lines are not encouraging: that number is down from a high of 90,000 in 2008, and most volunteers are retirees with flexible schedules. It’s not clear that the younger generation is interested in or willing to do the same kind of volunteering. So the Southern Baptists have dropped their training requirements, allowing online sign-ups and requiring volunteers only watch short safety videos. That’s fine for simple physical work like clearing debris, but not good enough for cooking with big-kitchen equipment.
The Southern Baptists like to call themselves the best-kept secret of disaster relief. And anyone who has seen them work, anyone with experience in American natural disasters, knows they are critical to delivering that relief. Without these elderly missionaries, and their mobile kitchen trailers, there is no food for the Red Cross and others to hand out. They may not be food experts, but their experience of working in the middle of disasters is world-class.
Five years after Sandy, as Hurricane Harvey slammed into Texas, I was still watching closely. Four days after the hurricane made landfall in Texas, I flew into Dallas, as the storm stalled overhead, dumping trillions of gallons of rain. I traveled with two other chefs: Victor Albisu from Del Campo in D.C., and Charisse Dickens from my ThinkFoodGroup. We connected with some local chef friends and drove down to Houston. I stopped at a Target on the way to buy boxes of pasta and jars of sauce to prepare dinner for five hundred people living in a shelter that I’d heard about from the Red Cross. They told me there was a very real need for support. After more than eight hours driving around and around, we never reached the shelter because it was totally stranded by flooding, so we gave up. In fact we almost got stranded ourselves by rising floodwaters. Still, the water would not stop us from delivering the pasta and sauce. We ended up giving away our food to a Houston church. It was right there that I realized we needed to prepare heavy-duty vehicles to deal with these disasters, and there was nothing heavier in my world than a food truck. I had put some into action in Haiti a year earlier, after Hurricane Matthew, and I knew these sturdy old trucks could handle anything.
As soon as we arrived in Houston, I made contact with the executive chef of the George R. Brown Convention Center, Edward de la Garza, who had plenty of experience with disaster relief, including after Hurricane Katrina. At the same time, I found out which company was in charge of the facility: Aramark. I called a local Aramark executive in D.C. and said, “Can you get me in touch with the people of Aramark in Houston? Just to get some information because I’m bringing some cooks with me.” I wanted to know if the convention center was a place where I could activate the kitchen. It took Aramark three or four days to get back to me. I was already cooking in the convention center by the time my Aramark friend in D.C. texted me: they couldn’t track down their coworkers in Houston.
Feeding spaces such as the convention center may be privately managed but in the case of emergency, that’s almost always temporary; the government can take them over. In Houston, there was a woman from the Red Cross who wasn’t happy with our cooking and had a lot of power over the food decisions. We had a clear idea of what food relief could be; she had a clear idea of what food relief she wanted to see. So they shut down the convention center kitchen for reasons I still don’t fully understand.
We could have served so many people, but the Southern Baptists were coming and perhaps they thought they could easily replace Edward’s cooking. My team moved on to a children’s hospital, as well as to a restaurant called Reef, which was closed after damage from the hurricane. There we worked closely with chef and owner Bryan Caswell and his wife, Jennifer, and we developed the model we would soon use at José Enrique’s restaurant, of making sandwiches in his dining room and hot food in the kitchen. We cooked for three days, making ten thousand meals a day, and the experience was invaluable for our operations in Puerto Rico.
In the meantime, I returned to the convention center to deal with a delivery of chicken I had organized, when a big McDonald’s truck arrived. It was a very powerful moment for me. The Red Cross used donated burgers to feed twelve thousand hungry, displaced people.
“How many burgers can you produce an hour?” I asked.
“Five hundred,” the McDonald’s staff replied.
“That’s not bad,” I said, impressed with their efficiency and scale.
But feeding twelve thousand refugees resulted in people having to wait two or three hours in line to get their hands on a burger. McDonald’s staff had no idea how to serve so many people. This was not a simple challenge, but the convention center had already solved it, through a kitchen designed to feed huge numbers of people.
Later I watched the Southern Baptists set up a kitchen under the highway right behind the convention center. I was amazed that they were using a mobile kitchen unit, because during Katrina, they had used the kitchen in the convention center. I was also worried about what was being done for the people in the outer areas of Houston. Why weren’t the relief agencies activating the Southern Baptists and their mobile kitchens in more remote areas? I also saw them setting up in the parking garage, doing a terrific job, with the Red Cross trucks del
ivering the food. But we had Twitter and Facebook now, and could communicate easily with people in need. I imagined there and then that food trucks could deliver a hot meal from the Southern Baptists, as long as they knew where the need was.
My head was spinning: if only we could match the food intelligence of a group of chefs with the disaster intelligence of the Southern Baptists.
Chapter 3
Discovery
WHY PUERTO RICO? WHAT WAS IT ABOUT THIS CORNER OF THE UNITED States that conspired against its citizens to turn a natural disaster into a man-made one? To answer those questions, you need to understand the living history of these islands. The past is never dead, as Faulkner said, it’s not even past; and it’s nowhere near past in a place like Puerto Rico.
The original people to live on these islands were the Taínos, whose name means “good” or “noble” in Arawak, and who served as the original model for the “noble savage” caricature. Their legacy lives on in the organization of the island’s municipalities, as well as in indigenous names such as Mayagüez, Humacao and Loíza. Their language gave us the word to describe the most destructive force they encountered: the hurricane. Most of the indigenous population died from disease and violence—through slavery and armed conflict—which decimated the population from as many as 100,000 to just 1,500 in the first 4 decades after Columbus arrived on the island, on his second voyage to the Americas. Still, genetic studies suggest that two-thirds of today’s Puerto Ricans have Native American roots. Puerto Rican food today reflects this history, especially in the Taíno farming of yucca, sweet potato and corn.1
The first Spanish conquistadors shaped the island’s future in ways we can still recognize today, more than five hundred years later. The first governor was Ponce de León, who gave his name to the island’s second city, and who also colonized and named Florida. It was Ponce de León who forced the Taíno into slavery to work in gold mines, construction and farming. When the local population died off, the Spanish brought African slaves to Puerto Rico to work in the mines and the sugar industry. Over the next three centuries, the Spanish forced as many as 75,000 Africans into slavery on the island. At the same time, Spanish immigrants arrived, first from the south of Spain and later from the Canary Islands and Mallorca, attracted by the sugar and coffee plantations. But for the Spanish crown, Puerto Rico’s greatest value was strategic: the governor was a military leader and San Juan was a heavily fortified garrison that defended Spanish territory across the Americas.2 El Morro castle is now one of the UN’s World Heritage Sites and remains the icon of the island, proudly displayed on its license plates.
Puerto Rico was the classic colony: a distant territory, reliant on cheap and slave labor, with strategic military value and no democratic rights. By the late 1800s, it was the second largest exporter of sugar, after Cuba, and it attracted immigrants from other Caribbean islands as well as Mediterranean countries. Slaves remained the foundation of the sugar plantation business, and their descendants still live around the plantation centers, in Loíza near San Juan, and Guayama near Ponce. The rise of coffee drove more Puerto Ricans into the highlands of Utuado and Adjuntas, and it also changed the island’s diet, as coffee drove out crops like rice and sweet potatoes. More than a century ago, Puerto Ricans were mostly poor, racially diverse and widely dispersed across the island, as they are today.3
The Spanish kept tight control of the island, crushing any uprisings or separatists, as they feared another revolution like that in Haiti. While the Creole elite wanted more freedom and prosperity, they were also proud of their Spanish roots and feared a slave uprising. Spain finally granted Puerto Rico some measure of self-government six months before it ceded the island to the United States, along with Guam and the Philippines, after it lost the Spanish-American War.4
The United States wanted Puerto Rico for the same colonial reasons as the Spanish: the island was a great naval base and a cheap producer of sugar. Troops invaded the island in July 1898, and the Treaty of Paris in December of that year left it to Congress to decide its political status. Unlike in Hawaii and Alaska, the U.S. Constitution did not fully apply in Puerto Rico, and the Supreme Court created a whole new category of American-controlled land known as “unincorporated territories.”5 The U.S. wanted to own and govern Puerto Rico as the Spanish had since Columbus.
Why the strange language and legal twists? Because the founding story of the United States is about overthrowing colonial power. How could a nation built on the notion of freedom ever admit that it was now a colonial power? This fundamental lie remains at the heart of Puerto Rico’s struggles, and played no small part in the island’s suffering after Maria.
As a colony by another name, Puerto Rico had no political voice, and lived under an American governor until 1952. For the first half century of American control, Puerto Ricans had less power than they did in the final months of Spanish rule. Under the Jones Act of 1917, Puerto Ricans became U.S. citizens but they did not have the rights of citizens: they had no vote in Congress or rights to a trial by jury as long as they lived on the island. If they moved to the mainland, they magically earned their constitutional rights. They could, however, be drafted into the military, and they were, within a month of the Jones Act becoming law: many Puerto Ricans were drafted to guard the Panama Canal in World War One.6 U.S. rule meant an Americanized control of the island, with the teaching of English, a ban on the Puerto Rican flag and the name of the island officially changed to Porto Rico.
Under American rule, Puerto Rico’s coffee exports to Europe collapsed as the crop came under U.S. tariffs. But its sugar industry thrived, thanks to the island’s special access to the mainland. Still, that flow went both ways: the island’s cigar production was hammered by cigarettes from the mainland. Soon the Great Depression dealt a body blow to the sugar industry, and it never recovered.
After the war, the island attracted industrial investment with its cheap labor and special access to the mainland, giving American businesses their highest profit margins anywhere in the hemisphere. By the early 1970s, Puerto Rico was the biggest producer of clothes for the mainland. But as wages rose, production moved to other low-wage countries, and the NAFTA trade deal in 1994 shifted the balance in Mexico’s favor forever. Who needed a colony’s access to the mainland when Mexico had easier access and a cheaper workforce? In 2006, the ending of generous tax breaks for Puerto Rican subsidiaries of U.S. businesses triggered a recession that continues to this day, as factories shut down. The economy only worsened after the financial crisis and recession that began in 2008.7
Puerto Rico did not win its current version of limited political rights until after World War Two, with the direct election of Luis Muñoz Marín as governor in 1948. At first an advocate for independence, Muñoz Marín later campaigned for autonomy under a so-called commonwealth status. As the nationalists embraced armed revolt and even terrorism, Muñoz Marín shifted his position from political to cultural nationalism.8 The Cuban revolution helped cement that shift, as Cuban exiles moved to Puerto Rico and the island took on new national security importance in the Cold War struggle against communism. American tourism moved from Cuba to Puerto Rico, along with rum production.9 There was little desire to follow Cuba’s path to independence.
Today most Puerto Ricans are unhappy with their current political status, and the most popular alternative is statehood, while a minority prefer more autonomy. The most recent poll, just three months before the hurricane, showed a 97 percent majority for statehood, although opponents said the vote was rigged and refused to take part in the poll. Five years earlier, statehood won 61 percent of the vote.10 Yet Congress will not grant statehood to the island in the foreseeable future because, as with the District of Columbia, Republicans oppose what they see as the creation of two new Senate votes aligned firmly with the Democrats. Instead, some Puerto Ricans say that statehood is most likely to come about by Florida annexing the island. That kind of political upheaval could only take place if the politics of the mainl
and changes, along with the influx of Puerto Ricans onto the mainland after the hurricane.
Whatever happens, the status quo cannot survive. Well before Maria, the island’s financial crisis exposed how unsustainable the colonial system is for Puerto Rico. Its governments have taken on crushing debts that they could not pay through two decades of recession. With islanders paying no federal income tax, the government does not have the same economic power as other parts of the U.S. At the same time, 43 percent of the island lives below the poverty line, and the median income per household is just $19,600.11 Since 2016, the island’s finances—and with them, its government—are in the hands of an oversight board appointed by the president.
That economic hardship pre-Maria was already changing the island’s population with each passing year. But the hurricane, and its man-made aftermath, has rapidly reshaped the Puerto Rican people, in perhaps the first of the great population shifts resulting from climate change. Florida officials said that more than 200,000 Puerto Ricans arrived in their state within two months of the hurricane.12 Those numbers are more than enough to tip the balance in presidential elections: Donald Trump beat Hillary Clinton by little more than half that number in Florida in 2016, and the last governor’s race in Florida was decided by an even smaller margin. Other data from FEMA and the U.S. Postal Service show that Puerto Ricans have migrated to all fifty states.13 That means Maria drove more people out of Puerto Rico than either the so-called Great Migration between 1945 and 1965, or the long economic decline since 2000.14 In two months, Maria changed Puerto Rico as much as did two decades of economic upheaval.
