We Fed an Island

by Jose Andres

  Historically Puerto Rican migrants to the mainland have not been treated well. The Great Migration led to high concentrations of Puerto Ricans in poor neighborhoods of New York City associated with high crime rates. That in turn led to ugly caricatures in movies and on TV, perpetuating the prejudice that first developed under Spanish rule. According to those racist views, Puerto Ricans were either lazy or ignorant, violent or corrupt.15 It is much easier to cling to that prejudice than address hundreds of years of colonial exploitation, historic poverty, under-investment and financial instability.

  Those attitudes have in turn shaped U.S. policies toward the island in ways that are unthinkable for the rest of the country. Take food stamps. In the early 1980s, after Ronald Reagan vilified “welfare queens,” Congress decided that Puerto Rico was costing too much in food stamps. Ignoring the poverty levels on the island, Washington simply capped the level of food assistance. The result is that to receive food assistance in Puerto Rico you need to be much poorer than citizens on the mainland (with around one-third of their net income). If you qualify, you receive around 60 percent less in benefits than people who qualify on the mainland. For a family of three, you need to take home less than $599 a month in order to get food assistance of $315 a month. On the mainland, the same family could take home as much as $1,680 and get benefits of $511. To make matters worse, because the funding is capped, it cannot be expanded in case of a natural disaster like a hurricane.16 It’s hard to imagine a clearer signal from Washington to its colonial subjects: you are second-class citizens.

  Food is not a minor way to send a message in Puerto Rico, or some functional way to consume calories: it plays a huge role in Puerto Rican pride and culture, and gives us present-day clues to the island’s past. Rice, a central part of many meals, was introduced by the Spanish and cultivated by African slaves in the marshlands.17 Today’s rice or plantain pasteles, or patties, wrapped in leaves and boiled in water, are based on African cooking techniques.18 They feature in Christmas feasts including the Spanish import of the lechón asado, or roasted suckling pig, and the African and indigenous mixture of arroz con gandules, rice with pigeon peas. Another Christmas dish that defines Puerto Rican food—the mofongo, or fried plantain—is named after the Angolan word for plate, presumably because the plantain is first mashed on a plate before frying.19 Puerto Ricans spend as much as half their income on food, reflecting a combination of the poverty on the island, the high cost of food imports and the cultural importance of food.20

  If you want to talk to Puerto Ricans, try sharing a meal with them. If you want to tell them you care, try cooking for them.

  Chapter 4

  Big Water

  IT WAS THE END OF MY FOURTH DAY; A WEEK AND A DAY AFTER THE HURRICANE tore up the island. We were back at the penthouse bar at the AC Hotel in San Juan. Outside, on a roof with views to the ocean, the pool and cabanas were empty of the usual crowd of tourists and partygoers. Inside, there was an end-of-the-universe atmosphere around a bar that was humming with heavily armed Homeland Security agents, a collection of disaster relief workers, and some locals desperate for power, air-conditioning and a stiff drink.

  Even though there had been a dry law in place, I got the hotel to save me a couple of bottles of white wine. I noticed a few Red Cross people sitting on the sofas by the door. Beside them was another group: a Puerto Rican guy sitting with an African-American woman and a buzz-cut man who spoke with a deep Southern accent. He looked like he might be ex-military or ex–Secret Service. They made for a strange group, so I took my wine over to them and started talking about our cooking in Santurce. Three days into our rapidly expanding food relief operation, I already could tell a pretty good story. We had doubled our output from 2,500 to 5,000 meals and we were only just getting started.

  “We can feed the island,” I told them, as I laid out my plan for operations spanning across Puerto Rico. At the same time, I knew we were already getting squeezed on resources. We were financing all the supplies on our own. My executive director of World Central Kitchen, Brian MacNair, had just arrived on the island and he wasn’t exactly relaxed about the size and growth rate of what we were doing, with no money to pay for it all. We had a little cash left over from our last fund-raiser, but it was nothing like enough for what we had begun. We were a small nonprofit with no record of massive fund-raising in a crisis.

  The Puerto Rican guy was a lawyer and a politically connected fixer by the name of Andrés López, who was an early supporter of one Barack Obama as president. They were at Harvard Law School around the same time, and López was rewarded for his support by being named a member of the Democratic National Committee and a trustee at the Kennedy Center in Washington. He was sitting next to another DNC member, Karen Peterson, a state senator from New Orleans and chair of the Louisiana Democratic Party. She was recounting the state’s early relief and recovery after Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

  As I continued to outline my vision for feeding one million people across the island, the Southern guy turned to the other two and pointed to me.

  “This is it,” he said. “This is the guy. Let’s bring him in tomorrow to FEMA.”

  “What do you mean this is the guy?” I asked.

  It sounded like they were sitting there waiting for something to happen, or someone to show up. Someone with an idea they could use.

  The Southern guy was Josh Gill, and he started to explain his background. He was also from Louisiana, where he served as a state emergency bulk fuel coordinator, and had some experience with the recovery after Hurricane Katrina, as well as some knowledge of the Federal Emergency Management Agency. It wasn’t clear if Peterson and Gill were trying to help or looking for business, or some mixture of the two. López was a friend of Peterson, and was staying at the hotel with his family to give them a break from their blacked-out home.

  “I’m going to bring you in tomorrow to talk to the FEMA guys,” Gill told me. “We’ll go to the mass feeding meeting.”

  We talked in vague generalities about what we hoped would happen: some combination of FEMA and the Red Cross would pay us to feed one million Puerto Ricans. That was only 989,000 meals more than we had already cooked. If it sounded like an impossible dream—both the funding and the feeding—that’s because it was.

  AS FAR AS THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION WAS CONCERNED, EVERYTHING in Puerto Rico was going exceptionally well. “FEMA & First Responders are doing a GREAT job in Puerto Rico,” Trump tweeted that evening. “Massive food & water delivered. Docks & electric grid dead. Locals trying . . . really hard to help but many have lost their homes. Military is now on site and I will be there Tuesday. Wish press would treat fairly!”

  It wasn’t clear where he was getting his information about the “massive food & water” deliveries. They certainly weren’t obvious to those of us on the ground, or in any of the official reports.

  “Puerto Rico is devastated,” he continued in another tweet. “Phone system, electric grid many roads, gone. FEMA and First Responders are amazing. Governor said ‘great job!’ ”

  At least he recognized how bad the infrastructure was on the island. We’d had many differences between us, but on this I had to agree with him: the island was clearly devastated.

  The tweets were probably the result of news coverage of his own staff briefing earlier in the day. Brock Long, FEMA’s administrator, gave Trump a personal walk-through of what was going on. It was unclear what was more detached from reality: Long’s account of Puerto Rico’s situation or Trump’s understanding of it.

  Either way, it resulted in lots of happy talk from Press Secretary Sarah Sanders at the podium in the White House briefing room. “The full weight of the United States government is engaged to ensure that food, water, healthcare, and other lifesaving resources are making it to the people in need,” she began.1 I live in Washington, D.C. I know what the full weight of the U.S. government looks like. It didn’t look anything like the food, water and health care operations in San Juan at the time sh
e said these words. Or at any other time, for that matter. And San Juan was by far the best served place in Puerto Rico.

  Once again, the White House proudly declared that there were lots of people on the ground. “Ten thousand federal government relief workers are there, including 7,200 troops are now on the island and working tirelessly to get people what they need,” Sanders said. “We have prioritized lifesaving resources to hospitals and can report that 44 of the island’s 69 hospitals are now fully operational.”

  I’m pretty sure that a week after Hurricane Sandy, if only two-thirds of New York’s and New Jersey’s hospitals were functioning, there would have been street protests, lawsuits and maybe criminal charges. It didn’t seem like something to brag about, but rather something to be ashamed of. In any case, there were credible reports that only one-third of the hospitals were functioning.2

  “There’s a long way to go, but we will not rest until everyone is safe and secure,” she concluded. “Our message to the incredible people of Puerto Rico is this: The President is behind you. We all are—the entire country. Your unbreakable spirit is an inspiration to us all. We are praying for you, we are working for you, and we will not let you down.”

  We will not let you down. It was hard to forget those words, so easily repeated, in the weeks to come.

  Of course, it wasn’t just the communications side of the White House that was the problem. Accompanying Sanders at the podium was Tom Bossert, Trump’s Homeland Security adviser, the top official inside the West Wing overseeing the recovery.

  His words amounted to a colossal admission of failure, dressed up as a boast about operations.

  “Through aerial surveillance we’ve seen the entirety of Puerto Rico,” he told reporters, admitting that after a week on the ground, the United States had failed to check on its own citizens on an island just seventy-one miles long. “Some of the southwest and southeast sections of the island have had a little bit more sparse on-foot exploration,” he said. The southeast was where the hurricane landed.

  “But it’s the interior of the island that’s presenting the biggest problem for us right now,” he said. “The mountainous interior is where we’re dedicating our efforts to try to get in with rotary wing support.”

  This wasn’t Afghanistan in winter surrounded by Taliban terrorists hiding in caves. The mountainous interior of Puerto Rico was not hostile territory in an impossibly harsh climate. The Trump administration had failed to throw its full weight behind the recovery. After the earthquake in Haiti, a foreign country, eight thousand U.S. troops were en route within two days. A week after a hurricane on U.S. soil, we had fewer troops on the ground, on an island with literally tens of thousands of U.S. military stationed here. The idea that we couldn’t mobilize troops to visit the interior of the island until ten days after the disaster was stunning. How exactly did the world’s most powerful military force invade foreign countries if it couldn’t reach the middle of an island it fully controlled?

  And how did the administration explain its vastly different responses to Harvey in Texas and Maria in Puerto Rico? By this time, they had seventy-three helicopters over Houston. It would take three weeks to get that number flying over Puerto Rico. By this time, they had distributed more than twenty thousand tarps in Houston, but just five thousand in Puerto Rico. By this time, they were on the verge of approving permanent disaster work in Texas. It would take another month to do the same in Puerto Rico.3 And Maria affected so many more people over so much more territory than Harvey.

  One reporter standing at the side of the briefing room confronted Bossert with some facts from Puerto Rico.

  “Tom, I’ve got a text here from a volunteer who has boots on the ground and he says that they need helicopters to evacuate people from remote areas of the island,” he said. “And he says there are people burying their family members in front yards, communication is badly needed, and they look at apocalyptic conditions between 48 and 72 hours.”

  Bossert insisted that he wasn’t going to “micromanage” the recovery. “That’s the mistake you’ve seen in the past,” he said. “I believe—I’m confident anyway—we’ve got enough resources marshaled and deployed forward to make those decisions under the right command and leadership structure. What we’ve done, and as I’ve explained in the past, is we’ve had to augment and change our business model in the field.”

  This business model was nothing like any commercial enterprise I had ever seen. If it was a business, it wasn’t clear who the customer was, or how the government was serving them. For Bossert, everything was just fine, even for the people texting about their urgent needs.

  “First, people seeing 24- and 48-hour horizon problems where they’re saying, ‘I don’t see enough food and water coming,’ it’s my sincere belief that that food and water is going to get to them before that deadline arises and that we’re going to save their lives. I have no doubt in it.”

  His belief was rooted in the numbers, he said. “We’ve got commodities distribution now exceeding millions. So 1.3 million meals, 2.7 million liters—that type of thing—of water.”

  There were 3.4 million people living in Puerto Rico before the hurricane. After eight days, and just two meals a day, they would need 54 million meals. Even if 90 percent of the island had access to its own food in that time, the remaining 10 percent in the greatest need would be 4 million meals short. As for water, doctors say the average person needs around three liters a day, unless he is sitting in air-conditioning all day. That wasn’t the case in tropical Puerto Rico, limping along on a few generators. It was shocking that the president’s most senior adviser would feel good about distributing 2.7 million liters of water—less than a liter per person for an entire week.

  “Now, if there’s somebody burying somebody in their front yard, that’s an absolutely terrible story,” Bossert said. “What I don’t want to do though is project it as the norm, and I think there’s a careful distinction here.”

  “What is the norm?” the reporter asked.

  “Right now we’ve seen 16 fatalities confirmed from the state authorities,” he replied. “No fatality is acceptable. If that number increases significantly, that will be a devastating blow. We are going to do everything we can to prevent that. The loss of life from the storm is one thing; loss of life that’s preventable is another. And that’s why we’re trying to marshal our resources.”

  THE JONES ACT OF 1920 WAS ONE OF THOSE PIECES OF LIVING HISTORY that told you everything about Puerto Rico’s status as a colony. Its formal name is the Merchant Marine Act of 1920, signed into law just three years after the people of Puerto Rico were granted U.S. citizenship, just in time to be conscripted into the U.S. Army in World War One. The 1920 Act was supposed to protect the U.S. shipping business by requiring that all sea freight travel between U.S. ports on U.S.-built ships, owned by U.S. citizens and operated by U.S. crews. It is hard to imagine a more nationalist and protectionist law, especially at a time of a globalized economy, where sea freight flows through so many international players. But at the time, the Jones Act of 1920 was intended as a way to boost the maritime industry and U.S. national security. It also enshrined the privileged status of U.S. territories like Puerto Rico, Guam, Hawaii and Alaska. The latter two only became full states forty years after the act. In the meantime, these countries all had special access to the U.S. The exchange was clear: in return, like all good colonial powers, the U.S. imposed special control for its favored corporations.

  Whatever the original intent and effect, the Jones Act of 1920 is a singular disaster for Puerto Rico today, even without a hurricane or two to make things worse. The Federal Reserve of New York concluded that the Jones Act “does indeed have a negative effect on the Puerto Rican economy,” according to its 2012 study of the island’s competitiveness.4 It couldn’t say exactly how much of a negative effect that was, but it did make these helpful comparisons. First, it pointed out that just four carriers control all shipping between the mainland and Puerto Ric
o. Another study revealed those carriers operate just five container ships to supply the island.5 The numbers are clear in terms of the impact on prices. It costs twice as much to ship a twenty-foot container of household goods from the East Coast to Puerto Rico as it does to nearby Santo Domingo in the Dominican Republic or Kingston, Jamaica. As a protected trade, those prices remained stable in Puerto Rico even when the global glut of shipping was driving costs down elsewhere in the same part of the Caribbean. Puerto Rico was hurting, the New York Fed found. Over the previous decade, the port in Kingston had overtaken San Juan in total container volume, even though Puerto Rico’s population was one-third larger and its economy was more than triple the size of Jamaica’s. To add insult to injury, the nearby U.S. Virgin Islands had been exempted from the Jones Act since 1922.

  If the shipping restrictions were harmful in normal times, imagine what it was like in the aftermath of Maria’s devastation. From the first days after the hurricane, reporters began asking the administration about lifting the Jones Act to help with supplies to the island. After all, the administration had issued a temporary shipping restrictions waiver for Texas and Florida after hurricanes Harvey and Irma just a few weeks earlier.6 Homeland Security officials told reporters that this was because those hurricanes affected oil supplies, whereas Maria did not affect national security and there were enough American ships to supply Puerto Rico, in any case. This kind of thinking is impossible to understand. Why is gasoline for cars a more important form of energy than food and water for people? As a chef and as an American citizen, I cannot accept that food and water are excluded from national security concerns. Never mind that Puerto Rico is critical for medicine production for the mainland.