I tell you
this because the world into which I woke, this morning, was devoted to three
issues, which the morning radio repeated endlessly. First, Pablo
Casellas is in a
coma.
You may
remember this guy, who is the son of Salvador Casellas,
a federal judge, whom colleagues describe as completely recto or straight. Allegedly, Pablo Casellas
returned home on the morning of 14 July 2012 and saw an intruder jumping over a
ten-foot wall by the pool. Casellas, who is an expert marksman and has (or had
at the time) 33 guns, went back inside, got a gun, and fired several shots. He
then discovered his lifeless
wife sitting at the poolside; she’d been shot.
What did
Poppa do? Well, the
judge rushed to the house to be with his son, and to ensure that the
investigation is done properly. The press arrived at about the same time and
caught the judge scurrying under the yellow “do not cross—police
investigation”—tape. Made a great photo—the judicial rear end bumping up
against the tape….
But that
was only the beginning. There were bloodstains in Pablo Casellas’s car; the
grass on the other side of the wall showed no sign of being trampled; the shots
in the wall were from a special gun that Casellas reported stolen in a
“carjacking” close to the shooting range where Casellas had been practicing.
Except that it
was closed, that day; it was Fathers’ Day.
Well, it’s
taken a year of legal screwing around to get this case to court, and the trial
was to have started next Monday, so what does Casellas do?
The family
isn’t talking—do they have to? “Sources” are saying that he’s in very, very
delicate shape, and that they will start a process akin to dialysis to cleanse
his blood. The next 24
to 48 hours are critical….
So where’s Poppa
now? Sitting by the bedside, presumably on the taxpayer’s dime. And morning
radio is speculating—is it suicide? Did Casellas fils swallow pills? A guy with all those guns
has to do the one spectacularly poor way of offing himself?
I know
‘cause I was a nurse. Every time one of our regular patients presented at the
ER with an empty bottle of Tylenol in her hands, the ER nurses had
instructions: don’t buy in, be utterly matter-of-fact, and tell the patient,
“just sit over there, hon—we’ll take you when we can.”
So Casellas
is in the anteroom of death, and the island is hanging on its ears. But what
else is going on?
Coffee—the
price is going up 40%.
Coffee, according to
The New Day, is doing about as well as Pablo Casellas, at the moment. Costs of
fertilizer, electricity and everything else have gone up. The farmers are being
squeezed out of business—which is serious, because we drink 300,000 quintales (no idea what that is, but sounds
impressive) of the stuff but only produce 80,000 quintales annually. So we
import the majority of our coffee.
You might
ask—isn’t there land for coffee in Puerto Rico?
Of course
there is—plenty of it, and in fact there is lots of coffee that goes unpicked.
So what’s the problem?
Nobody
wants to pick it.
Be
fair—it’s a pretty rotten job. You’re standing (hopefully—otherwise you’re
sliding) on a wet, muddy mountainside with branches slashing your face and
insects stinging you and carrying a sack into which you are putting more and
more coffee—thus adding more and more weight as you get more and more tired.
Now it
begins to rain….
Second
scenario—you can go to the Departamento de la Familia and get the Tarjeta de la Familia and that gets you free food, which you
can munch on around noon, when you get up.
Well,
fortunately the next island over has never dreamed up the idea of the
Departamento de la Familia—so guess what? The mountains are
filled with Dominicans (from Santo Domingo—not the religious order),
according to a student from Jayuya, deep in the center of the island.
OK—Casellas
in coma, coffee in crisis…what’s next?
Well, the
island has 14
people who are still in shelters—down from the 88 people who were in
shelters last week, when a tropical wave dumped 9.15 inches of water on the
island. And now the mayor of San Juan wants
the governor to declare San Juan a disaster, since the city has 300 cases of
damage to examine.
But there’s
a problem.
According
to The New Day, the entire island is in a permanent state of emergency.
Why? Because the planning has been so wretchedly bad that any rain can
cause chaos. We have built on flood plains; squatters have built on flood
plains; we have given no maintenance to whatever systems we had to drain water.
Nor is it
entirely the government’s fault.
“You can’t
be serious,” I said to my student, after she had described her flood-plained
community’s creative approach to financing redecoration.
Their
practice—before the advent of a serious storm—was to throw a few sofas into the
Rio Cañas just before the storm. The sofas would block the culvert
down by the bridge; the water would rise wonderfully. Soon, it would be
swirling deliciously through their house, delightfully whisking away all that
stuff the eyes had grown tired of seeing. The press would come, the neighbors
would stand woefully in front of their houses, and then FEMA would send the
check.
See?
Well, it
makes sense down here….
