Vasallo Dreams Up a Canal

Good news—the city has a terrific museum. And why not, since the founder, Luis A. Ferré, was, in addition to being governor, a seriously rich guy. How rich? Well, he owned the factory that produced all the island’s cement at the time. (Critics suggest that his intrusion into politics was to further the law that required all cement to be locally produced—is there anyone left with faith in the basic goodness of man?).

So Ferré went running around collecting Pre-Raphaelites, which at the time were both around and cheap, relatively. Consequently, the city of Ponce, Puerto Rico, has one or two of the best collections of Pre-Raphaelites in the world. Want to see this picture?

Head to Ponce!

What doesn’t Ponce have? Well, despite two seriously large cranes, and despite ten years of dithering, it doesn’t have the super port that the late mayor proposed for it. And why not? It wasn’t lack of money—we’ve already spent a quarter of a billion on it. Nor was it lack of potential: we had the infrastructure, the ties to the US mainland, the engineers to do the job. In fact, ten years ago we were in a good position to capture a developing market. Now? Here’s Caribbean Business on the subject last year:

"At that time, all the horses were at the starting gate. Now, all the other horses have finished the race. Our neighboring islands expanded their facilities, signed agreements with global operators and are fully functional while we never got out of the gate," Lewis said.

What happened?

Well, I could look it up and tell you all the various issues and controversies that cropped up, but why bother? In a nutshell, it was business as usual, which in Puerto Rico means politics. And so when the governor was of one party, the mayor of Ponce was of the other party. And on those rare occasions when the mayor and the governor were of the same party? Well, then they only had four years—insufficient time to reverse all of the progress that had been made—if any,—revoke the contracts to the former governor’s friends, fight the legal challenges that ensued, and re-award the contracts to the preferred companies / cronies / friends. All of this takes time, you see.

Time which the Dominican Republic used well, since they now have a super port and cheap labor, whereas Puerto Rico? No super port, expensive labor.

Happily, while Ponce may have blown—or had it blown—their shot at a super port, they are not without resources. As proof, Inquiring Reader, I bring you this….

OK—here’s what you need to know about Ponce: it’s fiercely hot and just as dry. In fact, there is a certain point in crossing over the central mountain range when I will unconsciously start to sing Copland’s Rodeo—because at any moment you think that Agnes de Mille is going to send her dancers out. Oh, and the mountains spontaneously burn during dry season, which lasts nine months.

It’s perhaps the fact that he has never seen a river that accounts for the desire of a legislator from Ponce, Víctor Vassallo, to convert this “body” of water into the Panama Canal. Because where you and I might see a ditch, what does Vassallo see? Let The New Day tell the story:

Vassallo está convencido que su proyecto es viable y sueña con la idea de que Ponce tenga una obra que opere con un sistema de compuertas o esclusas con ingeniería de la utilizada en el Canal de Panamá. Otro que confía en la viabilidad del proyecto es el presidente de la Comisión de Desarrollo de la Industria Turística, Ángel Matos García, quien desconocía el costo total del proyecto. Indicó que “en su primera etapa no veo (que la inversión sea) mayor a $2 millones”.

Loosely, “Vassallo is convinced that his project is viable and dreams of the idea that Ponce have a work that operates on a system of compartments and locks with engineering like that used in the Panama Canal. Another who believes in the viability of the project is the president of the Commission for the Development of the Tourism Industry, Ángel Matos-García, who was unaware of the total cost of the project. He indicated that, “in the first stage, I don’t see that the investment would be greater than two million.”

Vassallo sees the canal as having twin benefits. First, it would be an excellent form of transit, and who hasn’t suffered through a Ponce traffic jam? Second, it would be a terrific tourist attraction—who wouldn’t want to come and see the canal, the locks, the boats floating gently through the arid landscape?

The predictable scoffers are sniffing, of course. There’s the fact that not one of Puerto Rico’s rivers is navigable. There’ also the fact that the US government has stuck in 375 million bucks to build a dam on the river four miles north of the city. Why? Because when the weather isn’t being fiercely hot and dry, it’s being torrential. So what happens? The ditch that you saw above overflows, carrying off cars, cows and the occasional child.

Despite all these obstacles, what’s happened to Vassallo’s proposal? Well, even despite all the objections and difficulties, guess what? Our legislators have agreed to study the matter.

Oh, and the water level in the Río Portugués yesterday?

Two inches!

A Walk Through a New Day

Right—time to take a walk through the new day. Or rather, The New Day, since that’s what the premiere and maybe at this point only newspaper on the island is called: El Nuevo Día. So what kind of day are we having?

Rotten, if the Day is to be believed. We start off grimly enough with the news that many of us, living in violence-prone communities, now have Posttraumatic Stress Disorder—the same PTSD that soldiers coming back from Iraq are experiencing. So what percentage of the population suffers from PTSD in these communities? Forty percent.

I know all of this because I saw the headline online—The Day, however, has taken to not publishing its main story online: you have to buy the paper in paper, or buy the paper in eInk (at last! A red squiggle I like—I’m totally with you, computer….) So I went to the drug store, where I bought the paper—approximately the size of the New York City telephone book, or at least the one twenty years ago, before people had smart phones….

“It’s Like Living a Civil War,” says the lead story, which goes on to point out that in the last six years, we’ve had 5,637 murders on the island versus 2,291 deaths of soldiers in Afghanistan. Granted, at its peak the US presence in Afghanistan was only 140,000 soldiers, versus a population of 3.7 million people on the island. But still—what to make of the fact that New York City, with 8 million people or so, has considerably fewer murders than Puerto Rico? 

Particularly worrisome is how are kids are doing: 40,000 have major depression and 53,000 are said to have suicidal ideation. Say what? Almost by definition, wouldn’t you assume that anyone with suicidal ideation suffers from major depression? Seems screwy to me….

We are, in short, all cocked up. So what’s the solution? Well, the Day has the answer (or perhaps The Answer), and that is integration of programs that have proven effective in Puerto Rico. And the Day lists them; curiously, all but one of the nine programs is named in English.

Well, that’s good to know, and very much needed, because on turning the page we get to the story about the school principal who got gunned down on a highly transited road while driving at 7:30 in the evening. Oh, and there are no leads, though lieutenant Elexis Torres, who’s investigating the case, said there has to be someone who saw the car, or the color of the car, or even the license plate of the car. But guess what? No one’s talking….

OK—wrap my head around that, and doesn’t it seem logical that the next page is a long interview with our new chief of police, James Tuller, who was born in New York but lived on the island for much of his childhood and has “close ties” to the island. He has, however, 40 years experience of being a cop, all of it in New York City.

And he was around for the “broken window” program, more formally known as the Bratton Plan. You’ll remember the theory—go after the small stuff and the big stuff will take care of itself. So that meant cracking down on people who were jumping over the turnstiles in the subway, fixing broken windows, fining the guys out washing car windows and shaking down the motorists who hadn’t wanted the service.

Well, Tuller is going to have his hands full. Or rather, there are many opportunities here. We could start with the people who are selling parking on public streets, and promising to offer “protection” for your car. Who knows what might happen? You wouldn’t want to come back and find your windshield broken—would you? Just a few bucks and everything will be all right. Worth it, really, for the peace of mind….

Right, skip gently over the news that DTOP—that’s the Department of Transportation and Public Works—is offering a 35% amnesty on traffic tickets. Oh, and we’re getting a new president of the University of Puerto Rico, which, it turns out, gets a third of its funds from federal money.

Lastly, we come to an opinion piece by Benjamín Torres Gotay, who uses the sorry situation of the putative super port of Ponce as a metaphor for our society.

Ponce, you see, is our second largest city, and is incidentally one of the fifteen most crime-ridden cities from page 4. And twenty years ago, the mayor of Ponce hit on the idea: expand and dredge the harbor, get the big cranes in, and make a super port. Merchandise would come in from Asia or wherever in huge ships, and then get put into smaller ships to be shipped around the Caribbean and the Americas.

Great idea, right? Nor is it just an idea—since in the twenty years since the idea was proposed, some quarter of a billion dollars has been spent. And not without something to show for it.

I’ve seen them—the two cranes—and they are massive. I saw them on a voyage into the absurd that my friend Harry drove me through last year. First we passed a wind farm with some 50 or 60 massive turbines that were supposed to be spinning. They weren’t, so what was the problem? Well, the company that made them had announced that the blade was falling on some identical models somewhere else in the world. But that wasn’t the only problem, because if seemed that the valley had insufficient wind. In fact, there is nowhere on the island where there is enough wind to make this project profitable.

We then got to the Playa de Ponce , a community so poor that a nun—the sister of a former governor—had to start a community center for the people there. And what was there? Two enormous piles of junk metal.

“It’s the only thing we export,” said Harry gloomily. “Oh sure, some specialty coffee, and some specialty fruits—but nothing else. The only thing that the world wants or needs from Puerto Rico? Our trash—that’s all we produce….”

Then we went a bit further, and came to the massive cranes—erected who knows when and never used. What’s happened? Well, they’ve been the focus of political squabbles –the most recent of which is whether the project should be in the hands of the municipality of Ponce or of the central government.

Guys?

Twenty years, and you are arguing this? And Torres Gotay says it best: in the time that we have spent arguing whether the color should be yellow or orange, the Dominican Republic—as corrupt as it is—has managed to build a super port of its own. So guess what? We may as well skip the idea, wait until the salt air takes its toll and the cranes are in imminent danger of collapse.

And then what?

Well, there’s a nice pile of junk metal nearby….  

Fertile Fields

This being a decent blog, I can’t repeat what I said when I saw them, that day with Harry, but it was something like, “what the fuh…?”

Harry was driving; we were on the highway to Ponce, the island’s second largest city. And right there, where Santa Isabel should be, was this:

Yup, 44 windmills in a plain between two mountains. Quite a cite / sight it was, and a bit difficult to overlook.

“They’re completely worthless,” said Harry. “They’re not producing any energy, really. It was another stupid plan of your governor….”

It was a joke—OK, maybe the slightest of jabs. Harry favors independence, but fears gravely that I am a statehooder.

“I’m not surprised,” I said, “that it’s not producing any energy. I tried for years to get Wal-Mart to install windmills, and the sustainability guy told me there’s nowhere on the island with enough wind.”

Actually, if memory serves, the only place with enough wind was alongside of the expressway we were driving on. Cars moving at 65 miles per hour create a lot of air movement.

We had been talking, Harry and I, of the wonderful developments in Puerto Rico. The statue of Christopher Colombus, a monstrosity bigger than the Statue of Liberty, had been shipped off to Arecibo, a town west of San Juan, where it was to be erected. It had been offered to several cities in the US, but curiously, nobody wanted it. Could it be because it looked like this?

“Well, not every statue has to be beautiful,” I said to Harry. And he agreed: there has to be a place for diversity of aesthetics in our society. And went on to tell me that the windmill parts had been stored in his neighborhood, and that each blade was exactly one city block long. He even showed me the block.

“There are two over at Bacardi,” I said, “and one sitting on the municipal dump.”

Right, so Harry had to tell me the story on that.

The governor, wanting to promote this excellent scheme, had erected the windmill on the dump, and they had all watched breathlessly for the majestic white—symbolic for clean and renewable—blades to spin. They were as still as corpses.

Well, that was a problem, but not for long, and not for our governor. What did he do? Rigged it up with electricity, and we now have, as Harry explained it, an enormous fan slowly twirling in public view. See? Instead of producing any energy, it is in fact consuming it….

This made perfect sense, in a tropical sort of way; it was a precise example of a previous, also statehood, governor’s campaign motto: “¿Problema? ¡Resuelto!”

(Problem? Fixed!)

Well, it was a thing to know about, so I looked it up, after I got home. And found that a company, Pattern Energy, had invested 215 million bucks into this project, and were intending to sell the power company 95 MW, enough to power 33 thousand homes.

Yes, and this would be a savings of $13,000 per hour for the company, and thus for us!

Well, the news came out, a week ago. The windmills have been stopped, for the time being. And why? It seems that the turbines have an unfortunate habit—the blades are flying off. So, shut down until further notice.

Fear not, Readers, that we will be sitting in the dark, reduced to rubbing sticks to light the fires to heat our food. For the new director of the energy company—for we have a new governor, so everybody has to change, even the president of the University of Puerto Rico—has just stated what Marc and Harry knew that day in September.

There’s no wind.

The project, in fact, generates all of 3% of the energy on the island. And the turbines are working at only 20% of capacity, not the 40%-50% that is expected. So Pattern Energy, “one of North America’s leading independent wind and transmission companies,” according to their website, has just stuck in $215,000,000 to Puerto Rico, and is getting back…

…what?

“Did García Márquez really say that about Puerto Rico?” I asked Harry. He knew immediately the remark; it’s part of Puerto Rican folklore. When asked why he didn’t write about Puerto Rico, García Márquez said something like, “they didn’t believe me when I wrote about Macondo, so they really wouldn’t believe me if I wrote about Puerto Rico….”

“Absolutely,” returned Harry. 

Good to know. What would I write about, if I woke up and found everything normal?

The Killer in Your Kitchen

It was the alert doña Taí who advised me of it.

“You ever heard of the Boston Molasses Disaster?”

Sounds like a joke, doesn’t it? And if it weren’t, why, having lived in Boston for a year, had I never heard of it? Definitely something to check out.

It seems that on 15 January 1919, a huge vat of molasses exploded in the North End of Boston, creating a 40-foot wave that rushed through the city. Killed 21 people and several horses; 150 people were injured. And it did some serious damage to infrastructure. Take a look below….

Well, in my zeal to alert the international readership of this blog, I checked all this out in Wikipedia. Only to discover that there was a reference to another disaster.

The London Beer Flood.

Jump back a century or so, to 1814, in the St. Giles section of London. A vat of beer explodes, and causes other vats to explode in a domino effect. All in all, 323,000 imperial gallons (no idea what that is, but it sounds impressive…) of beer flood the city. St. Giles is an area of poor houses, with many families living in basements. These flood, and the death toll is eight.

Well, it seems that nothing is safe anymore. There are killers in the schools. Molasses can kill. Beer as well, in a way I had never thought.

With all the mayhem afoot, I’m happy to report that a great bunch of kids from Ponce, Puerto Rico, decided to cheer up a food court in their hometown. Here they are, in full swing!

Desperately Seeking Harry

It was a day when the news was so bad I had to read about George Michael.

Right—I better explain. Yesterday had been fiendishly hot. I had come home, written a post—hey, and gotten my first comment! Thanks, Anonymous!—and sent it to Harry. I had a brainstorm—Los Choferes Unidos de Ponce! Surely the united drivers of Ponce could—singularly or collectively—find a way to get me from the biggest city in Puerto Rico to the second biggest city. I mean, come on!

I sent Harry the post, and also the news about the UDOP (United etc.). “At precisely 8AM I will be in my car, driving to San Juan,” responded the good Harry. He apparently thinks less of UDOP than I.

Great! Woke up at seven, had my coffee, looked outside, and saw the cold front move in.

Cold I can use….

Rain is another story. Because very quickly, we were in a chubasco.

It’s a word I love, and was curious about. Why did I think it was Puerto Rican slang? So I looked it up, or was about to when…

Drip drip drip drip drip drip…..

You get the picture. Or rather, you don’t.

OK, a chubasco is a strong, sudden, heavy rain. Not a problem—we need rain (actually, apparently everybody except—who else?—the British needs rain).

What I didn’t need was a stream of water pouring into the apartment. I raced to get the two buckets and two pots necessary to collect the water. Also the mop…

…passing Loquito, who was busy pissing on the floor of the living room.

Snarled at him, grabbed the buckets / pots, positioned them and then my cell phone went off.

Harry, informing me that it was precisely 8AM, and he was on the expressway. I did the only thing I could think off.

Held the phone to the rim of the metal pot.

What to do? Rather, how to do it? How can I cancel a SECOND time on my dear friend, who spent all last week in bed in agony (gory details omitted), and now was jumping up to drive 65 miles to get me?

OK—check out the weather situation. Shout at Raf, who is nowhere to be found. The radio alarm, however, is on—as it has been since 6:30. Great, so Raf should know something about the weather, right? I mean, they do talk about the weather on morning radio.

Mr. Fernández, however, had been sleeping soundly in the preceding hour and a half.

Great—a chubasco situation. Pissing cat, sleeping husband, half of Niagara Falls flowing through the apartment.

OK, flip on the computer, check El Nuevo Día. It’s the local rag, though how it can be—electronically—is a mystery.

Chubascos, said The New…and increasingly terrible…Day. 

Thanks, New Day! But I must be fair. The New Day did tell me that Harry was heading for disaster—a truck had jackknifed on the expressway.

I call Harry and tell him all this. Of course he understands.

“I wouldn’t feel comfortable leaving my house if it were leaking like that,” he says.

Spend ten minutes deciding whether to kill the cat….

And decide to check out the news.

Something I rarely do. I mean look, does it make sense to take anti-depressants AND read the news? That’s pretty much like combining Antabuse with vodka. 

With pretty much the same results….

Well, it’s not pretty, our world. The guy who predicted the 2008 meltdown thinks it’s gonna happen again, just worse. Watched that for ninety seconds. Bank of America reported second quarter profits. Great—nobody has a job, but the banks are making money! Greece says it can’t make the austerity cuts that the European Union is demanding.

The situation in Syria is unspeakable.

Think it can’t get worse?

Think again, because in a world besieged with every imaginable problem, George Michael comes up with a new one!

Well, new to me, at least.

ForeignAccent Syndrome.

Well, God knows, I should know about this. Number one, I have one (a foreign accent, that is). Two, I’m an English teacher—thus working every day with accents.

Well, here’s the deal. George was singing away on a tour last year, and then fell sick.  Pneumonia. Bad pneumonia. Progressing to a coma. The he woke up.

Speaking with a foreign accent.

Here’s AP news:

Michael said that as he opened his eyes, doctors asked him if he knew who he was—to which he replied, "King of the world?" in the distinctive West Country burr.

It was almost the last straw. The goat that calms the cup (la gota que—oh, forget it). But those seven sturdy years of unrelenting optimism gave me the tools I need.

Another problem?

NO!

An opportunity. So here’s what I’m gonna do. People got a problem with my accent? I’m really Puerto Rican!

I woke up from MY coma sounding like a gringo!
 _________________

Etymological note—chubasco is from the Portuguese chuva, rain.
Meteorological note—been sunny all day!