Bad Party, Terrible Hangover

The good news?

I did not wake up this morning with a hangover.

The bad news?

The island did.

Whatever you think of the current governor, nobody can dispute that, on at least one point in the news conference yesterday, he was right: both the major parties that rule Puerto Rico got us into this mess. And that is? Yesterday, after years of waving red flags, Standard & Poor’s degraded our credit rating to junk status.

Terrible golpe al país shouts the The New Day’s headline in a special 15-page extra to today’s regular printed edition. Conscientious blogger that I am, I read all 15 pages, which told me basically what I knew, as well as some things I didn’t.

The gist of it is that for forty years, the public has allowed our political leaders to engage in politicking, instead of providing services, making fiscally responsible decisions, and running efficient governments. And how did they do that? By doing on a collective basis what many of us do on a personal level: living on credit.

There’s nothing too sexy about economics—nothing as sexy as building a great whacking (thanks, Franny!) stadium or investing a billion dollars in “special communities,” which today remain just as special as they were when the program began. (The program identified poor communities and tried to invest funds for improvements to infrastructure and social services…)

OK—so how bad is it? Some facts lifted from the special edition of today, as well as a New York Times article on the topic:

•       Our debt is almost 70 billion dollars
•       Each person—man woman and child—would have to pay $10, 635 dollars up front to clear this debt. That’s ten times the average per state
•       As a result of this decision, we’re going to have to pay about 940 million bucks, since we promised we would if our rating was sunk to junk status
•       We had been planning to go ask the market to buy bonds that would give us an additional 1 to 2 billion next month
•       Puerto Rico is the third largest issuer of municipal bonds, after California and New York
•       Many of these bonds are collected in mutual funds, which are attractive: you don’t have to pay taxes on the interest you collect on them. Therefore, a lot of mutual funds in the US hold Puerto Rico bonds. However, a lot of the bonds are held by the Puerto Rican middle and upper classes, especially retirees; some 1.5 billion dollars of Puerto Rico debt is held on the island

Now, how’s the economy doing?

•        In December of 2013, the rate of unemployment was (officially) 15.4%
•       Largest employer in Puerto Rico is…the government of Puerto Rico: 27.8% of the work force works for the government. Estimates for the average state public sector range from 10% to 15%
•       Manufacturing accounts for only 9% of the non-farming Gross National Product
•       25% of the commonwealth budget comes in federal funds
•       The population of Puerto Rico is 3.67 million: in 2013, the government estimated that 1.3 million people were working. That means that one in three Puerto Ricans is working

OK—so what was the response on the island? Well, the editorial in The New Day called for…unity. Now is not the time, it said, for finger pointing. The governor, as well, said that now is the time for all Puerto Ricans to come together and figure out what to do with this mess.

Though there were some who couldn’t resist, of course. The governor himself couldn’t resist suggesting that his government, though young, had acted like adults, but that it was time for the local Supreme Court to “put on the toga of adulthood.” Why the jab? Because the Supreme Court had put the reform of the teacher retirement system on hold until the lawsuit brought by the unions had been resolved.

And the President of the Senate came out and said that the current government had been firm and financially responsible; nowhere else in the states had a government acted as Puerto Rico had to correct their problems. Puerto Rico didn’t deserve this betrayal.

The teachers, too, pointed out that since we got degraded to junk status, it was clearly proof that a reform of the retirement system wasn’t needed in the first place.

Yes, you say, but beyond calls for unity—however successfully heeded—what does the government propose to do?

It would be premature, said the governor—donning the mantle of a serious and wise leader—to discuss any specific measure until they had been carefully and thoroughly scrutinized and examined in order to assure that the measures taken will have the maximal impact on the economy while minimizing any adverse effects on the private lives of the people of Puerto Rico, who working together, hand in hand, making ties that extend beyond petty politicking, can go forward confidently towards a better future.

All right—I made that up. That’s what I would have said. The governor doesn’t know what he’s gonna do—so he fell back on rhetoric.

Nor does the average person know what this means: according to The New Day, even business people didn’t really understand what all this meant. The reality is that almost 90% of the students I have taught over the last 20 years have tuned out politics. And now that the crisis is here? Many people are confused.

And the worst of it? However bad the hangover, it was never a very good party anyway….   

Lady and the Monkey

It was a day when about all I could do was listen to the story of Lady and the monkey.

I could have written about the son of a Federal judge, Salvador Casellas; the trial of the son is in its 11^th day, and everybody is talking about it. Nor is it looking very good for Casellas, who is accused of killing his wife as she sat by the pool one weekend morning last year. The wife is reported not to have struggled against her assailant; a neighbor—though admittedly a junkie—reported seeing a man driving a light grey Mercedes. Nothing too unusual there, but how often do you see someone fling a quite rare and expensive pistol out a car window? Fortunately, the junkie knew what to do: he went down to the drug punto and sold it for a thousand bucks (and some marijuana) to the pushers there. Oh, and today’s news is that the bullets match the gun that Casellas reported as stolen months before the murder.

OK—so a guy whom a friend told me was seriously entitled even as a child is—apparently—not getting away with murder. Anything else happening on the island?

Well, the teachers are furious, as are the judges—both groups got their pensions slashed. So the judges did what judges do: go to court. The teachers went to two very predictable allies—the fire-and-independence breathing archbishop and the new mayoress of San Juan. And the archbishop instantly invoked the magic word: without teachers, he thundered, there is no patria.

Astute readers of this blog will know: anytime you want to talk independence covertly, the word patria is invoked. So the archbishop and mayoress are getting together at the Colegio de Abogados de Puerto Rico, along with assorted others, to forge together “amendments” to the bill.

It’s hard to imagine what amendments could be done to the bill, but it’ll fun to see. In all likelihood, the teachers will propose to increase their retirement to higher levels than they were before the reform, and will lower the number of years teaching to be eligible to retire from thirty to five.

People aren’t getting it—we’re broke, and one more degradation of our credit rating will sink us into junk category; the party, as one economist put it, is over. Nor is it just the central government: El Nuevo Día reports that 16 of our towns have unemployment rates above 20%; one town up in the mountains has a rate of 27.5%.

“Mommy, the teachers begin teaching the moment the bell rings,” said the son of a friend of a friend, whose mother had sent him for a year to Alabama to learn English. The child was astonished—in Puerto Rico, the teachers chat in the hall for ten or fifteen minutes before ambling into the classroom.

So the question on everybody’s lips is whether the two-day strike that the teachers announced for next week will really only be two days. Or will the strike be extended? No one knows.

That said, it seemed easier, yesterday, to hear the story of Lady and the monkey.

“I never liked that monkey,” said Lady, who owns the coffee shop and two other businesses, and she showed me a picture of it: it was barring its teeth in a truly frightening way.

Nor was it an empty threat; the monkey attacked and nearly killed Lady’s stepfather. Among other things, it carried the stepfather up a tree and then dropped him. So Lady’s mother had to go wrestle with the monkey, who was pulling the legs one way as mother was pulling the shoulders the opposite way. Eventually, the monkey let go, and mother dragged the stepfather into the house.

It was a brutal mauling, with large chunks of flesh….OK, I’ll spare you. And Lady, then seven years old, was stunned

There was a bar next door, and one of the patrons, who was completely sloshed, decided that someone had to dispense the monkey. This he proposed to do, if he could get out the door. To no one’s urging, he left the bar, found the monkey, whipped out a gun, and on the first shot got the monkey right between the eyes.

“He was a hero in the town, after that,” said Lady.

“Nonsense,” said Saúl, who had stopped by to use the Internet, and who had stories of his own. “It was just a lucky shot.”

Lady considered this, and went on with the story. A hurricane arrived—these things happen in Puerto Rico—a few days later, and since everybody wanted to be close to the hospitalized stepfather, and nobody wanted to be up in the mountains, their veterinarian offered to take the kids. And Lady was having a hard time of it—having frequent nightmares and flashbacks of the monkey.

And one night she had a particularly bad nightmare, woke up screaming and crying, and went down to get some milk—not knowing that there were two refrigerators: one for food, one for dead animals. So what did she see when she opened the refrigerator door?

Right—the monkey!

We go on to talk about animals—which ones can interact with humans, which cannot. Crows, says Saúl, are very intelligent; snakes are—well—snakes. And he once knew a guy who had a 20-foot long python, as well as a six-year old daughter. And one day, the python began losing weight. The vet, when consulted, was stumped, until he asked, “were there any kids in the house?”

“The python is making room for your daughter,” said the vet, “so tell me what to do with it, ‘cause you’re not taking it home….”

We sit and ponder this for a moment; Lady has to go off to paint casitas, the ornamental plaster house facades that she sells.

“It’s like a sit-com, coming into this place,” said one of the employees. “You know that the regulars will be there, in their usual places, doing their usual things.”

Lady comes by, kisses me, tells me, “I love you.”

“I love you too.”         

Of Dix and Spontini

OK—it’s not really a day when you want to look at island news. The New Day couldn’t be clearer: 53% think things are going muy mal (very badly) and 40% think things are bastante mal (fairly badly). Oh—and bad news for the governor, who promised everybody that he would create 50,000 new jobs in the first 18 months of his…err, reign. Because 73% say that there are few jobs, and only 2% believe that there are many (hard to believe that the governor’s family is so big….)

Prices? 90% think they’ve risen in the past three months. Oh, and what about the threatened degradation of our credit into junk status? Well, 61% of us don’t understand at all or only a little the whole thing, but 67% think it would affect them personally. 41% rate the quality of life in Puerto Rico as bad or very bad, and guess what? Fully 33% think it likely to some extent that they will leave the island in the next four years.

Right—take that razor blade away from your wrist, Dear Reader!

(Note—all of these data appear in the print edition of El Nuevo Día of 4 November 2013, which I bought for 75 cents yesterday at the grocery store. Unfortunately, the survey is available only through the “paper” paper or a “digital” (read “for sale”) paper. Two choices, Readers! Trust me, or send me a comment, and I’ll scan the paper….)

Into this grim situation steps the governor, who electronically is reported as admitting that the situation, the mood on the island is “pesimismo.” He then wonderfully retreats to his delusional world by stating the following:

“El crimen se ha reducido, el desempleo se ha reducido, la luz se ha reducido, el agua hay que reducirla”, expuso sobre las metas que se ha propuesto o cumplido para acabar con la imagen negativa.

Here it is: “Crime has been reduced, unemployment has been reduced, electricity has been reduced, and water has been reduced,” he stated about the goals that he had proposed or achieved to put a finish to the negative image.

Well, well—time to check up on the gov, which I can now do, since I am one of the 22% of the population without a job. So let’s google “costo de agua Puerto Rico.” Right, and halfway down the first page is this, from El Nuevo Día of 31 August 2013:

Sube la tarifa del agua en los condominios en Puerto Rico

Subir—to rise, go up, increase, mount.

Electricity?

La electricidad de la Isla es la segunda más cara en EE.UU.

OK—that’s from two years ago, but according to WAPA television, as of 1 October 2013, the price may rise.

Look, do I need to go on? Is there any good news, anywhere?

In fact, there is: the world just got 1500 pieces of art back; here’s The New York Times on the subject:

The trove includes works by Picasso, Marc Chagall, Auguste Renoir, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and the German artists Max Beckmann, Max Liebermann, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and Carl Spitzweg, said Siegfried Klöble, the head of the Munich customs office, which oversaw the operation to recover the art.

Hey, great news—though it does come with an opportunity, as I used to say in my corporate days. And that is? Well, most of this stuff was either looted or bought at rock bottom price from Jews wanting out of Nazi Germany. So how do you figure out who owned what, and who sold what for what? Here, according to the Times, is what art historian Meike Hoffmann had to say:

She stressed that it is extremely difficult to nail down the origin and the ownership history of some of the works and that she has only begun initial research on some 500 of the works. Further research, she said, could take years.

Among other things found, by the way, was an unknown self-portrait of Otto Dix, about whom I knew nothing: here’s another self-portrait:

Right—so now we have two!

Oh—and good news in the world of opera: the Times is reporting renewed appreciation of the works of Spontini.

Spontini?

Damn—it’s one thing after another, the stuff I don’t know. So who was the guy?

Wikipedia to the rescue!

Gaspare Luigi Pacifico Spontini (14 November 1774 – 24 January 1851) was an Italian opera composer and conductor, extremely celebrated in his time, though largely forgotten after his death.

Right—that made me feel better. And if our governor can live in his own private Puerto Rico, can’t I create a nice delusional cocoon myself. Why not listen to a 1954 recording of Maria Callas singing Spontini? So I ambled over to YouTube and dug her up.

Verdict?

Not sure—but why does the term “justly forgotten” spring to mind?

As our Governors Fiddled

Ouch—I’ll give it to you first in Spanish, and then in English:

“Esto es de lo peor que he visto”, comentó Zamansky, quien ha visto todo tipo de casos, incluyendo el sonado caso de Bernard Madoff.

“This is the worst I’ve ever seen,” Zamansky commented, who has seen all kinds of cases, including the famous case of Bernard Madoff.

And what is Jake Zamansky, a security and investment fraud attorney, talking about? Well, the case of the Puerto Rican branch of UBS, which has been selling Puerto Rican bonds to its clients for years now.

And what’s wrong with that? Aren’t bonds supposed to be a safe investment?

It seems not—especially in the case of Puerto Rico, whose credit rating is one step above junk bond rating, and whose government is seriously broke. How seriously broke? Well, how serious is 70 billion bucks? Our pension program is 37.3 billion underfunded.

“Of course,” said my friend Tony, “that’s just a guess-timate. Because you know what? There’s no actuarial work or studies done on the plan….”

My years with Mr. Fernández have taught me about actuaries; they’re statisticians who predict how much money a plan will need based on the number of people in the plan, the age, expected life span, etc. And if you don’t have that info? You’re operating completely in the dark.

This caused the governor, last month, to scurry up to New York to tell Moody’s and the other credit rating houses that all was well on the island, and that he / they had raised taxes and had a solid, solid plan to deal with the mess.

Did they? Well, it’s true that they had raised taxes—but what had they not done? The one thing that would really bring howls: cut the size of the government.

They did, however, take on the retirement system, and high time, since one of the senators…well, let him speak for himself:

"No retirement system in the world is as broken as ours," Senate President Eduardo Bhatia said on Thursday, before the overhaul legislation was approved by both houses of the Caribbean island's legislature.

The overhaul was bitterly protested, and went to the local Supreme Court, which upheld it. So now the protests have died down, but it’s anybody’s guess when the money will run out….

Now then, into this gloomy picture—oh, and I have told you the unemployment rate is about 15% and the per capita household income is half that of the poorest state, haven’t I?—steps UBS, which is one of the three biggest brokerage houses on the island.

And because of a unique feature in the law, Puerto Rico bonds happen to be rather attractive, at least potentially. Why? Here’s Bloomberg—and who should know but they?—on the subject:

Interest on debt issued by Puerto Rican governments is typically tax-free across the U.S., and yields on some issues topped 10 percent in recent weeks amid doubt about whether investors will be repaid. The bonds’ high yields and tax-exempt status make them popular with retail investors, according to the statement.

Nice, hunh?

Not so nice, said the Commonwealth of Massachusetts Secretary William F. Gavin in the same Bloomberg article:

“Puerto Rico is currently on the verge of insolvency and many of its obligations are at or near junk rating,” according to the statement. “The risks associated with its municipal debt obligation are disproportionally high.”

‘Well,’ you are perhaps thinking, ‘let the rich suffer. I, for one, only have the shirt on my back, the roof over my head, and the rice and beans in my stomach. So, however bad the losses in the bond market may have been, it’s hardly my problem….’

Wish that were true. But first, you should know that the losses were 2.2 billion in the month of September alone. Nor is it just the wealthy affected.

In fact, here’s Zamansky again:

“He atendido por lo menos a 150 personas y escucho, esencialmente, lo mismo. Son retirados, personas que son inversionistas conservadores y que se le dijo que invirtieran todo o una gran parte de su dinero en estos fondos cerrados y en bonos de Puerto Rico”, sostuvo el abogado. “A más de la mitad de estas personas se les instó a que tomaran prestado”.

“I’ve taken care of at least 150 people and have heard, essentially, the same tyhing. They are retired, people who are conservative investors and were told to invest all or a great part of their money in these closed funds and bonds of Puerto Rico,” he stated. “And more than half of these people were told to take out a loan to do so.”

The problem? Was UBS informing these people of the risks of investing in Puerto Rico? No bond is guaranteed if the government goes broke. And the advisability of offering or urging a line of credit or a loan to investors?

The Government Will Decide Whether to Sue UBS—reads the headline in The New Day, our local paper.

In the meantime, Zamansky and other lawyers are sitting in hotels, interviewing hundreds of mostly middle class retirees, many of whom have suffered significant losses. How significant? Some people are so old that they’re in nursing homes, and now the families are having to take them out of them: there’s no money left.

The handwriting has been on the wall for a long time, of course. A few years back, a Reuter’s blog came out and said it bluntly: Puerto Rico is America’s Greece. If our folly and foolishness had hurt the rich, I might cheer. But the idea of hard-working, prudent, conservative people losing their life savings?

…heart breaking.

The Plutocratic States of America

It may be that I’m thinking about money, lately, because I’m about to buy an apartment. Or it may be because I’m generally broke. Or it may be simply because that’s one of the two things—won’t specify the other—that guys think about.

At any rate, if you have half an hour or so, you might want to look at the three videos below. In the first, you’ll see how drastically unfairly the wealth is distributed in our country. In a nutshell, most people have no clue how radically rich the 1% is. But consider this lead from an article in the Christian Science Monitor:

4 out of 5 US adults struggle with joblessness, near-poverty, or reliance on welfare for at least parts of their lives, a sign of deteriorating economic security and an elusive American dream.

4 out of 5? 80%? Ummm, I hate to write incendiary words in an age of surveillance—but shouldn’t we have insurrection in the streets? Looting, riots, marches on Greenwich, Connecticut?

We have CEOs making hundreds of millions annually—and 80% of us are poor? Say whaaaa?

OK—consider the following facts, gleaned from a blog in the Washington Post:

·      Average pay for the CEOs of the top 350 firms, including the stock options they exercised, was $14.1 million in 2012–up 37.4 percent from 2009. 

·      That’s a bit higher than it would be if you just measured stock options granted. “Firms apparently pared back the value of new options granted because CEOs fared so well by cashing in options as stock prices grew,” the report’s authors write.

·      The ratio of CEO pay to average worker pay is 273-1, down from a high of 383-1 in 2000, but up from 20-1 in 1965.

·      CEO pay has increased faster than wages to high-skilled workers, suggesting that the salary market isn’t very efficient. “Consequently, if CEOs earned less or were taxed more, there would be no adverse impact on output or employment,” the report concludes.

·      CEO pay is now also closely tracking the S&P 500 index, which didn’t used to be the case.

OK—the first ingredient in the stew: we seriously screwed up who gets the cookies and who hopes for the crumbs in this society.

Now then, the second video. Caveat at the start: this was produced by the AFL CIO, which understandably has a hatchet or two to grind. But here’s the gist: what happens—even in a game, even when you know the game is rigged—when you get rich? Well, the video will tell you. You become entitled, you think you deserved it, you have no empathy for somebody who didn’t do it the way you did—by hard work and the sweat of your brow. Sure, your name is Rockefeller, but that didn’t mean you had it easy, that just meant you had to work harder to prove yourself! So fuck the poor!

I met twice the wife of Oscar Mayer—yes, of the bacon and hotdog fame. She was a nice lady, she adored my father, and she also completely stunned me by ordering Gunnar Johansen, a famed concert pianist, to sit down and play. After a bit, she told him to stop. Johansen was a gracious man, but was it just charm that made him get on and off the piano bench? Or did the fact that Mrs. Mayer had given him the piano (a rare double keyboard) enter into the equation?

Right—now we get to the last video. In which we hear, at about 9:30, that “capitalism at its most ruthless rewards psychopathy.” And then, 10 seconds later, that capitalism at its most ruthless is a manifestation of psychopathy. And guess what? I’ve worked for one of the biggest SOBs in the business; from the reports I got from the upper levels, it’s true.

And consider—what is the rate of psychopathy in the general population? 1%. That should ring a bell—remember that the 1% of the richest people own over thirty percent of the wealth. And guess what those guys are? You got it—psychopaths.

Oh, and they own us, because they bought Congress, and the media as well, and-I-hate-to-sound-like-Edward-Snowden but the only people who are speaking out are nobodies like me.

When I lost my job—yes, I’m part of the 80%—I went down to get my unemployment insurance with Moisés, my brother-in-law. We got up at 4:30; we were making the line at 5AM. Nor were we the first—we were number thirty or so. There were perhaps a hundred people at 7AM, all mulishly lined up against plate glass windows in the Puerto Rican sun; we were waiting for the 150 bucks a week that we could get for a year. The office was on a street that has the water company, the housing department, the labor department—in short, every social service department in the government. Three blocks away, men in three-piece suits were strolling into the corporate offices of the largest banks on the island.

Why weren’t we storming them?

Two Wings and a Lady

Cuba y Puerto Rico son

De un pájaro las dos alas

It’s a famous quote from a poem by Lola Rodríguez de Tió, and can be translated roughly as “Cuba and Puerto Rico are two wings of the same bird.”

Well if true, it may be that the wings of the bird are flying in completely different directions.

From the video below, it seems that the Cuban wing is set to soar. Raúl Castro has had to face the inevitable: the economy, supported all those years by the Iron Curtain buying Cuba’s sugar at inflated prices, was broke. The fields—five million acres of them—were overrun with a weed called marabú (marabou.) Nor is it just a weed—it’s highly invasive and thorny. If you attack it with a machete—pretty much the only thing at hand in lightly mechanized Cuba—you’ll end up bloody at the end of the day.

The buildings are falling down in Havana, and the state workers, who are supposed to repair the houses, are backlogged and slow to respond. How slow? One woman interviewed has waited 16 years with her ceiling propped up with four-by-fours. She worries that the roof will collapse every time it rains.

Seventy percent of the food has to be imported; supplies in the state-run shops are scant. Doctors make twenty-five dollars a month; one doctor interviewed makes a better living selling copper tubing on the side.

And so, you say, how can the wing be flapping skyward?

Well, Cuba’s economy grew 3% last year, and is expected to grow about the same this year as well. Sure, it’s not quite the 3.6% that Castro wanted, but it’s not far off.

And by allowing 181 jobs to be done by licensed private individuals, the government has at last introduced some incentive to work. In the past, there was a saying, “the government pretends to pay us; we pretend to work.” Now, there’s the beginning of an independent, free market economy.

And let’s face it, where was Miami before the Cubans arrived?

My friend Harry has a story. In those days when Harry was selling shoes, he entered a small shop, got tossed out, and went to a café. Still burning with the humiliation, he overheard a conversation among the boys—a group of middle-aged guys who were complaining: the damned Cubans had come and taken all the jobs away in Puerto Rico. Harry turned to address them.

“If the Cubans are working and you are not, it’s because they are NOT sitting in cafés drinking beer at 10 o’clock in the morning. They came with nothing and got a bike and sold what they could sell and now they have multinational corporations and live in gated communities. Oh, and I’m not Cuban but Puerto Rican….”

Which will explain why the Puerto Rican wing seems to be plummeting.

La producción propia es la tarea urgente contra la dependencia de fondos federales en Puerto Rico

That’s one of the headlines in today’s El Nuevo Día. Economists are urging us—as they have for all the twenty odd years I’ve lived here, to create jobs to avoid dependency on federal funds.

And on the double, since 24,200 fewer people are working here on the island than last year. Granted, that may not be a problem, since we are also shrinking in population, but government (the largest employer on the island) is reporting 20,600 fewer jobs this year than last.

Here’s Caribbean Business Report on the subject:

Puerto Rico’s population was pegged at 3,725,789 in the 2010 Census, down from the 3,808,610 registered in the 2000 Census. It marked the first time the island population had declined between census counts. The 2010 Census also showed there were 4.7 million Puerto Ricans living in the states, marking the first time more Puerto Ricans lived stateside than on the island. Only one state, Michigan, registered a drop in population in the 2010 Census, dipping 0.6 percent.

It’s happened before—in the Great Depression, droves of Puerto Ricans left, primarily workers who would man the factories of the (then) industrialized North East. Who’s leaving now?

Young professionals.

Which is why the article in Caribbean Business Report ends thus:

The population drop of nearly 83,000 over the last 10 years and the continuing exodus raises the prospect of less federal funding for Puerto Rico, increased pressure on the financially ailing public-pension system and a dramatically aging population with fewer financial resources.

Yes and no.

I’m sitting in a terrific local business, Poet’s Passage, run by a great lady, and named in fact, Lady. She explained this curious fact by noting that her father’s family came from Australia via Scotland, where they were all lords and ladies. (Tactfully, I never inquired as to the exact circumstances of the move to Australia).

And Lady has been here since 11AM—busy getting her sister store adjoining the café ready for an activity tonight. Which means that she will be here until the wee hours of the morning.

“There’s money in poetry,” she told me once, “and I sat down with the board of directors of WesternBank and convinced them—I’d made a great business plan. And in six years of business, I’ve never missed a payment.”

She’s less person than dynamo, raising the emotional temperature by several degrees every time she comes into the café. She kisses everyone; she calls out, “Hi, Marc!” from fifty feet away. She’s home-schooling her child or she’s painting one of her poems onto a piece of canvas or she’s busy telling a customer about poetry night, every Tuesday night at 7 PM. She admits it privately—some of the poetry heard there may not last in the canon of Puerto Rican / Latin American literature, but that’s not the point. She’s seen poets grow, as she has; she’s seen self-esteem bloom. It’s a space, a necessary space.

An embracing space. How embracing? The gentleman at the table two doors down is busy working at his computer. He also serves me coffee—and very good it is—when he’s working. How many other workers choose to hang out at their workplace when not on the job? (I except bars….)

Lady dropped out of high school to help in the family business. But it hasn’t stopped her. “Who’s your favorite female poet of the 20^th century,” she once asked me, and we went on to talk about Audre Lorde, Sylvia Plath, Marianne Moore—an army of great poets. I was sweating to hold up my end of the conversation. 

The only resource Puerto Rico has is an amazing human potential. And looking at Lady charge into her café, greet the customers, kiss the staff, give the order to clean the bathrooms, and then take a dirty plate off the table while kissing the customer—I’m convinced.

The two wings can soar upward again.

Culebra

“Culebra is a pretty good place to leave your stress behind,” said the lady who had stroked, caressed, pounded and pulled my body for a half hour.

Relax—it was all done in public.

And the lady, besides giving me a very good massage, was right. Culebra does induce relaxation. In fact, I arrived under the assumption that I was fine, rested, relaxed. And could barely get out of bed the next day.

It’s Puerto Rico’s version of Key West. It’s a tiny island between the main island and the Virgin Islands. And yes, it has a seriously good beach.

It’s a place I’m always a little suspicious of, son of a newspaperman that I am. Are the people really that cool? Is it that smooth—the relationship between the town people and the invaders? The gringos come and open chic little shops and hang at the beach, but what do the locals do?

Well, I first came to the place twenty years ago, when I was just new to Puerto Rico. And yes, it was magical: quiet, tranquil, relaxed. And the people seemed friendly, too. Would it be different now?

The answer seems to be no. Or so says Luis, the cab driver. I had just spotted a very upscale resort, and wondered how the town felt about it.

Well, it created jobs, both in the building of it and today. And he says the island doesn’t want anything bigger. A thousand-room hotel would swell the population from 2000 to 10,000—nobody can imagine that.

“But it’s still a very safe place. In fact, my door to the house is unlocked, and I have cash on the dining room table.”

OK—so what are they all doing?

The answer seems to be fixing the roads.

“The mayor’s got all this federal money—so he put ‘em all to work. Anybody who wants a job is working. If they don’t want to work, well—those days are over.”

True, I did see guys working on the roads. I also saw guys drinking beer in the morning in front of their ramshackle house. So I’d call it a draw.

“Guy hasn’t opened in six months,” shouted a guy driving by, beer can in hand. Well, everybody deserves a day at the beach, and at least he was adding color.

Of which there is quite a lot. Here’s the door to the guesthouse I was staying in…

Or what about this?

Walking the town, I came on an old gentleman carving ships out of cocoanut shells. He was also feeding banana kwits.…

Every morning he sprinkles sugar on the plate….

Well, it’s got its charm, this little island. What it doesn’t have is the pharmaceutical factory. In the days when I first came here, it was Baxter. Then it changed hands a few times, and is now shuttered.

So in a way, it’s an elusive island. The only thing here is tourism, and construction. Periodically, the state government will decide on a project, start to build it, and then go away. Even the city hall isn’t done. And there’s a huge complex by the airport that sits unfinished, open, and vandalized.

If you’re young and gringo, Culebra is great. But for the natives? Well, there are constant problems with the ferry. Prices are high—everything comes in from the main island. The “hospital” isn’t much more than a dispensary. And it’s hard to attract teachers to the island.

In one of the shops, I found myself translating for a gringa. She was buying food, and clearly had lived some time on the island. Why hadn’t she learned Spanish?

Luis—the cab driver—might be right. Maybe all is well. Why do I feel so unsure?