The Escalation of Dire Factors in Puerto Rico: An Interview with Jorge Duany
- The Escalation of Dire Factors in Puerto Rico: An Interview with Jorge Duany
INTRODUCTION
Jorge Duany is Director of the Cuban Research Institute and Professor of Anthropology in the Department of Global & Sociocultural Studies at Florida International University. Born in Cuba and raised in Panama and Puerto Rico, his earlier appointments include serving as Acting Dean of the College of Social Sciences and Professor of Anthropology at the University of Puerto Rico (UPR), Río Piedras; and Chair of the Department of Sociology and Anthropology and Director of the journal Revista de Ciencias Sociales at UPR. He has held visiting research and teaching appointments at several US universities, including Harvard, Connecticut, Wisconsin, Florida, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and City University of New York. Duany earned his PhD in Latin American studies, specializing in anthropology, at the University of California, Berkeley. He holds an MA in social sciences from the University of Chicago and a BA in psychology from Columbia University. He has published extensively on migration, ethnicity, race, nationalism, and transnationalism in Cuba, the Caribbean, and the United States, most recently the book Puerto Rico: What Everyone Needs to Know (Oxford University Press, 2017). Between 2003 and 2017, Duany contributed a monthly editorial column for the newspaper El Nuevo Día; in 2010, he received the Bolívar Pagán Prize in Journalism from the Institute of Puerto Rican Literature. This interview was conducted over the phone in January 2018.
What would you say is the major impact of Hurricane María on Puerto Rico’s future? What most concerns you at the moment?
At this point the major issue is still the lack of electrical power throughout the island, and, as you probably know, there are different estimates of how many people actually have power in their houses. It looks like it’s almost about half of all households throughout the island, though it’s not clear [as of January 2018]. I think that’s the major problem, and it doesn’t look like it’s going to be solved anytime soon. The estimates that I have seen in the press talk about six more months. So, I think that’s a major challenge: to recover from the extensive damage that was made to the island’s power grid and also [in the longer term] rebuilding it in a way that is more resistant to future natural disasters.
Many people don’t have running water and can’t move around in some places, in the highlands especially, because many roads cannot be used [and bridges are gone]. What most concerns me right now is that precisely because of the lack of power and other basic necessities, the current economic climate, and even the moral climate is that many people are looking at migration as the only way out. And I know that’s your next question, but I think the most important issue right now is how to recover from the crisis in such a way that people are happier with their lives in Puerto Rico and don’t have to consider migration to address those issues.
With the economic crisis, the decline in taking care of the infrastructure, and in some ways the debt [already in process before the hurricane], do you feel there was a complacency beforehand that is exacerbating the situation now? Or where do you think folks will go with this out-migration as the natural escape valve?
As your question suggests, this isn’t the beginning of the crisis. A crisis from a fiscal perspective had begun a decade earlier with the phasing out of Section 936 benefits for US companies in Puerto Rico,1 and that’s where we begin to see a very steady decline in economic activity, related to an increase in migration and even to population loss for the past decade and a half.
Clearly, the current crisis is even more serious simply because of the disaster that took place and the chaos that ensued after the hurricane. So it is a very different situation than what we saw before September 20 [when the hurricane struck]. In addition, I have to...
