An Arson Attack in Puerto Rico

On the night of January 1st, as Puerto Rico was recovering from an island-wide blackout, a small restaurant in Cabo Rojo, a beach town on the southwest coast, was facing its own trouble. A white tourist from the mainland United States who appeared, to staff, to have had too much to drink verbally attacked them when they refused to serve her more alcohol. She grew angry and, despite repeated requests, refused to leave. The restaurant’s owner called the police, who escorted her across the street to the Airbnb where she was staying. The woman returned, police intervention was again required, and she was escorted out a second time.

At midnight, the restaurant closed and everyone went home. About half an hour later, a security camera captured footage of a woman who bore a striking resemblance to the angry tourist carrying a red gasoline can. (A can had been left in the tourist’s Airbnb to fuel an electric generator.) Shortly afterward, a fire engulfed the restaurant and three adjacent businesses—a shop belonging to the restaurant’s owner, another belonging to a family member, and a hostel where dozens of people were staying. They were all safely evacuated, but the damage to the buildings was nearly total. Around 5 A.M., the woman left her Airbnb, several days before her scheduled checkout date. That evening, she flew home.

Puerto Ricans woke to the news of the arson, with reports featuring security footage and TikTok videos of the altercation. Outrage spread across the island, and personal information about the alleged perpetrator—including her name and where she worked in St. Louis—was circulated widely on social media. Daniela Velázquez, a St. Louis alderperson of Puerto Rican descent, directed a letter to the woman’s employer, detailing the accusations. The firm responded that the woman had been suspended, pending further investigation. On Tuesday afternoon, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives in St. Louis executed a search warrant at her house. (The woman hasn’t made any statements, and couldn’t be reached for comment.)

It was not, of course, the first case of a vacationer from the mainland insulting or attacking Puerto Rican service workers. Two days later, another tourist hit a waitress in Rincón, a popular beach town north of Cabo Rojo—that incident was also caught on video and posted on social media. But the violence of the arson attack, and the major financial loss it brought to a neighborhood family, seemed like an escalation. It also tapped into a rage that has been brewing for years against the surge of visitors, investors, and new residents from the mainland who enjoy benefits that have not been extended to locals. “It was like a slap in the face to Puerto Ricans,” Jorell Meléndez-Badillo, an assistant professor of history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the author of “Puerto Rico: A National History,” told me. “It reopened a fresh wound caused by gentrification, displacement, and colonialism. Now, once again, you can see the slogan ‘Gringos Go Home’ painted on walls in Puerto Rico. It’s a collective sentiment.”

Among the list of calamities that have struck Puerto Rico in just the past two decades are an economic recession, a catastrophic debt crisis, and devastating hurricanes and earthquakes. Hundreds of thousands of native Puerto Ricans have left, most for the mainland. At the center of these ills stands the island’s relationship with the mainland. It’s hard to describe it other than in colonial terms, starting with the fact that people born in Puerto Rico—which the United States occupied after the Spanish-American War of 1898—have U.S. citizenship but are not allowed to vote in federal elections, including Presidential elections, unless they move to the mainland. Today, Puerto Rico is neither a state nor a sovereign nation; it is an “unincorporated territory.” The highest political officeholder on the island is the governor, but she does not have full control over Puerto Rico’s finances—those are managed by an oversight board created by the U.S. Congress. (Its seven members are appointed by the U.S. President.) Puerto Ricans also do not have a voting representative in Congress.

The economic situation for locals has been worsening for years. In 2006, Congress eliminated long-standing federal tax-break benefits for corporations operating on the island, which led to a loss of capital and investments, followed by a reckless accumulation of debt. In 2016, Congress established the oversight board to take control of the island’s finances, resulting in cuts to pension benefits and severe reductions in public services. The following year, after the local government failed to make its debt payments and its bonds were downgraded to junk status, Puerto Rico declared bankruptcy.

Hard times for locals coincided with increasing advantages for those on the mainland. In 2012, a legislative assembly passed Acts 20 and 22 in tandem, creating a tax haven for wealthy mainland Americans—they pay no federal or capital-gains taxes—who become residents of the island. (A number of crypto investors are among them.) In addition, companies pay a reduced rate of just four per cent on export services from Puerto Rico. In 2019, the government passed Act 60, known as the Puerto Rico Incentives Code, which consolidates more than thirty decrees, subsidies, and reimbursements to non-Puerto Rican transplants. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, between 2021 and 2022, twenty-seven thousand people from the continental U.S. relocated to the island. In 2023, the number of applications from individuals and businesses seeking tax incentives for relocation grew by twelve per cent when compared with 2022. Similarly, official data show that 2023 was a record-breaking year for tourism in Puerto Rico, with more than 6.1 million visitors, marking a nearly twenty-per-cent increase from the previous year.

The influx brought a new demographic into a struggling but culturally tight-knit community. It became particularly noticeable during the pandemic, when many from the mainland chose the island as a remote-work location. They purchased properties, then turned many of them into short-term rentals, which led to a rise in real-estate prices—according to a 2022 investigation by the Center for Investigative Journalism (C.P.I., in its Spanish-language acronym), a nonprofit newsroom based in San Juan, between 2012 and 2021 the average home price increased by sixty-three per cent. This occurred as Puerto Rico, where the population is 3.2 million people, was undergoing a housing crisis, with a deficit of twenty thousand units, owing in part to the proliferation of short-term rentals and the limited construction of public housing. And, unlike local residents, the newcomers could afford to pay in cash, which is an uncommon practice on the island; the same C.P.I. investigation found that all-cash payments increased by seven hundred and forty per cent from 2012 to 2021, and almost twenty-five per cent of new buyers have non-Hispanic last names. “The buying spree, price increases, and displacement began in luxury enclaves in areas like Dorado on the North Coast, Rincón in the West, and San Juan, but it has spread to other areas of these same towns and to poorer municipalities, mainly along the coasts,” C.P.I. reported.

The cultural impact has been profound, too. “Puerto Ricans who live in high-tourism areas, such as Old San Juan, Rincón, and Vieques—where some of the most spectacular beaches in Puerto Rico are located—now feel displaced,” Carla Minet, the executive director of C.P.I., told me. “Local business employees are starting to speak only in English, and there are more businesses run by foreigners than by locals.” There is also a growing resentment over a perceived double standard from the authorities. “In Vieques, people told us that the police do absolutely nothing when foreigners drive golf carts recklessly on the streets, but if locals do it they get fined,” Minet said. The outsiders’ privileges are striking, “particularly in how the municipality prioritizes these business owners’ interests.”

This double standard was also noted in the Cabo Rojo arson. The restaurant’s owner requested that the police detain the tourist for intoxication and disturbing the public order; on Sunday, Cabo Rojo’s mayor said that the responding officer had been suspended while the case was being investigated. As the suspect was leaving the island, a new governor, the conservative Jenniffer González-Colón, was being sworn into office, in San Juan. (She did the “Trump dance” during the festivities.) As part of the inaugural events, González-Colón attended Mass, and, during the service, a local resident was cited for shouting “Muerte al P.N.P.!” (“Death to P.N.P.!”), the acronym for the Partido Nuevo Progresista, the Governor’s party. González-Colón demanded that charges be pressed. “No one has permission to do whatever they want here,” she said. Someone replied on X, “Except for the gringos, who can even burn your business down.”

The fire heightened what many Puerto Ricans regard as continental Americans’ contempt for them. Memories of the President-elect Donald Trump tossing rolls of paper towels to the crowd at a press conference about Hurricane Maria, which killed nearly three thousand people, remain fresh. So do the remarks of a comedian at Trump’s closing campaign rally, in Madison Square Garden, who called Puerto Rico “a floating island of garbage.”

Three days after the Cabo Rojo fire, on January 5th, Bad Bunny released a new album, “Debí Tirar Más Fotos” (“I Should Have Taken More Photos”), which he dedicated to his native Puerto Rico. (Not incidentally, Bad Bunny popularized the slogan “Muerte al P.N.P.” by singing it during a podcast interview before the gubernatorial elections. Speaking of the island’s affluent new arrivals, he told Time, “Politically and historically, they know nothing about Puerto Rico, nor are they interested in knowing.” He added, “They don’t even know that Puerto Ricans on the island don’t even vote for the president, but they do know that they can go to the island to legally evade taxes.”) The album is accompanied by a short film, which he co-wrote and directed. It stars Jacobo Morales, a popular actor and director who is now ninety and whose Oscar-nominated movie, “Lo Que le Pasó a Santiago,” from 1989, is a Puerto Rican classic. In Bad Bunny’s film, Morales plays an old man in a rural town, nostalgic for a lost Puerto Rico. “There was something here,” he says at the start. “I’m not sure what, an unbelievable magic.” He shares his modest home with an animated coqui frog named Concho—the coqui, a beloved endangered species on the island, is often used as a symbol of Puerto Rico.

The two spend some time looking at old pictures, then they get hungry, so the man goes to a bakery. On his way, he walks past houses blasting heavy metal and country music and watches a stereotypical white American family having an American-style barbecue on their front lawn; the dad gives the old man a hostile look. At the bakery, which appears straight out of gentrified Brooklyn, the cashier replies to him only in English, as does almost everyone else there, and she answers the old man’s requests for traditional pastries with a maddening string of options. When he asks for a quesito, a popular cheese turnover, she asks, to his perplexity, “Regular quesito, bacon quesito, or guava quesito?” She adds that she may have a “vegan quesito”—a quesito without cheese. Back at his house, the old man says to Concho, “I mean, if they are going to take the cheese away, they might as well call it something else.”

In the comment section for the film, on YouTube (where it has been watched by more than nine million people), someone noted the obvious allegory: a quesito without cheese; a Puerto Rico without Puerto Ricans. Locals can also recognize a political reference. In 2019, a leaked Telegram chat among government officials, which sparked mass protests, included the following remarks from a publicist close to the President: “I saw the future (of the island) . . . is so wonderful. . . . There are no puertorricans.” But in the film a defiant statement is spoken twice. “We are still here,” the old man says early on, to Concho. In the bakery, another Puerto Rican customer pays the old man’s bill when the cashier refuses to accept his cash. (“It’s corporate policy to offer our clients a cash-less environment,” she announces.) “We are still here,” he says, patting the old man’s arm.

There was a similar sense of solidarity in Cabo Rojo over the weekend. More than four thousand people made small donations to a GoFundMe fund-raiser launched by the restaurant’s owner. The total was a hundred and fifty thousand dollars. The restaurant plans to reopen. ♦