Puerto rico cnn: Puerto Rico: Then and now

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January 2, 2023
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Puerto Rico: Then and now

Hurricane Maria left millions of Americans without power, water or shelter. Puerto Rico’s recovery has been slow and, at times, painful. See what life is like on the island a year later.

San Juan

CNN’s Leyla Santiago covered the category 4 storm as it made landfall. She returned often in the following months.

“Some point out progress. Others note they have a long way to go. But they all tell me they will never be the same.”

Cataño

FEMA says the response to Maria was the largest and longest to a domestic disaster in US history. Massive flooding damaged more than half a million homes. Many families are still rebuilding.

17-year-old Marytere Santos’ house flooded up to this water line.

Toa Baja, September 2017

CNN met Santos when she climbed aboard a rescue truck with only a backpack and a trash bag of her belongings.

Toa Baja

Santos gets emotional when she thinks about how lucky her family is and how much her community supported her after the hurricane.

Humacao

After Maria, Puerto Rico’s already weak electrical grid failed. It took nearly 11 months to restore power across the island. Some communities are still running on generators.

Humacao, October 2017

Angel St. Kitts didn’t have power or running water when CNN visited him a month after Maria.

Humacao

St. Kitts has power now but says his life is far from normal.

Cataño

Blue tarps were given to homeowners without roofs. Meant to be a 30-day fix, they are still visible around the island.

Comerío

It was almost a year before Carmen Rivera had a permanent roof over her head. She said it was installed one week before CNN revisited her in August 2018.

Comerío

Rivera says the hair on her arms stand up whenever she sees rain coming.

“When the water was at my waist, I didn’t think I would survive. I am grateful God gave me a chance.”

Carmen Rivera

In December, the government said 64 lives were lost. In August, the official death count was raised to 2,975 people.

Cataño

After Maria, just 400 of Puerto Rico’s 16,700 miles of road were passable due to debris and landslides.

Morovis

Today traffic is flowing, but the government says it needs $647 million to finish repairing roads and bridges.

Añasco

When CNN met David Iturrino he was delivering bottles of water to a community cutoff by mudslides. It took 5 months to fully restore the island’s main water service.

“Maria abruptly changed our lives. I lost everything and at my age I can’t start over from where I started.”

David Iturrino, 71

Corozal

Schools were turned into shelters after the storm. The majority welcomed students back in December 2017.

Nannete Rivera says she rebuilt her classroom with a lot of love.

“We had students that didn’t even have a home. School became their safe space.”

Quebradillas

What Brenda Medina wanted most was for CNN to tell the world she was alive. Maria wiped out Puerto Rico’s communication services.

Quebradillas

The island is back online after large portions of the grid were rebuilt, but officials know they are forever vulnerable in a hurricane.

The trauma caused by Maria lingers. Yet where there is resiliency there is hope.

Hope that reconstruction will finish. Hope that tourists will return …

Hope that once again Puerto Rico will be seen as the Island of Enchantment.

Story by: Leyla Santiago, Claudia Morales, Jeremy Moorhead

Video contributors: Adolfo Ibarra, Jose Armijo, John Rubenstahl, McKenna Ewen

Development & Design: Marco Chacón, Alicia Johnson, Sean O’Key

Hurricane Maria changed Puerto Rico.

In a new exhibit, artists reflect back

Written by Leah Asmelash, CNN

After Hurricane Maria struck Puerto Rico in 2017, artist Gabriella Báez’s life changed.

It wasn’t just the material stress of living through the hurricane — the widespread death and devastation, and shortages of food, water, and gasoline. Or the societal issues that followed, including austerity measures, power outages, extensive public school closures and intensified gentrification.

The island Báez knew didn’t exist anymore. Neither did the life. In the months following the storm, Báez’s father died by suicide — a death they in part attribute to the mismanagement of the emergency by both the local and federal government.

Báez turned to their camera to process their twofold grief: mourning both their father and their country. Alongside that of 19 other Puerto Rican artists, their work will now be part of a new exhibit at The Whitney Museum of American Art in New York.

The exhibition meditates on Puerto Rican art and life in the five years since Maria made landfall. Its title, “no existe un mundo poshuracán,” comes from Puerto Rican poet Raquel Salas Rivera, translating to “There is no post-hurricane world.”

It is the first scholarly exhibit focused solely on Puerto Rican art organized by a major U.S. museum in almost 50 years, according to the Whitney.

Making art to bear witness

Marcela Guerrero, the Jennifer Rubio Associate Curator at the museum, is the brain behind the exhibition. Guerrero, who is Puerto Rican, watched the storm unfold from New York, where she had just given birth. Many in the diaspora were glued to the news, she said, trying to do all they could to help; she immediately knew she wanted to use the hurricane as a focal point.

When you talk to people from Puerto Rico, she said, it’s BM and PM: “before Maria” and “post Maria.”

Armig Santos, Procesión en Vieques III, 2022. Credit: Courtesy Armig Santos

“There are certain events that mark histories and societies,” Guerrero said. “I think Maria was that moment in recent Puerto Rican history, arguably all of its history. I didn’t want to ignore that.”

And in Maria’s aftermath, not much has changed, Báez said — it’s gotten worse.

The country has seen protests that led to the ousting of governor Ricardo Rosselló, earthquakes, crushing debt, austerity measures inflicted on the country by a US-appointed oversight board, and, of course, Covid-19. Not to mention Hurricane Fiona, which struck just months ago.

Hence the title of the exhibit.

“That verse kind of brings up this idea of being perpetually caught in this wake of the hurricane,” Guerrero said. “Puerto Ricans are not afforded the luxury to think outside of the hurricane. Everything is a consequence of the disaster.”

Sofía Córdova, still from dawn_chorus ii: el niagara en bicicleta, 2018. Credit: Courtesy Sofía Córdova

After 2017, San Juan-based artist Sofía Gallisá Muriente’s perspective — on her work, and on her country — shifted.

She began experimenting with analog film, working with film moldy from humidity and coating rolls in salt in an attempt to corrode the images. Just as the storm and the environment destroyed parts of the country, she used the environment to destroy her art.

“Puerto Rico was suddenly so visible internationally (after Maria), but so many of the images that were traveling the world were of destruction and people suffering,” Gallisá Muriente said. “I didn’t feel comfortable just going out in the street with my high definition video camera to make beautiful images of something so horrible. And so that’s how I ended up working a lot with film and deterioration.”

Her short film “Celaje” is featured in the Whitney’s exhibition, and juxtaposes her grandmother’s life story with that of Puerto Rico. In the 1960s, her grandmother moved to Levittown, then one of the largest planned communities in the country. At the time, Gallisá Muriente said, it was a brand new suburb of middle class homes, epitomizing the American dream of upward mobility.

A still from Sofía Gallisá Muriente’s film, “Celaje,” 2020. Credit: Courtesy Sofía Gallisá Muriente

But by 2019, when her grandmother died, the neighborhood had completely changed, Gallisá Muriente said — full of shuttered schools and houses that had been transformed into businesses. (Her grandmother’s house, meanwhile, was flooded when Maria hit.) And the disintegration of those slippery dreams of progress is shown literally in “Celaje,” through expired and decaying film.

Curating memories in a time of change

At home in New York, Guerrero remembered seeing an image of the archipelago completely dark, due to loss of power. It looked almost like the country had been erased from the map.

It felt, she said, like a perverse prophecy — Puerto Rico disappearing. And today, many Puerto Ricans are migrating away from the island, Guerrero said.

“The conditions of living are so impossible that the island almost feels like it’s being emptied,” she said.

Báez echoed those sentiments. With rising costs of living, material conditions on the island make it hard to stay, they said. It’s becoming an island for foreigners, not Puerto Ricans.

Gabriella Torres-Ferrer, Untitled (Valora tu mentira americana) (detail), 2018. Credit: Courtesy Gabriella Torres Ferrer

The hurricane, Guerrero said, just exacerbated the challenging circumstances Puerto Rico was already mired in, specifically as US territory, bound to American laws but left out of federal benefits.

“By talking about Hurricane Maria, sure, I’m talking about a hurricane… but in the specific case of Puerto Rico, when you have such a strong, devastating, catastrophic natural event happen, but on top of that you add this colonial context, you get a society that is losing its people,” Guerrero said. “It’s this constant scene of death, even if it’s not literal, of mourning a Puerto Rico that’s no longer there.”

With this exhibition, artists are reflecting on the storm and its impact, Guerrero said, and affirming their existence through their work.

On display isn’t just art. It’s resistance.

CNN: Trump wants to deprive Puerto Rico of additional financial aid – Gazeta.Ru

CNN: Trump wants to deprive Puerto Rico of additional financial aid – Gazeta.Ru | News

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November 13, 2018, 02:38
News

100%

US President Donald Trump intends to deprive hurricane-hit Puerto Rico of additional financial assistance. This is reported by CNN , citing sources.

According to the channel, the Trump administration believes that Puerto Rico should be excluded from the bill, which provides funding for the elimination of the consequences of hurricanes.

As noted, Puerto Rico has not yet spent all of its aid funds.

Earlier media reported that Trump was “violently criticized” due to lack of confidence in the number of victims of hurricane in Puerto Rico.

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