San Juan, April 2018 (Final Entry)

Our last day in Puerto Rico was going to be one of relaxation. We woke up around 10 to return our rental car. After dropping it off, we took an Uber to La Comederia Fonda Urbana, a restaurant located a 3 minute walk from our airBNB.

Nestled in the middle of a residential neighborhood, Fonda Urbana is a place which is easily missed but not easily forgotten. 

This was easily our favorite restaurant during our visit to Puerto Rico. Fonda Urbana is a small farm-to-table concept led by chef Xavier Pacheco.

We got the pork belly mofongo which was executed perfectly and beautiful in its simplicity. We followed that by splitting a couple of other items on the menu. This is by far the best place we ate in during our time in Puerto Rico.

After brunch we headed back to where our trip started: Condado Beach. We rented beach chairs from the same people we did last time and laid back under the sun. This time we were sure to have enough sunscreen on to prevent us from getting par-broiled again.

As I laid there, enjoying the ocean breeze and the warm sun, I couldn't stop myself from thinking about everything I had seen during our time on the island.

Puerto Rico is a beautiful island and a wonderful place to visit. Unfortunately, if you look past the surface and delve into the island's history, you're faced with a harsh reality: an island that has been exploited and taken advantage of for decades by colonizers.

As a first-generation American, Puerto Rico's treatment at the hands of the US federal government is particularly troubling.

As mentioned in a previous blog post, the island is not seen as a state but rather as an unincorporated territory, meaning that although all US federal laws apply in Puerto Rico, the people of the island have no representation in the chamber that makes those laws.

This has led to rampant economic exploitation of the island as the federal government has passed several laws making Puerto Rico an enticing place for large businesses to open manufacturing plants there. Although that may sound like a good thing, these laws have not helped to create nearly the amount of jobs that they promised. These incentives have been seen more as a benefit to the companies receiving the tax breaks than to the actual people of Puerto Rico.

This topic was recently explored by John Oliver on the main segment of his show Last Week Tonight back in April 2017. That segment can be seen below.

This exploitation is made even more tragic after hurricane Maria made landfall on the island as a Category 4 storm back in September of 2017. In a year that was marred by two major storms making landfall in continental US, Maria's destruction in Puerto Rico has been seen as an afterthought by many in the mainland.

The storm left parts of San Juan flooded waist-deep with water, the entire island was left without electricity, and nearly a billion dollars in crops were lost. Many were critical of the federal government's response to the disaster as it took several months to get power and water back online for more than half of the island.

At the time of this writing, eight months after Maria made landfall, there are still parts of Puerto Rico that do not have power or water.

Whenever we wanted to eat somewhere local, the recurring theme we encountered was that many of the mom-and-pop restaurants in town were just never going to be able to reopen after the storm. Instead, restaurants like Denny's, Olive Garden, Fogo de Chao, and other chains were able to reopen since they had the corporate backing and capital to rebuild quickly.

Property values in Puerto Rico are plummeting due to the lack of water and power and a lot of big conglomerates are buying up the prime real estate. The total gentrification of the island is in progress.

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When the sun finally sank behind the skyline, we decided it was time to leave the beach for the last time. We went back to our AirBNB to finish packing for our trip home. Our flight left at 3:30 in the morning back home.

At the airport, all travelers returning to the mainland have to send their bags through a special screening process. This is to make sure they are not taking any produce that may bring foreign strains of crop-harming diseases back to the continental US.

I tried to get as much sleep as I could on the plane. When we landed we had to snap back to the reality of our every day lives fairly quickly. Our plane landed in Boston at 8:30 in the morning and I started my first day at my new job at 10 so I had to to hit the ground running.

Although our time in Puerto Rico was brief, it was a perfect retreat from our everyday lives. The island offers a beautiful tropical destination without the exorbitant costs that typically go with it. Like Hawaii, Puerto Rico offers warm, clear blue waters and a temperate climate but with a Latin flair and the remnants of its Spanish colonial past intermingling with its American colonial present.

The people of Puerto Rico are hurting right now and tourism, which has historically been a large part of the island's economy, has taken a huge blow after Hurricane Maria. If you would like to help directly, you can click here to donate money to the Hurricane Maria Community Recovery Fund, OR you can visit the island and help to inject money back into their economy.