The Thing About Puerto Rico
Why Puerto Rico competes separately from the U.S. in the Olympics — and why that question always annoys me
Every four years, when the Olympics come around, like clockwork I hear baffled spectators utter the same undying comment: Why does Puerto Rico have its own Olympic team? I thought it was part of the United States.
The reason for that is pretty simple. But before I get to that, a story . . .
We were in Puerto Rico for our 10th anniversary two Februaries ago. My wife had never been to "my island," which is what I kept calling it during the four-day weekend — "how you liking my island?" — even though I was born and raised in Chicago, and had only been to P.R. once before, back in 2017, right after Hurricane María blew everything down. Still, I was happy to show her off — the island, that is.
Or islands, I should say, since Puerto Rico is an archipelago (fancy word for a group of islands). The plan had been, in fact, to spend our first two nights not on the main island but on the tiny island of Culebra off the eastern tip. "Snake Island," as the name means in English, is world famous for its beaches, namely Flamenco Beach, with its white sand and turquoise water— even if you've never heard of it you've probably seen it in one of those screensavers that come with computers. I'd rented an Airbnb (or was it Vrbo?), something with a porch overlooking a deep blue bay. We were all set for a lovely stay in paradise.
But first we had to get there . . . Our flight landed at Luis Muñoz Marín Airport at 5:30 p.m., which gave us exactly two hours to pick up our rental and haul ass over to Ceiba where the last ferry of the day sailed out at 7:30. We would've made it, too, had it not been for the slowpokes at Enterprise. The way they moped around — as though there wasn't a line of sweaty toe-tapping customers anxious to get the hell outta there (like they were playing some kind of sick prank on us) — made me hate my own people; it also lent credence to the slur, often credited to white America but just as often heard from fellow Latinos, that Boricuas are "lazy" and "don't know how to move" with any urgency, except on a dance floor.
We reached the docks at Culebra just in time to watch the last ferry chug out to sea. With it went our dream weekend, plus the now-nonrefundable 500 bucks for the Airbnb (or Vrbo).
We drove back to the capital, taking the scenic route down through Humacao and up through Caguas and the central mountains. By then the sun had already set, so we didn't see much. Rocio, my passenger princess, used the hour or so to find us a decent place to stay in San Juan, since the front desk at the Caribe Hilton, where we'd booked a king suite for our last two nights, said they couldn't take us in till tomorrow.
Ro found us a room at the four-star Ciqala in Miramar. The hotel itself wasn't much — the narrow eight-story building looked like what new but cheap apartments look like here in Vegas — but it had a little restaurant and bar up on the roof. So after checking in, showering, and getting dolled up, we headed up there.
The place was popping, considering. Everybody was dressed to impress, the girls especially — skin-tight mini dresses and high heels with straps wrapping halfway up the lower leg (you know the look) — and the DJ was playing a mix of hip hop and reggaetón. The rooftop was draped in string lights and gave a great view of the neighborhood, with the black Laguna del Condado just a few blocks north and the glittering lights of Condado just beyond it. There was even a little swimming pool up there, glowing sea green.
We sat at a high-top and ordered two mojitos de maracuya. Rocio looked glamorous in her form-fitting black and gold dress with spaghetti straps, her make-up flawless, her skin unreal, her dark hair fluttering radiantly in the ocean-smelling breeze. I ordered the mofongo, but for starters we split tostones with ropa vieja and a ceviche stuffed into half an avocado as big as my face. We ate and drank and swayed in our chairs to the music, beaming like two kids on Christmas.
In the morning, I walked to the tiendita a few buildings down to see what they sold (who travels without taking a peek inside the local convenience stores?). I walked away with a little bottle of Don Q and two Cokes. Then Ro and I packed our shit, loaded up the rental, and drove out to the Isleta de San Juan, the oldest part of town. I was taking her to the most sacred spot in all of Puerto Rico — El Morro.
Fun fact, and a bit of history: San Juan is the second-oldest European settlement after Santo Domingo in the D.R. Columbus landed in Puerto Rico during his second voyage in 1493, naming the island San Juan Bautista (St. John the Baptist), after Jesus's guru. But it was Ponce de León who established the first official settlement there in 1508, on the southern lip of San Juan Bay. That first site was a nightmare — something in the air was supposedly killing babies — so the next year everybody moved out to the little island shielding the bay. They named the new settlement Puerto Rico, or "Rich Port."
The town was officially founded in 1521 and renamed Puerto Rico de San Juan Bautista. Then sailors started mixing up the names, and eventually "Puerto Rico" referred to the whole island while the city itself went by "San Juan."
I've known all of that since at least my college days, when I studied under the hardcore Puerto Rican nationalist José López in Chicago. Prof. López's older brother, Oscar, led a pro-independence group blamed for dozens of bombings in the United States during the 1970s and '80s, for which Oscar served 36 years in federal prison, making him the longest-held political prisoner in the world, till Obama freed him on his way out of the White House in 2017.
Rocio knew none of this when we flew out to P.R., being both a Mexican and what history nerds and political junkies call a "normie." As with most normies, Ro thought Puerto Ricans were proud of their colonial heritage, just as they were proud to be colonized by the United States today. I've done what I can over the years to disabuse her of this belief, but she still sees my antipathy toward Puerto Rico's colonial status as more a me problem.
That's why I was so keen on taking her to El Morro. It's not for nothing that Puerto Rico's most revered site is a fortress with dozens of cannons aimed out to sea. Sure, it was the Spanish who built the fortress (with a hand from enslaved Africans) and put those cannons on the battlements, but it was locals who later fired those cannons on enemy ships, first the Dutch, then the British, and eventually the U.S. Navy. I wanted to show Ro that Puerto Rico hadn't offered up its belly to invaders like some whimpering mutt.
Our visit to El Morro seemed to do the trick, as she admitted, after seeing all the armaments and reading about all the battles, that she never realized Puerto Rico had been such a fiercely contested piece of land.
I will always remember this doughy white woman there from the States who pointed to the lighthouse and told her little girl, "You think a princess lived in there?" I'm still not sure if she meant it as a serious question — I hope to fucking God she didn't — but her ignorant-ass question (it's a lighthouse, for one), and the fact that her kid had been climbing all over the walls of El Morro like she was at a McDonald's PlayPlace, still makes my blood boil for reasons I don't fully understand but which seem to bubble up from somewhere deep inside me. That little family (the dad was there too) offended me as a Puerto Rican of course, but also as someone who — and maybe this is just me — who tries to show enough respect to a place I'm visiting and its people to learn about their history and, at the very least, not treat its cherished sites like a jungle gym.
I was still annoyed as we ate lunch at the Condado Ocean Club — more mojitos, this time with calamari, plátano maduro, and fish tacos. Afterward, we took off our shoes and walked along the beach. The sweet smell of dank wafted toward us in the salty sea breeze, and we turned to see a young dark guy huddled next to a middle-aged white woman. Since we hadn't dared to bring any bud with us — after all, Puerto Rico has often been a major drug-trafficking hub — we approached them and asked if they had any to spare.
The kid, a local, looked nervous and shifty. The woman, though, was from New Jersey, and she spoke with the confidence that only white Americans carry abroad, as though no one could touch her. When she heard we were visiting from Vegas for our 10th anniversary — it was that day, actually — she offered us a nug and some rolling papers as a gift. As a Puerto Rican, albeit from the Diaspora, I had absolutely no qualms about accepting this gift from this white Yankee, feeling almost entitled to it as a sort of tribute or reparations. But after we'd thanked the lady and were walking away, Ro made me go back and hand her a 20, which I did with some resentment (my face felt heavy with it). That I had to insist that she take my money only made matters worse.
That night we returned to swanky Condado for our anniversary dinner at this rooftop steakhouse overlooking the lagoon. We entered through a three-story boutique hotel and took the elevator. The wall opposite the elevator door was made of glass, and the wall of the elevator shaft on the other side was lit up and covered with fake plants and flowers all the way up to the top.
The restaurant's decor was rustic chic, everything wood from the floor to the tables and the pergolas, with purple wisteria hung from the pillars. It was early, so besides a table of four we had the whole place to ourselves. The head waiter, a trim light-skinned dude with tattoos on his arms and a skull cap on his head, black skinny jeans tucked into short brown boots, ignored us when we walked in. We waited by the hostess stand, and when he finally eyed us from afar, I saw him make the face I've gotten my whole life — the face of instant disdain. He took his sweet time, too, greeting us and showing us to our table. Since it was our 10th anniversary, and to judo flip his ass, I balled out and ordered two mojitos, a couple appetizers, two of their finest steaks, and their most expensive bottle of champagne, which was only a Cuvée Rosé Laurent-Perrier (I was hoping they had Dom or Cristal).
You should've seen the look on dude's face as he uncorked the bottle, smiling at me as if it hurt him to smile. I bet it did — I'm hoping it did.
So, getting back to the question I promised to answer at the start of this, as to why Puerto Rico can be "part of the United States" and still compete separately from the U.S. in the Olympics, it's because Puerto Rico ISN'T "part of the United States" — Puerto Rico, according to over a hundred years of Supreme Court precedence, is a piece of land "belonging to . . . but not a part of the United States" (emphasis mine). That is to say what the Supreme Court refuses to say even now, with a Puerto Rican sitting on the bench, that Puerto Rico is a U.S. colony, which by definition makes the United States not a republic, as it loves to tout itself, but an empire.
I've seen the look of shock and horror when I inform normies that the residents of D.C. aren't allowed to vote in presidential elections and have no real representation in Congress like the rest of us do. This information offends their Americanness, as it should. But when I add that the U.S. citizens living in Puerto Rico, whether they were born there or not, and those living in Guam, American Samoa, the Northern Mariana Islands, and the U.S. Virgin Islands, can't vote in presidential elections either and have no effective representation on Capitol Hill, these same people who were so upset about D.C.'s second-class citizenship now appear unmoved, their eyes glazing over as though I'm boring them with a bit of useless trivia — and not even that, because I bet if I told them that the heart of a blue whale is five feet long and weighs 400 pounds, or that a hummingbird's heart beats 1200 times a minute, I'd see those eyes of theirs widen with astonishment.
Why most Americans seem to care more about hummingbirds and the people living in D.C., but not the 3 million-plus living in Puerto Rico, I leave to you to think about.