Dear Island of Enchantment:

I write to you with a heavy heart filled with both love and sorrow. It’s heartbreaking to see what you have been reduced to. The world used to see you as a dream, but lately you’ve become a nightmare to them. A growing debt, a fiscal control board and a threatening virus have filled the world with fear of you. I long to tell you that there will be an easy fix, but I cannot bare to lie to you. Poor investing and twisted laws have left us at the mercy of the United States.

I know that there is promise here, I know that we too can rise from this but how can we when we are not in control? For years we have been plagued by the Jones Act which forces any incoming goods to be brought on American ships, meaning that said goods can have passed the Island on their trek to the U.S., yet they will only be delivered on one of the most expensive merchant ships. And this is not the most absurd ramification of our condition. We pay exorbitant prices for products grown locally because they are shipped off to the States where they come back with a “Made in the USA” label that hikes up the prices.

I wish I could say that’s the worst of it. Political corruption and misconduct have left us without options. A fiscal control board wishes to take you over. It seems that instead of moving forward we are stuck in some warped time where we are going back. If this is implemented – and it is almost certain that it will be implemented – we will go back to being a territory at the mercy of the colonizers. No longer will we get a say in what is done to our own country. We will have a marionette of a governor who will sit in on meetings but will not be allowed to speak. Please, tell me this is all a nightmare.

Puerto Rico, our people are fleeing. I do not blame them, some days I think of fleeing too. How can we live when there is no work? When overtime is not payed, when schools are shut down, when every inch of you is being sold piece by piece to outsiders who will make bank off of you and leave us here to rot when bankruptcy comes knocking at their door – how can I blame them for leaving? We are trying to survive and I want to fight alongside you, so do they – make no mistake – but while we fight we cannot forget to survive.

We have been silenced for so long, we dare not confront the injustices being done to you by others because we know that once we face the Northern giant that we are enslaved to there will be no going back. Our people are afraid because we were whipped into dependence and now we can no longer stand on our own without them. Oh, how I dream for us to find a way out of this. They are nervous to do anything because when political prisoners go unpardoned like Oscar Lopez Rivers is, the fear of not seeing our home and our loved ones for more than 30 years shakes us into submission.

My island, my home – my one true love. I do not know how we’ll survive this. The world is crushing us day by day and we go unnoticed due to our size. We are voiceless, but we need not be afraid. We must rise, we must find a solution, we must stand our ground. I wish only to protect you, to save you – but I cannot do it on my own. My beloved, I don’t know how we’ll get out of this, but I pray to God every day that we may survive – that we may overcome.

With all my love,

A Puerto Rican Abroad.