For today I have been asked to speak a bit about my country, Puerto Rico, and the socioeconomic crisis that is currently developing there.1 Given the time constraints, I want to provide you with a brief overview of what is being experienced there by the victims of the crisis. I want to also speak a bit about those over there that have benefitted from the economic catastrophe. Finally, I want to make some general observations regarding the immediate political future of the island, and for that I want to highlight the fragility of the position of the current administration of the colony.
For those of you wondering, I was born in Puerto Rico and I left almost exactly twenty years ago to come and do graduate studies here in the United States, thinking that I would be able to return to my island to contribute in various ways to progressive and radical causes once I finished my training in radical political economy. Like a good economist, I was unable to predict the future, and little did I know that I was being part of the prelude to a new immigration wave that would be triggered by the deep socioeconomic crisis that started on the island in 2006. Such mass waves of migration were not new and had happened in the 20th century as well. Then as now, they were supported and enabled by local Puerto Rican governments trying to manage the limits of a colonial economy that could not produce enough jobs. As you can guess, however, an important difference between the 20th and 21st century immigration waves is the transformed background of global capitalism and Puerto Rico’s place in it. Still, I want to focus my talk on something else and give you my perspective on what I see happening over there, as a Puerto Rican who doesn’t live on the island but shares with most Puerto Ricans the feeling that the island is heading straight towards a wall at a 1,000 miles per hour.
Let me start with three important facts regarding the reality over there, which are manifestations of the two decade long economic crisis. First, there is a demographic imbalance, with low fertility and birthrates combined with immigration. This has produced an aging and shrinking population. For example, when I left in 2005, the population was reaching 4 million. Now, twenty years later, the population is tending towards 3 million. And there is an increase in the median age, where in 2005 half of the population was 33.6 years or older, whereas now in 2025, half is 45.8 years or older. Another way of visualizing our aging society is that there has been an absolute and relative increase in those with age 65 or above.
The second fact I want to share pertains to Puerto Rico’s substantial income inequality. Depending on who you ask, and which measurement is made, Puerto Rico is more or less one of the top ten most unequal countries in the world, where, for example, those whose income is based on their labor (wages) is stagnant or declining in comparison to the rising gains made by those whose income depends on property (profits, rents, dividends, interest).
Finally, when compared to the fifty US states, Puerto Rico has more or less half the median income of the poorest state of the union, which is Mississippi ($25,096 versus $54,915). Also, Puerto Rico’s poverty rate, around 40 percent (in the United States it’s around 11 percent) is also higher than that of US territories Guam (20.2 percent) and the U.S. Virgin Islands (22.8 percent).
Now, apart from these general ways in which the crisis has manifested, let me give you some further pieces of information to flesh out what seems to be an inexorable movement towards a catastrophic horizon within an already crisis-ridden society. According to a recent study, 47 percent of households can’t afford a sudden and unexpected blow of $2,000 to their pockets. You might ask why is this relevant? Well, before we saw that the median yearly income in Puerto Rico is $25,000, so $2,000 is no small potatoes. But it’s also relevant because of the high chance that many families have of encountering unexpected expenses given the recurrent problems with the provision of electricity that people on the island have dealt with since September of 2017, when a Category 4 hurricane (Maria) devastated the island, killing around 4,000 persons and causing $100 billion dollars in losses. The failed management of the crisis at that moment would become an important determinant two years later when, in the summer of 2019, popular uprisings ousted the administration of the then governor Ricky Rossello.
But now, on top of the long-term damage associated with the 2017 hurricane, these problems with the supply of electricity have become more pronounced since the year 2021, when the provision of electricity on the island was privatized as part of the outcomes associated with the debt restructuring process for public corporations and the government of Puerto Rico, a process ongoing to this day. The debt restructuring itself had started in the year 2016, when a so-called “rescue bill” was passed that imposed a Fiscal Control Board to enforce Puerto Rico’s debt obligations after the government declared default on its debt the previous year.
This Fiscal Junta, which had as one of its purported functions the “responsible management” of Puerto Rico’s accounts to regain a good standing with credit markets, has so far engaged in a neoliberal structural adjustment where public funds are redirected towards the payment of the debt. On top of that, this Fiscal Junta has so far cost the public coffers over $2 billion dollars, a far cry from the initial cost estimate of $370 million.
We could now talk about how the fiscal crisis of 2016 is tied to economic depression that started in 2006, or how this can be a second act following the fiscal crisis of 1975, or what does the economic model installed since 1947 has to do with all of this, but I want to return to the current electricity problems on the island. Again, to remind you, 47 percent of households cannot afford an unforeseen blow to their pockets in a context where chronic voltage fluctuations and power outages are continuously damaging electrical appliances in households (think refrigerators, ovens, computer systems and in our tropical island, air conditioners). Also think about the effects on important elements of the creole capitalist class. For example, in our dependent colonial economy, where we consume what we don’t produce, importers and retailers (i.e. commercial/merchant capital) play important roles with their refrigerated warehouses in an island where over 80 percent of the food, including fish, is imported.
Even worse, we have the recurring cases of families that have lost their homes and belongings because of fires caused by short circuits caused by erratic voltage fluctuations. In a related and unfortunate example, in October of last year a 93-year-old woman lost her life when the electric generator she was using during a power outage exploded.
But again, these failures since hurricane Maria in September of 2017 have been more severe since 2021 with the privatization of electric power on the island. Now, those private monopolies that currently run the electric service in Puerto Rico—which have continuously sought and achieved increases in electrical bills, and which manage the reconstruction funds sent by the federal government of the United States—have forecast that power outages will be four times more likely this summer when compared to last summer, when record temperatures were experienced in an island where 26 percent of the energy consumed by households is used by air conditioners and fans.
It’s precisely during this summer and into the fall that international artist Bad Bunny will hold a series of concerts titled No Me Quiero Ir de Aquí (“I don’t want to leave from here”) to advertise his new music album, Debí Tirar Más Fotos (“I should have taken more photos”), an event whose economic impact is estimated to be over $200 million on an island desperately seeking new economic activity, even if its short-term.
Apart from the potential positive economic impact that many are highlighting, there has been some political anxiety surrounding the event, given that Bad Bunny has been a very outspoken critic of previous and current governmental administrations of the two main political parties (one pro-statehood, the other one pro-colonial/status quo) that have dominated Puerto Rican electoral politics for over six decades. The anxiety also comes from the fact that this artist is an expression of the ripple effects that still can be felt on the island since summer 2019, when the then governor was driven out of office by mass protests, and more recently by the results in the 2024 election, when an alliance between the Puerto Rican Independence Party, the Citizens’ Victory Movement, and other groups, got second place in the election for governor of the island. It was in this last election that the ghost of “communism” was resurrected by both traditional main parties and the creole bourgeoisie to try and maintain whatever is left of their hegemony in this collapsing society.
Since then, the elected governor from the pro-statehood party Jennifer González, who is a Trumpian Republican, has slowly lost support within various sectors of her party and those of a local capitalist class that needs the electricity question to be successfully addressed. Earlier this year, González had made what so far has been an empty promise to cancel the contract with the private monopoly that distributes electricity, while also promising more federal funds from the United States. This last promise came crashing down with Donald Trump’s second term and the cuts in federal spending, some of which have applied to Puerto Rico in crucial areas (e.g., cuts in education of $400 million and cuts by the Environmental and Protection Agency of $60 million). Add to that the uncertainty surrounding the tariff wars, the potential inflationary effects, the expected increase in electrical tariffs, and what you have is an explosive cocktail ready to detonate at any moment.
The tenure of governor González, which is only in its fifth month, seems extremely fragile to anybody with ears and eyes on the ground, and this summer and the hurricane season will probably pose formidable challenges to her incompetent administration—an administration that, as I said before, is quickly losing legitimacy among many within her own ranks. What will come out of all of this is of course difficult to envisage, but one thing is clear: more and more Puerto Ricans are understanding that solving the colonial situation on the island is a necessary but not sufficient condition for remedying the problems of most on the island.
Note
[1] This is the text prepared for a speech given at the 2nd annual John Jay Economics Department BBQ in Brooklyn, New York, on May 17, 2025. The text has been very lightly edited for clarity.