TRAVELANDLEISURE.COM (^85)
T
HE WOMAN SITTING next to me leaned
over to look out the airplane window at the ocean below.
“Nosotros los puertorriqueños,” she said. “We come from
the water.” Introducing herself as Diana, she told me
she was returning to Puerto Rico for the first time since
Hurricane Maria, the Category 5 storm that devastated the
island in 2017. Some of her relatives had yet to rebuild their
roofs, and Diana had come to lend a hand. The rest of the time?
She’d be at the beach listening to Bad Bunny, Puerto Rico’s
rising star of reggaeton, and eating bacalaítos, or cod fritters. If I
was serious about finding out what island life was like, she said
as we touched down, I should do the same.
In the hurricane’s wake, two narratives about the island have
taken root. In one telling, Puerto Rico is slowly clambering back
to normalcy, rebuilding homes and infrastructure and entiretowns, still reeling from loss. In another, tragedy
and disaster spurred community building and
new ways of doing business, and the Puerto
Rico that has emerged since is more vibrant
and creative, clinging to joy more tightly than
ever, having seen how quickly it can slip away.
I’d come to find out which side of the story felt
closest to the truth.
Sunlight blazed through the waves as they
crested, capped in white, then crashed and
spread foam across the pier. I was staying at the
Caribe Hilton, which reopened last May after
15 months and more than $150 million of
renovations to the 70-year-old structure, which
sits on the northeastern edge of San Juan.La Factoría’s Hijos de
Borinquen cocktail, made
with rum, lemon, apricot
liqueur, and cinnamon.Kites at El Morro, a
16th-century Spanish
fortress overlooking
the Bay of San Juan.TAL0620_F_PuertoRico.indd 85 FINAL 4/21/20 8:27 PM