Olga Dies Dreaming(113)
“Prieto, I can’t with the wedding right now,” she started into the phone.
“No, Olga.” His voice sounded urgent and a nervous sensation fluttered in her chest. “I got a call this morning … I mean, at this point, it’s on the news.”
“I was running out to help Mabel with Milagros. Is everything okay?”
“She did it.”
“Who?” she said. But then she knew. “Fuck.” She was fumbling with her key in the lock. She ran over to her computer to check out the news for herself.
“Early this morning a bomb went off in La Fortaleza; it didn’t do too much damage, so I think they were trying to keep it quiet but … well, fuck, just look.”
They had not heard from their mother since just after Maria. They had, after much torment and a commitment to therapy, come to the familial decision to mourn her like the dead, so speaking of her now was like being grabbed by a ghost. Of course, she had lingered in the back of their minds. Her brother had served two more terms before deciding to run for governor of New York, and though he did plenty for the people of Puerto Rico, he never did go back.
They had both, of course, seen the headlines: after Maria, as their mother predicted, the awakening among the people that had begun after PROMESA only became louder, more organized and intense. Estimates on Maria’s death toll ranged in the thousands; one team of scientists put the count at 4,645. Outraged and grief-stricken, people stopped looking to the central government and strengthened the organization of their smaller municipalities. Just as they had been organized in the beginning, when the land was Borikén.
Then, two funny things happened.
The first seemed innocuous enough, though not to Olga. Two years after Maria, in the summer of 2019, a mysterious hack unearthed a trove of private messages between the governor and his cabinet. Journalists had been steadily unraveling the web of corruption that had lined these politicians’ pockets—both before and after Maria—but these texts were different. They revealed the disdain, disregard, and disrespect that the governor, and by turn his government, had for the people. They mocked their own citizens while patting each other on their backs and laughing en route to the bank with their FEMA money. People demanded Ricky’s resignation. In his obstinance, he ignored their calls until the people—millions of people—flooded the streets, day after day. He was eventually forced from office, and though he was merely one piece of a vastly corrupt puzzle, his ouster signaled a shift. The people saw and remembered their power.
Olga watched the protests in Puerto Rico that summer, her heart swollen with pride. On the news, on the covers of all the papers, on social media, Olga saw them, Los Pa?uelos Negros, mixed among the people, getting tear-gassed, getting goaded by the police. She knew her brother had seen it, too. After their mother met with Mercedes, the Pa?uelos, their demands for Puerto Rico, and their vision of liberation did receive periodic press coverage. Unlike her predecessors, however, their mother insisted on complete anonymity. Still, rumors swirled. The Pa?uelos and their mark had begun to generate a folklore of its own. That they had been behind the hack; that they had amassed hundreds of thousands of followers around the island. That they were backed by wealthy Boricuas from the diaspora.
The second thing that occurred happened so quietly, when Olga saw it in passing, she almost missed it. For more than two years much of the island sat in darkness as PREPA and the government failed to rebuild the power grid and contracts were issued to inept consultants and shell companies owned by the U.S. president and other administration officials. Residents and municipalities, tired of waiting for PREPA to come and charge them extortionary amounts of money for an unreliable utility, slowly began to pool their money for their own solar panels. Building, in effect, their own solar grids. Two years after Maria, the island was ravaged by earthquakes and within seconds, the entire island was again in darkness. The people, realizing that their infrastructure was still as fragile as their citizenship, were exhausted of being held hostage to this ineptitude. The public recognized what Olga’s mother had seen several years before and began, en masse, to organize themselves towards solar. The climate was ripe: Reggie Reyes had successfully opened a mid-sized solar production facility, which in turn led Dick to make a push with Eikenborn Green Solutions. Solar suddenly became accessible. PREPA, seeing their client base take matters into their own hands, began to panic and, with the cooperation of the Puerto Rican legislature and private industry, passed a Solar Tax, ensuring they made money even on power that nature provided. A municipality, aided by a mainland-born lawyer of Puerto Rican descent, filed a lawsuit protesting the tax, which slowly wound its way to the Supreme Court. In the ensuing years Sol Libre became a rallying cry as the issue of taxing the utilization of a resource God had provided to everyone seemed to touch a raw nerve. Songs—trap, bomba, salsa—were written about Sol Libre. Logos were created. Chants were uttered. Adding to the fury was that the Puertopians had installed their solar grids years before. They had been living with power. They would be exempt from the tax.
An injunction was placed on the tax while the Supreme Court decided if and when to take up the case and, motivated by a window of opportunity and a gesture of political defiance, solar energy was adopted by large swaths of the island. Families on the mainland were pooling together money for their relatives—their houses, their buildings, their towns—to obtain solar panels. Puertorrique?os across the diaspora were crowdsourcing to fund solar energy for the villages and cities they had descended from. Quite recently, The Washington Post had reported that the campaigns had gotten nearly 50 percent of the island’s households operating completely on solar. Olga had texted the story to Prieto, but they never discussed it.