The Hill News

In the movie “The Rum Diary,” a young American journalist played by Johnny Depp discovers that Puerto Rico in the late 1950s is a sunny and vibrant island that happens to be an American territory, with seemingly limitless economic potential. As I watched the closing credits in a theater 1500 miles away from San Juan, I felt nostalgic and saddened by what the intervening half-century has brought to my native island. Long gone are those heady days in the late ‘50s, when Congress granted Puerto Ricans a measure of self-government and transformed a poor and agrarian economy into an important manufacturing base for U.S. corporations. They have been replaced by skepticism and pessimism among a population facing alarming crime rates and drug related violence, a mass exodus of manufacturing jobs in an economy mired in a recession for more than 5 years, and an unclear picture of where and how Puerto Rico fits politically with the rest of the United States.

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