by Jose Andres
That day our cooking operation was bigger than ever. We were still cooking huge amounts of sancocho, as well as making sandwiches inside the main dining room. Outside, in the car park, we now had three giant paella pans cooking chicken and rice. On top of all that, we had three food trucks reaching out farther into the communities of need, both inside and beyond San Juan.
In our mobile kitchen, parked in the street opposite José Enrique’s pink restaurant, chef Wilo Benet made pastelónes for the first time, a lasagna-like specialty of the island, complete with layers of sweet plantain, beef, potatoes, and tomatoes. Wilo was one of the great chefs of Puerto Rico and his Pikayo restaurant was a trailblazer. But it was now shut, along with the Hilton hotel that was its home. Rather than waiting for insurance claims to be processed, he was one of the first to join us at José Enrique’s. He cooked in unbearable heat, but he didn’t seem to mind. Like the rest of us, he knew that he was sweating to help the whole team serve the greatest needs in Puerto Rico. “It’s a good feeling knowing you are doing something to help,” Wilo used to say.
Our second kitchen was humming at Enrique Piñeiro’s Mesa 364. Taped to the wall inside the restaurant was a flip-chart sheet that read just like the ones inside José Enrique’s restaurant. The places and numbers told the story of an island in desperate need: 175 hot meals for the elderly at one egida, 75 at another and 100 sandwiches for a third. A tray of meals for fifty at the children’s hospital, another for the medical students at the University of Puerto Rico hospital, yet more for a nursing home. And barrio after barrio asking for hundreds and hundreds of hot meals. We weren’t in the business of saying no. We took every call that came in.
If anything, my problem was that we were growing too fast. Enrique wanted mayonnaise and cheese for more sandwiches but I insisted that we centralize our sandwich-making. The only way we could scale up this kind of thing was to focus on big production lines. “We want to use 100 percent of the donations we get,” he texted me. “We have pastrami, legs of ham and bread. What do you propose we do?”
“Bring them to Santurce!” I shot back. “Donations for donations don’t work. We have to centralize. We will create a central headquarters for sandwiches. Use your bread to accompany your rice and chicken!”
The contrast with the skepticism, confusion and inertia at FEMA headquarters could not have been greater. We hit 10,000 meals that day, including 2,000 sandwiches, to bring us to a grand total of 21,500 meals cooked in four days of operations. We had doubled our output and doubled it again. There was no reason to think we would stop here.
That night my friend Anderson Cooper was broadcasting his CNN show live from outside a gelato shop at the Marriott, just a few blocks from our hotel. I told him I cried a lot for Puerto Ricans that day; I cried for their suffering, for their generosity and because I felt we all needed to do more. I believed we all could do so much more. Anderson talked about seeing families cooking outdoors for entire neighborhoods, and it was true. The spirit of Puerto Rico was always astonishing. But it was especially powerful at a moment when others thought the worst of Puerto Rico, or would have behaved worse themselves in such a disaster zone. It was time for the United States to step up like its own citizens in Puerto Rico.
“What you see is the heart of Puerto Rico,” I told Anderson. “When there are moments of hardship, they come together. And with nothing, they are able to do a lot.”
Anderson said it was sad that so many Puerto Ricans felt the need to say they were American.
“This is very simple,” I said. “I’ve been in Haiti for many years. I went after the earthquake. And the amount of help that came from America was far and away bigger than the amount of help that has come to Puerto Rico from the military. At one point we had 25,000 military in Haiti and we’re not very close to that in Puerto Rico. So this message is very simple: Mr. Trump, we want you to lead. But let’s keep on doing what we did in the past so successfully. Not different, just equal.”
It wasn’t clear what Trump was doing about Puerto Rico, judging from his public comments. Earlier in the day, he told a meeting of the National Association of Manufacturers about what he called “a massive federal mobilization” of five thousand military personnel.
“All appropriate departments of our government, from homeland security to defense, are engaged fully in the disaster and the response and recovery effort—probably has never been seen for something like this,” he said, forgetting entirely about Haiti.12
“This is an island surrounded by water—big water, ocean water.”
Big water, ocean water. Puerto Ricans would repeat these words for weeks to come, giggling at the president’s understanding of their plight.
Worse, Trump thought the island and its government were obliterated in the apocalypse, yet he was still boasting that five thousand military was sufficient.
“We’re closely coordinated with the territorial and local governments, which are totally and unfortunately unable to handle this catastrophic crisis on their own. Just totally unable to. The police and truck drivers are very substantially gone. They’re taking care of their families and largely unable to get involved, largely unable to help. Therefore, we’re forced to bring in truck drivers, security, and many, many other personnel, by the thousands. And we’re bringing them onto the island as we speak. We’ve never seen a situation like this.
“The electrical grid and other infrastructure were already in very, very poor shape. They were at their life’s end prior to the hurricanes. And now virtually everything has been wiped out, and we will have to really start all over again. We’re literally starting from scratch.”
They weren’t literally starting from scratch. Everything wasn’t wiped out. But it would have been great if the Trump administration behaved like it were. Instead, what we saw was a long way short of the world’s most powerful nation responding to “this catastrophic crisis.”
“We will not rest, however, until the people of Puerto Rico are safe,” he promised. “These are great people. We want them to be safe, and sound, and secure, and we will be there every day until that happens.”
I hope that the United States will be there every day. Puerto Rico is, after all, part of the United States.
At the same time as Trump was describing the big water around Puerto Rico, the mayor of San Juan was describing the real situation on the ground. While Trump was claiming to lead, Carmen Yulín Cruz was demanding some actual leadership from the federal government. Her urgency was not just the result of what we were all seeing on the island; it was a response to the White House boasts, the day before, about the size of its operations. We will not let you down.
“I am asking the president of the United States to make sure somebody is in charge that is up to the task of saving lives,” she told reporters. “They were up to the task in Africa when Ebola came over. They were up to the task in Haiti. As they should be. Because when it comes to saving lives, we are all part of one community of shared values. I will do what I never thought I was going to do: I am begging. I am begging anyone that can hear us to save us from dying. If anybody out there is listening to us, we are dying. And you are killing us with the inefficiency and bureaucracy.”
Her words about Ebola rang true. My friend Ron Klain was named the Ebola czar by the Obama administration and his work was an example of how best to handle an emergency that nobody had planned for. Ron’s leadership was vital in the successful turnaround as the world helped to control and eradicate the Ebola outbreak in West Africa in 2014.
Pointing to supplies behind her, the mayor said: “This is what we got last night: four pallets of water, three pallets of meals and 12 pallets of infant food. Which I gave to Comerio, where people are drinking out of a creek. So I am done being polite. I am done being politically correct. I am mad as hell because my people’s lives are at stake. And we are but one nation. We may be small, but we are huge in dignity and zealous for life.
“So I’m asking members of the press to sen
d a mayday call all over the world. We are dying here. And if we don’t stop and if we don’t get the food and the water into people’s hands, what we are going to see is something close to a genocide. So Mr. Trump, I am begging you to take charge and save lives. After all, that is one of the founding principles of the United States of North America. If not, the world will see how we are treated. Not as second-class citizens, but as animals that can be disposed of. Enough is enough.”13
Her tone was much harsher than I would ever be, but I understood the passion and the despair. There wasn’t going to be a genocide, but she was right: people were dying because of inefficiency and bureaucracy. Puerto Ricans were not being treated as Americans, but as second-class citizens whose lives mattered less than those of their fellow Americans on the mainland.
In fact, the military leadership in charge of the recovery shared her view that the operation fell far short of what was needed. Lieutenant General Jeffrey Buchanan, the three-star general who was named that week to lead the military support for FEMA, said there weren’t enough people and assets to deal with the humanitarian crisis. Buchanan, the commander of the U.S. Army North, told reporters bluntly, “No, it’s not enough, and that’s why we are bringing a lot more.”14
After my CNN interview I officially met Mayor Cruz for the first time, as well as the Puerto Rico governor, Ricardo Rosselló. They also were being interviewed by Anderson, and both seemed familiar with what we were doing. Cruz was very emotional as she told me of the desperate need for food and water. I promised her we would give her the meals she wanted if she came back to Santurce to pick them up the next day. She started crying and we hugged. She never came over to pick up the meals. So the next day, we got a pickup truck and took one thousand meals to her. For some reason, we never heard from her, or her team, again. We were feeding many people in the San Juan area, which was her area of control. Mayors are important leaders across the island’s municipalities, and the success or failure of a feeding operation depends a lot on their leadership. I assumed she was doing fine without coordinating with us, but I was confused by the lack of contact.
Before sunrise the next day, Trump made it clear he wasn’t serious about coordinating with the local governments. In a series of tweets directed to Mayor Cruz, he decided she was his political enemy, along with the rest of Puerto Rico, which he cast as lazy and incompetent. “The Mayor of San Juan, who was very complimentary only a few days ago, has now been told by the Democrats that you must be nasty to Trump,” he wrote. “Such poor leadership ability by the Mayor of San Juan, and others in Puerto Rico, who are not able to get their workers to help. They want everything to be done for them when it should be a community effort. 10,000 Federal workers now on Island doing a fantastic job.”
They didn’t want everything done for them. Cruz insisted she was just asking for help, like so many others.15 It was only “nasty to Trump” because he thought any criticism of him was nasty. What was truly nasty was life in Puerto Rico, where the challenges were so much bigger than one man’s ego, even if that man was the president of the United States.
Trump’s comments earned a swift and searing response from Lin-Manuel Miranda, the musical genius who created Hamilton and In the Heights, and whose family is from Puerto Rico. “You’re going straight to hell,” he tweeted at Trump. “No long lines for you. Someone will say, ‘Right this way, sir.’ They’ll clear a path.”
BY SATURDAY, ONLY FIVE DAYS AFTER I LANDED IN PUERTO RICO, IT WAS clear to me that we had outgrown our space in Santurce. We needed to go back to our initial plan: the giant facility of an arena, with its huge kitchen, staging areas, delivery bays and road access. We needed to get inside El Coliseo, known to everyone as El Choli. That space was in the hands of the first lady, the governor’s wife, who was using the main arena floor to store donations of food, household goods, generators and even toys to distribute around the island. It looked mostly empty, but there were still plenty of supplies that could help many people. I didn’t understand what she was doing with all those supplies, but I also didn’t want to criticize her publicly because I needed her help. The surrounding space that I wanted was totally unused. So among my many conversations, by phone and text, I called the governor’s representative in my hometown, Washington, D.C. Carlos Mercader, the executive director of the D.C. office, was a miracle worker. I told him of my hope of getting FEMA funding for our food relief, and our need to go into the much bigger space of El Choli. We also got early support from the wife of the island’s secretary of state, Margarita Rivera, as well as support from Clara Roman, a Puerto Rican entrepreneur. Luvian Rodriguez, a friend of the governor’s wife, came along with them. For me, their visit to our Santurce operation was an important sign of moral support, and gave us more connections to the government, and more good references for our work. Within hours, both the arena and the FEMA funding were in motion.
Mercader’s ability to break through was a revelation to me. It underscored how nobody was in charge, and everybody was in charge. The governor’s office had the power to get things moving, but no apparent capabilities to feed the people of Puerto Rico. The resources were there but you needed to know how to find them and use them. It was as if somebody invited you for dinner and told you to order anything you wanted, but didn’t give you a menu. Can I get water? Yes! Can I get rice and beans? Yes! But you don’t know you can get sushi and cassoulet. You need a master’s degree in FEMA to understand what resources they have and how to make them work for the people who need them.
It was a rainy day but that didn’t stop the long lines of people waiting patiently for sancocho under their umbrellas in the historic streets of Santurce. And it didn’t stop the weekend crowds at each stop made by our three food trucks, which all delivered one thousand meals on their own. We prepared 13,000 meals that day, including 10,000 hot meals: 5 times what we cooked at the start of the week. We were unstoppable.
We now had enough public support that the operation threatened to spiral out of control. With the best of intentions, it’s possible to overwhelm a fast-growing operation like ours. People want to help, but they can quickly undermine your best efforts. The visitors at our parking lot were out of control, and I was getting nervous: I even kicked out José Enrique’s father, Pepe, because I didn’t recognize him. He was proud of what his son had helped to create, but I was worried about all the visitors. I felt so bad. After that, we printed stickers to identify our volunteers and approved visitors.
Our visitors were growing in stature, as well as numbers. The regional head of FEMA, Alejandro De La Campa, came to see what we were doing, and ate a sandwich. He seemed impressed with both the cooking and the food. “Help us to help you feed the island,” I said. He remained non-committal. The same day, Governor Rosselló was supposed to show up. We waited for hours but he never made it. I looked out at our incredible start-up kitchen and was almost heartbroken that we had to leave this magical corner of San Juan. Here I could manage and control with my own eyes and hands the whole operation. Soon we would embark on something much bigger that I couldn’t see and touch every day. Our time here had been intense. It was only a week, but every hour felt like a day, and every day felt like a week. We were doing so much, for so many people, in such a short time. The sheer volumes were overwhelming.
Ramón Leal from ASORE told me he had received some huge donations: fifteen thousand pounds of chicken, propane gas tanks, hot dog rolls, tortilla wraps, fresh fruit and five pallets of water.
“Ramón, we need to coordinate now!” I told him. “It’s too much to move all of that!”
“I know,” he replied. “That’s why you need to come with us to the radio station this morning. I’m calling out to all my friends, the restaurants and food suppliers, to join in and help.” Radio was the most powerful form of communication on an island with very limited cell phone service, but we still needed to take our time and prepare properly.
“Ramón, be careful! I need organization and this can become a cir
cus. Please don’t do it yet. Please.”
We met at my hotel and talked through a solution. Ramón really wanted to help his relatives in the mountains, so he organized a delivery there. But he was dedicated to helping all the people of Puerto Rico and it was taking its toll on him, as it was on all of us. Like us, he found this food relief operation both exhausting and inspiring at the same time. He was working with other business leaders in the private sector and government officials too. He was bringing a plane full of supplies donated by the Mexican government from Miami to San Juan, with food for our operation and medical supplies, like oxygen tanks. At night, he would deliver diesel and propane to homes for the elderly and hospitals. He would show up and disappear like a ghost, but was always helping somebody, somewhere. He was sleeping just three or four hours a night and had lost over fourteen pounds in the ten days since the hurricane.
“But I never felt better,” he said.
WEEKENDS ARE USUALLY A DAY FOR FAMILIES AND FOOD IN PUERTO RICO. People travel to the hills to eat huge meals of roast pork, plantains and rice, at a lechonera, or barbecue, where roast pigs turn on vast spits above open fires. They line up at kioskos near the beach, where they deep-fry vast numbers of bacalaitos with salt cod, or plantain tostones. This is the time for family and friends to come together as a community, in a town square, in front of a church, or just at the biggest house in the neighborhood.