During last week’s Holy Week observations, Puerto Rico was plunged once more into darkness. One image quickly went viral: a woman at a supermarket, plugging her respiratory machine into an outlet. A private act turned into a public indictment of a broken system.
Like many in the Puerto Rican diaspora, I experienced the blackout from afar through dropped calls and frantic texts, part of an all-too-familiar loop of state failure. I stayed on the phone with my mom as night fell on Wednesday, hoping to ease her sense of abandonment.
Near tears, she recalled how she had spent her life working multiple jobs, saving carefully as a single mother for a modest but dignified retirement. Now, she was heating a meal on a camping stove she could barely light with her arthritic hands.
“I don’t think I deserve this,” she said. She’s right. This isn’t the life Puerto Ricans were promised.
The latest islandwide blackout is not just a technical failure; it is the most recent sign that Puerto Rico’s colonial bargain has collapsed. For over half a century, its commonwealth status — under U.S. federal control but lacking full political rights — was justified by promises of security, stability and the material comforts of modern life.
But through storms and earthquakes, bankruptcy and blackouts, displacement and austerity, that promise has steadily unraveled. Each flicker of the failing power grid reveals a deeper truth: the waning promise of American empire, the hollow performance of local politicians and the growing conviction that Puerto Ricans must — and will — forge a different path.
At her first press conference after the blackout, Puerto Rico’s newly elected governor, Jenniffer González-Colón, declared, “Puerto Rico cannot be the island where the power is constantly going out,” and cast herself as a mere inheritor of the island’s longstanding energy crisis. Yet, as a career politician, staunch Republican and public supporter of President Trump, she spent the past eight years as Puerto Rico’s non-voting member of the U.S. House — a period defined by congressionally mandated financial austerity in the wake of the island’s 2015 debt default, failed disaster relief and the controversial privatization of the power grid. During this time, Puerto Rico has become exactly what she now decries.
That was never supposed to be the deal. In 1952, as anticolonial movements arose worldwide, Puerto Rico was cast as a showcase of American-led progress through the creation of the commonwealth status. In exchange for limited self-rule, the island received paved roads, public schools, hospitals, industry and electricity reaching even the most remote mountain towns. Power lines and reinforced concrete came to symbolize a broader political promise: that under U.S. oversight, Puerto Rico would thrive.
That illusion suffered a deadly blow in August 2016, when the federal government appointed a fiscal board — the Financial Oversight and Management Board for Puerto Rico — in light of the country’s default. Just a month later, a fire at a power plant set off the first islandwide blackouts. At the time, it felt almost quaint. Neighbors gathered in the streets. Children played outside. Many people likened it to a short story by the celebrated Puerto Rican author José Luis González, “La Noche Que Volvimos a Ser Gente” — “The Night We Became People Again.”
At that time, I wondered if Puerto Rico was entering its own “Special Period,” like Cuba’s era of post-Soviet scarcity, marked by blackouts, food shortages and economic collapse. Now the comparison feels less speculative. The old warnings issued by those not in favor of independence — “You don’t want to end up like Cuba” or, more recently, Venezuela — no longer carry the same weight. We already live with constant blackouts, crumbling infrastructure, a housing crisis, political corruption and mass migration. What exactly are we being protected from?
Yet, some Puerto Ricans still cling to the idea that deeper integration with the rest of the United States is the solution to our problems. After the latest blackout, calls to federalize the electricity grid resurfaced on social media. But what does that mean today in an era defined not by New Deal public investment but rather by DOGE-driven dismantlement in the name of efficiency? Not to mention that America’s own energy grid is under mounting pressure.
Since 2017, Puerto Rico has been governed by a succession of pro-statehood leaders, each echoing the promise of the 1950s: that U.S. citizenship — albeit in a full, enfranchised form — would finally bring stability, prosperity and dignity. Though they often pose as adversaries, local politicians and members of the federally appointed fiscal oversight board have advanced the same agenda: austerity, privatization and disinvestment, all while enabling speculative investments through generous tax incentives. Just this month, Gov. González-Colón proposed extending Act 60, a law that offers tax exemptions to wealthy outsiders, from 2035 to 2055.
For decades, Puerto Ricans seeking independence from the United States were warned that without its protection the island would descend into chaos or dictatorship. But as the nation flirts with authoritarianism — detaining international students for expressing dissent, imprisoning migrants abroad without due process, and warning that “homegrowns” (citizens) could be next — U.S. citizenship begins to feel less like a shield. The fear of becoming like Cuba might just be canceled out by the fear of becoming like Florida.
So what comes next?
Puerto Rico’s future isn’t being shaped in Washington or the governor’s mansion. After last week’s blackout, Bad Bunny — Puerto Rico’s most recognizable voice — posted on X: “When are we going to do something?” The truth is, Puerto Ricans, including Bad Bunny himself, have already done plenty. They’ve occupied shuttered schools and turned them into community centers. They’ve battled developers to reclaim public beaches. They’ve built grass-roots solar networks and started community farms to fight food insecurity. They even toppled a governor. And in the last election campaign, they broke with tradition, forming new voting alliances and daring to imagine new forms of governance unconstrained by Cold War-era fears.
These aren’t isolated acts of resistance. They signal the slow build of a new political project — one rooted in mutual aid, solidarity, sustainability and self-determination rather than dependency or tutelage.
I have no romanticism about this. How could I, watching my own family pushed to the brink just to survive?
But I do have conviction. And I know I’m not alone. When Bad Bunny asks, “When are we going to do something?” he’s not posing a question. He’s voicing a certainty. The work has already begun. The only unknown is when we’ll reap the fruit of the seeds we’ve already sown.
Yarimar Bonilla, a contributing Opinion writer and a professor at Princeton University’s Effron Center for the Study of America, is the author of “Non-Sovereign Futures: French Caribbean Politics in the Wake of Disenchantment” and an editor of “Aftershocks of Disaster: Puerto Rico Before and After the Storm.”
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