Oct 6, 2017 4 min read

About 1,000 miles seperates Puerto Rico from the American mainland. Havana is closer to the United States than San Juan, Puerto Rico’s capital city. A terrority of the United States, its residents are not represented in Congress, nor can they vote in our presidential elections.

But they are American citizens. And they need our help.

In January 2010, when a devastating earthquake tore Haiti apart, 20,000 U.S. troops were dispatched to the Caribbean island to help residents, many of whom live in dire poverty even in the best circumstances, get back on their feet. Seven years later, Puerto Ricans are facing suffering that almost certainly matches that of Haiti’s at the turn of the decade. It’s all thanks to Hurricane Maria, which tore across the island last month shortly after Hurricane Irma left its mark on its way to Florida.

The toll has been, from all accounts, unrelievedly grim.

Some experts say a deployment of 50,000 U.S. troops is necessary for Puerto Rico in order to get shattered hospitals back to a level of bare functionality, construct tent cities and get power generators humming.

Further estimates have put the restoration of power at six months.

And we thought we had it bad when “Snowmageddon” knocked out power for a fews days here in 2010. Communications within Puerto Rico is threadbare or nonexistent, dams are threatened, potable water is at a premium, its infrastructure has been laid to waste and supplies are slow in arriving. Some observers believe it will soon slide into the realm of a full-blown huminitarian crisis and, at the very least, set the island back 20 or 30 years.

By the end of last week, the Trump administration was being criticized for a dilatory response, even as it received relatively solid marks for its response to the hurricanes that hammered Florida and Texas. Some of the president’s critics suggested that he was slow off the mark because he either wasn’t aware that Puerto Ricans were U.S. citizens or, even worse, he was disinterested because the island’s inhabitants are Spanish-speaking and have no say in presidential elections.

Some of President Trump’s detractors also suggested that he was too engrossed in his manufactured, culture-war skirmish about NFL players taking a knee during the national anthem to devote his full attention to the plight of Puerto Rico. If so, he had some accomplices in the media, since, by some estimates, network news broadcasts were devoting a fourfold amount of time to the NFL fracas last weekend than the ruins of Puerto Rico.

A presidential trip to Puerto Rico is apparently on tap for this week, and Thursday Trump agreed to waive a century-old law, the Jones Act, requiring goods being shipped from one port to another in the United States be carried by American-made and operated vessels.

Julio Ricardo Varela, the co-host of the In the Thick podcast, pointed out in The Washington Post that the United States “may not like to see itself as the type of nation that has colonies, but if you’re not treating Puerto Rico and its American citizens the same way as you treat states and theirs, that’s the only explanation. The island always struggles to get federal aid for natural disasters that flows virtually automatically to people on the mainland. Maria is the worst example, but it’s hardly the first.”

Puerto Rico has many long-running problems, from a sluggish economy to a mountain of debt. But stitching the island back together after Maria may be the most daunting challenge of all. It will need all the help from Washington, D.C., it can get.