Late every summer, there’s a breadfruit festival in Humacao, a Puerto Rican town not far from where Hurricane Maria made landfall on September 20, 2017. The leftist journalist Naomi Klein describes the scene when she visited, months after the storm struck: “Women who usually do the cooking for the festival came together, pooled whatever food they could find, and made hot, healthy meals for about 400 people a day. Day after day. Week after week. Month after month. They are doing it still.”
Maria struck Puerto Rico with sustained 175 mph winds, damaging half a million dwellings and decimating the island’s electrical grid and cellphone infrastructure. About 80 percent of the harvest was lost. After initially claiming the storm killed 64 people, the government posted a preliminary report online in July acknowledging that the death count was much higher. The official estimate is now 2,975.
In her brief book The Battle for Paradise, Klein describes several community-driven recovery efforts that sprouted after the disaster—what she calls “the miracles Puerto Ricans have been quietly pulling off while their government fails them,” writes Tate Watkins in his review.
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