The Second Invasion of Culebra

Puerto Rico Update, February 2002

By Carmel Ruiz Marrero

From Claridad, 23 November 2001

In Culebra, the Puerto Rican island near Vieques that was used as a bombing range until 1975, the U.S. Navy left, but foreign millionaires — actually, billionaires — have taken their place. It is a second foreign occupation that serves as a warning for planning the future of Vieques.

Ariel Lugo, director of the International Institute of Tropical Forestry, and Culebra residents who were interviewed warned that the town is the object of an uncontrolled invasion of development, a true construction blitzkrieg that threatens to convert the island paradise into an ecological disaster zone unfit for human habitation.

The small island is full of luxurious mansions with satellite antennae, irrigated gardens, pools and controlled access. With each year that passes, the population of Culebra is less Puerto Rican and more foreign, and Spanish is becoming a secondary language. Most of the foreigners are from Europe, not the United States, including Swiss, Germans, and French.

Some of the new mansions are valued in the millions of dollars. One source assured us that some of the residents are not only millionaires, but billionaires, who only come to their palaces on Culebra for vacations a few weeks per year. The rest of the year there are custodians, gardeners and security guards occasionally patrolling the mansions.

The majority of these prosperous immigrants do not know Puerto Rico apart from Culebra, since they come and go from the island by private airplane or yacht, and have never been in the San Juan airport. For them, Vieques and Culebra are the Spanish Virgin Islands.

Yet more and more mansions and villas come. Heavy construction vehicles are visible all over, and the ferry from the big island barely makes a trip without carrying trucks full of landfill material.

The environmental impact of this urban explosion is monumental. The developers remove the earth’s skin and build without considering the topography, causing severe erosion problems. The soil ends up as sediment on the beaches, where it ruins the marshes and coral reefs. What is more, according to one source, those soils are contaminated with herbicides and other agro-chemicals, since some residents and landscape gardeners have no ecological awareness when they maintain their yards.

According to Lugo, the anti-erosion measures taken by builders are pathetic and laughable, in many cases applied too late when the damage is already done. With reason, he calls Culebra the fast track paradise.

All of this is happening on the watch of Puerto Rico’s Departments of Natural Resources and Tourism and the Planning Board. The federal authorities also share responsibility, since Culebra has a federal wildlife refuge that is endangered by uncontrolled development.

The environmentalists who have watched this destruction fear that Culebra cannot tolerate the situation for many more years or decades, or the island will become an arid land of rock with a ruined ecology. If that day comes, the wealthy foreigners will simply move somewhere else and leave in their memory abandoned palaces surrounded by weeds.

Some of those interviewed expressed concern that, if there is no preventive action, the same panorama will be repeated in Vieques once the Navy leaves there.