[music]

Brooke Gladstone: This is On the media's midweek podcast. I'm Brooke Gladstone. You may remember that around this time last year, we broadcast a series of stories about Puerto Rico. The show name La Brega, or in English, The struggle is hosted by former OTM producer Alana Casanova-Burgess. This winter, she produced another story in the series about an unusual winter occurrence. For several years in the early 1950s, Puerto Rico received snow right around Christmas. Here's Alana.

Alana Casanova-Burgess: Many years later, as he sat for an interview, Ignacio Rivera was to remember that distant morning when his father took him to discover snow in San Juan.

Ignacio: I thought that it was almost impossible for me to have seen snow. At that time it was something that came from the moon. Something strange, like going to Mars. Something out of the imagination.

Alana: It had been announced in all the newspapers, snow was coming. It was the early 1950s. Ignacio was around eight years old, living with his parents in Barrio Obrero.

Ignacio: From watching movies, I know snow was white, but I had no idea what cold was because I had never been exposed to under 70 degrees in my life. You don't know how it falls, how it accumulates, how it turns into ice once it start to melt.

Alana: It came, real fluffy snow. Cold and fresh from the slopes of the northeast, brought to a city park for a snowball fight.

Ignacio: I simply enjoyed myself, had a snow fight with my friends. Something that we knew we would never see again because that's a one-shot deal.

Alana: It actually wasn't a one-shot deal. For four years in a row, kids in Puerto Rico were invited to the snowball fight in the tropics. To see snowmen assembled under palm trees. For a brief moment in the early 1950s, it was a miracle that kept happening.

Ignacio: Magnificent, magnificent. Maybe it was a subliminal message there, which I begin to understand at the tail end of my life.

Alana: From WNYC Studios and Futuro Studios, I'm Alana Casanova-Burgess, and this is a special holiday installment of La Brega. In this episode, snow in the tropics. If you've read One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez, maybe all of this sounds familiar. The first sentence is one of those iconic lines in literature. Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice. This happens in Macondo, a fictional town somewhere in the Caribbean. We never learned exactly how the ice got there, or where it came from, or how long it lasted in the tropical heat.

In the novel, the ice is a symbol for a kind of wondrous progress, but also for something existing where it doesn't belong. A kind of dark magic. In here in the real world, Macondo is shorthand for any surreal place. Where the unexplained is routine.

Ignacio: [unintelligible 00:03:40] place where the most impossible things can happen, and people get used to it, and they don't even get affected by it.

Alana: Ignacio is a defense attorney and political commentator based in Puerto Rico, which as it happens, people call Macondo all the time.

Ignacio: If we saw flying saucer land right now in San Juan, half of the people wouldn't even blink an eye because we're used to the extreme economic and social collapse of the country.

Alana: In Puerto Rico, potholes are so big that people put Christmas trees in them to warn other drivers. Shuttered school buildings are taken over by vegetation as though by force, but it's not quite true that nobody blinks an eye when these kinds of things happen. The absurdity is maddening, frustrating, stifling, there are protests, and a level of austerity that nobody can get used to. Unlike in the fictional Macondo, where bizarre things happen for no reason, Puerto Rico's weirdness is often a function of a broken government, and of the colonial relationship with the US. There are people in power who are responsible, who make decisions that affect people's lives.

Even though we never learn how the block of ice came to Macondo, I can tell you how snow came to San Juan, and who brought it there.

Felisa Rincón de Gautier: My population is about more than half a million.

?Speaker 1: Half a million people just in the city of San Juan?

Felisa: In San Juan [unintelligible 00:05:17] which is composed the whole of San Juan.

Alana: This is Felisa Rincón de Gautier, known in Puerto Rico as Doña Fela or Doña Felisa. She was mayor of San Juan for 23 years, starting in 1946. She was considered an incredibly effective politician. For example, she developed a kind of preschool system that was the model for the head start program in the states. She also expanded healthcare in the city, as she told WNYC during a visit to New York in 1957.

Felisa: I'm working on a new hospital. I have two hospitals, but the physical facilities are not as a good as I want to, and I'm working for the plan for a new hospital.

Alana: If she was populist, she didn't look it. She had studied fashion design in New York, and owned a clothing boutique in old San Juan before running for office. She wore strings of pearls and elaborate gowns. Her long hair, first blonde later gray was braided and coiled on top of her head. Defying gravity and also humidity. She looked like an older Marie Antoinette if Marie Antoinette also wore sunglasses.

Ignacio: The queen and imagining a poor country when you dress like that, you stand out.

Alana: Ignacio remembers her vividly.

Ignacio: People want to be like her. She played that role all the way until she became extremely old and retired. She was a very elegant woman.

Alana: Hilda Jimenez was Doña Felisa's assistant for 20 years. She's 96 now, and we connected in a shaky Zoom just after a blackout in San Juan.

Hilda: [Spanish language]

Alana: She says the mayor was extraordinary, incomparable. Hilda kept Doña Fela's calendar and organized official trips. She remembers the mayor going to John F. Kennedy's inauguration. There was one invitation that would cement the mayor's legacy. It was 1952, and an executive from Eastern Airlines asked if she'd come to a big company conference in Florida.

Hilda: [Spanish language]

Alana: 400 delegates, only three were women. Hilda says that Doña Fela would the keynote speaker. When they arrived, the executive approached Hilda with a message. The head of Eastern Airlines would like to thank the mayor for coming with a gift.

Hilda: [Spanish language]

Alana: Maybe a watch? Would Doña Fela like a watch? Absolutely not, Hilda said. The mayor did not accept gifts. After the speech, she was approached yet again.

Hilda: [Spanish language]

Alana: What does the mayor want? What gift would she accept?

Hilda: [Spanish language]

Alana: Give her only flowers, nothing more. She told the mayor, "Look, this Eastern Airlines guy is being very persistent." Doña Fela said, she'd think about it. At breakfast the next morning, she had a request, snow. She wanted him to figure out how to bring snow to the Caribbean.

Hilda: [Spanish language]

Alana: As we talked on the Zoom, I could see Hilda put her hands up to her face, mimicking Doña Fela holding a ball of imaginary snow. Sucking on the cold. The mayor remembered that joy from living in New York. I want you to take snow to my kids, she said. Hilda says, she'll never forget the look on the man's face when he heard the request.

Hilda: [Spanish language]

Alana: That was a Saturday. They got back to Puerto Rico on Sunday, and by Wednesday, Eastern Airlines was calling. They would bring her snow. Coming up after the break, a snowball fight. This is La Brega. We're back. This is La Brega. I'm Alana Casanova-Burgess. In San Juan, it was in all the local papers.

Ignacio: My father was a public servant, and he said that the mayor of San Juan, Doña Felisa was bringing snow to Puerto Rico.

Alana: In 1952 that first year, the snow arrived in March. In future years, it came on Three Kings Day, January 6th at the height of the holiday season. Here's how it happened in 1953 according to one local paper. In Pico Peak, Vermont two tons of snow was prepared for its journey. An article in the Rutland Daily Herald claimed it would be packed by local kids as a gift for the children in San Juan, snow untouched by adult hands.

The snow went into insulated bags that could hold 10,000 snowballs, no mention of how that calculation was made, and a snowman in parts ready for assembly. Then the bags went into a refrigerated truck bound for a New York airport, where they were loaded onto a four-engine constellation airplane packed into a kind of aluminum canoe.

Ignacio: A big gigantic like the trailer truck size. It was full of snow.

Alana: It was attached to the bottom of the plane, a belly boat. Once it arrived in San Juan, that canoe was put on a trailer and driven just a few minutes to [unintelligible 00:11:14], a strip of land that connects the peninsula of Old San Juan to the rest of the city. Thousands went to a park there to receive it.

Ignacio: [Spanish language]

Alana: It was unforgettable.

Ignacio: [Spanish language]

Alana: Ignacio remembers he and his friends were so excited. They couldn't wait for the snow to be unloaded.

Ignacio: I was not that disciplined, so a bunch of my friends jumped inside the container. We had a snow fight with the guys outside. I began to realize that tennis shoes are not the best thing to be stepping on snow because they tend to get very cold but I didn't-- I have no idea what cold was, so we had to learn the hard way.

Antonio: Oh, you learn fast, and I had seen pictures and the movie and whatnot.

Alana: Antonio [unintelligible 00:12:05] was 11 or 12 when he made his first snowball from Doña Fela's snow. He grew up to be one of Puerto Rico's most famous living artists. His portrait of Doña Fela is part of the collection in the national portrait gallery in DC. He remembers that she threw the first snowball ever thrown in Puerto Rico.

Antonio: [Spanish language]

Alana: This began a pitched battle that made for some quirky news back in the states.

?Speaker 2: It's a race against time to enjoy this fun importation for the mean temperature here is 73 degrees. Gather your snowballs while you may. The thermometer is too uncooperative.

Alana: In this newsreel from 1955, you can see hundreds of kids packed together with a flurry of white being hurled at short range.

?Speaker 2: A snowball fight to end all snowball fights for 10,000 youngsters seeing this fleecy stuff for the first time.

Alana: The snowball fight isn't trench warfare. It's more a hand-to-hand combat, men with shovels spread the snow on the ground. A boy in short sleeves zooms by on a sled. Doña Fela is tossing it into the air. Her updo perfectly intact, enjoying herself, but the star of the newsreel is not Puerto Rican at all. She's a tiny ambassador for this white Christmas.

?Speaker 2: To San Juan Puerto Rico from new Hampshire's white mountains comes 12-year-old, Nancy Conway. The snow princess Nancy is bringing to this torrid zone Commonwealth a commodity unknown here, but plentiful in Nancy's home state. Transported by airplane [unintelligible 00:13:51]

Alana: The snow princess comes down the airplane steps in a cable knit sweater and a winter hat. Doña Fela and a couple of kids in traditional costumes greet her. Watching it you wonder how much snow is melting during all that pomp and circumstance. Do you remember trying to taste it?

Ignacio: Yes, I did. It was ice a big surprise in Puerto Rico. We put flavor to the [Spanish language], which is a cone of ice.

Antonio: With a syrup, with a sugary flavor on top of it, and it's delicious.

Ignacio: It didn't taste like my [Spanish language], but it tasted like nothing like water, which is what it is.

Antonio: What's the [unintelligible 00:14:32] There's nothing to, tastes like nothing.

Alana: Ignacio recalls the delight of the snow lasting hours, and so does Hilda, but not Antonio.

Antonio: Because it melted right away. Didn't have much time to enjoy it. I think it was about all together about 10 minutes. That was it.

Alana: He remembers all the kids showed up wearing white.

Antonio: [Spanish language]

Alana: As the snow melted, everything turned to mud and the illusion melted in their hands.

Antonio: We saw that the dream turned into a nightmare that the snow melted into mud, but the overall view was this wonder thing. This woman brought snow, made the impossible possible. The dream come true.

Alana: The thing is, there was plenty of Christmas magic in San Juan already, even without snow. Street vendors would throw an orange peel up in the air. The shape it made on the ground would be like a love spell.

Antonio: That letter would be your boyfriend or your girlfriend or the one you were supposed to marry. It was great.

Alana: The holidays in Puerto Rico last from Thanksgiving through Christmas, then through Three Kings Day, and all the way to San [unintelligible 00:16:19], a festival in late January.

Antonio: We felt privileged in that way, and we still do because we have not only one [unintelligible 00:16:27], we have two.

Alana: By the early 1950s, hundreds of thousands of Puerto Ricans had moved to the states. Part of a massive wave of migration. Antonio and many other kids on the island were already getting reports from cousins about the glorious of American Christmas. Of course, those reports were often exaggerations. Nobody wants to tell their family that they're struggling in some far away frigid city. Yet to Antonio, it still felt like there was a message about living in the colony, but it was a second class Christmas, even down to the weather

Antonio: Yes. The [unintelligible 00:17:03] change. It was a little cooler than the rest of the year but not that much. We did feel that it wasn't a privilege to have this tropical climate. We felt really underprivileged.

Alana: Over the decades, Antonio came to see the snow, not simply as a wonderous discovery-

Antonio: [Spanish language]

Alana: -but as an attempt at assimilation.

Antonio: [Spanish language]

Alana: A sign that being Puerto Rican was to be less than, what he calls the colonized mind.

Antonio: Not only snow was better than sunshine, but also English was better than Spanish, being white and blonde was better than being dark and Puerto Rican, and being in the north was better than being in the south. Of course, it all had to do with question of privilege, be it true or imagined. The colonized world is very polarized, is either this or that. Of course, you always picture yourself in the bottom striving to get to the top.

Alana: All of this wasn't only a matter of culture or psychology. It was politics and it was brutal. In the early '50s, there were severe violent clashes between the independence movement and the government. Wheels were in motion to make closer ties with the US seem like the best option, and the snow was literally blanketing over that tension. The first year the snow came, 1952 was critical. It happened in late March, just a few weeks after Puerto Ricans approved a new constitution that would change ever so slightly their relationship with the United States. Puerto Rico would be rebranded as a Commonwealth or a [Spanish language]. A free associated state, which doesn't mean much.

Today there's widespread understanding that it's not the same as self-government. Puerto Rico is still a United States colony, regardless of the rebranding and Doña Felisa supported it. Hilda, her secretary says the snow wasn't about that. It wasn't a political manipulation. It was just that the mayor loved snow, relished that memory from when she lived in New York of holding a snowball to her mouth sucking in the cold, she wanted the kids in Puerto Rico to experience it, and if they couldn't afford to go to snow, she would bring snow to them. Antonio says, Yes, but--

Antonio: All politicians, at least most of them are colonized themselves more so even than most people.

Alana: It's worth remembering that Puerto Rico in the 1950s was a place of intense poverty. It still is. San Juan had vast slums with no running water against the backdrop of those urgent issues, it's hard not to see snow as a corporate stunt.

Antonio: Well, politics is all about fantasy. They are artists in their own Machiavellian way. They try to turn reality into something else for their purposes, for their convenience. I've seen that happen over and over again. It's happening now.

Alana: The arrival of the snow, this extravagant fantasy come to life, was yet another sign of the might and wealth of the US. It furthered this promise that staying close to the empire would lift Puerto Rico out of poverty, but 70 years later, that's still not the case. When hurricane Maria Torah crossed the island, it knocked out the entire electric grid. Four years later, there are still blackouts constantly. The system was recently privatized and the cost of energy is going up while the service is getting worse. Then just last month, there was a headline that seemed ripped from Macondo.

The mayor of Utuado a town in the lush mountains in the center of the island was going to use $100,000 of COVID-19 aid for the creation of an ice skating rink, at a time when electricity is at such a premium and people are struggling to keep their insulin refrigerated.

Ana Teresa Toro: When there's another blackout, and it usually happens in the middle of the night so you wake up because you are sweating.

Ana: Ana Teresa Toro is a journalist, a novelist based in Puerto Rico.

Ana: The first thing I do is to take off my baby's pajamas because he's sweating even more than me. I will put a little bit of [Spanish language] fresh towels with a little bit of water. Then we wait for the morning because usually, you cannot sleep anymore.

Alana: She lies awake, her mind turning over the questions, will daycare be canceled? Did she buy too much food? The last time she went to the supermarket, will it rot?

Ana: Is this going to last a few hours or is this going to last a few days? There's uncertainty. Everything in your work, week goes off the rails. There's a feeling of you feel defeated because you start thinking things that I don't want to think, and things like nothing works here so why am I even trying? Why do I even bother? Then you start looking around and you realize that the world, it kept moving and you feel left behind. Of course, you could say, well, I could leave.

Alana: Ana Teresa lived for six months without electricity after the hurricane. Some people like my aunt lived a whole year without it. I remember visiting her and thinking about another part of 100 years of solitude. The residents of Macondo, the fictional Macondo are afflicted with insomnia and they all begin to forget the names for things, so they have to label objects with notes. Like this is a chair, it is for sitting. This is the cow, you must milk her every morning. I looked around my aunt's home and saw the oscillating fan useless without electricity. This is a fan. It used to keep us cool. This is a television. It used to show us movies. This is a light switch.

This is a refrigerator, a washing machine, a cell phone charger, a lamp, and on and on and on. When nothing works, people leave. Puerto Rico has lost over 10% of its population in the past 10 years. People wonder openly in newspapers on the radio, on Twitter, if the government is actively trying to make life impossible for Puerto Ricans? If rich people from the United States are welcome to pay less in taxes and develop the Island's coastline while everyone else is standing in line waiting to buy bags of ice.

Ana: Anyone from Puerto Rico that went through hurricane Maria will have different relationship with ice. It changed radically. Maybe I was eight hours waiting for the ice and it lasted three or four because if I got to the ice at three o'clock, well, maybe it lasts a few hours to the middle of the night because it was so little ice, so small amount.

Alana: In a Caribbean climate, there's nothing more delicious than the feeling of cold, even the memory of cold. There's a different story about snow in Puerto Rico that has stayed with Ana Teresa. A story that has shaped her idea of what it means to be Puerto Rican. The big mall in San Juan is called Plaza Las Américas, and every Christmas it has this elaborate display of fake snow. Eight years ago, she went to write an article about it, and she had a pretty good idea of what she thought.

Ana: Look at the palm trees full of fake snow. This is so ridiculous to have fake snow in here, and this is stupid. Why are people coming to see this? Oh, my God. There was this woman who came from Humacao that's like an hour or so, a little be less than an hour to San Juan. She was with her two kids, and I was like, "Look at this woman, how could she come from Humacao with her two girls, they are supposed to be in school and to see the fake snow, how could people do this?"

Alana: The woman explained that she grew up in New York, the daughter of that generation of Puerto Ricans, who moved to the states in the '40s and '50s who would've told their cousins about the beautiful snow at Christmas. In the '70s, many of them moved back to the island and brought their US-born kids with them.

Ana: She told me, "Well, I have no money to take my daughters to New York to show them how was my Christmas, so this is the only chance I get to share with them, this very special memory of my childhood. Every time I remember that I get goosebumps."

Alana: There's a saying that Puerto Ricans are Puerto Rican, wherever we are. Even if we're born on the moon, it's a way to bind the enormous diaspora to the island. As long as people have roots in Puerto Rico, Ana Teresa says, as long as there's a love there.

Ana: Now, every time I go to Plaza Las Américas, I even stay a little bit. I look at the fake snow with tenderness, with emotion, because I remember that, yes, it's a spectacle. Yes, you could give it the colonial lens to read the experience, but also there are human stories behind that, that we have to respect and that we have to embrace as our own because Puerto Rican history has a lot of snow in it.

Brooke: Alana Casanova-Burgess is the host of La Brega. Just so you know, this episode and every episode is available in Spanish on the WNYC website. Join us this weekend for the big show wherein we explore best practices for journalists interviewing believers in the big lie. For those who say they are. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

[music]

 

Copyright © 2022 New York Public Radio. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use at www.wnyc.org for further information.

New York Public Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline, often by contractors. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of New York Public Radio’s programming is the audio record.