Hurricane Maria lifted a “veil from our eyes”, said Carmen Yulín Cruz, her broad smile and warm manner belying the steely edge to her voice. “We are awake to our inequity – and our inequality,” the mayor of Puerto Rico’s capital city of San Juan told the Guardian on a recent visit to a political summit in Baltimore.
The storm in September plunged Puerto Rico into darkness and tainted the drinking water. Homes were flooded, crushed or swept away. Debris blanketed the streets and people died, while aid delivery was slow to reach its shores.
Six months later, the island, a commonwealth of the US, is struggling. Tens of thousands of Puerto Ricans still lack access to power, water and permanent shelter. The rate of suicide has climbed. Meanwhile, officials there warn of an exodus of Puerto Ricans abandoning the island for the mainland.
Cruz, who rose to prominence as an unsparing critic of the Trump administration in the hours after Maria made landfall, said the halting and, in her view, neglectful federal response to the crushing devastation on Puerto Rico was a glaring reminder of the island’s “status as a US territory”.
Despite her fighting words during the immediate crisis and her calm determination to get social justice for Puerto Rico now, she has been changed forever by the storm, she said.
In the storm’s aftermath, Cruz positioned herself as a leading voice of the Puerto Rican people. When then acting secretary of homeland security Elaine Duke declared the island was a “good news story” in terms of the progress that had been made on the island Cruz fired back during an interview on CNN: “Damn it, this is not a good news story.”
Her brusque criticism of the administration won her support among those on the island – as well as a number of detractors, including one at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Donald Trump decried Cruz’s “poor leadership” and disparaged her as “nasty”, an epithet he once directed at Hillary Clinton.
“I’m not the same person I was on 20 September of last year. None of us are,” Cruz said. “We’ve all changed. We look at life with different eyes. I presume in a way we’re better because we’re also hardened.”
Born in San Juan in 1963, Cruz demonstrated talent and political ambition from a young age, first as president of her high school student council and then as a representative at a presidential youth summit. Like many Puerto Ricans, Cruz left the island to pursue her studies in the mainland US, where she earned a bachelor’s degree in political science from Boston University and a master’s in public management and policy at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh.
Cruz was born in San Juan in 1963. She studied and worked for Corporate America on the US mainland in her youth, before returning to Puerto Rico and getting closer to politics. She began working for Sila María Calderón, the mayor of San Juan, who would later become governor.
Then, in 2012, Cruz ran for mayor. She was late to enter the race and few knew her name, much less gave her a chance of winning. She advocated for gender equality, LGBT rights, disabled rights and a municipal plan for universal healthcare. That November, she defeated a three-term incumbent to become San Juan’s third female mayor. She won re-election in 2016.
In the wake of the hurricane, Cruz parried speculation about whether she has ambition for higher office, such as the governorship. But lately she has been less dismissive.
In an interview with Radio Isla this week, Cruz said her name will be on “a ballot” in 2020, though she would not say if she would run for a third-term as mayor or seek the governorship.
Cruz disagrees with Puerto Rican officials who have accused the Trump administration of neglecting the island because it does not appear on the electoral map.
“One word: Katrina,” she said, implying that the Bush administration’s response to the 2005 storm that flooded New Orleans and left hundreds of people dead showed the US government could just as easily ignore the needs of a state.
Long before Maria made landfall, Puerto Rico was mired in economic crisis. In May of last year, the island, crushed by more than $70bn in public debt, filed for bankruptcy.
In November, the island’s governor asked Congress to approve $94.4bn in disaster relief to rebuild the island, strengthen its infrastructure and restore its power grid. US lawmakers have so far appropriated only a fraction of that request.
Cruz has returned to Washington multiple times in the past few months to brief lawmakers on the humanitarian situation in Puerto Rico and urge Congress to provide the island with more relief.
She supports a so-called “Marshall plan” for the island, introduced by progressive senators Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren and Kirsten Gillibrand, that would help Puerto Rico pay off its debt and provide additional funding for healthcare, transportation and education.
Earlier this month, Cruz spoke on a panel at the Congressional Progressive Caucus strategy summit in Baltimore alongside New York congresswoman Nydia Velázquez, a Democrat who was born in Puerto Rico, and Stacey Plaskett, the Virgin Island’s delegate to Congress.
“I’m not known for being politically correct,” Cruz teased the audience, taking a seat onstage. “I’m just going to say two things about President Trump,” she continued, drawing laughs. “The American people have a big heart. Trump has a big mouth.”
She lashed out again at Trump for the “unfathomable action of throwing paper towels at us” and for “tweeting from a golf course in Mar-a-Lago” while Puerto Ricans suffered.
But the message she wanted to impart to the room: “We are still dying. Not in the great numbers like they were before, but we are dying. Those deaths cannot be forgotten. Those lives cannot just flicker and not be remembered. So help us.”
The White House has defended its handling of the disaster, and Trump rated his administration’s response 10 out of 10.
Cruz said, advocating for the plan: “This is not the first time the US looks at a country that has debt and forgives it. This is not the first time that the US says it is in our best interest to make sure that things go this way and not the other. Puerto Rico deserves no less.” “If the US did that in world war two, why wouldn’t they do it for a country that they made citizens of the US in 1917?”
As the recovery continues in the months and years ahead, Cruz does not hesitate to say she will speak out when necessary and leverage her national platform to crusade for the people of Puerto Rico.
“I didn’t do anything special,” Cruz said. “I did what had to be done. And I would do it again and again.”