The New Yorker Radio Hour - When Snow Came to San Juan

Episode Date: December 21, 2021

For several years in the early nineteen-fifties, Puerto Rico received snow, right around Christmas. Children in San Juan rode a sled and had a giant snowball fight in the tropical weather. It wasn’t a miracle, or a meteorological outlier. The snow was a gift from San Juan’s longtime mayor, Felisa Rincón de Gautier, who had fallen in love with snow during her years in New York. It was delivered by Eastern Airlines, which milked the publicity for all it was worth. A young New Hampshire girl escorted one delivery, wearing a hat and a cable-knit sweater. The snow didn’t cost Puerto Rico anything, but it certainly came with strings attached. At a time when the independence movement was being harshly suppressed, in favor of a continued colonial relationship with the United States, the fetishization of the northern “white Christmas” reads to some as a gesture of cultural imperialism that has never quite ended. And even recently—as the island still faces routine blackouts of its electrical grid, years after Hurricane Maria—the mayor of a small town proposed building an ice-skating rink. WNYC’s Alana Casanova-Burgess reports on why the snow came, and what it meant to Puerto Ricans.  Our story was produced in collaboration with “La Brega,” from WNYC Studios and Futuro Studios. New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. The way things are going on this planet, I've got to wonder if one day people will have to take their kids to Barrow, Alaska, or Greenland, in order to see a white Christmas. Somewhere north of the Arctic Circle. But since the beginning, Christians, all over the world, world have managed to celebrate the holiday without sleigh bells and without snowmen. Alana Casanova Burgess is the host of La Brega, and she brings us a story about a very unusual holiday occurrence, not quite a miracle, but close. For several years in the early 1950s, Puerto Rico

received snow right around Christmas. Alana spoke to people who saw it with their own eyes. 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. I thought that it was almost impossible for me to have seen snow. But at that time, it was something that came from the moon, something strange, you know, like going to Mars, something out of the imagination. 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. From watching movies, I know snow was white, but I had no idea of what cold was because I 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 starts to melt. And it came. real fluffy snow, cold and fresh from the slopes of the northeast,

brought to a city park for a snowball fight. I simply enjoy myself, had a snow fight with my friends, something that we knew he would never see again, because that's a one-shot deal. 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.

Magnificent, magnificent. Maybe there was a subliminal message there, which I begin to understand at the tail end of my life. If you've read 100 years of solitude by Gabriel Garcia-Marquez, maybe the snow in the tropics sounds familiar. The first sentence is one of those iconic lines in literature. Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Wendia 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 learn 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. And here in the real world, Macondo is shorthand for any surreal place, where the unexplained is routine.

A crazy place where the most impossible things can happen, and people get used to it, and they don't even get affected by it. Ignacio is a defense attorney and political commentator based in Puerto Rico, which, as it happens, people call Macondo all the time. You know, we saw a flying saucer land right down 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. 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. And 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 U.S. There are people in power who are responsible, who make decisions that affect people's lives. So even though we never learn how the block of ice came to Makondo, I can tell you how snow came to San Juan, and who brought it there?

My population is about more than half a million. Half a million people, just in the city of San Juan. In San Juan, San Juan, which is composed, the whole San Juan. This is Felisa Rincond de Gautier, known in Puerto Rico as Doña Fela, or Doña Felisa. She was mayor of San Juan for 23 years. starting in 1946, and 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 health care in the city, as she told WNYC during a visit to New York in 1957.

The physical facilities are not as good as I want to, and I am working for the plans for a new hospital. But if she was a 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. Like a queen and imagine in a poor country, when you dress like that, you stand. out.

Ignacio remembers her vividly. People want to be like her. And she played that role all the way till she became extremely old and retired. She was a very elegant woman. Yilda Rodriguez was Donia Fela's assistant for 20 years. She's 96 now. And we connected in a shaky zoom

just after a blackout in San Juan. She says the mayor was extraordinary, incomparable. Ilda kept Doña Fela's calendar and organized official trips. She remembers the mayor going to John F. Kennedy's inauguration. But 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. 400 delegates, only three were women.

And Ilda says that Doniafellé, Fela would be the keynote speaker. When they arrived, the executive approached Ilda with a message. The head of Eastern Airlines would like to thank the mayor for coming, with a gift. Maybe not, would Dona Fela like a watch? Absolutely not, Ilda said. The mayor did not accept gifts. After the speech, she was approached yet again.

Give her only flowers, nothing more. But she told the mayor, look, this Eastern Airlines guy is being very persistent. Donia 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. As we talk to me As we talked on the zoom, I could see I

go to the zoom, I could see Ilda 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. Ilda says she'll never forget the look on the man's face when he heard the request. That was a Saturday.

They got back to Puerto Rico on Sunday, and by Wednesday, Eastern Airlines was calling. They would bring her snow. In San Juan, it was in all the local papers. My father was a public servant, and he said that the mayor of San Juan, Loña Feliza, was bringing snow to Puerto Rico. In 1952, that first year, the snow arrived in March. In future years, it came up. 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. A big gigantic, like the trailer truck size. It was full of snow. 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 Porta de Tierra, 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. It was unforgettable. Ignacio remembers he and his friends were so excited, they couldn't wait for the snow to be unloaded. 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 have no idea what cold was. So we have to learn the hard way. Oh, you learn fast. You learn fast.

And I had seen pictures and the movies and whatnot. Antonio Martorel was 11 or 12 when he made his first snowball from Donia 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 D.C. And he remembers that she, through the first snowball ever thrown in Puerto Rico. And thus began a pitched battle that made for some colds of the nation. And thus began a pitched battle that made for some cool. quirky news back in the States.

It's a race against time to enjoy this fond importation, for the mean temperature here is 73 degrees. So gather you snowballs while you may. The thermometer is too uncooperative. In this newsreel from 1955, you can see hundreds of kids packed together with a flurry of white being hurled at short range. A snowball fight to end all snowball fights for 10,000 youngsters seeing this fleecy stuff for the first time. The snowball fight isn't trench warfare. It's more hand-to-hand combat. Men with shovels spread the snow on the ground. A boy in short sleeves zooms by on a sled. Donia 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.

To San Juan Puerto Rico from New Hampshire's White Mountains comes 12-year-old Nancy. The Snow Princess. Nancy is bringing to this Torrid's own Commonwealth of commodity unknown here, but plentiful in Nancy's home state. The snow princess comes down the airplane steps in a cable-knit sweater and a winter

hat. Donia 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? Yeah, I did.

I eat it. It was ice, you know, a big surprise. In Puerto Rico, we put flavor to the piraigua. The piraigua, which is a cone of ice. With a syrup, with a sugary flavor on top of it, and it's delicious. And it didn't taste like my piraigua. It tastes like nothing, like water, which is what it is. What's the fuss?

There's nothing to it. It tastes like nothing. Ignacio recalls the delight of the snow lasting hours. And so does Yilda, but not Antonio. Because it melted right away, melted right away. Didn't have much time to enjoy it. I think it was about all together, about 10 minutes. That was it.

He remembers all the kids showed up wearing white. And as the snow melted, everything turned to mud, and the illusion melted in their hands. We saw that the dream turned into a nightmare, that the snow melted into mud. That's the artist Antonio Marterell, speaking with WNYC's Alana Casanova Burgess. Our story continues in a moment. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remenick.

We'll continue now with a story of how snow came to San Juan Puerto Rico in the 1950s. A gift from the city's mayor and delivered by Eastern Airlines, which milked the publicity for all it was worth. It didn't cost the people of Puerto Rico much at all. You could say the snow came with other strings attached, though. WNYC's Alana Casanova Burgess picks up our story. Even before the snow arrived, there was plenty of Christmas magic in San Juan. Street vendors would throw an orange peel up in the air. The shape it made on the ground would be like a love spell.

that letter would be your boyfriend or your girlfriend or the one you were supposed to marry. It was great. And the holidays in Puerto Rico last from Thanksgiving through Christmas, then through Three Kings Day and all the way to San Sebastian, a festival in late January. We felt privilege in that way, and we still do, because we have not only one Christmas, we have two. But by the early 1950s, hundreds of thousands of Puerto Ricans had moved to the same. States, part of a massive wave of migration. So Antonio and many other kids on the island were

already getting reports from cousins about the glories 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. And yet, to Antonio, it still felt like there was a message about living in the colony, that it was a second-class Christmas, even down to the weather. You know, the leaves didn't change. It was a little cooler than the rest of the year, but not that much. So we did feel that it wasn't a privilege to have this tropical climate. We felt really underprivileged.

But over the decades, Antonio came to see the snow not simply as a wondrous discovery. Oh, absolutely, assimilation. But as an attempt at assimilation. It was the sunno of colonized, a sign that being Puerto Rican was to be less than, what he calls the colonized mind. 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 a question of privilege, be true or imagined. But 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 U.S. 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 an Estado Libre Associado, a free associated state, which, yeah, 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. But Ilda, her secretary, says the snow wasn't about that.

It wasn't a political manipulation. It was just that the mayor loved snow. Antonio says, yeah, but... Our politicians, or at least most of them, are colonized themselves, more so even than most people. 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. The arrival of the snow, this extravagant fantasy come to life, was, yet another sign of the might and wealth of the U.S.

And 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 tore across 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. And then, just last month, there was a headline that seemed ripped from Macondo. The mayor of Utoado, 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. When there's another blackout, and it usually happens in the middle of the night, so you wake up because you're sweating. Anna Teresa Toro is a journalist and novelist based in Puerto Rico. 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, well, a lot of fresh towels with a little bit of water. And then we wait for the morning because usually you cannot sleep anymore.

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? 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. And there's a feeling of you feel defeated because you start thinking things that I don't want to think.

Why do I even bother? and then you start looking around and you realize that the world, it kept moving, and you feel left behind. And of course, you could say, well, I could leave. Anna 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 number, Makondo, 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. And when nothing works, people leave. Puerto Rico has lost over 10% of its population in the past 10 years. And 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 bag of of ice. Anyone from Puerto Rico that went through Hurricane Maria will have different. Relationship with ice, it changed radically. So maybe I was eight hours waiting for the ice. And it lasted three or four.

In a Caribbean climate, there's nothing more delicious than the feeling of cold, even the memory of cold. And so, there's a different story about snow in Puerto Rico that has stayed with Anna 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 Americas, 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. Look at the palm trees, full of fake snow. This is so ridiculous. You have fake snow in here, and this is stupid. And why are people coming to see this? Oh, my God. And there was this woman who came from Umakau that's like an hour or so a little bit less than an hour to San Juan. And she was with her two kids.

And I was like, look at this woman. How could she come from Macau with her two girls? They are supposed to be in school. And to see the fake snow. How could people do this? 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 have told their cousins about the beautiful snow at Christmas. In the 70s, many of them moved back to the island and brought their U.S.-born kids with them.

And 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. And every time I remember that, I get goosebumps. There's a saying that Puerto Ricans are Puerto Rican wherever we are, even if we're born on the moon. As long as people have roots in Puerto Rico, Anna Teresa says, as long as there's a love there. Now, every time I go to Plaza Las Americas, I even stay a little bit. I look at the fake snow with tenderness, with emotions. 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. That's Anna Teresa Toro talking with Alana Casanova Burgess. Alana is the host of Labrega from WNYC Studios and Futura Media. If you missed any of today's episode, remember, don't worry, you can find The New Yorker Radio Hour anywhere that fine podcasts are sold. I'm David Remnick. Thanks for joining me. And have a wonderful holiday. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.

Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garbus of Tune Arts. This episode was produced by Alex Barron, Emily, Boutin, Ave Carrillo, Cala Leah, David Krasnow, Gauphin and Putubuele, Louis Mitchell, Michelle Moses, and Stephen Valentino. With additional help this week from Jenny Lawton,

Joe Plourd, and Victor Ramos, an additional scoring by L.D. Brown of Grey Reverend. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherina Endowment Fund.