Why would anyone choose to live in Puerto Rico?

From the eastern Atlantic, the US looks boringly uniform. Yet Alaska is almost as different from Alabama as Turku is from Turkey. If you travel the length of the Mississippi, food, laws, customs and lingo change as surprisingly as along the Danube. Particularism is rife. In two counties in Vermont, there are warrants for the arrest of George W. Bush. In some parts of the South, you must step across a county line to evade laws against alcohol. In Indiana, where I live, every county sets its own time zone and you have to keep adjusting your watch on your way to Chicago.

In this land of anomalies, nowhere is odder than Puerto Rico. It is an ‘associated’ state, but not a state of the union. Natives are US citizens, with every constitutional right except the one that America most over-values: equal and unfettered suffrage. Puerto Ricans take part in presidential primaries but, unless they move to the mainland, cannot vote in general elections. The archipelago has one non-voting representative in Congress – which can override the autonomy of the legislature in San Juan. In official documents, the use of estado (which signifies ‘state’ in Spanish) to mean ‘commonwealth’ in English magnifies confusion. Cases abound of minor officials miscasting Puerto Ricans as foreigners.

This tissue of absurdities, which has enveloped Puerto Rico since Congress conceded devolution in 1952, does not seem to have done the islanders much good. Rich by hemispheric standards, they are on average the poorest people in the US. The political elite remains small, inbred and plutocratic. A yankee veneer hardly enhances the typically corrupt gleam of Caribbean politics. US bailouts kept the archipelago afloat during the past decade’s succession of bankruptcies, hurricanes, earthquakes and intractable political bust-ups, without even trying to boost stagnant demographics or reverse economic decline.