After the Celebrities Leave

Vieques, a tiny Caribbean island with more tree frogs than traffic lights, has attracted an extraordinary share of the world spotlight in the last several months. Environmental attorney Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Jacqueline Jackson, wife of the Rev. Jesse Jackson, have gone to jail for protesting the Navy's decades of bombing exercises on the island. The Rev. Al Sharpton has gone to jail and gone hungry over it. And a slew of celebrities who have never set foot on the island, from Ricky Martin to Jose Feliciano, have publicly and indignantly declared that the Navy should get out of Vieques.

Now, two years after a Vieques civilian security guard named David Sanes Rodriguez died in the explosions of two misguided bombs, it looks like Vieques will finally be rid of the U.S. military--by 2003, or sooner, depending on the outcome of a referendum today.

What the island's publicity-savvy supporters don't seem to realize is that the Navy's departure will not singlehandedly solve Vieques' problems. If they are really taking Vieques and its issues as seriously as they say they are, they should be reading Puerto Rican history books in their jail cells instead of plotting campaign strategies and delivering sound bites to an accommodating media.

Vieques is one of the poorest municipalities in Puerto Rico. Per-capita income is $3,000 a year, and unemployment is estimated to be as high as 50% because there is no industry, save for small-scale tourism. A General Electric Co. manufacturing plant, for years the island's top employer, now employs fewer than 100 workers. The island is also a key conduit for Greater Antilles drug dealers, who funnel cocaine and heroin by ferry or prop plane over to San Juan and then on to the U.S. mainland.

From the many editorials in U.S. newspapers calling for the Navy's exit from Vieques, one would conclude the island's principal town of Isabel Segunda is the equivalent of a war-torn Beirut, with locals ducking for shelter from ear-splitting noises and donning gas masks at a moment's notice. In truth, Vieques is as close as it gets to a pre-Club Med Caribbean, with endless rolling hills that recall Central California's cattle country, two-dollar taxi rides and inns where guests may have to step around giant toads and grazing horses to check in. From Esperanza, the laidback tourist strip on the south-central part of the island, the bombing exercises sound like echoes of thunder.