Francisco Alvarado is a writer in Miami.

ORLANDO—A few times a day, on no particular schedule, a plane pulls up to a gate at the airport here and disgorges a hundred and fifty or more exhausted, anxious, and very often hungry people. Only three hours before, they were among thousands of panicked storm victims, packed into a sweltering airport in San Juan, clamoring for an $800 seat on anything with wings that might ferry them away from the devastation left nine days ago by Hurricane Maria. Now, in the air-conditioned comfort of Concourse D, they are safe in a country that is technically their own, but they are not home.

The halting parade of evacuees that has passed through the Orlando airport over the past week—and through Miami’s airport, too—lacks the visual drama of earlier crises in the Caribbean, when oppression, natural disaster or plain desperation pushed Cubans and Haitians onto crude homemade rafts or into the holds of leaky fishing trawlers. But this is every bit an exodus of that order. The means of escape is not a harrowing ordeal, but what’s being left behind most certainly is. And those lucky enough to get out are not so exhausted that they can’t summon anger at the government officials who they feel paid them less heed than hurricane victims on the mainland.


When Roberto Marquez and his wife Lourdes arrived at Luis Muñoz Marín International Airport in San Juan around 5:30 a.m. on September 25, they found utter chaos. “There were a few thousand people already there,” the 53-year-old attorney said. “There was no power, no ventilation, no cell service and no security guards. Just airline employees sort of winging it.”

The couple had tried to leave Puerto Rico before Hurricane Maria slammed into the island five days earlier, but were unable to find available seats. After the storm with its 155-mile-per-hour winds passed, Marquez was able to reach his sister in Florida, who booked two tickets on a Southwest Airlines flight scheduled to depart on September 22. It was cancelled because the airport had not reopened. Two days later, when a few flights resumed, Marquez and his spouse drove to the airport. “We had to physically be there in order to get on a list for a flight on Monday,” he said. “On Monday, we were told to get in a long line of people who were being picked to get on a plane on a first-come, first-served basis.”

After waiting for nearly four hours, the Marquezes boarded a Southwest jet that was supposed to depart for Orlando at 9:30 a.m. The flight didn’t take off for another two hours. Marquez estimates the plane carried 166 passengers, including dozens of elderly people and unaccompanied children. “There was an old lady who had an oxygen mask and needed dialysis,” Marquez said. “The man sitting in front of me was a renal patient. And I counted seven children who were 2-years-old or younger.”

Marquez’s sister picked them up and drove them 90 miles to Tampa, where the couple intend to stay indefinitely. “My plan is to work from Tampa for as long as I can,” Marquez said. “To be honest, things were pretty bad in Puerto Rico before Maria hit us. I don’t know if I am going back.”

Marquez is not alone. Between September 24—the first day departing flights resumed—and September 28, more than 3,000 passengers from San Juan have arrived at Miami International Airport (Orlando airport officials could not provide similar arrival numbers). Most will likely resettle in Central Florida, which in recent years has become home to more than 1 million Puerto Ricans seeking job opportunities and financial stability as the U.S. territory continues to slog through a crippling debt crisis that has driven unemployment to 10 percent. Hurricane Maria, which left most of the island’s 3.4 million people without electricity, knocked out a third of the hospitals, leveled thousands of homes and tore up hundreds of miles of road, only hastened the collapse.

“I’ve heard an estimated 15,000 Puerto Ricans from the island will be in Central Florida by mid-October,” said Ney Rivera Garcia, a founding member of Orlando-based Puerto Rican Action Initiative. “We are preparing to do whatever we can to help our brothers and sisters.”

Garcia was among dozens of volunteers packing up supplies and essentials inside El Centro Borinqueño, a large Puerto Rican community center and event venue in Orlando. The 64-year-old Puerto Rican activist said he was able to purchase airline tickets at $800 each for his daughter, his son-in-law and his granddaughter. They live in Bayamon, a city in Puerto Rico’s northern coast that experienced heavy floods. “She called my wife to let us know she was fine right after the storm,” Garcia said. “But it’s been two days that I haven’t heard from her.”

Elected officials in Orange County are just beginning to figure out how to deal with the coming onslaught of Puerto Rican storm evacuees, who cannot be turned away since they are U.S. citizens. Orange County Mayor Teresa Jacobs could not be reached for comment, but in a September 28 memo to county commissioners, she said she spoke with Governor Rick Scott to determine what resources will be available to assist individuals and families who have left or plan to leave Puerto Rico.

“The governor has assured me that he is working directly with the Federal Emergency Management Agency to meet the needs of those evacuees,” Jacobs wrote. “Not only must our federal government partners have a plan, a number of local entities, from schools to hospitals to social service agencies, must also be ready to welcome our friends from the storm-battered island.”

However, some evacuees blame FEMA and the Trump administration for providing a slow, disinterested response to the calamity enveloping Puerto Rico. Javier Colom arrived in Orlando on a JetBlue flight Wednesday morning. The 31-year-old from Mayagüez, Puerto Rico’s eighth-largest municipality, said he and three friends sustained themselves for almost a week on a diet of fruit, crackers, peanut butter and water.

He said the federal government has been dragging its feet compared to the response after Hurricane Harvey inundated the Houston area and only days later Florida was raked from sourth to north by an equally monstrous Hurricane Irma. “Whether we are here or in Puerto Rico, we are still U.S. citizens,” Colom said. “We have sent our people to wars and to defend this country. We deserve respect from the people in charge who can help us.”

Garcia echoed Colom’s criticisms. “We are treated like second-class citizens,” Garcia said. “We are seen as immigrants just like any Mexican or anyone from a Latin American country.”

Meanwhile, Hurricane Maria refugees continue trickling through Orlando International Airport. On a Wednesday afternoon, family members anxiously waited outside the terminal’s concourse D for relatives arriving on a Southwest plane.

Francisco Marrero, a husky Puerto Rican with gelled black hair, woke up at 7 a.m. and drove four hours from Miami to pick up his wife, Karla, and his daughters, Amber and Inara. After the hurricane hit, he didn’t hear from his wife for almost three days. “Those were the most stressful days of my life,” he said. “I wasn’t able to calm down until I heard her voice.”

Marrero relocated from Gurabo, a city in central Puerto Rico, to Miami two months ago. His wife and kids were supposed to join him the week Hurricane Maria hit the island. “God moved heaven and earth to bring them here,” he said. “I had a stable job in Puerto Rico, but I got a better job offer in Miami. So there was no thinking twice about it.”

Karla said she had been staying with her parents, whose home got flooded, but did not sustain any wind damage. “It was an extremely frustrating experience not being able to let my husband know we were okay,” she said. “Our plan now is to stay here and live in Florida.”

Nearby, Marlene Santiago held up a white poster stamped with the Puerto Rican flag that read, “Welcome home! Mom and dad, we missed you!”

Spotting her parents William and Marjorie Santiago, she ran into their arms and held them in a long embrace. “I was hysterical,” Marlene Santiago said. “For three days, I didn’t know anything about my parents.”

She said a family friend had to drive an hour-and-a-half from Ponce, where her father and mother were staying, to San Juan in order to get phone service and call her to let her know they were fine. Marjorie Santiago said she and William had been trying to catch a flight to Orlando since Sunday. “We waited for six hours and had no luck,” the 74-year-old retiree said. “We went back on Tuesday early in the morning and waited until around 5 p.m.”

The Santiagos finally got seats the following day when William, a diabetic, started to show signs of low blood sugar. ‘The conditions in the San Juan airport are horrible,” Marjorie Santiago said. “It is incredibly hot because there is no air conditioning. Everybody there is desperate to get out.”

