When Hurricane Maria made landfall on Puerto Rico, on September 20th, it smashed into the island with withering winds of up to a hundred and fifty-five miles per hour. The storm destroyed the island’s electric power grid, wiped out eighty per cent of its agricultural crops, and knocked out ninety-five per cent of its cell networks, along with eighty-five per cent of its aboveground telephone and Internet cables. Roads, bridges, and a major dam were damaged, homes were flooded and destroyed, and thousands of people were made homeless. The economic damage to the island was colossal, estimated to be in the range of a hundred billion dollars. Very quickly, it was clear that Maria was the worst natural disaster in Puerto Rico’s history. Three months later, Puerto Ricans are still picking up the pieces. Thirty per cent of the island remains without power. And the catastrophe only compounded the problems of a bankruptcy and unemployment crisis that has dragged on for several years. As soon as they could after the storm, large numbers of Puerto Ricans—convinced that the situation will not improve—began packing up and leaving for new lives on the U.S. mainland. As many as two hundred thousand people out of the island’s population of 3.3 million have left so far, an exodus that shows little sign of abating.

In spite of the scale of the disaster, Puerto Rico’s authorities have touted the storm’s extremely low death toll; as of last week, the official count of the dead was sixty-four. President Trump picked up on this fact early on, and used it simultaneously to defend his Administration’s response to Maria and to minimize the storm’s importance as an issue of concern for the rest of the country. During a brief visit to the island, on October 3rd, Trump compared Maria’s death toll to Hurricane Katrina’s. “Sixteen versus literally thousands of people,” he said. “You can be very proud.” During that same trip, Trump infamously tossed paper-towel rolls to Puerto Ricans at a hurricane-relief shelter as if he were giving away souvenir T-shirts at a basketball game. Earlier this month, after several organizations—including Puerto Rico’s Center for Investigative Journalism, the Times, and CNN—independently published findings concluding that actually as many as a thousand and sixty-two people had died in the storm, Ricardo Rosselló, Puerto Rico’s governor, announced that an investigation would be undertaken to establish the true figure.

A few days after Trump’s visit, I spent a week in Puerto Rico. The devastation was obvious. And everywhere, the sensitive subject of the island’s relationship to the mainland as an “unincorporated U.S. territory” was being discussed. Trump’s paper-towel-throwing appearance had struck a nerve, and was a subject of intense media coverage. For Puerto Ricans, the episode was a reminder, on top of Trump’s foot-dragging and generally dismissive response to the disaster, that they were second-class citizens.

In Utuado, a rural community in the epicenter of the island and the site of some of Maria’s worst ravages, I spoke with a local man, Pedro J. López, who had lost his home in a mudslide caused by the hurricane. He was busy trying to put his family’s life back together—he had two daughters and a diabetic wife—and he made it plain that he was doing so with pride, and was not waiting for any handouts. But he also told me that he had heard about Trump’s visit, and he wondered aloud whether the American President expected Puerto Ricans to use those paper towels to wipe “our asses or our tears?”

Puerto Rico’s relationship with the United States is an unequal one, and it has over the years brought about many humiliations for Puerto Ricans—who are U.S. citizens but who cannot vote for President if they live on the island, and have limited representation in Congress. Yet in modern times, most American Presidents have taken pains to be respectful of the island and its status. Not so with Trump. San Juan’s outspoken mayor, Carmen Yulín Cruz, who repeatedly tangled with the President on Twitter and through the media in the immediate aftermath of the storm, told me that he was “a man with a big mouth” who “lacked empathy.” But she hoped that the political fallout from Hurricane Maria would provide an opportunity to finally redefine Puerto Rico’s relationship with the United States, which, she said, “needs to be dignified. It has to change.”

Puerto Rico was claimed for Spain five hundred years ago, and its first governor was Juan Ponce de León. Beginning in the nineteenth century, the island’s residents began jostling for greater freedoms. Inspired by the liberal reforms espoused by the French Revolution and by Simón Bolívar’s battles for independence around the hemisphere, a Puerto Rican nationalist movement was born. Beginning in 1868, these nationalists launched a series of revolts that were abortive but persistent enough to convince Spain’s government, in early 1898, to grant the island a measure of autonomy. Yet just a few months later, following the brief but decisive Spanish-American War, the island was claimed as booty by the United States. Something similar happened in neighboring Cuba, where local patriots had fought the Spaniards at great human cost for most of the preceding four decades, only to be similarly “freed” by the Americans, who promptly put them under military rule. The two islands, which the Puerto Rican poet Lola Rodríguez del Tió famously called “two wings of the same bird,” were Spain’s last colonies in the Americas, and in the course of one summer, both fell under U.S. control. In 1902, Cuba was granted its independence in exchange for, among other concessions, tolerating the U.S. naval base at Guantámano Bay. Puerto Rico’s day never came.

In 1914, Puerto Rico’s nominal Congress—operating under U.S. jurisdiction—unanimously voted for Puerto Rico’s independence, but the gesture was ignored. Instead, in 1917, citizenship was imposed on Puerto Ricans, and the island was given an American governor appointed by Washington. The move polarized the Puerto Rican political scene, splitting its parties into those that sought independence, those that sought statehood, and those that sought a better deal with the mainland. (More or less the same splits persist among Puerto Ricans today: a little over half of Puerto Ricans now support full U.S. statehood; about a quarter like the status quo—Puerto Rico as an “associated sovereign country,” as defined in its formal agreement with the U.S.; only about fifteen per cent wish for greater autonomy or outright independence.) American sugar interests increasingly began to dominate the Puerto Rican economy. Puerto Rico’s ports, utilities, and railroads were also American-owned. In the nineteen-thirties, after security forces repeatedly used lethal violence to quell demonstrations by Puerto Rican nationalists, some opted for armed struggle, and they launched a campaign of assassinations and other violent attacks against government officials and security forces.

The leader of the independence movement, Pedro Albizu Campos, was a Harvard Law graduate, a polymath, and a gifted public speaker. He adopted the goal of Puerto Rican independence as his life’s purpose under the slogan, “the homeland is valor and sacrifice.” As the leader of the Puerto Rican Nationalist Party, he organized a militarily trained youth wing called Los Cadetes de la República, with the idea that these young “soldiers” would eventually lead the armed struggle for the country’s independence. In 1936, after two cadets assassinated a notorious police official and were in turn caught and executed, Albizu Campos and several cohorts were arrested and found guilty of sedition. Albizu Campos spent most of the next decade in U.S. prisons. He was freed and returned to Puerto Rico in 1947, just before the island’s first-ever free gubernatorial elections were held.

The politician who won them, Luis Muñoz Marín, was Albizu Campos’s total opposite. He not only opposed Puerto Rico’s independence but was also a driving force behind a move to keep the island within the American orbit as an “unincorporated U.S. territory.” Seen as a pro-U.S. bulwark against the rise of Communism in the hemisphere, Muñoz Marín became a darling of successive American Administrations. During the first nine years of the sixteen he would spend in power, Muñoz Marín benefitted from La Ley de la Mordaza, or the Gag Law, which allowed him to jail anyone who publicly espoused pro-independence beliefs. Huge numbers of Puerto Ricans were placed under long-term surveillance by secret police, and thousands were arrested for their political beliefs. The Puerto Rican flag was outlawed.