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By Carina del Valle Schorske
Carina del Valle Schorske is a contributing editor of the magazine. He spent 4 days on Mona Island, where he climbed a driftwood ladder to reach a cave.
Every year I spend a month or two in Puerto Rico, where my mother’s family circle is from. I spend there in winter, with the other snowbirds, seeking solace among the palm trees. But I’m not a tourist, not really. I’m going after developers who privatize the coast; I abide by the environmental reports that give our beaches a failing grade. I’m disenchanted with Enchantment Island, wary of a symbol that obscures the unglamorous situations of everyday life: common power outages, scarce utilities, a rental market devastated by Airbnb. Maybe that’s why I got away from the sun and started exploring caves with my friends Ramon and Javier, looking for wonders that weren’t yet crowded for the tourist economy. I’ve come to love stalactites and screeching bats, black snakes and cloistered waterfalls. – and even, slowly, the darkness itself.
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The Greater Antilles and the Yucatan Peninsula form one of the largest cavernous regions in the world and many of those caves contain pre-colonial inscriptions. But no other site can match the density of drawings discovered in Mona, a semi-arid mesa halfway between Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic. The island is surrounded by rugged cliffs and bordered by miles of underground passages. Most of the inscriptions are hidden in the so-called dark zone, far from the access to the upper planet, gathering around rare freshwater pools. The available rooms space out other stories: an Inca vase filled with gold coins, fragments of a Spanish olive jar stained with the oldest wine in the Americas. In one cave, a foreign guest in the 16th century carved a kind of observation next to ancient petroglyphs: “plura fecit deus. “”God has done many things. ” I kept repeating the word to myself like a mantra, seeking to impose a divine order on the contradictions of the New World, the only one I had ever known.
Mona now “belongs” to Puerto Rico (and therefore to the United States), yet the island has retained some self-control, emerging fatherless and molded entirely from the sea like an American Aphrodite. Archaeologist Ovidio Dávila described the island as “a floating island. “fortress”: isolated, inhospitable, an arsenal of mysteries. But Mona is also teeming with life: flowering cacti, flocks of seabirds, orchids, iguanas, and frogs found nowhere else on Earth. Hawksbill turtles from as far away as Panama slowly move the shore to nest under the summer moon. Huge baskets of sponges and gorgonian corals cling to the boardwalk. Many migratory species are rarely noticed in Puerto Rico near the coast: dolphins, pilot whales, tiger sharks, bluefin tuna, flying fish. The secluded beaches of Mona are paid homage from remote waters, as if they could be the secret center of the world.
But for many Puerto Ricans, Mona is a mythical backwater, the culmination of a whole genre of jokes: Their political enemies ‘couldn’t even win Mona’s mayoral race,’ socialists deserve to ‘live with iguanas’ Array the Supreme Court He might consider installing “his little theocracy” there. Like Robinson Crusoe, even locals who deserve to know better see this other island as a blank slate for exile or utopia. Of course, Mona wasn’t always an abstraction. Before Europeans ventured west, indigenous people settled on the island as early as 3000 BC. When Columbus first arrived at Mona in 1494, a network was developing a glorious variety of culminations and tubers on a thin strip of arable land on the west side of the island. Indigenous people continued on Mona for another hundred years (much longer than in other parts of the region) seeking refuge in the island’s mysterious interior. Since then, the island has hosted a lively procession of conquistadors, converts, maroons, priests, pirates, prisoners, guano miners, soldiers, treasure seekers, scientists and safe havens.
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