So, let me get this straight.
While one part of the U.S. government is quietly turning Puerto Rico into a forward operating base bristling with F-35 stealth fighters for a potential showdown with Venezuela, another part is waxing poetic about turning it back into a pharmaceutical tax haven like it’s 1985. And while all that is happening, the island’s biggest cultural export since Ricky Martin, Bad Bunny, is headlining the Super Bowl and leading a grassroots cultural movement of national pride so potent it’s being compared to the Grateful Dead.
What in the absolute hell is going on?
This isn’t a coherent strategy. This is a nation treating its own territory like a messy utility drawer—a place where it tosses its spare fighter jets, its forgotten economic policies, and its inconvenient cultural phenomena, hoping they don't all rattle against each other too loudly.
The Pentagon's Caribbean Vacation
Let's start with the least subtle part of this whole mess: the war toys. The Pentagon just parked ten F-35Bs at the former Roosevelt Roads Naval Station (F-35s Deployed To Puerto Rico Showcased In First Official Images (Updated)). These aren't your grandpa's prop planes; these are the most advanced—and bug-ridden—stealth fighters on the planet. And they’re not just there for show. SOUTHCOM just released video of them being loaded with live 500-pound JDAMs.
The official line is that this is all for "counter-narcotics operations." Give me a break. You don't use a fifth-generation stealth fighter to chase go-fast boats full of cocaine. That's like using a sledgehammer to kill a fly. No, this is about Venezuela. It's about sending a message to Maduro. The Trump administration has even declared drug cartels "unlawful combatants," basically giving themselves a green light to start a "non-international armed conflict."
You can almost hear the roar of the afterburners from a beach in San Juan, a sound that cuts right through the reggaetón blasting from a nearby bar. It's a stark reminder of who really calls the shots. Puerto Rico, in this context, isn't a place with its own dreams or aspirations; it's a strategically located piece of real estate. An unsinkable aircraft carrier in the Caribbean.
But does anyone in Washington stop to ask what it feels like to live on an aircraft carrier? To have your home turned into a staging ground for a conflict you have no say in, by a government you can't even vote for? Probably not. They're too busy planning the mission.
Rewind the Tape to 1985
Then you have the think-tank crowd, pushing to solve Puerto Rico’s economic woes by… bringing back the 80s. Their big idea is to restore Section 936, the tax incentive that once made the island a powerhouse for Big Pharma (Puerto Rico, Once A Pharmaceutical Powerhouse, Can Become One Again). The logic is simple: give corporations a giant tax break, and they’ll build factories, create jobs, and fix everything. It’s presented as this brilliant piece of "pro-growth" policy, the "carrot" instead of the "stick."
The article I read literally said, "Some critics will say this is just 'corporate welfare.' Nonsense."
Nonsense? It’s the literal definition of corporate welfare. It’s bribing companies with public money to do something they might have done anyway if the conditions were right. This is a bad idea. No, 'bad' doesn't cover it—this is a lazy, unimaginative, and deeply cynical idea. It assumes the only way to generate prosperity is to let multinational corporations feast at the tax-free trough, hoping some crumbs fall off the table for the locals.
It completely ignores the cultural tidal wave happening on the island. The very slogan of Bad Bunny's record-breaking residency was "No Me Quiero Ir de Aquí"—I Don't Want To Leave Here. It’s a defiant scream against the forces of gentrification and economic despair that have pushed so many Puerto Ricans to the mainland. People want to build something authentic, something of their own. They don't just want a job on an assembly line owned by a company from New Jersey that will pack up and leave the second the tax breaks dry up again. Because they've seen that movie before, and they know how it ends.
This whole pharma plan feels like a solution conceived by people who have never set foot on the island, who see it only as a line item on a balance sheet. Its a deeply unserious proposal for a deeply serious problem.
A Split-Screen Reality
So here we are, watching Puerto Rico on a split-screen TV, and the two channels are showing completely different worlds.
On Channel 1, it’s a Tom Clancy novel. F-35s streak across the sky, a "shadowy special operations mothership" called the Ocean Trader prowls the coast, and generals talk about "non-international armed conflict." It’s all hard power, geopolitical chess, and the cold logic of military strategy.
On Channel 2, it’s a vibrant, unapologetic cultural festival. Half a million people are packed into a coliseum in San Juan, screaming lyrics in Spanish, celebrating their identity with an artist who made it cool to be exactly who you are, from exactly where you're from. It's a story of soft power, of cultural resilience, and of a people defining their own future.
And then, I guess on some third, grainy, black-and-white channel, you have the economists and lobbyists trying to resurrect a zombie tax policy from a bygone era.
Do the people on these different channels ever talk to each other? Does the pilot in the F-35 cockpit understand the cultural significance of the concert happening below? Does the pharma CEO trying to secure a tax break have any clue about the "we don't want to leave" movement? Offcourse not.
It feels like three different entities are pulling on the island at once, each with its own agenda, completely oblivious to the others. The Pentagon sees a military asset. Wall Street sees a tax haven. And the people of Puerto Rico? They just see home. And they're fighting like hell to make it a place worth staying in, a place that's more than just a backdrop for someone else's ambitions. The question is, who wins? Or does the whole thing just...
The Island of Contradictions
In the end, maybe there is no grand plan. Maybe America's policy toward Puerto Rico isn't a strategy at all; it's a symptom of its own chaotic identity crisis. We don't know if we want to be a global cop, a corporate haven, or a multicultural society, so we try to be all three at once, and Puerto Rico is where the messy contradictions spill out into the open. The real story isn't the jets or the tax code. It's the people in the stadium, building a nation in the middle of all that noise, and you have to wonder if anyone in Washington is even listening to the music.