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To complicate matters, the ferry’s schedule is not just unreliable but deadly, says Torres.
In early February, protests erupted when a Viequense woman, Sheila Sanabria, died after suffering a heart attack while waiting for the ferry at Ceiba.
A day before her death, she had appeared on the local TV news network NotiCentro while waiting to board the ferry.
The medication she needed was six miles away on Vieques, she told the broadcaster.
Shadows of the Past
Residents also remember that the US military’s deadly presence went beyond environmental contamination.
In 1999, the navy killed a civilian security guard, David Sanes Rodriguez, during a bombing practice. His death ignited years of protests in Vieques.
In April 2001, the navy began transferring 17 sq km of the former Naval Ammunition Support Detachment.
In 2003, when the then-president George W Bush withdrew US forces from the island, all 59 sq km of the former Vieques naval training range were transferred.
When a plane takes off from the Roosevelt Roads base, Monisha Rios’s home in Ceiba goes through what she likens to the aftershock of an earthquake.
There are cracks spidering across her ceiling that were not there when she bought the home in 2022 – before the view from her bedroom window became a military airstrip.
Rios is a US army veteran who spent years in Vieques before moving to Ceiba, where she wanted to live closer to hospitals and set up a place for people to stay when travelling to health appointments.
