Returning to Vieques

“I’ve always thought of Vieques as ‘my’ island,” said Stephen, who was making his second visit since the storms. He’d discovered it when he was living in Boston and spotted a cheap flight to San Juan. “My copy of ‘Let’s Go’ suggested Vieques as a pretty good day trip. So I left my rental car on the ferry dock in Fajardo, figuring I’d be back that night. I ended up staying the whole week.”

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Others lured by Vieques’s beauty, lack of pretension and low cost of living, have lived here for decades: In my short stay I ran into a museum director, an academic, artists, a retired nurse and a couple from Colorado, Norm and Deb, who had retired early and moved to the island sight unseen to live, as they put it, “on purpose.” Stephen was staying at El Blok, a Brutalist-style cement hotel at one end of the Malecón. When it opened in 2014 it was hailed as hip, chic and a little fancy, with a menu created by a famous chef — something of an anomaly on Vieques. Now the building has a plywood facade painted with the slogan “Vieques Se Levanta” — Vieques Will Rise. Workers head to the bar after sunset, and the vibe is friendly and a little raucous.

A local chef turns out delicious dishes from a mesquite grill. Prices, like those at many places, have been lowered. Burr and I ate there one night, sharing the dining room with electrical workers, visiting doctors and Mark Martin-Bras, who works with the Vieques Conservation and Historic Trust and ViequesLove, a GoFundMe organization that has been a galvanizing force for the recovery. There were also some vacationers, including a couple with a baby, first-timers on the island. Diners flowed from table to table as if they were at a party.

“If you take the long view, Vieques will end up better off,” said Mr. Martin-Bras, a biologist who came to work at the Bioluminescent Bay, the ecological marvel that draws visitors from all over the world. “The infrastructure will be stronger. We were on the cusp of a tourism boom; there was the W Hotel, there was talk of cruise ships. Would that be good for the island, or the appeal of the island? Probably not. So now that we have the essentials covered — there’s food in the supermarkets, beer in the bars, music in the streets — we have a chance to create tourism that’s more community-oriented, more nature-oriented, that can preserve and conserve the island, that’s more sustainable.”

The trust’s base, a tidy museum in Esperanza that houses nature and history exhibits has reopened. The W Hotel, with 156 rooms the island’s biggest hotel, has not. Its formerly manicured grounds remain gated; a spokeswoman for Starwood, which owns the W, said the reopening date was “up in the air,” and depended on when the power grid was restored so that repair work could be undertaken. Its closing represents a significant loss of jobs and revenue. Tourism accounts for 65 percent or more of the economy, according to Bob Gevinski, a board member of the Puerto Rico Hotel and Tourism Association and manager of the Hix Island House on Vieques.

The Bio Bay has suffered, too. On an earlier trip I had paddled it at night, plankton glowing magically as I let my hands drift through the water or a fish waggled by. I’d planned this trip to coincide with a moonless sky — the best time to see the glow — and had corresponded with BlackBeard Sports to line up a Bio Bay excursion, or perhaps snorkel or bicycle to the sugar industry ruins in the island’s interior.

But conditions were uncharacteristically windy for those activities, and the Bio Bay, the outfitters said, was glowing only at about “2 on a scale of 10.” The mangroves that surround it and nurture the sea life have not yet recovered.

So a guide, Regalado Miró, and I roamed the island in a van. He pointed out relics of Vieques’s richest days, when Europe couldn’t get enough of the sugar the island produced: a decrepit pier near Esperanza and a rusted 19th-century railway engine that had hauled the sugar cane.

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Next we passed an old military truck, a reminder of the decades beginning with World War II when the United States Navy had used the island for bombing practice. After a Viequense was killed by an errant bomb, Rega took part in protests beginning in 2000 against the Navy’s presence. The environmental lawyer Robert Kennedy Jr., the activists Al Sharpton and Dennis Rivera and the actor Edward James Olmos, among others, joined the cause.

Rega took Mr. Kennedy scuba diving to see the effects of bombing practice on the reefs. “Three feet underwater was a junkyard,” Mr. Kennedy recalled during a phone conversation. “There were dozens of sunken ships and hundreds of bombs filled with toxic material.” Mr. Kennedy represented Vieques in a suit against the naval presence and later took part in a protest that landed him in a Puerto Rican prison. The efforts led to the Navy’s departure in 2003. The areas used for bombing practice were designated a Superfund site, and a National Wildlife Refuge. Now beachgoers can poke along dirt roads until they find a spot that suits — gentle waters in coves, waves breaking on rocky cliffs and caves, palm-shaded sand or prime sunset-watching.

Elsewhere on the island, Rega and I checked on a huge, gnarled, 300-year-old ceiba tree, sacred to Viequenses. We visited a honeybee farm, La Finca Consciencia, crucial to pollination, and the Tin Box, a funky barbecue joint whose architecture lives up to its name. It hadn’t yet reopened, but rows of arugula, banana trees, avocado trees, cherry tomatoes, cilantro and lemongrass were growing in the garden.

Back in Isabel, the lights were out at BlackBeard Sports, but the door was open, and there were even a few customers. Many of the businesses whose buildings were sound enough to open have done so. Owners want employees to have paychecks, even if limited, and open doors boost morale, they say.

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