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Tiny Island, Big Dreams
This story is published in collaboration with the Local Catch Network.
At the end of a short road that spreads out into a paved spit of working waterfront on the tiny island of Culebra sits a small building with hurricane-proof windows, a sunflower yellow trim and two rows of solar panels on its roof. A calm canal borders the wharf, with boats docking or passing through from a protected lagoon out into the Atlantic.
Until recently, the structure was boarded up, a relic of the Puerto Rican island’s once thriving fishing community. But in 2024, drivers passing by to fill up their tanks at the island’s only gas station next door began noticing renewed signs of life — workers putting up new siding and adding coats of paint, and the occasional group of fishers sitting outside shucking oysters.
What they and other Culebra residents would soon learn was that the modest white building was, in fact, being put back together, one brush stroke at a time, returning it to its former status as the beating heart of the local community.
Volunteers work on renovation of the villa. Photo courtesy of Nicolás Gómez-Andújar.
“We took on the task of reclaiming the building for the fishing community,” explains Nicolás (Nico) Gómez-Andújar, a fisherman who grew up on the island. Gómez-Andújar, whose father was also a fisherman, recalls the building was once a thriving communal space for the island’s fishers, a piece of public infrastructure set up by the local government called a villa pesquera.
At its peak in the 1970s, the villa was quite literally a village — including a market and a meeting space, ramps, docks and gear storage for local fishers — and was the headquarters of the Asociación de Pescadores de Culebra, Inc. (Fishermen’s Association of Culebra), an organized cooperative of people making a living fishing off the island’s coastal waters.
Small-scale commercial fishing operations prospered under these circumstances in which fishers benefited from access to infrastructure while also receiving the social support of the Asociación, a member-led advocacy group. For generations, this kind of small-operation fishing sustained large portions of the Culebran population.
But by 2002, because of a variety of factors including unsustainable tourism development and gentrification, the archipelago-wide Department of Natural and Environmental Resources’ fishery census counted just 12 fishers on the whole island. This attrition led to a shuttering of the villa and the cessation of Asociación activity for the next 20 years. As a result, the residents of Culebra, more than a fifth of whom live below the poverty line, lost access to fresh, affordable fish.
Work at the villa in its first iteration. Photo courtesy of Nicolás Gómez-Andújar.
A series of acute crises followed, including Hurricane Maria in 2017 and the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020. This put the Culebrans’ lot as a small island of approximately 1,100 residents who could hardly afford to purchase fresh seafood, let alone fish for it, into stark relief for Gómez-Andújar and his colleague Tomás Ayala, another veteran fisher on the island.
For the two men, the dearth of fresh seafood wasn’t attributable to just one factor, but many. The waterfront displacement of fishers by Airbnb and other tourism rentals, the lackadaisical environmental regulations and the out-migration of residents all imperiled not only the socio-economic reality of so many Culebrans, but Culebranese culture itself. What was needed was infrastructure and community, this much was clear to them both.
“It started out not planned,” says Gómez-Andújar, who explains that the effort to get fresh fish to the aging and rural population of the island arose organically. “It started with Tomás and others just doing this spontaneously during the pandemic.”
But momentum to organize built quickly as they began to receive positive feedback. Soon the two men were holding community meetings that culminated in the revival of the Asociación, with Gómez-Andújar as acting secretary and Ayala as its president. “We just said, ‘hey, this is something we need to do, and we’re going to fix it no matter what,’” says Gómez-Andújar.
Culebrans didn’t need much convincing to pitch in, perhaps because of the Asociación’s history as an influential political group. In 1901, the Flamenco Peninsula (along with other parts of the island), an area of about 2,500 acres, became property of the U.S. Navy, which began using the expanse of pristine coastline as a gunnery, running military drills and offshore operations. By 1940, all of Flamenco’s residents and commerce, including the island’s grain milling facility and fishing settlement, had been displaced.
Years of war games and maneuvers followed, polluting the waters surrounding the island and making them uninhabitable for many of the once life-sustaining fisheries. Meanwhile, Culebrans were organizing; 1965 saw the founding of the original Asociación Pesquera de Culebra with eighty participating fishers as members, a group created to represent the rights of fishers on the island but which evolved into something much bigger.
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The next five years saw an organized effort on behalf of the residents of Culebra, often led by the Asociación, of protest, civil disobedience and legal action, culminating in the successful ousting of the U.S. Navy in 1975. Following the military’s departure, the Asociación created the Reserva Natural del Canal Luis Peña, Puerto Rico’s first no-take marine protected area, in order to give the fisheries — and residents’ livelihoods — a chance to recover.
Emmanuel Maldonado-Gonzalez, a sociologist on the island, has identified several key factors contributing to the food insecurity crisis for Culebrans. Almost 100 percent of food available to residents is imported, making its way to the island via a two-hour ferry ride aboard an aging and unreliable public maritime transportation system.
This is compounded by a century of displacement on the island due to privatization of land, first by the U.S. military and now by the tourism industry. Coastal short-term rentals and the building of private docks have blocked access to the ocean — in other words, the food.
The Asociación’s collective process in action. Photo courtesy of Nicolás Gómez-Andújar.
Under Gómez-Andújar and Ayala’s leadership, the Asociación set out to create a system in which islanders generally, and poor and elderly islanders specifically, could get seafood more reliably and at cheaper prices by incentivizing fishers to sell their catch to the Asociación rather than to restaurants for consumption by tourists. Simultaneously, they sought to rehabilitate the island’s fishing industry by providing free education to fishers and a forum in which updates to fishery rules and regulations are communicated and explained to members.
One of the more novel and effective elements of the Asociación’s work has been self-governing, fisher-led conservation, which upends the oft-cited fishermen versus stewardship trope. The Asociación has found that fishers often make great conservationists as they are the ones most frequently out on the water, therefore gathering the best data. Sometimes, this means expanding what the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration already has in place.
For example, last February, fishers in Culebra were catching an abundance of female sharks (the shark fishery is legal in Puerto Rico), which was unusual. The fishers came to the Asociación with their findings and asked the leaders to look into whether it was okay to continue taking sharks.
“What they were doing was legal,” says Maldonado-Gonzalez, “but internally we decided we have to do something, because they were bringing a lot of pregnant females.” After looking at the data, they implemented their own community rules, which outlined best practices — where to fish for the species, and how to continue data collection to ensure the shark fishery’s future stability. “We’re going beyond what the regulations say you can catch and cannot catch,” says Gómez-Andújar. “We’re recommending what we know.”
Tomás Ayala processing a catch. Photo courtesy of Nicolás Gómez-Andújar.
Fishing communities across Puerto Rico are watching what’s happening in Culebra closely. Vanessa Rodriguez, a fisher and organizer from Cabo Rojo — a town on the big island’s west coast — is in frequent communication with Gómez-Andújar and Ayala, and similarly identified a group of fishers all running disparate operations when she entered the fishing industry in 2011.
“Everyone was on their own,” she recalls.
Rodriguez determined three key elements lacking in the fishing community she had just joined: A dearth of education regarding laws and regulations; a lack of communication between fish market owners, which made it hard to maintain the loyalty of local fishers and make sales; and no emergency response system for local fishing groups in the event of a missing or capsized boat.
She set out to open up a dialogue between fishers and market owners centered around safety, the idea being that fellow fishers might be able to step into the role of first-responders should an emergency unfold on the ocean.
“I started talking with the fishermen of all the fish markets, asking them, ‘what do you think about if we get together and make an emergency plan?’”
Soon she had organized so many fishers in Cabo Rojo that she needed to hire school buses to take them to public hearings.
As the success of Culebra’s Asociación took off once more, there was one thing missing: A headquarters. Three years ago, Gómez-Andújar and Ayala began the labor intensive transformation of the abandoned villa. Their plans were ambitious — divide the building in half, restore its infrastructure, open a fish market on one side and transform the other into a research center.
At first, it was just the two of them. “You only need two people who are going there, just giving free time, free labor and recognizing this is our place,” says Maldonado-Gonzalez.
But soon, a curious thing happened: People passing by took notice of the building’s progress and began stopping by to help. So much had to be done. “There was carpentry, electricity, plumbing, painting, solar system, rainwater catching system, saltwater system for the life of lobsters, new walls, new tiles, new floors — everything, basically everything,” Gómez-Andújar says, detailing the different forms of volunteer expertise that went into the villa’s renovation. In the end, over 60 volunteers provided hundreds of hours worth of labor that amounted to nearly $150,000 worth of time and work, he says.
The newly opened fish market at the villa. Photo courtesy of Nicolás Gómez-Andújar.
In October, the fish market opened and now Culebrans can drop in to buy fresh snapper, conch and lobster, among other local species. Today, the Asociación has 45 active members but also an entire village of people contributing expertise outside of their day jobs. “We have biologists, we have Emmanuel the sociologist, and environmental planners,” says Gómez-Andújar. “We have cooks, marine mechanics and so many people that bring different knowledge to the association. We all live here, and we all contribute. That has been […] the key ingredient.”
Shortly after the villa re-opened, the Asociación threw a party with local food and music, and even a reenactment of the Culebrans expelling the U.S. Navy from the island, performed by local kids. An estimated 400 people showed up, more than a third of the island’s population.
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When Gómez-Andújar and Ayala were seeking vendors for the party, they told people they could charge for the food they were selling but everyone refused, insisting it should be free. The spirit of reciprocity among the islanders stood out to Ayala. “It’s not only the activities,” he says, while discussing the vendors’ donations to the party. “It’s also how the people are interacting in the activity.”
Now, whenever the Asociación hosts an event, they can expect crowds in the hundreds. “[On] an island where everybody loves to eat fish, and it’s very important economically and culturally, there wasn’t a fish shop, and fishermen’s livelihoods were very threatened,” says Gómez-Andújar. “So we took on the task to organize our community, and with lots of cooperation, we’re making good things happen.”
The post Tiny Island, Big Dreams appeared first on Reasons to be Cheerful.
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