Vieques (; , ), officially the Isla de Vieques, is an island and municipality of Puerto Rico, comprising the Spanish Virgin Islands together with Culebra. Located about east of the main island of Puerto Rico, it is about long and wide. Vieques is spread over 7 barrios and Isabel Segunda (or Isabel the Second, sometimes written Isabel II), its historic and administrative center. Residents of the island are known as . The population of the island is 8,249 as of the 2020 Census.
The island's name is a Spanish spelling of a Taíno word said to mean "small island" or "small land". It also has the nickname , usually translated as "girl island" or "little girl island", alluding to its perception as Puerto Rico's little sister. The island was given this name by the Puerto Rican poet Luís Lloréns Torres. During the British colonial period, its name was Crab Island.
Vieques is best known internationally as the site of a series of protests against the United States Navy's use of the island as a bombing range and testing-ground, which led to the Navy's departure in 2003. The legal battle between Governor Carlos Romero Barceló and the Navy was difficult, since the Supreme Court in 1990 refused to consider whether the Federal Water Pollution Control Act obligated courts to enjoin the military from bombing the island.
Today, the former Navy lands are a national wildlife refuge; some of it is open to the public, but much remains closed off due to biological or chemical contamination or unexploded ordnance that the military is cleaning up.
Some of the most well-known beaches on the island are on the eastern end (former site of the Marine Base) that the Navy named Red Beach, Blue Beach, Caracas Beach, Pata Prieta Beach, La Chiva Beach, and Plata Beach. At the far western tip (formerly the Navy Base) is Punta Arenas, which the Navy named Green Beach. The beaches are commonly listed among the top in the Caribbean for their azure waters and white sands.
History Pre-Columbian history Archaeological evidence suggests that Vieques was first inhabited by ancient Indigenous peoples of the Americas who traveled mostly from South America perhaps between 3000 and 2000 BCE. Estimates of these prehistoric dates of inhabitation vary widely. These tribes had a Stone Age culture and were probably fishermen and hunter-gatherers.
Excavations at the Puerto Ferro site by Luis Chanlatte and Yvonne Narganes uncovered a fragmented human skeleton in a large hearth area. Radiocarbon dating of shells found in the hearth indicate a burial date of . This skeleton, popularly known as , was buried at the center of a group of large boulders near Vieques's south-central coast, approximately one kilometer northwest of Bioluminescent Bay. Linear arrays of smaller stones radiating from the central boulders are apparent at the site today, but their age and reason for placement are unknown.
Further waves of settlement by Indigeous peoples followed over many centuries. The Arawakan-speaking Saladoid (or Igneri) people, thought to have originated in modern-day Venezuela, arrived in the region around 200 BCE (estimates vary). These tribes, noted for their pottery, stone carving, and other artifacts, eventually merged with groups from Hispaniola and Cuba to form what is now called the Taíno culture. This culture flourished in the region from around 1000 CE until the arrival of Europeans in the late 15th century.
Spanish colonial period The European discovery of Vieques is sometimes credited to Christopher Columbus, who landed in Puerto Rico in 1493. It does not seem to be certain whether Columbus personally visited Vieques, but in any case the island was soon claimed by the Spanish. During the early 16th century Vieques became a center of Taíno rebellion against the European invaders, prompting the Spanish to send armed forces to the island to quell the resistance. The native Taíno population was decimated, and its people either killed, imprisoned or enslaved by the Spanish.
The Spanish did not, however, permanently colonize Vieques at this time, and for the next 300 years it remained a lawless outpost, frequented by pirates and outlaws. As European powers fought for control in the region, a series of attempts by the French, English and Danish to colonize the island in the 17th and 18th centuries were repulsed by the Spanish.
At the beginning of the 19th century, the Spanish took steps to permanently settle and secure the island. In 1811, Don Salvador Meléndez, then governor of Puerto Rico, sent military commander Juan Rosselló to begin what would become the annexation of Vieques by the Puerto Ricans.
In 1832, under an agreement with the Spanish Puerto Rican administration, Frenchman Teófilo José Jaime María Le Guillou became Governor of Vieques, and undertook to impose order on the anarchic province. He was instrumental in the establishment of large plantations, marking a period of social and economic change. Le Guillou is now remembered as the founder of Vieques (though this title is also sometimes conferred on Francisco Saínz, governor from 1843 to 1852, who founded Isabel Segunda, the main town in Vieques, named after Queen Isabel II of Spain). Vieques was formally annexed to Puerto Rico in 1854.
In 1816, Vieques was briefly visited by Simón Bolívar when his ship ran aground there while fleeing defeat in Venezuela.
During the second part of the 19th century, thousands of slaves of African descent were brought to Vieques to work the sugarcane plantations. They arrived from mainland Puerto Rico, the nearby islands of St. Thomas, Nevis, Saint Kitts, and Saint Croix, and many other Caribbean islands. Slavery was abolished in Puerto Rico in 1873.
European colonial period
The island also received considerable attention as a possible colony from Scotland, and after numerous attempts to buy the island proved unsuccessful, the Scottish fleet, en route to Darien in 1698, made landfall and took possession of the island in the name of the Company of Scotland Trading to Africa and The Indies. Scottish sovereignty of the island proved short-lived, as a Danish ship arrived shortly afterward and claimed the island, as it was previously claimed in 1682 by the Danish West India Company.Christoph Rella, Dissertation: Im Anfang war das Fort, Europäische Fortifizierungspolitik in Guinea und Westindien 1415 – 1815 From 1689 to 1693, the island was controlled by Brandenburg–Prussia as (German for crab island), where the English name Crab Island came from. Brandenburg–Prussia had been given a trade outpost on the Danish island of St. Thomas, and occupied without Spanish consent as a satellite outpost. The German state returned it to Spain due to the impracticability of defending the small outpost.
United States control
Puerto Rico was ceded by Spain in the aftermath of the Spanish–American War under the terms of the Treaty of Paris of 1898 and became a territory of the United States. In 1899, the United States conducted its first census of Puerto Rico finding that the population of Vieques was 6,642 (but this included 704 residents from a nearby island, Culebra).
In the 1920s and 1930s, the sugar industry, on which Vieques was dependent, went into decline due to falling prices and industrial unrest. Many locals were forced to move to mainland Puerto Rico or Saint Croix to look for work.
In 1941, while Europe was in the midst of World War II, the United States Navy purchased or seized almost eighty percent of Vieques as an extension to the Roosevelt Roads Naval Station nearby on the Puerto Rican mainland. It is said that the original purpose of the base (never implemented) was to provide a safe haven for the British fleet and the British royal family should Great Britain fall to Nazi Germany. This assertion does not match U.S. Navy documents and the obvious fact that Canada's Halifax harbor would have been a more likely fallback position for the British fleet, with British King George VI already reigning as King of Canada. The base was however seen as the Atlantic's counterpart of Pearl Harbor in the Pacific due to its strategic location. The Naval Station at Roosevelt Roads was a perfect location to defend the strategic approaches to the Panama Canal.
Much of the land was bought from the owners of large farms and sugar cane plantations, and the expropriations triggered the final demise of the sugar industry. Without consulting the local population who had lived and worked there for centuries and protested the expropriations, the decision to turn it into a bombing range was made in Washington. In a similar way as the former population of the Chagos Islands, who were displaced to make way for an Air Force Base in the Indian Ocean in the 1960s, many agricultural workers, who had no formal title to the land they occupied, were evicted and forced to migrate.
For over sixty years, the US military used the island (with a population of over 9,000 inhabitants in 1950) for live munitions target practice. According to internal Navy documents, bombardments occurred 180 days per year on average. The US military used the highest possible contaminant depleted uranium (DU) munitions since 1972 on the populated and biodiverse island, at a rate of over 80 live bombs daily for decades. The health consequences are felt into the 21st century, as the cancer rates are ostensibly higher for the population of Vieques, especially children, than for those on the main island.
After the war, the Navy continued to use the island for military exercises, and as a firing range and testing ground for munitions.
Protests and departure of the United States Navy
The continuing postwar presence in Vieques of the United States Navy drew protests from the local community, angry at the expropriation of their land and the environmental impact of weapons testing. The locals' discontent was exacerbated by the island's perilous economic condition.
Protests came to a head in 1999 when Vieques native David Sanes, a civilian employee of the Navy, was killed by a jet bomb that the Navy said misfired. Sanes had been working as a security guard. A popular campaign of civil disobedience resurged; not since the mid-1970s had come together en masse to protest the target practices. The locals took to the ocean in their small fishing boats and successfully stopped the Navy's military exercises for a short period, until the Navy and two Coast Guard cutters began controlling access to the island and escorting boaters away from Vieques.
On April 27, 2001, the Navy resumed operations and protesting resumed. At this point over 600 protesters had already been detained.
The Vieques issue became something of a cause célèbre, and local protesters were joined by sympathetic groups and prominent individuals from the mainland United States and abroad, including political leaders Rubén Berríos, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson, singers Danny Rivera, Willie Colón and Ricky Martin, actors Edward James Olmos and Jimmy Smits, boxer Félix 'Tito' Trinidad, baseball superstar Carlos Delgado, writers Ana Lydia Vega and Giannina Braschi, and Guatemala's Nobel Prize winner Rigoberta Menchú. Kennedy's son, Aidan Caohman "Vieques" Kennedy, was born while his father served jail time in Puerto Rico for his role in the protests. The problems arising from the Navy base have also featured in songs by various musicians, including Puerto Rican rock band Puya, rapper Immortal Technique and reggaeton artist Tego Calderón. In popular culture, one subplot of "The Two Bartlets" episode of The West Wing dealt with a protest on the bombing range led by a friend of White House Deputy Chief of Staff Josh Lyman; the character was modeled on future West Wing star Jimmy Smits, a native of Puerto Rico who was repeatedly arrested for leading protests there.