“So many people are leaving you can’t even find suitcases,” said Erica Lebron, 30, as she sat outside a housing project bodega.
It’s the lunch hour at Baker’s Bakery, a fixture in Río Piedras, one of Puerto Rico’s oldest neighborhoods, but the bustle at the counter is long gone. The front door opens and shuts only a few times an hour as customers, holding tighter than ever to their money, judiciously pick up some sugar-sprinkled pastries and a café con leche.
On the first day of the new sales tax, which jumped to 11.5 percent from 7 percent, the government’s latest rummage for more revenue, Puerto Rico’s malaise was unmistakable.
“People don’t even answer you when you tell them, ‘Buenos dias,’ ” said Ibrahim Baker, 55, on Wednesday as he stood at the cash register of the bakery he has owned for 25 years. “Everyone is depressed.”
After nearly a decade of recession, Puerto Rico’s government says it cannot pay its $73 billion debt much longer. Gov. Alejandro García Padilla warns that more austerity is on the way, a necessity for an island now working feverishly to rescue itself. With so many bracing for another slide toward the bottom, the sense of despair grows more palpable by the day.
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