Aracataca and Sucre

"García Márquez is like a head of state," Fidel Castro has remarked. "The only question is, which state?" The comment starts to take us into what's unique about its subject's work and life--not least because of who delivered it. No other writer in our time has operated on so vast a scale. None has approached his literary achievement; none has so parlayed achievement into political prominence. His multifarious career as novelist, journalist, screenwriter, institution-builder, freelance diplomat, all-around wise man, global celebrity and keeper of his own gaudy legend is unified by one idea: the writer as public man. For García Márquez, literature is the continuation of politics by other means--unless it's the other way around. Other contemporary writers have sought such a role--Norman Mailer, Günter Grass, A.B. Yehoshua, Arundhati Roy--but none has approached his continental, even worldwide reach. He is Tolstoy for the twentieth century, a Latin American Dickens. Above all, he is Joyce, for while Dickens aimed himself at particular ills, García Márquez, inspired by Castro's example to lead a comparable revolution in the mental sphere, created the unformed conscience of his race. Before he could do so, however--and this is the great story of his life--he had to discover his own

How Gerald Martin manages to compress that life into fewer than 600 shrewd, lucid, incisive pages is a wonder in itself. That he is English, and writes in English, appears to have been little impediment. An esteemed scholar of Latin American literature, Martin interviewed more than 300 subjects over the course of seventeen years. A footnote mentions a 2,000-plus-page manuscript from which the present volume has been extracted. When the larger version is published, as is Martin's intention, it will undoubtedly be worth reading to the last drop.
Martin has not only beaten his way through the thicket of conflicting versions that García Márquez has offered of almost every major event in his life; he evaluates those events with a sensitivity tempered, especially with respect to his subject's incessant reputation-mongering, by skepticism. His psychological analyses are penetrating but prudent--no semi-Freudian overreach here--his biographer's inevitable "no doubts" and "must surely haves" generally persuasive. While he exhibits a degree of sympathetic bias in evaluating García Márquez's political activities, he does not shy away from pointing out his missteps, just as he is candid about the artistic demerits of his lesser works. To his comprehensive grasp of the multifaceted literary context from which his subject's work emerged, Martin adds a thorough knowledge of Colombian history and a sophisticated understanding of cold war politics and culture. His prose, nimble and forceful, is seasoned with wry humor. Best of all is Martin's abundant possession of that rarest and most precious commodity among literary biographers: critical acumen. To encounter his interpretations of One Hundred Years of Solitude, The Autumn of the Patriarch, No One Writes to the Colonel and other works--readings that combine biographical acuity with a remarkable feeling for form and voice--is to discover these masterpieces anew.
Gabriel García Márquez was born in 1927 in the small town of Aracataca in his country's sweltering Caribbean coastal zone, a provenance that determined his relationship not only to Colombian society but to the larger currents of world culture. In contrast to the dark clothes and long faces of haughty, chilly Bogotá--Andean, insular--costeño culture is unlaced, profane and feverishly exuberant: precisely the qualities that first strike us in so much of García Márquez's work. It is also mongrel; through the world of his childhood blew a "leaf storm" of transients (to take the title of his first book)--Arabs and Gypsies, East Asians and Europeans, Indians from the Sierra and migrants from the old runaway-slave regions--all drawn by the banana plantations of the United Fruit Company. While metropolitan Bogotá sat removed in its high mountain valley, little Aracataca found itself stirred into the great, global mixing bowl of the Caribbean Basin.
As a young boy, the shy, solitary García Márquez looked out upon this tumultuous world from the shelter of the place he would forever after think of simply as The House: his grandparents' compound of verandas, gardens, workshops, plaster saints, guava trees and macaws--a treasure chest of meanings and smells. One of the delights of reading about his life is discovering how many of the marvels recounted in his fiction are not made up. There really was a wandering accordionist named Francisco the Man who sang the news of distant places. The writer's grandfather really had been a colonel in the civil wars, really did sire a brood of illegitimate children, really had left his native town after killing a man in an affair of honor, really did spend his retirement making little golden fishes. If the old man represented an amalgam of José Arcadio Buendía, the patriarch, and Colonel Aureliano, the warrior, García Márquez's grandmother was the magnificent Ursula--mercilessly superstitious, iron-willed, a baker of little candy animals--whose family name, Iguarán, she shared. The two figures divided his boyhood world: the rational, practical, public realm of the Colonel, who would take his grandson by the hand as he made his rounds about town, and the domestic, feminine, spirit-ridden space of Tranquilina Iguarán and her fleet of housemaids and aunts. The dictionary on one hand; the fables of the kitchen on the other.
If his grandparents' domain became One Hundred Years of Solitude, García Márquez was living there for reasons adumbrated in Love in the Time of Cholera. Like Florentino Ariza, the writer's father was a lowly telegraph operator, charming but illegitimate. Like Fermina Daza, his mother was a stubborn beauty whose family refused to sanction the young couple's love. As in the novel, Luisa Santiaga was sent away on an arduous backcountry trek designed to extinguish her passion, only to thwart the scheme with the help of a conspiracy of telegraphists. But the feckless Gabriel Eligio lacked his alter ego's determination and industry, which is why his eldest son was placed with his maternal grandparents for the first ten years of his life, while his mother continued to produce offspring (there would eventually be eleven altogether) and his father bounced from place to place, an itinerant "pharmacist" now.
The parallels with Joyce are noteworthy: the loutish, braggardly father; the large brood of more or less alien younger siblings. García Márquez never seems to have integrated himself into the life of the family once he joined their peregrinations. He refused to accept Gabriel Eligio's authority--the Colonel would always be his real father--and the early sense of maternal abandonment would haunt him for the rest of his life. Sucre, the isolated river town where the family finally dropped anchor, would become Aracataca's demonic twin. The latter was reborn as Macondo, locus of enchantment, the former as the anonymous and malevolent setting of No One Writes to the Colonel, Chronicle of a Death Foretold and In Evil Hour, whose intended title was "This Shit-Heap of a Town."
Whatever his struggles in the family, however, García Márquez was valued for another quality he shared with the Irishman: early evidence of intellectual ability. School ignited his wildfire passion for reading, classmates deferred to his superior gifts and a long string of teachers promoted his advancement despite his intractable inability to spell and hopeless incompetence at math. By 20, he was publishing his first stories under the shadow of Kafka while pretending to study law in Bogotá. Within a year, however, fate had taken a sharp turn for both himself and his country. The assassination of Jorge Eliécer Gaitán, a charismatic populist who had dared to challenge Colombia's decades-long oligarchic consensus, touched off days of rioting in the capital city and, eventually, the years of right-wing repression known as La Violencia. García Márquez would later remark that the Bogotazo, as the upheaval became known, was the moment that Colombia finally entered the twentieth century. It certainly marked his own political coming-of-age. By striking coincidence, Gaitán was to have met that day with another 21-year-old, in town for a Pan-American student congress. The name in the slain leader's appointment book read "Fidel Castro."

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Another Mysterious Electrocution Death in Iraq

Adam Vernon Hermanson "was a natural-born leader," according to his brother, Jesse. In 2002, just before his eighteenth birthday, Adam enlisted in the US military, armed with the required permission from his parents because he was not legally an adult. Adam spent six years in the Air Force. In all, he did three tours in Iraq and one in Uzbekistan. After he was honorably discharged from the military in early 2009 with the rank of staff sergeant, Hermanson took up employment as a private bodyguard in his hometown of Las Vegas, where, according to his family, he protected a wealthy individual. But according to Jesse, Adam was interested in returning to Iraq as a private military contractor. "He had been talking about it a lot; he was interested in Blackwater," Jesse recalls.


US Air Force Staff Sgt. Adam Hermanson, pictured in Baghdad, Iraq, died Sept. 1. At the time he was working for Triple Canopy.

In May, Adam signed a contract that would put him back in the action--as a private contractor for Triple Canopy, the company that the State Department has chosen to take over much of Blackwater's security work in Iraq. According to his cousin, Paul Moreno, Hermanson was offered about $350 a day for a four-month contract. "It happened real fast," Jesse remembers. "He didn't want the family to know and get worried. He actually did it behind the backs of the family--my mom found out a day and a half before he was going. We were trying to change his mind and say it wasn't worth the money, but he felt that he needed to do it to pay off bills and get a house and be financially secure." Jesse adds, "He had also tried to get a job in Vegas as a Metro Police officer, and they denied him even with all of his training." Adam's mother, Patricia, says, "We know he disliked it. His plan was that after four months he was going to leave Triple Canopy and get a house."
Hermanson arrived in Iraq in June and took up residence inside the Green Zone at Triple Canopy's base at Camp Olympia. His family said his e-mails were brief and primarily made up of questions about how everyone else was doing. As for his work, he told the family he wasn't allowed to say much. "The last time I talked to him, I noticed that it wasn't really Adam--the way he talked," Patricia recalls. "He said he was working seventeen-hour days. When I asked how it was going there, he said, 'I can't really say much, but let's just say the average Joe couldn't be here and do what we do.'"
Earlier this week, Hermanson returned home on a flight to Dover Air Force Base in Delaware. His body was in a coffin. Hermanson was not killed by enemy fire or an improvised explosive device or even by "friendly fire." In fact, he died in what is considered to be the safest place in Iraq for Americans--the heavily fortified Green Zone. His body, according to his family, was discovered on the floor of a shower near his quarters at Camp Olympia. It appears that Hermanson was electrocuted.
On Tuesday morning, the military medical examiner who performed Hermanson's autopsy met with Hermanson's wife, Janine. "He said that everything was still pending and that he can't make a final [statement] because the toxicology and all that stuff has not come back yet. But he said that [the cause of death] was a low-voltage electrocution," she told The Nation. "When I got the call I was told that he was found in a shower, and now I am getting told that there was even still electrical current on the shower floor when they found him."
When Patricia got the news, she thought there must have been a mistake. "Adam didn't want me to worry and had told me he was in Kuwait. I just found out he was in Iraq the day he died. He said, 'Mom, I'm gonna go to Kuwait, it's gonna be a piece of cake--they even have a water park there.' All along he was telling me a lie because he didn't want me to worry."
Hermanson's family suspects that Adam may have died as a result of faulty electrical wiring. And they have good reason to think that--at least sixteen US soldiers and two contractors have died from electrocution. The Pentagon's largest contractor in Iraq, KBR (a former Halliburton subsidiary), has for months been at the center of a Congressional investigation into the electrocution deaths because the company has the massive LOGCAP contract and is responsible for almost all of the electrical wiring in US-run facilities in Iraq. The eighteen soldiers and contractors died as a result of KBR's "shoddy work," according to Senator Frank Lautenberg.
Janine Hermanson, who served four years in the Air Force, where she met her husband, said Adam will be cremated on Wednesday and a funeral service will be held Saturday. "I just want whoever is responsible to pay for it," she says. "It's not right. I know there are many cases, and it shouldn't keep happening. It should stop." Patricia echoed those sentiments. "My son went over to Iraq four times, and he was in harm's way every single time, and for him to die like this is just wrong," she says. "We want justice for this. It is shocking and unbelievable that he died, but worse is how he died."
KBR has long denied that it has been responsible for any of the deaths in Iraq, and the company says it had nothing to do with Hermanson's death. "KBR has no operations or maintenance responsibility for the living, office, or shower facilities at Camp Olympia, the Triple Canopy compound where the death occurred. Nor does KBR maintain the electrical system in the facilities or for the camp," KBR spokesperson Heather Browne said in a statement to The Nation. "We have found no evidence that that KBR constructed the camp, installed the electrical system, or ever had any operations or maintenance responsibility for the living, office, or shower facilities." The Defense Department, which is responsible for KBR's work in Iraq, did not respond to requests to confirm or deny KBR's claims. Triple Canopy would not comment on whether it did the electrical wiring for the facility where Hermanson died or if an outside contractor was involved. A Triple Canopy spokesperson told The Nation she was "unable to provide additional information at this time."
The problem of electrocutions and shocks in Iraq has become a major issue because of the number of deaths and incidents involving soldiers and Defense Department contractors. The military is making its way through inspections at the more than 90,000 US-run facilities in Iraq, a massive undertaking. According to the Associated Press, "KBR's database lists 231 electric shock incidents in the more than 89,000 facilities the company runs in Iraq, according to military records."
As The Nation has previously reported, the Defense Department paid KBR more than $80 million in bonuses for contracts to install electrical wiring in Iraq. The award payments were for the very work that resulted in the electrocution deaths of US soldiers, according to Defense Department records. More than $30 million in bonuses were paid months after the death of Sgt. Ryan Maseth, a highly decorated 24-year-old Green Beret who was electrocuted while taking a shower at a US base in January 2008. His death, the result of improper grounding for a water pump, was classified by the Army Criminal Investigations Division as a "negligent homicide," but the Pentagon recently announced there would be no criminal charges filed in the case. Two other soldiers who died from electrocution while showering are Navy Petty Officer Third Class David Cedergren and Army Cpl. Marcos Nolasco.
As for Hermanson's death, a Triple Canopy spokesperson said the company is "saddened at this terrible loss," telling The Nation, "As a matter of policy, Triple Canopy will not comment further until the investigation is complete." The State Department did not return calls requesting comment. Hermanson's family members, however, say they will not give up until they get to the bottom of Adam's death. "I know at the end Adam was fighting--fighting to stay alive even as he was being electrocuted," his mother says. "Now we need to fight for him."

Hacienda Cobrará Impuestos A Deambulantes Que Duerman Bajo Puentes

San Juan, Puerto Rico - En lo que a su juicio representa "la medida de mayor justicia contributiva implementada por nuestra administración hasta el momento", el Secretario de Hacienda, Juan Carlos Puig, anunció ayer un agresivo programa de impuestos especiales sobre la propiedad a residentes que habiten bajo exclusivos puentes, banquitos y aceras en diferentes puntos del área metropolitana, poniendo fin a la inaceptable evasión contributiva que por décadas ha afectado los recaudos del gobierno.



"Es increíble que ninguna administración anterior haya sido capaz de identificar la flagrante evasión contributiva de estos residentes que habitan en los sectores más exclusivos del país y, que se sepa, nunca han pagado contribuciones", explicó Puig, pausando momentáneamente para afilarse los colmillos con una vistosa lima de acero inoxidable. "La situación se viene dando en una cantidad alarmante de vecindarios exclusivos: hay gente bajo los puentes frente a Plaza Las Américas, en la [Avenida] Piñero, en Montehiedra, en fin, esencialmente bajo todos los puentes y aceras del área metro, viviendo de forma ostentosa y encima de eso durmiendo plácidamente a la vista de contribuyentes responsables que transitan por esas vías todos los días. Es el colmo del descaro", sentenció enfáticamente el Secretario.

New Battle on Vieques, Over Navy’s Cleanup of Munitions

VIEQUES, P.R. — The United States Navy ceased military training operations on this small island in 2003, and windows no longer rattle from the shelling from ships and air-to-ground bombings.

Mayor Evelyn Delerme Camacho of Vieques says residents want to use thousands of acres for ecotourism after the cleanup.
Gone are the protests that drew celebrities like Benicio Del Toro and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Real estate prices and tourism have boomed: a 157-room Starwood W hotel is expected to open by December on the island, which is seven miles east of Puerto Rico’s mainland.

But Vieques, once the largest training area for the United States Atlantic Fleet Forces, is still largely defined by its old struggles. Once again, residents have squared off against the American military.

The Navy has begun removing hazardous unexploded munitions from its old training ground by detonating them in the open air. It also proposes to burn through nearly 100 acres of dense tropical vegetation to locate and explode highly sensitive cluster bombs.

But what could have been a healing process has been marred by lingering mistrust. As the Navy moves to erase a bitter vestige of its long presence here, residents assert that it is simply exposing them again to risk.

“The great majority of emergency room visits here last year were for respiratory problems,” said Evelyn Delerme Camacho, the mayor of Vieques. “Can they guarantee that contaminants or smoke won’t reach the population? Would we have to wait and see if there’s a problem?”

The cleanup comes as the local Vieques government and most of the island’s 9,300 residents pursue claims against the United States government for contamination and for illnesses that they assert are linked to pollutants released during decades of live-fire and bombing exercises beginning in World War II.

Given the history of grievances, many locals are aghast that the Navy’s methods involve burnings and detonations whose booms can be heard in some residential areas, setting people on edge. They have spoken out at public hearings and in legislative resolutions.

But Christopher T. Penny, head of the Navy’s Vieques restoration program, said the unexploded bombs are too powerful to be set off in detonation chambers. And he said that experiments to cut through the dense vegetation with a remote-control device had not had much success.

Environmental Protection Agency officials who are overseeing the project say that such on-site detonations are typical of cleanups at former military training ranges. Jose C. Font, an E.P.A. deputy director in San Juan, says they pose no threat to human health as long as limited amounts are exploded each time, the wind is calm and air quality is monitored constantly.

In 2005 the training ground was designated a federal Superfund site, giving the E.P.A. the authority to order a cleanup led by the party responsible for the pollution.

The unexploded munitions lie on 8,900 acres of former Navy land on the eastern end of the island, including 1,100 acres of what was once the live impact area. The E.P.A. says the cleanup could take 10 years or more.

Workers are using historical records, aerial photography and high-power metal detectors to locate the munitions before cutting through the foliage and detonating them. So far, the Navy says, it has identified 18,700 munitions and explosives and blown up about a third of those.

The E.P.A. says that the hazardous substances associated with ordnance that may be present in Vieques include TNT, napalm, depleted uranium, mercury, lead and other chemicals, including PCBs.

Residents’ concerns about the cleanup are heightened by suspicions of a link between the contaminants and what Puerto Rico’s health department found were disproportionately high rates of illnesses like cancer, hypertension and liver disease on the island.

In 2003, the federal Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, which assesses health hazards at Superfund sites, concluded that levels of heavy metals and explosive compounds found in Vieques’s soil, groundwater, air and fish did not pose a health risk.

But this year the registry agency said it would “rigorously” revisit its 2003 finding, and its director, Dr. Howard Frumkin, plans to visit Vieques on Wednesday to meet with residents.

Puerto Rico’s legislature, meanwhile, has asked President Obama to keep a campaign promise to “achieve an environmentally acceptable cleanup” and “closely monitor the health of the people of Vieques and promote appropriate remedies.”

Most contested here is a Navy request to the E.P.A. and the Environmental Quality Board in Puerto Rico to allow the controlled burn to clear vegetation and find bombs. The risk of accidental explosions, the Navy says, is too high for workers to do it by hand using chainsaws, machetes and trimmers.

“The issue is safety,” said Mr. Penny of the Navy. Many residents complain that they have not received enough information to feel reassured. Among them are a group that gathers on most evenings in a plaza of sand-colored buildings anchored by the church in Isabel Segunda, Vieques’s main town.

“We hear they are taking out bombs, but we haven’t been informed of what exactly is coming out of there and whether there’s more contamination when they get it out,” said Julio Serrano, 57, who works at the airport as an operations supervisor. “We need to be told clearly what’s in there.”

Yet some experts on military cleanups suggest that, rather than focusing on any short-term air quality problems, residents might consider the possibility of an accidental explosion that is years away.

“The real risk is that there’s no technology available that would guarantee that they’ve removed every piece of ordnance,” said Jacqueline MacDonald Gibson, an assistant professor of environmental sciences and engineering at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill who has studied the risks of adapting former training ranges. “There’s no way to make that land safe for reuse unless it’s very restrictive.”

Other battles loom. Most of the 26,000 acres the Navy used to own on the eastern and western ends of Vieques — making up about three-fourths of the island — have been turned over to the Department of the Interior, which plans to maintain the land as a wildlife preserve.

The Fish and Wildlife Service has already opened up small portions of the area to the public as a wildlife refuge that includes gorgeous undeveloped beaches where sea turtles like the loggerhead and hawksbill nest.

But Mayor Delerme Camacho said that once the cleanup is over, Vieques’s residents want to be able to use the land for housing and ecotourism, too. Already, those eager to build have staked out makeshift claims with signs on trees within a chunk of 4,000 acres transferred by the Navy to the municipal government.

Though fishermen can now catch red snapper and yellowtail unfettered by the Navy’s target practice, and visitors have discovered the rural charms of a place where horses roam freely on the roads, Vieques still has high rates of poverty and lacks a full-fledged hospital.

Ismael Guadalupe, 65, a retired teacher and leader in the long resistance to the Navy’s operations here, said that while the training is over, the fighting continues. “As one of our sayings goes, ‘If we had to eat the bone, now we should be able to eat the meat,’ ” he said.

In hard times, some Puerto Ricans choose life back on island

Cultural nuances, such as strong family ties that provide a safety net, and a potentially lower cost of living, make it easier to endure hard times.


Eunice Cruz, with son-in-law Joel Espinosa, works in her garage Friday to prepare to move from Orlando back to Puerto Rico. (GARY W. GREEN, ORLANDO SENTINEL / September 4, 2009)

Jeannette Rivera-Lyles

Sentinel Staff Writer

September 7, 2009

After 13 years in Central Florida, Eunice and Miguel Cruz are packing up their Orlando house to go back to their native Puerto Rico. They are sad to go, the Cruzes say. This is where they raised a blended family of seven kids, founded a business and had their first grandchild. But the recession has hit them hard. Facing the loss of a business and a drained savings account, the Cruzes have decided the island offers their best chance to get back on their feet.

"If we're going to have a hard time, we'd rather be close to the family," Eunice Cruz said.

To weather the economic storm that has left many Central Floridians jobless, many Puerto Ricans are seeking refuge at home. It's not that the situation on the island is any better. But cultural nuances, such as strong family ties that provide a safety net, and a potentially lower cost of living, make it easier to endure hard times.

The Cruzes' ordeal began a year ago when Eunice lost her job at a car dealership. During the nine months she was unemployed, the family went through savings. Just as she was able to secure a job, Miguel was given a 45-day notice to vacate the building that houses his mechanic shop. It had been sold.

"I tried to relocate the shop," Cruz said. "But no bank would give me a small loan. My credit is good. But they are just not lending."

The Cruzes plan to live with a grown son in Fajardo until they can rent a house. Miguel, who has a degree in education, plans to teach auto mechanics.

They know there is no guarantee they'll get jobs there. Chances are, they'll make less money. But the Cruzes believe that having their families' support will also make life less stressful.

"We just want to be at peace," Eunice Cruz said.


Island also struggles
Hiram Rodriguez is the owner of La Rosa del Monte Express, an Orlando moving company that specializes in moving Floridians to and from Puerto Rico.

In the past two years, as the economy took a dive, Rodriguez's business climbed. The moves back to the island went from an average of 100 families a month in 2007 to an average of 160 a month so far this year. Meanwhile, the moves to Central Florida from the island dropped by half.

"We hear the same thing over and over [from the clients]," Rodriguez said. "It's the economy, the economy, the economy."

Life in Puerto Rico for the average family is far from idyllic. Unemployment is at 16.5 percent, the highest of all U.S. jurisdictions. Its debilitated economy reached recession levels a year earlier than on the mainland.

The cost of living in the San Juan metro area is high. According to a 2008 Coldwell Banker Real Estate report, the average price of a three-bedroom, two-bathroom home there is $329,750. But on the rest of the island, it is still possible to rent an apartment for $400 a month or a small home for $600 a month.


Temporary refuge?
Many returning to the island hope they'll be able to come back to Central Florida when the economy improves.

Sylvia Roig, a 38-year-old single mom, lived in Buenaventura Lakes for nine years. An accountant, she became a mortgage broker six years ago in order to work from home and spend more time with her two young children.

When the housing market went bust, she struggled to keep a roof over their head.

In April, Roig rented out her BVL home and moved in with her 84-year-old grandmother, who lived alone in her three-bedroom home in Arecibo. She's been freelancing as an accountant and has started a home-based cake-making business. She wants to return to Central Florida if things here improve.

"Schools are better [in Central Florida] than here, government agencies are not so chaotic and crime is not such a big worry," Roig said. "But right now, it's about keeping our heads above water."

Roig's case is typical, said Alicia Ramirez, director of Hispanic Office of Local Assistance, an Orlando office that helps Hispanics obtain social services. "We see it here every day," Ramirez said. "It is a revolving door."

Because Puerto Ricans are American citizens, going back and forth doesn't pose a legal or immigration issue. "Some have come to see Central Florida as an extension of the island," Ramirez said. "We joke and say that it is Puerto Rico's 79th municipality."

Ramirez said that some social idiosyncrasies make the move easier.

"Culturally, it is perfectly acceptable for a grown man to move back to his parents' home with his own family in tow," Ramirez said. "And then, there's the underground economy. People can easily start roadside businesses selling food, hammocks or whatever, with little government regulation."

The island's other bonus is a government-run universal health-care program that, although bankrupt, still provides free services for low-income people.

That was a big consideration for Carlos Jeffrey of Hunter's Creek in south Orange County, who moved back to Puerto Rico after 13 years. He had lost his job as a medical technologist.

"Not having health insurance is nerve-racking," Jeffrey said.

He relocated to a beach property in Aguada that he had purchased as an investment. He doesn't rule out returning.

"I miss it already," he said.

Jeannette Rivera-Lyles can be reached at 407-420-5471 or jrivera@orlandosentinel.com.