Vieques, Island Paradise?

     From South Florida, it's about a thousand miles to Puerto Rico, out past Cuba, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic.in the Caribbean.  It's a flight of about three hours.   If you walk through the airport and follow the signs, you get to the Vieques Air Link desk where you sign in for the eight mile hop to the tiny island of Vieques, twenty-one miles long by four miles wide.  Tiny.  It has one zip code.
     Yes, zip code.  For like Puerto Rico proper, Vieques  belongs to the United States, which used the island, at least a third of it, for bombing practice in World War II--and kept using it (and charging other countries for the pleasure of bombing it too) until 2003, when protesters from around the world supported the people of Vieques, and the United States government finally pulled the plug on bombing.  The island is still waiting for significant cleanup efforts to begin and a timetable for the island to reclaim the land that has been off limits for most of a century.
     And through it all, Vieques has managed to attract increasing island entrepreneurs and tourists (maybe by the thousands, but certainly by the hundreds) to see its splendors--its gorgeous beaches, its 2,500 wild horses that wander freely over roads, lawns, and cemeteries, and its look of a time-forgotten paradise.
     Like Puerto Rico, Vieques is a poor country, and because all local improvements get caught up in "mainland" politics and bureaucracy in San Juan, which has plenty of its own financial problems, very little in the way of self-improvement money ever gets appropriated for the roads, say, which are among the worst in the hemisphere, especially the ones you have to drive to get to the most beautiful, and most isolated beaches in the world.  They are winding dirt roads with pot holes the size of lakes and five-mile-an-hour speed limits that are actually set too high.  You have to inch along in places as you serpentine your way for a couple of miles before you get to the beach.  The local car rental company only carries four-wheel-drive Jeeps.  And every road is so narrow that you have to squeeze to one side whenever another Jeep comes the other way.  Especially when horses decide to walk down the road too.
     Vieques isn't perfect--you'll need lots of mosquito repellent!--but it comes close to being an island paradise.  Close enough anyway.