Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio took several deep breaths while thousands of Puerto Ricans shouted “Benito, Benito, Benito,” and with teary eyes he looked side to side at a stadium packed with his people in San Juan. He spun around moving his fingers as if seeking strength, took the microphone and asked for an “applause for mommy and daddy because they really broke it”, followed by the rhythm of the trumpets of La mudanza.
Moved, Bad Bunny reunited this Saturday with Puerto Rico in the penultimate concert of his tour DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS. The last one will be this Sunday and will end a tour that took him to 21 other cities, from Santo Domingo and Buenos Aires to Madrid and London.
The 32-year-old artist returned home with a message that combined a harsh critique of the chronic problems with water and electricity supplies in the archipelago and a call not to throw in the towel in the face of the frustration that this generates. “I can’t bring water to the people who don’t have it, nor can I bring light to those who lose power every day. What I want today is to bring a little joy, what I want to bring today is the desire to keep feeling proud to be from here. What I want to bring you today is hope and strength to fight and keep defending this land,” he said to the nearly 18,000 spectators who received him fervently at the Hiram Bithorn Stadium in the capital.
This was just days after he announced that “we close at home” the journey that took him around the world since last November and was supposed to end in Brussels. Tickets for these final two shows sold out in just hours after his return to Puerto Rico was confirmed, following days of anticipation due to the huge scaffolding erected in the stadium.
“We save this people”
His words at Saturday’s concert were, as has happened before, a kind of love letter to Puerto Ricans. “I want to tell you something from the bottom of my heart, being very honest with you, I want you to know something: you don’t need me, I need you. You don’t need any artist, any celebrity, we need you. This stadium is full today because of you, I am here today because of you. My success and that of all the artists who come from this island, which are many, is because of you. What do I want to tell you with that: that you save this people, we save it and I include myself, not as Bad Bunny, but as Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio, and I am part of this people of which I am proud and grateful.”
“This chaos, this disaster, is created on purpose to try to play with our emotions, to try to make us give up, to make us leave so they can keep selling the island piece by piece and fulfill their mission of a Puerto Rico without Puerto Ricans. I would like that today, for the next two and a half hours, we forget any problem that may be happening outside this stadium. But before that, I want you to hear me loud and clear… Nobody gets me out of here, I’m not moving from here.”
The last months have been very difficult for thousands of Puerto Ricans who frequently suffer power and water service outages. Large sectors of the metropolitan area are under a rationing plan and others had, until this Sunday, more than three consecutive days without water due to a breakdown in a plant whose repair date is unknown. Interruptions in the supply of this resource have worsened and added to the chronic blackouts since Hurricane Maria hit Puerto Rico in September 2017, when the archipelago was practically left in the dark amid devastation.
The DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS tour followed his hugely successful residency No me quiero ir de aquí, which with about thirty concerts generated more than 350 million for Puerto Rico’s economy last year. It was a huge bet in which 31 concerts were sold and more than half a million people from around the world saw Bad Bunny at the Puerto Rico Coliseum.
