San Juan - Puerto Rico - page 140

FEAR & LOATHING IN SAN JUAN
Long before Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and the sharp, stylized prose that gave
birth to 'Gonzo' journalism, US writer Hunter S Thompson earned a meager living
as a scribe for a fledgling Puerto Rican English-language weekly called El Sportivo,
based in San Juan.
Thompson first arrived in the Puerto Rican capital in 1960 on the cusp of an un-
precedented tourist boom. With the Americans recently ushered out of Cuba by a bel-
ligerent Fidel Castro, the rum party had moved defiantly east as corrupt businessmen
and nascent tour companies attempted to re-create the tawdry nightlife and glitzy
casinos that had once run rampant in Havana.
Attracted raucously into the melee, Thompson lapped up the louche bars with
hungry relish. To finance his Caribbean sojourn he vied for a job with the (now de-
funct) San Juan Star, a newspaper then edited by subsequent Pulitzer Prize winner
William Kennedy (author of the novel Ironweed ) but, after being passed over in fa-
vor of more reliable fodder, he set his sights dangerously lower. For the literary
world, it was a fortuitous demotion. Money was tight but rum mysteriously abundant
in 1960s San Juan and, while many of Thompson's experiences quickly evaporated
in back-to-back drinking binges, the essence of the era was later to emerge rather
dramatically in his seminal book, The Rum Diary. Published in 1998 (nearly 40 years
after it was written), the novel is a thinly veiled account of Thompson's alcohol-
fuelled journalistic exploits as seen through the eyes of Paul Kemp, a struggling
freelance writer caught in a Caribbean boomtown that was battling against an incom-
ing tide of rich American tourists. Kemp, rather like Thompson, was a young chan-
cer, eager to make his mark in a city that was getting its first insight into the decaden-
ce and depravity of the American Dream. Transfixed and reviled in equal measure,
he regularly plied the streets of Old San Juan drinking rum for breakfast and gate-
crashing free press parties for lunch.
However, built on precarious foundations, Thompson's Puerto Rican honeymoon
didn't last. The writer left San Juan nine months after he arrived and made tracks for
America's west coast. His characteristically manic Rum Diary scribblings, released
40 years later, offer a rare glimpse of an island at an important turning point in its
history and a snapshot of a journalistic genius in the making. Hailed today as a mod-
ern classic, the topic has been made into a Hollywood movie starring Johnny Depp,
due for release in 2011.