Bad Bunny’s ‘La Velita’ Recalls Hurricane Maria and Serves as a Sore Indictment

Bad Bunny once again uses his music to draw attention to his homeland of Puerto Rico and his social activism.

After some time away from the spotlight, the Puerto Rican rapper unexpectedly released the single “Una Velita” (“A Little Candle”) with producers Tainy and La Paciencia, exactly seven years after Hurricane Maria devastated the U.S. territory on September 20, 2017.

The song begins with ominous, folkloric sounds and a chorus describing the omens preceding a storm and impending doom. The song’s title, combined with the album cover, depicts a scene of a dresser in someone’s bedroom with a lit candle and a painting of the Virgin Mary—a familiar sight to many on the mostly Catholic island.

“The storm is coming/Who’s gonna save us?” sings Bad Bunny in Spanish.

The song is an indictment of the situation in Puerto Rico before and after the massive storm.

“Fueron cinco mil que dejaron morir y eso nunca se nos va a olvidar” – “They let 5,000 people die that we will never forget,” he sings.

It refers to a study that found that as many as 5,000 Puerto Ricans may have died in Hurricane Maria — thousands more than the official government death toll. Many of the deaths were caused by disruptions in health care, electricity and utilities after the hurricane hit the island, according to researchers.

The song transports listeners to the island and to intimate moments of fear and despair that many Puerto Ricans experienced before the disaster.

The Category 4 storm was the deadliest hurricane to hit Puerto Rico and one of the deadliest natural disasters in U.S. history. Bad Bunny criticizes government leaders for “hiding” and showing up just to show off but not actually sending any help.

He describes the island’s failed leadership in terms of infrastructure, singing about “the bridge they built too late/the river rose, it’s finally gonna break it” and the rolling power outages that plagued the island even before the hurricane.

“The lights will go out, and God knows when they’ll come back on,” he sings in the first verse, referring to the blackout caused by Hurricane Maria, which knocked out 80% of the power, leaving parts of the island in the dark for 328 days, making it one of the longest blackouts in U.S. history.

She also sings about remembering a viejita, or older woman “who lives alone/needs to be helped.”

“Who will save us?” the choir chants.

Fans across the internet applauded Bad Bunny for using his platform to bring attention to what happened. Some created video reactions about how the song moved them to tears. Others commented on how they connected to the song and felt seen, including some who had lost loved ones.

“This made me really cry because I lost my grandpa to Maria, he couldn’t get his meds,” the person commented in a TikTok reaction. Puerto Rican TikTok creator Carlos Calderon, known for his lively and funny dance videos, took to the platform in a post where he broke down the meaning of the song and translated the lyrics, showing himself with tears in his eyes.

In the song “La Velita,” Bad Bunny sings that “we’re taking down the palm tree that they want to hang the country with,” a sarcastic dig at the island’s pro-independence party that was in power at the time of Hurricane Maria and has long had the palm tree as its symbol.

This isn’t the first time Bad Bunny has used his art to raise awareness of the issues facing his homeland. In 2022, he paired his song “El Apagón” (“The Blackout”) with a 23-minute documentary by filmmaker Bianca Graulau titled “El Apagón — Aqui Vive Gente” (“The Blackout — People Live Here”), which chronicles the hardships of living amid rolling blackouts and higher electricity costs on an outdated and dilapidated grid — despite new government contracts to upgrade the system.

The 2022 document also criticized the displacement of Puerto Rican residents after the local government offered wealthy investors tax incentives if they settled on the island, driving up real estate prices.

In a recent interview with Puerto Rican YouTuber El Tony, Bad Bunny expressed his concern about the situation on the island and encouraged its youth to take action and register to vote. “It’s good to go out in the streets to protest, to make your voices heard as people, but I think the greatest act of protest is voting against the people who got us into this mess on November 5th,” he said on the podcast.

Bad Bunny also spoke about the burden he feels when talking about his homeland, and broke down in tears. “I’m really worried about Puerto Rico, and I don’t know if it’s a burden… to get off the island,” he said, saying his mission is to represent the island to the world. “I want my people to live happily in Puerto Rico,” he told El Tony.

With swelling drums, a chanting choir, and a guitar riff setting the tone for a rallying cry, Bad Bunny delivered a political message on “La Velita,” but also shared an experience the outside world rarely gets to see in the wake of such disasters.

Hurricanes are typically depicted in news reports and aerial shots of rescue efforts and devastated landscapes, but Bad Bunny’s song and video transport audiences into the bedroom of an ordinary islander, praying to survive another day as a deadly storm closes in. It’s an anthem that evokes compelling emotion, and Bad Bunny seems on a mission to remind his fellow islanders to make their voices heard—including at the polls.

“Al pueblo, el pueblo le toca ratvar,” he sings, which roughly means that the community must save its people.