Sounds like a Third World country run by a little tiny tinpot dictators in their little tiny towns.
And independence would make it official. Being a Commonwealth is the people's only hope for justice.
In my military years, I came to work with several Puerto Rican guys, and they all told the same basic story. It’s a third-world island with the bare necessities of a democracy...corrupt politicians around every corner...and nothing working right. All of them who joined the military and left the island...never intended to ever move back there.
It would serve the US well to just hand them two or three billion in cash, and dump them as a territory. Let them survive like Haiti.