The Many Faces of the Caribbean

The uneasiness that I felt being a cruise passenger in the Caribbean has some merit.

From Kristoffer A. Garin's Devils on the Deep Blue Sea:

"Beginning with the marketing of the islands themselves, much of the Caribbean cruise tourist's experience is as tightly orchestrated an affair as any Disney World trip with the locale nothing more than beguiling scenery...This Caribbean is more a simulation than a genuine place--a real -life theme park composed of resorts sealed away behind fences and armed guards, of air conditioned touring vans whose pith-helmeted drivers and guides whisk you through the places where local people live en route to this beach, or that charter boat, or this 'colorful' straw market where ladies in bandannas hawk 'local' crafts, with not a local customer in sight. Indeed, most of the major cruise lines have taken long-term leases on private islands where they can treat their passengers to a version of the Caribbean 'as it's meant to be' without any inconvenient interruption from the locals.

"Not that Caribbean cruises are actually marketed as opportunities to learn about the places themselves. Leafing through the glossy brochures, one would never guess that the region's nearly forty million people share an economic, military, and social history that, from slaves, sugar, and rum to the Monroe Doctrine and gunboat diplomacy, is inseparable from that of the United States itself.

"The Caribbean's allure, instead is presented as generic, an opportunity for 'castaways' from the United States to let their hair down for a week in a carefully constructed Eden--to leave behind the stresses and complexities of their everyday lives. To the extent that a sales pitch mentions the character of local life at all, it's usually to paint a picture of a touchingly simple folk, who for all the appear to hold no dearer wish than to welcome yet another tourist to their unthreateningly primitive world--and put an umbrella drink in his hand. Tucked away, out of frame, are the armed guards patrolling the beachy borders of this wonderland, there to protect visiting eyes from the far less photogenic reality: of unemployment rates as high as 20 percent, of political frustrations nutured by centuries under corrupt, inept, to cruel rulers, of the resentments held by peoples who after two generations of political independence are still hopelessly unequal players in the arenas of international trade and diplomacy.