Eastern Caribbean in Focus: A Guide to the People, Politics and Culture

This slim book is a helpful and fact-filled introduction to the history and socio-economic trends in the Caribbean basin. Its focus is on the gentle arc of islands stretching from Anguilla to Trinidad. Sugar, bananas, and oil are among the commodities that have and continue to play a role in the economic life of the region. The author gives us a brief history of the Caribbean's past reliance on the slave trade to support its agricultural economy and the sometimes bloody uprisings prior to its eventual abolition in the nineteenth century. It is the kind of information you will not find in Fodor's or most travel brochures (I write this note standing at a Curacao resort photographing an idealized mural of healthy black servants - the second I have seen today). Of greater interest to the curious North American may be the history of colonial involvement which has left its ethnic mark on the islands' culture along British, French, and Dutch lines. Anglo-Canadians will almost certainly be amused to recall that it was in the Treaty of 1763 that Britain opted to retain Canada - dismissed by Voltaire as a "few acres of snow". In exchange, the delighted French retained a dotted cluster of islands that for all its imagined similarity to paradise is extraordinarily difficult to locate on any map - Guadeloupe. The impact of tourism is tremendous in the Caribbean today and it seems only destined to grow with cheap airfares and travel 'channels' of information breathlessly promoting the regions' splendid climate and recreational amenities. While some voice reservations about the cultural or ecological impact of this recent 'invasion', others might argue that the material benefits imparted to the island economies are real, needed, benign, and re-occurring. Each island's cultural identity is a dynamic asset that can be protected but not totally controlled from change with civic planning and an eye toward promoting the preservation of local traditions. In this way tourism and local identity can evolve together. The cultural impact of tourism, the development of off-shore banking enterprises, an ever-present awareness of the United States (the CNN Effect) get little attention and are generally beyond the scope of this book. The sinister threat of the drug trade moving through the islands is noted (A vacationing Amsterdam physician tells me to read SNEEUW OVER CURACAO, J.van den Heuvel [untranslated]). These are topics that warrant serious attention. Reading Ferguson's introduction is a reasonable place to prepare for that more serious study.