The Sugar Islands

by Alec Waugh

  Antigua has something of the best of everything that the other islands can offer and at half the price, a third of Cuba and Jamaica. Sterling was devalued in 1949, but a pound is still a pound to an Englishman; and wages and the cost of labour have kept their level. A maid is paid three-and-six a day, and feeds herself on that. She will steal a little, but within reason.

  The following prices are indicative of the cost of living.

  You can get a good single room at the Beach Hotel at two pounds a day, American plan. There is a ten per cent, reduction if you stay a week. After 30th April—and May is a delightful month—there is a further fifteen per cent, reduction. Extras need not be excessive. You can keep your bar bill low by drinking rum. Bourbon is hard to obtain. Heavy duties are paid on Scotch and gin, and Scotch is sometimes in short supply. French wine in a restaurant costs a pound a bottle and is rarely worth it. But Barbadian rum costs four shillings a bottle. Barbadian rum is little known outside the islands: it is lighter than Jamaican, heavier than Cuban rum, and it is excellent. Monotony can be avoided by following the West Indian custom of drinking a punch at noon—long, sweetish, and cold, it is excellent after a swim—swizzles before dinner—they are sharp, bitter, highly flavoured with angostura, to be gulped rather than sipped at, and in tune with the heightened tempo of an evening’s conviviality; after dinner a rum and water highball. Rum drinks average a shilling.

  Transport presents a problem for there are no practical forms of public transport. There are no trains. Buses are crowded, unpunctual, smelly, and hardseated. It is too hot for bicycling. The Beach Hotel runs a ferry service into St. John’s, at fixed times; from the Kensington you can hire a taxi to the nearest beach—the St. James and one of the very best—at ten shillings the round trip. But with picknicking, one of Antigua’s first attractions, far and away the best plan is to hire a drive-yourself car. The cost is a question of bargaining. The West Indian always asks a fantastic price at first, but he is very amiable and comes down without rancour. I had a long argument with a boatman who wanted to charge me six shillings when the fare was three and six. At first he refused to accept my three and six; but at the last moment, just as my launch was sailing, he returned to take my money. ‘Thank you very much,’ I said. ‘Don’t thank me, thank yourself,’ he answered. He had a broad grin on his face. You should be able to hire a car for one pound a day.

  For the visitor who decides to make a longer stay, there should be little difficulty in renting a bungalow; there are several on the Beach estate; they are modern, stone-built, with modern plumbing, and they vary in size. The weekly rent for a family bungalow should not exceed five pounds. The cost of living is conditioned by the low rate of wages.

  Much of the traveller’s enjoyment depends on his ability to mix in the local life and to recognize and appreciate the national characteristics that make the country he is visiting different from his own, and it is a great help in visiting a British island to arrive with a letter of introduction to one of the residents. It is said that the English are inhospitable. I hope that is not true, but we do all live so close to one another that we are chary of making new acquaintances; every acquaintance is practically a neighbour, so we do not speak in trains to people whom we do not know. But one letter of introduction to a resident will introduce you to half a colony. It is also a wise precaution to sign the book at Government House. It is a courteous gesture and may lead to something.

  It is not of course always possible to arrange for such letters of introduction, and it is possible for a visitor to feel lonely in a British colony. But this is unlikely to happen in Antigua. So much coming and going has created a readiness to welcome the bird of passage. There is, moreover, an admirable social catalyst in the person of Nick Fuller, a young Chicagoan who came down during the war, acted for a while as American Vice-Consul and when the post eventually folded, decided to stay on.

  Facing you when you land by air is a large army hut welcoming you in faded letters to the Coolidge Airport. Once a recreation room for enlisted men, it is now, as a bar, one of the many irons in Nick’s well-tended fire. You might well do worse than pause there for a punch or Cola before you drive on to the Beach or Kensington. Nick has already converted the old officers’ club into the island’s single ‘hot spot’ and as of now he is busily creating a guest house out of an abandoned barracks. Anyone with a gregarious nature who introduces himself to Nick should soon find himself caught up into the island’s life, and the agreeable succession of picnics and of punch parties that form its framework.

  Sooner or later almost certainly you will find yourself included in an invitation to Mill Reef. You will be very foolish if you do not accept it. Mill Reef is very special. It is a private club for American membership only, where a large guest house provides resort facilities for a rapidly increasing group of bungalows—at the moment there are over twenty and the terrain can accommodate sixty. Its members are hospitable and during the season from New Year to 15 th April, stage innumerable lunch and cocktail parties, at individual bungalows and at the central guest house. The actual members are for the most part retired and middle-aged, but they invite down their children and their children’s friends. There is a youthful and gay atmosphere about the Saturday night dances.

  Antigua, as an air junction, is, moreover, an excellent jumping-off place for amusing short expeditions. I took one this spring that I can heartily recommend. It lasted five days, the transportation cost twenty-five dollars and it included visits to two of the most discussed and least visited islands in the West Indies: the Dutch island of Saba and St. Martin which is half French, half Dutch, whose disputed ownership was settled two hundred years ago by setting a Frenchman and a Dutchman to walk round the island in opposite directions and drawing the dividing line from the point at which they met.

  St. Kitts is by air half an hour distant from Antigua and every Wednesday afternoon the Dutch mail boat, the Blue Peter, starts on a tour of the small Dutch islands. The Blue Peter is a schooner with an auxiliary engine. It has cabins and is compact and comfortable; from its deck you get an excellent view of the St. Kitts canefields and the vast fortifications of Brimstone Hill on whose defence in 1782 the fortunes of the British in the West Indies hinged. You reach the Dutch island of St. Eustatius as dusk is falling. You can go ashore if you like and eat in the rest house a poor dinner for two dollars, and for an extra two dollars you can stay the night. But it is cheaper and cosier to bring sandwiches and stay on board. At six in the morning you sail for Saba, which you reach at 10 a.m. and where you disembark.

  On the Saturday morning the Blue Peter calls back to take you to St. Martin. From St. Martin on the Monday a K.L.M. plane will return you to St. Kitts. You have two days at St. Martin to compare the difference in atmosphere between colonial France and Holland and also, since St. Martin is a free port, to stock up on perfumes. For seven shillings a bottle you can drink good claret on the French side of the line but you will be better housed on the Dutch side. On both sides they will confuse you by explaining that the Dutch gilder is the currency they prefer—a type of coin you are certain to be without. You will come off a little badly with taxis and with boatmen, but not so very badly. It is by and large a bargain trip.

  You will not meet café society in Antigua, nor are there any night-clubs. But apart from that—and is that so heavy a disadvantage?—you can get there the best of what the Caribbean has to offer and at half the price.

  1 My friend Charlesworth Ross—one-time controller of Montserrat—now runs the White Sands Hotel.

  An Island to be Explored

  from WHEN THE CLOCKS CHIME TWICE

  If February 1951 Hamilton Wright took a party of journalists to Puerto Rico, to celebrate the hundredth of the new industries with which ‘operation bootstrap’ was trying to bring prosperity to the island. I was invited to join it, on the verbal understanding that I should ‘Some day write something, somewhere’. This is the only occasion on which I have not paid my own passage money and
I hope it will be the last. The undertaking to ‘write something, some day’ put me in the position of a guest delivering himself of a bread-and-butter letter. I did not feel that I could say all I wanted, as I could and did when I was describing St. Lucia, Grenada, and Martinique. The writing of this piece convinced me of what I should have known before, that a travel-writer must never put himself under an obligation. I have, however, included this piece because it contains some background material about Puerto Rico.

  Written in 1951

  AIR-PASSENGERS for St. Thomas change planes at Puerto Rico, as do most passengers who are bound for or across the Caribbean. San Juan has become the most important provincial air junction in the world, but its airport is all that the average tourist sees of the island of which it is the capital. A Frenchman once wrote a book called England; the Unknown Isle, and the same sub-title could serve for an essay on Puerto Rico.

  The third largest island in the Caribbean, it was for centuries the most neglected. When the Spanish-American War broke out in 1898, the war correspondents who hurried to the public library ‘to read it up’ could find practically nothing on it in the English language. Discovered by Christopher Columbus on his second voyage, its first Governor was Ponce de Leon. On sighting the harbour of San Juan, he exclaimed, ‘Ah, que Puerto Rico !’ (What a rich port!) And it was prophetic of the island’s destiny that that name should have been chosen; its subsequent importance to the Spaniards was simply that—its value as a port.

  The Spaniards crossed the Atlantic with a triple-pronged objective, ‘Glory and Gold and God’, and they soon lost interest in the colony that had no mines. But though Puerto Rico had no rich minerals, the prevailing trade winds gave a strategic value to San Juan. The country that owned its harbour was well placed to control the convoys of bullion flowing east from Panama, and its citadel was highly fortified to resist attack. John Hawkins lost his life there. Drake failed to land. Cumberland held it for a little, but fever killed off his troops. Through the long wars of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when Barbados alone among the British islands was uninvaded, the Spanish flag flew from the ramparts of the Morro Castle. It became the Gibraltar of the Caribbean.

  Puerto Rico was a garrison, no more and no less than that; a fact that presumably explains the distinctive nature of its population. Only a small proportion of its natives have marked African strains, the crinkled hair, thick lips, and nose that you will find in Guadeloupe, Antigua, and Jamaica. The average Puerto Rican has a darkish skin, but straight black hair and delicate European features. This cannot be due to the original Indian strain, for here, as in Hispaniola, the Indians were eliminated within a few years of the occupation. Very few Spanish women came out to the colony during the first decades, and it must have been with imported Africans that the Spanish troops formed their alliances. The plantation system was, however, not developed in Puerto Rico to the extent that it was in the sugar islands, in Jamaica, Barbados and Martinique. The number of slaves imported was limited to the needs of a garrison rather than an agricultural community. As a result, the Spanish strain predominated over the African.

  Spain valued Puerto Rico for the protection it provided for its commerce; a value that was not to be assessed in terms of a credit and debit balance-sheet. It was not expected to pay dividends, and its successive governors appear to have been more liberal, more beneficent, than those who were appointed to Peru and Mexico. There was little civil disorder; little resentment against Government, and the eighteen-twenties found Puerto Rico, with Cuba and San Domingo, still loyal to the Spanish Crown; a loyalty that was increased by the recruitment from Haiti and certain of the new Republics, of colonists who did not wish to lose their link with Spain. Puerto Rico was nicknamed ‘Ever the loyal isle’. Its relations with Madrid were cordial, and in the very year that the Spanish-American War broke out, Spain, through the diplomacy of Luis Muñoz Rivera, the father of the present Governor, ratified a constitution that granted the colonists a high measure of autonomy. The majority of Puerto Ricans were as contented with their lot as any group of inhabitants in an imperfect universe. It was merely the caprice of history that made them citizens of the United States.

  When the Maine was exploded outside Havana, few Americans can have visualized the acquisition of Puerto Rico as a war objective. Yet, in point of fact, when peace was signed Washington had no alternative. Spain could scarcely be allowed to retain a possession in the New World. Puerto Rico was in no position to conduct her own affairs as an independent republic. Moreover, since the Civil War, Washington had recognized the need for a naval base in the Caribbean. For some time it had been negotiating with Denmark for the purchase of the Virgin Islands. San Juan provided an immediate solution to that problem.

  It was not at the start a change of régime that the Puerto Ricans themselves particularly welcomed, and little was to happen in the immediate future to engender filial feelings. Washington was no more paternal than Spain had been. The Union is in large part self-built, its citizens have been encouraged and trusted to conduct their own affairs. The Puerto Ricans were allowed an equal latitude; in consequence, the island returned to the long obscurity that had shrouded her activities since the Morro Castle had rendered her impregnable. It was not till after World War II that Americans as a whole, through a slow process of gathering awareness which was startled into full recognition by the attempt organized by Puerto Ricans on President Truman’s life, came to realize quite what a problem they had on their hands.

  It was slowly, very slowly, that that awareness came. It was not till the middle nineteen-thirties that Eleanor Roosevelt was to be shocked by the conditions under which so many of her fellow citizens were living. Later the spread of the Pan-American network was to convert San Juan into an airport, where many Americans were forced to spend an hour or two in transit. The experience annoyed them and disturbed them. They were subjected to Customs inspections which seemed unnecessary, since they were in U.S. territory, and which were conducted by officials who spoke little English; they took a drive through a city supposedly American where they could not make themselves understood; they saw a slum quarter that matched in squalor anything that Kingston, Havana, or Port au Prince could offer, a slum quarter which was not even built on solid ground, but in one of the lagoons that skirted the main city: poles being stuck into the mud to support wooden shacks. A sense of responsibility was aroused, and Puerto Rico crept into the news. By the later ‘forties she was in the headlines. Continued unemployment had led to mass emigration into the United States. Puerto Ricans were citizens, and immigration and quota regulations could place no check upon their movements. They were going up at the rate of a thousand a month, speaking little English, unused to cold, to find themselves huddled into Harlem tenements, with no more security of employment than they had known at home; to drift, many of them, into crime.

  In synopsis the problem is this: two million American citizens speaking little English, trained in a Spanish tradition with little if any appreciation of American standards and ideals, living in an island that never has been self-sufficient, that never has paid dividends; an agricultural community the extent and nature of whose soil cannot find full employment for its population; a territory in which there is a strong enough nationalist minority to stage a revolution and attempt the assassination of the President. That is the problem, or rather that is the dark side of the problem. For there is a bright and hopeful side. There is the immense effort now being made under the inspiration of Luis Muñoz Marin, the son of the Luis Muñoz Rivera, who arranged the original treaty of autonomy with Spain, to reorganize the financial and industrial life of the island under a scheme that he has labelled ‘Operation Bootstrap’.

  My visit to the island coincided with the opening of the one-hundredth new industry that had been started to implement this policy. In a speech at the inaugural ceremonies, its Administrator, Teodoro Moscoso, explained the scope and purpose of the project.

  ‘There is,’ he said, ‘a
n average of six hundred and forty-five of us crowded on each square mile of land, and we are labouring under a lack of balance between resources and population density to a degree which is present in few areas of the world. Nowhere in the world can six hundred and forty-five persons per square mile subsist on a purely agricultural economy except at an extremely low level. The island is suffering from an industrial density of population and an agricultural production pattern. The land problem is something which we cannot change. We cannot stretch our land nor put into it minerals which are not there. What we can do is to adopt new techniques and learn new skills. The task in which we are engaged is to create the conditions for industry to develop and prosper, and a financial and social climate favourable for rapid economic development. We have brought a hundred new factories to the island.’

  There are at the moment of writing some hundred thousand semi-employed persons in Puerto Rico. For only some fifteen thousand do the hundred new industries provide full employment. Another seven or eight hundred industries will be required. In order to attract capital from the mainland, there has been a remission of Federal income-tax for fifteen years. A great, great effort is certainly being made.

  To attend the celebration of this one-hundredth industry, some sixty pressmen, publicists, and bankers were brought down from the mainland. I was invited to tag along. The junket was arranged to show us the type of industry that was being undertaken, and the type of island for whose benefit the project had been devised. It was also intended that we should enjoy ourselves. There were no customs formalities at the airport. On the contrary, while the baggage was being sorted out, frothing daiquiris were served. In our rooms awaited each of us a leather zip-fastening brief-case containing a great number of brochures and tourist literature, stamped with our own names, and in the centre, above the island’s seal, with the title Operation Bootstrap.