The Sugar Islands

by Alec Waugh

  It was a three-day programme. On the first day a nine-thirty start sent us off to a china factory forty miles west of San Juan. An early lunch was followed by a second forty-mile drive in the opposite direction for the opening of the one-hundredth industry —a blanket factory. Five names appeared on the list of speakers and I anticipated a full two hours of oratory. To my surprised relief no speech lasted more than seven minutes, and we were at liberty to examine not only the plant itself but an exhibition of the other ninety-nine new industries. Some excellent fish hors-d’oeuvres accompanied a rum-based swizzle. That evening there was a reception at the Governor’s palace, where we drank sweet champagne under the stars.

  The next day was given over to a picnic—a pig-roast at the Louquillo beach. Swimming and sunbathing, cock-fighting and local dances had been arranged. Ed Gardner was to stage a show with members of his Duffy’s Tavern. Fate was unkind. The weather could not have been worse. It was one of those grey, windy days that contradict more often than one would suppose the unqualified superlatives of the travel folders. It actually did not rain a lot, but it was no day for sunbathing and scarcely one for seabathing. Our hosts’ time-table was ruined. We had been invited for eleven, but it had not been planned to serve the meal until three o’clock. Owing, however, to the wind, the cold, and the grey skies, every guest on arrival made straight for the daiquiris. Ed Gardner lured us to his bandstand on the beach, but we went with glasses in our hands. It was soon apparent that by two o’clock at the latest an assault would have to be made on the six pigs that, transfixed on stakes, were roasting over open fires: those pigs had needed another hour.

  For the Puerto Ricans, to whom pig-roasts are a part of their routine, it was no doubt a disappointing afternoon, but to a visitor like myself to whom it was a new experience, the occasion was both enjoyable in itself and interesting as an indication of the kind of life that Puerto Ricans lived.

  For me that picnic was typical of the ten days I spent in Puerto Rico. Without getting the full enjoyment out of a pig-roast, I recognized how enjoyable one could be; in the same way, though I did not see the people or the place in the way that would have enabled me to write with any authority about the island, I recognized what there was to see and what I missed.

  During the long week-end while the Press representatives were being entertained, I took a number of drives into the country. With the junket over, I attached myself to a documentary film team that was preparing a picture on the sugar industry. The expedition took me round the north and west of the island, and south as far as Ponce. I returned to San Juan by air. I saw the actual terrain; I saw how intensively each section capable of agricultural exploitation had been developed; I realized the necessity for ‘Operation Bootstrap’; I saw how the north of the island differed from the south; I saw also how much the island had to offer to the visitor, the extent and beauty of its beaches, the picturesqueness of its mountain villages. I realized how little of the island you have seen if you have only seen San Juan. You might as well judge Ceylon from Colombo.

  There are indeed certain resemblances, socially, between Colombo and San Juan. Each is a port. The lounges of its hotels are littered with the bustle of arrival and departure. Each is a large, prosperous, and important city whose residents have built up for themselves a personal and individual life, independent of and indifferent to the comings and goings of these visitors. In San Juan, as in Colombo, the tourist is conscious of an animated, busy life going on around him in which he has no part. San Juan possesses a number of hotels, at least two of which are classified de luxe. They were both booked solid. A number of the visitors were holidaymakers, staying some of them for a month. At the same time there is no resort atmosphere in either the Caribe Hilton or the Condado; each is self-contained, a world of its own. My room faced not upon the sea but upon a minor thoroughfare. All day long horns honked below my window. I looked out upon a series of apartment houses. An alien city lay about me. In Charlotte Amalie, Miami, Cannes, and Montego Bay the tourist feels that the whole locality has been built up for and is devoted to his tastes and needs, that the beaches, the bars, the night-clubs, the flowered terraces, the pools, the smart expensive little shops have all been put there for his pleasure. As indeed they have. There is no such atmosphere in San Juan. Though San Juan can sell you anything you need, it has no shopping centre. The smart shops are scattered through the town. On occasions, such as New Year’s Eve, the old families of Puerto Rico will attend at the Candado, sumptuously attired in silk and taffeta and brocade, of an unmodish cut but beautifully embroidered; young Puerto Ricans will bring their girls to dine and dance there, but the real life of the city is staged in private houses.

  A considerable effort is being made to develop the island as a vacation centre, but the effort, very wisely, is not being concentrated upon the capital. San Juan with its two or three first-class hotels is the most comfortable airport with which I am familiar. A couple of days can be spent there very profitably, loitering through the narrow streets of the old city, visiting the Morro Castle— which is so capacious that a freak nine-hole golf-course has been laid out within its walls; as you lay the basis of a sun-tan, you can enjoy the best long rum-based drink that I have ever tasted, a fruit punch based upon the local Don Q rum and flavoured with pineapple. In the small restaurants of the old town you can sample excellent colonial dishes. If you have letters of introduction to any residents, you will be introduced into a pleasant social world of picnics and clubs and cocktail parties. But to get the distinctive flavour of Puerto Rico you need to get into the country and the country towns.

  Once out of San Juan, America seems a long way off. Everyone speaks Spanish. Everyone looks Spanish. Every township with its plaza and cathedral has the feel of Spain. The houses are built on a Spanish pattern. When I was in Mayagüez, I visited the owner of the saltponds industry. His home could not have been less American: a bare wall with shuttered windows faced the street; a long narrow house ran through to the next block; the courtyard was open to the sky; there was a pianola.

  Spanish customs are still maintained. In a town like San German you will see on Saturday and Sunday evenings the young men and women strolling in couples round the plaza, in opposite directions, eyeing one another. The double standard is maintained. While upper-class girls are strictly chaperoned, Ponce at least maintains quite openly a highly adequate bordello—a dancing floor with bungalows set round it, attractive hostesses and a bar that is unexpectedly embellished, not only with Esquire pin-ups but photographs of the New York Yankees—a rival ball team, as my cicerone put it. In Ponce I was entertained by one of the heads of Don Q rum. Born in Puerto Rico, married to a Puerto Rican, the son of a German immigrant, tall and blond, speaking with a German accent, he told me that as a young man, raised in a tradition that was half German and half American, he had rebelled against this system of strict chaperonage, but now as a father he endorsed it. Puerto Ricans may be American citizens, but they are leading a Spanish life.

  There lies for the visitor the attraction of the island. If Cervantes were to return today, he might find himself less lost in Puerto Rico than in Barcelona. For over fifty years the Stars and Stripes have flown over its squares, but those fifty years have to be set against four hundred years of Spanish rule.

  I spent ten days in Puerto Rico. I did not, as I said, see either the places or the people that I should have done. But I saw enough to know what I had missed and whom there was to see. The island has a great deal to offer to anyone who gets into the country. It is an island to be explored. It provides another good reason for learning Spanish.

  ‘Typical Dominica’

  from WHERE THE CLOCKS CHIME TWICE

  Written in 1948

  For a long time I had felt curious about Dominica. I had been there twice—in 1929 and again in 1938. Of all the West Indian islands that I had visited, it was the one that I had liked the least; at the same time it was the one I was most anxious to see again; a contradiction that is ty
pical of Dominica, whose saga is a long succession of inconsistencies.

  Every fact about it is self-contradictory. The third largest of the British West Indian possessions, it supports one of the smallest populations. Though its soil is extremely fertile, only a small proportion of its surface is under cultivation. Though it possesses in Rupert’s Bay a superb natural harbour, its capital stands at Roseau in an open roadstead. One of the loveliest islands in the world, its beauties are hidden for weeks on end by cloud. Its beauty has, indeed, proved a liability. Its beauty is an effect of mountains, and its mountains by attracting rain have deluged the interior with such floods that no road has been built across the island1 and no road has been built round the island. Two-thirds of the windward coast is cut off from the capital.

  For many years the island has been in the red. Its ill-luck has been persistent, and its ill-luck has been accompanied by ill-management. In the middle of the eighteenth century, the island was put up for sale in lots by the British Crown. The sale realized a quarter of a million pounds. Not one penny of this sum was reinvested in the island. It was used instead for Queen Charlotte’s dowry. In the eighteen-forties coffee was a highly successful product, but disease destroyed the crops. Limes were planted, and Rose’s Lime Juice became an internationally accepted label, while planters on the windward coast produced a concentrated lime juice from which citric acid was extracted and which could be stored safely until an opportunity came for shipping it. In the nineteen-twenties, however, wither-tip disease damaged, in many cases irremediably, the lime plantations, and the discovery in Italy of a synthetic method of producing citric acid made the marketing of the Dominican product no longer profitable. When the Panama Canal was opened, Dominica by its geographical position should have become the coaling-station for British ships, but because the capital had been built at Roseau instead of Rupert’s Bay, owing to the malarial nature of the northern section, St. Lucia got the contract.

  Before World War I, a Royal Mail steam-packet toured the island weekly, collecting cargo and carrying passengers. The service was not resumed after the war, and planters on the windward coast had to rely on schooners and on canoes. For weeks on end the sea would be too rough for schooners to put in to shore.

  Work was begun on what was imposingly christened the Imperial Road, a broad-surfaced thoroughfare that was planned to link the windward and the leeward coasts. Heavy rains, floods, and mounting costs delayed, curtailed, and finally liquidated the enterprise. Then came the hurricanes of 1928 and 1930.

  The windward coast never recovered from these hurricanes. One by one the big plantations were abandoned; there is not now a single plantation house between Hatton Garden and Pointe Mulâtre. The estates are worked spasmodically by peasant proprietors who ‘head’ their produce across the mountains, supply local needs, or await the caprice of schooners.

  During World War II, the saga of ill-luck continued. It was typical Dominican luck that the island through lack of a suitable air-base should have been cut off completely from the general atmosphere of war, should have made no direct contribution to the war effort, should have been so isolated from the main currents of American and English thought, receiving none of the mental stimulus of being allied with great events. At the same time, it suffered very definite war damage. It was also typical of Dominican luck that, situated as it is between two French islands, it should have had to accommodate several thousand refugees, only a very small proportion of whom were honest adherents of the Free French cause, who, demanding a daily meat meal, created a cattle shortage that still continues. The interior economy of the island, a very delicately adjusted organism, was seriously disturbed.

  Ill-luck was accompanied by ill-management. The blockade of Madagascar created a market for vanilla, but the traders profited so imprudently in this unexpected boom that they shipped inferior and unripened pods. American buyers now distrust Dominican produce.

  It was decided finally that Dominica should be linked by air with the other islands. So an expert on aeronautics was sent to locate an airfield. He selected a strip on the north-east coast. The immediate disadvantages of this site were obvious. Not only was it already occupied with a valuable coconut plantation, but it had no direct communication with the capital. Passengers would have to motor to Portsmouth, then go by launch to Roseau, a journey that would take at least four hours. The expert maintained, however, that no other site was suitable, so the coconut palms were felled, a vast quantity of stones collected by hand labour, and simultaneously, so that there should be direct access from the airport to the capital, work was resumed on the Imperial Road. The labour and capital of the island were concentrated on these two projects. For a year the work continued. Then, when the air strip had been cleared and a valuable plantation ruined, a second aeronautic expert decreed that the site chosen was unsuitable for aircraft. Simultaneously, it was discovered that the sum of money voted for the completion of the Imperial Road was quite inadequate, so that today, for the expenditure of a hundred thousand pounds and the slaughter of several thousand palm trees, there is nothing to show except a track of cobbles through the jungle, and on the flanks of the mutilated Melville Hall estate three or four admittedly impressive piles of hand-gathered flints.

  ‘Typical Dominica,’ was the comment in St. Lucia.

  ‘Typical Dominica.’ It is a comment and a criticism that you will often hear made in the other islands.

  They will make it laughingly on a note of mockery, of affectionate, fraternal mockery. There is a Dominica legend in the Caribbean.

  ‘Everyone goes crazy there,’ they say. ‘All that rain and those mountains shutting them in and everything going wrong. Did you hear about that fellow who tried to dig a hole through the centre of the earth because his wife was buried in Australia? He dug it with a cutlass, carrying the earth up in a calabash. You can still see the hole. That’s typical.’

  It is typical, they will also say, that the island should have attracted so many English and American eccentrics, that square-pegs after long efforts to fit themselves into round holes should have made their homes there. Dominica is the only small island with an expatriate colony. It has been called ‘The Tahiti of the Caribbean’.

  I visited Dominica first in February 1929, a few weeks after the first hurricane had struck it.

  I stayed a week. It rained incessantly. Roseau even in the sunlight is a scrubby little place. It is clean, but that is the most that can be said for it. It has no harbour; it happens to be the capital only because it is there that the chief valley meets the sea. Seven blocks long and eight blocks wide, it is a cluster of small two-story houses built on stone foundations which have contrived to resist successive hurricanes because, it is claimed, at the time when they were built it was the practice to mix syrup with the mortar. Unpainted wooden balconies project over the pavements; there are no gardens, no trees, no flowers.

  There are admittedly a few attractive corners, particularly in the south, where a number of fine trees stand on a slight prominence of ground and police headquarters are housed in an old fort. The veranda of the library has a charming view of the bay and of Scotts Head. Beyond the Botanical Gardens, which are really fine, you can climb to the summit of Morne Bruce and see in the Roseau valley the lime trees of the Bath estate, stretching in even rows to be divided every so many yards by the windbreaks of the galba trees. There are attractive corners. But in a morning you can see them all.

  I made a trip by foot and horse across the island. The mountains were concealed in cloud; incessant rain symbolized adversity. In Hot Countries I compared the scenery to a reading of Endymion. ‘Like Endymion,’ I wrote, ‘it is lush and featureless. Like Endymion, it becomes monotonous. Hour after hour it is the same.’

  I was there for the carnival. There were cocktail parties every night. I was meeting for the first time the ‘sour cocktail’ of which angostura bitters is the chief ingredient. Compounded of rum, it is mixed in a large jug and beaten with a swizzle-stick until it
froths. It is pretty and pink, and looks like liquid candy. But it is very sour. It cannot be sipped. It should be gulped while it is frothing. I had not yet acquired the knack of gulping swizzles. Round followed round, exhaustingly and bewilderingly. It was the only time in my life when I found myself defeated by straightforward run-of-the-mill drinking. In a sense, it was all extremely gay, but beneath the gaiety I was conscious of an almost desperate defeatism. Dominica seemed to be flinging up the sponge; the hurricane was being accepted as the final straw. There was no point in trying any longer. The island was in the red for keeps. It was up to the Imperial Exchequer to take care of it.

  I had some good times in Dominica. I made two real friends there. But even so I was glad to get away. I was depressed by the all-pervading apathy. Yet in retrospect, in continuing terms of that framework of anomalies and contradictions, out of all the islands I had visited, it was of Dominica that I found myself thinking most. I kept feeling that it was my own fault, that it was due to some deficiency in myself that I had got so little from my visit. Dominica had something, I suspected, which the other islands lacked, something which I had failed to find.

  I was to hear much talk of Dominica during the nineteen-thirties. In London and New York, the Dominica legend was taking shape. The expatriate colony was growing. Stephen Haweis, for example, went there, and Elma and Lennox Napier and John Knapp. Stephen Haweis, the son of a distinguished Victorian clergyman, is an excellent and well-known painter. Lennox Napier held a gallant military record, and till his death during World War II played a prominent part in the island’s political and social life. Elma, the daughter of Sir William Gordon-Cumming, one of the chief figures in the Tranby Croft baccarat scandal, widely travelled and the authoress of several books, is very much a person in her own right. The name John Knapp will not convey anything to those who did not know him personally. A scholarly, well-bred American, at one time a schoolmaster at Groton, he never attempted to make anything of his life. He was a complete escapist. But he was a gifted and a charming man. I had met him in Tahiti. Outside his house a notice-board announced in high white lettering that visitors were not welcome. He sought solitude and privacy. He failed to find them in Tahiti. He did find them in Dominica.