 Palm trees swaying over white-sand beaches, pellucid waters with teeming
reefs just a flipper-kick from the shore and killer rum cocktails
brought right to your lounge chair - this is the Caribbean, as per
everyone's favourite tropical fantasy. The ultimate place to flop on the
sand and unwind, the region offers sun, sand and corporeal comforts
aplenty, and has long seduced those after life's sybaritic pleasures.
Given these obvious draws, a holiday in the Caribbean - anywhere in the
Caribbean - is commonly proffered as the ultimate getaway. But buying
into this postcard-perfect stereotype - and failing to recognize the
individual idiosyncrasies of the islands that make up the archipelago -
is the biggest mistake a first-time visitor can make. Drawing on the
combined traditions of Africa and those brought here by Spain, Britain,
France, Holland and the 500,000 people who arrived from India as
indentured workers after the abolition of slavery, no other area in the
Americas exhibits such a diverse range of cultural patterns and social
and political institutions - there's a lot more on offer here than sun,
sea, sand and learning to limbo.
Culturally , this relatively small, fairly impoverished collection of
islands has had an impact quite out of tune with its size, from the
Jamaican sound-system DJs who inspired hip-hop, to the Lenten
bacchanalia that have come to define carnivals worldwide. Over the last
five hundred years, each country or territory has carved out its own
identity (some much more recently than others, with the onset of mass
tourism and the advent of the all-inclusive), and it's hard to think of
worlds so near and yet so disparate as the sensual son and salsa of Cuba
compared to the dance-hall and Rasta militancy of neighbouring Jamaica
or the poppy zouk of Martinique and Guadeloupe. Sport rivals music as a
Caribbean obsession, and though golf is well represented by the scores
of world class courses, the region's game of choice has traditionally
been cricket, introduced by the Brits and raised to great heights by the
Windies team, who led the world for much of the 1970s and 1980s. Wins
are rather less common these days, but cricket remains central to the
Caribbean psyche, with international matches known to bring their host
islands to a complete standstill. Other popular spectator sports include
football, which has made massive inroads since Jamaica's Reggae Boyz
qualified for the 1998 World Cup, and baseball, firmly entrenched in
Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico and Cuba.
Each island has a strong culinary tradition, too, and while you might
come here to sample Caribbean classics such as Trinidadian roti,
Grenadian "oil-down" or Dominican mountain chicken (actually a very big
frog), you can also enjoy croissants and gourmet dinners in the French
islands, Dutch delicacies in the Netherlands Antilles and piles of good
ol' burgers and fries in Puerto Rico and the Bahamas - and on every
island with a fair-sized tourism industry you'll find "international"
restaurants of every ilk alongside hole-in-the-wall shacks selling local
specialities.
The Caribbean's natural attractions are equally compelling, its
landscapes ranging from teeming rainforest, mist-swathed mountains and
conical volcanic peaks to lowland mangrove swamps, lush pastureland and
savannah plains. The entire region is incredibly abundant in its flora ,
despite the sometimes volcanic or scrubby interiors on certain islands.
Heliconias and orchids flower most everywhere, while hibiscus and ixoras
brighten up the hedgerows, and the forest greens are enlivened by
flowering trees such as poinsettia and poui. Not surprisingly eco-tourism
abounds, whether it be hiking through the waterfall-studded rainforest
of Dominica or St Lucia, high-mountain treks in Jamaica, or birding in
Trinidad, which has one of the highest concentrations of bird species in
the world. The sea here is as bountiful as the land; besides taking in
superlative diving and snorkelling around multicoloured reefs and sunken
ships that play host to technicolour tropical marine life, you can
turtle-watch on innumerable beaches that see nesting leatherbacks and
hawksbills, go whale-spotting from St Lucia, Dominica and the Dominican
Republic, or frolic with giant manta rays offshore of Tobago and
stingrays in the Caymans.
Beyond their cultural and physical richness, the Caribbean islands share
a similar history of colonization . The first known inhabitants, farming
and fishing Amerindians who travelled from South America by way of
dugout canoes around 500 BC, were swiftly displaced by Christopher
Columbus , the Italian explorer who "discovered" the region for Spain in
the late fifteenth century, touching down on the Bahamas, Cuba,
Hispaniola and Jamaica, and mistakenly assuming that he had found the
outlying islands of India, bestowing the title "West Indies" to the
region. Seduced by fantasies of innumerable riches, other European
countries soon jumped on the bandwagon. The Spanish were followed by the
British, French and Dutch , who squabbled over their various territories
for most of the sixteenth century, their colonization of the islands
hindered by pirates and state-licensed privateers who plundered
settlements and vessels without mercy.
Nonetheless, European colonies were established throughout the region,
and by the seventeenth century, the islands had begun to be developed in
earnest. The British proved most adept at establishing huge plantations
of sugarcane - estates which required far more labour than the colonists
themselves could provide, and which gave rise to the appalling business
of the slave trade . Plantation life for slaves was one of unimaginable
barbarity, and eighteenth-century rebellions , combined with Christian
tenets of humanity and charity, engendered the first moves toward
emancipation - between 1833 and 1888 slavery was abolished in the
Caribbean.
Post-emancipation, conditions for all but the planter elites remained
abysmal, and the establishment of unions and subsequent labour strikes
led, by the 1930s, to the creation of political parties throughout the
region. This in turn nudged the islands to call for independence from
their colonial rulers, increasingly so after World War II. The early
twentieth century also saw tourism start to take root. Wealthy Brits and
North Americans had patronized palatial resorts since the late
nineteenth century, and the glitterati followed in the footsteps of Noel
Coward and Errol Flynn to Jamaica and Ernest Hemingway to Cuba, thus
creating the air of exclusivity which remains inextricably tied to the
Caribbean today. But with the introduction of long-haul air travel in
the 1960s, tourists began to arrive en masse. While the fenced-off all-inclusive
enclave is still going strong today, the region now has as many budget-oriented
bolt holes as it does luxury resorts, and as many possibilities for
adventurous travel as it does for staid beach holidays.
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