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.