Frequent travellers to the Caribbean are used to delays but these are typically caused by hurricanes rather than military action. Those seeking a dose of winter sun last month had their plans scrambled as the Federal Aviation Administration closed Eastern Caribbean airspace during the US special forces operation to extract Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro. Whether flying Paris to Martinique, London to Saint Lucia or Toronto to Turks and Caicos, the result was cancelled flights across the board – more than 1,100 in all. Those disruptions will almost certainly not be the last. Civil-aviation authorities recently warned pilots in the eastern Pacific of the ongoing risks from US military aircraft. Pentagon officials confirmed in late January that they had conducted their first airstrike on an alleged drug smuggling vessel since Maduro’s capture.
With high season under way, it’s high time that holidaymakers and tourism marketers dispense with the myth that the Caribbean is nothing but an interchangeable mix of sun, sea and sand. As Monocle contributor Tom Vanderbilt said in November after finding himself in a sticky situation in Tanzania, you should “do your geopolitical research before packing your passport.”
That kind of homework has long been anathema to tourists heading for the beach. Conventional tourism marketing for the Caribbean typically portrays sun loungers and parasols at the water’s edge, next to a tropical cocktail garnished with a slice of pineapple. In party-hard destinations such as Cancún, Jost Van Dyke and the all-inclusive resorts that litter Jamaica and the Dominican Republic, the aspiration is escapism – throw back another margarita to forget the news of the day.
Such mindlessness has always been poor form. As Antiguan-American writer Jamaica Kincaid put it in her 1988 book A Small Place, a non-fiction work examining her birthplace, “every native of every place is a potential tourist and every tourist is a native of somewhere”. But when the native becomes a tourist, she warns, they almost inevitably transform into “an ugly empty thing, a stupid thing, a piece of rubbish pausing here and there to gaze at this and taste that”.
That kind of shutting off of the brain when going on holiday is what allows one, for example, to meander past the pastel-coloured buildings in Willemstad, the Unesco-recognised capital of Curaçao, but fail to notice the enormous oil refinery, dormant since 2019, that could prove a geostrategic lynchpin if it can once again accept crude oil from Venezuela. At its worst, such inanity sees tens of thousands of cruise ship passengers disembark to ride zip lines and water slides at a gated resort in Labadee, Haiti, who have little awareness that they are in a troubled Caribbean nation. On a recent trip, the port of call was announced as “Labadee, Hispaniola”. Travellers, however geopolitically stunted, should at least know where they are. The region is not adrift from geopolitics: it is a hotspot and one in which the White House will continue to take a keen interest. Whether it’s Cuba or Haiti, more disruption is to be expected.
This finger-wagging is not to discourage travel to the Caribbean but rather to encourage visitors to brush up on this complex part of the globe. Colonialism left a painful legacy on the region but it also left an enriching cultural heritage. You might learn why you should pick up a few words of Papiamentu and seek out a baseball game in Aruba or pack a novel by Maryse Condé and order a ti’ punch at the bar in Guadeloupe. A quick history lesson might also point you in the direction of the most tranquil Caribbean destination: the US Virgin Islands, which Washington purchased from Copenhagen in 1916. With that territorial deal long in the rear-view mirror, you can relax on the beach in Saint Croix worry-free.
Gregory Scruggs is Monocle’s Seattle correspondent. For more analysis and insight, subscribe to Monocle here.
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