[My thanks to activist filmmaker Esther Figueroa of Jamaica and Hawaii for the introduction to Diana McCaulay. An interview with Esther is forthcoming.]
O n April 21st, the Jamaica Gleaner reported that PM Andrew Holness was warned by senior figures of his Jamaica Labor Party either to “clean house” and “end the corruption” or face defeat at national elections that must be called by September next year.
Modernizing according to IBM metrics touted by Holness reveals itself as veneer experienced more by tourists and by wealthy Jamaicans than by the undereducated Jamaican mass mired in wing-it poverty.
Why should you care that across the Caribbean, education and health rank near the lowest in Jamaica (see below). Because of the danger concealed by sham, villagers and beauty back of the hotel perimeter lurk as charm that hides menace everywhere.
Jamaicans know it and talk about it.
This is not a posting for avoiding Jamaica vacations. It’s a call for avoiding mass tourism and instead staying local — luxuriously if you wish.
A tottering regime
The current balance of the Jamaican House of Representative is JLP 49, PNP 14 following the last national election in 2020, or favoring the conservatives by more than 3-to-1. In the most recent election for parish governance held in January, the JLP won seven seats; the PNP six plus two municipal corporations.
The JLP Central Executive Committee called for the replacement of government’s entire cabinet except for Minister of Tourism Edmund Bartlett. Bartlett alone was doing his job. He was delivering workforce jobs.
Just yesterday (May 1), Bartlett announced thousands of new north shore hotel rooms and hotel worker housing. Along the way, mass tourism and Bartlett with his Emoji smile is also destroying villages and the ecosystems beloved by Jamaicans and visitors and by their destruction leaving his country more vulnerable to tropical storms while setting back the nation’s ability to withstand climate warming.
The corruption of mass tourism
The court case that led to the Jamaica’s north shore becoming the Gold Coast of Florida was the first ever filed by a Caribbean nonprofit (NGO) against its government. The Jamaican Environmental Trust was able to show how the hotel developers began to clear the land for the 1,812-room Bahia Principe Grand Hotel in St. Ann (parish seat Ocho Rios) even before the public environmental process began. Precisely because of developers sins, the Jamaica supreme court decided on appeal from a lower court ruling that had quashed the project that the building could go forward in its entirety because US$62 million had already been expended.
After the Supreme Court ruling, Diana McCaulay, who led the founding of the Jamaican Environmental Trust in 1991, rued that the “place which all who studied it, all who knew it, agreed was unique to the north coast of Jamaica was lost.”
How this plays out
Jobs drive mass tourism, which plays out in the derivative issue of public denial to beach access. Under popular revolt, the government of Jamaica (GoJ) has begun turning public beaches into beach parks — more “modernizing” that limits everyone’s access to designated hours that curb the use of natural beaches where village fishers have operated freely. By extending “modernizing” to “quick and cheap,” GoJ imagines itself able to forego capital improvement in education and public health, which in turn impact residents and tourists alike.
The environmental newsletter Petchary points out that while GoJ boasts that there are over 60 accessible public beaches islandwide, this represents only three (3) miles or 0.6% of access in comparison to the 494 miles of coastline. “This is nothing to celebrate in the 21st century as a sovereign country. GoJ is the major landowner of coastal properties and can easily remedy this problem.”
The impact of macro data on development doesn’t spread widely
In February, PM Holness claimed record-low unemployment by having created 150,000 (mostly new hotel) jobs since 2016, 10 consecutive quarters of economic growth, a balance of payments current account surplus of US$352 million, and a near 74 per cent debt-to-GDP ratio and that inflation ranged between four to six per cent for a solid economy.
Challenge was quick from everywhere.
Asked economist Rosalie Hamilton, were these macro fundamentals leading to the outcomes that Jamaicans want? “Jamaica’s undercapitalization should rank central.
“We are, for example, maintaining a labor force that is undereducated. Nearly 70 per cent have passed no exams or have not passed the required thresholds. They can only do skilled-level one and two-type jobs,” said Hamilton. . . “We need the voices of the Jamaican people to take us to the Promised Land.”
Except for the toll-financed Chinese toll expressways, bad roads are everywhere, pot-holed, badly paved, left washed out for years, rarely with sidewalks. Cars swerve through. Children are taught to cross roads wherever they want, and to try to stop traffic by raising their hands. Cars don’t slow. Obstacles like cars parked in a driver’s lane tell drivers they have the right of way if they get there first from either direction.
One in 11 Jamaicans dies from a car incident.
About hospitals that visitors might also be called on to use, Diana McCaulay offers her own “prose poem” while attending her husband hospitalized in Kingston. Excerpts follow:
“My husband is on a bed, his face stitched with pain half-masked by that stoicism men are taught at an early age.
“I am sitting in what appears to be a nurse’s station, where once a nurse would have looked out over the people waiting, maybe speaking words of comfort and care.
“Now it’s empty, except for the only chair I’m sitting on, which is stuck in the station, so I am not at my husband’s bedside.
“Painkillers and anti nausea meds are promised via the IV line, but it stops working, and no one comes to fix it.
“I prowl the corridors looking for matron or an occupied nurse’s station.
“At home my husband vomits the pain meds and we go back to the hospital. This time, he quickly gets the drugs he needs in the way he needs them.
“This time my chair is far away. . .. Why isn’t there a water cooler?”
“Our model of development is exploit, destroy, move on. I am quoting someone but I forget who. Unless that changes, the debate about where to exploit is moot.
“We must have what the West has, the traffic jams, the new phone every year so that if we are in a hospital waiting room we can distract ourselves, we must have houses with rooms that no one ever goes into, jeans that change their shape every year, fluffy beds to sink into and thousand thread count sheets, we must be able to tell our friends we have done Venice or Istanbul
“It is our turn to pollute right? Long past time, right?
“My husband is okay. We go home. My bed is, I decide, fluffier than necessary.”
We are also told that the nearer hospitals are to tourist zones, the better they perform.
