Visitors to beautiful Jamaica get to visit less and less among Jamaica’s people. Those they meet are wearing uniforms in the ever-larger hotels strung along Jamaica’s north coast from Montego Bay (MoBay) to Ocho Rios. Overseas hotel investment soars, as government lets developers ignore environmental constraints with properties of 500 and 1,000 rooms that lay waste to reefs, mangroves and fishing villages.
The freedom and independence that have let some Jamaicans thrive at home and excel in the larger world rarely benefit the mass because of their backs to the wall and their political leaders’ misrepresentations about it. Overseas chain hotel companies choose where to locate new properties among tropical destinations with the clout of cruise ship companies that play off ports of call against each other for the lowest passenger arrival taxes.
“[The] fast recovery [from Covid] must not be irresponsible, and that’s why the elements that deal with sustainability and resilience are so important,” said Jamaica Minister of Tourism Edmund Bartlett early in 2022 as additions to the largest hotel in Jamaica got underway, the now 850-room Bahia Principe Grand that destroyed the Pear Tree Bottom micro ecosystem of Runaway Bay.
Bartlett is right. Just because both major political parties are forced to ignore what they say doesn’t mean that sustainability and resilience aren’t “so important.”
It’s a heartbreaking lesson in failed climate action and in Jamaica’s particular failure to chart an independent position in global tourism.
Exposure to authentic Jamaica was once the tourism mainstay
This was through the work of a tourism visionary who from 1970 to 1975 was the first person of color and youngest director of tourism during the first administration of Michael Manley and his progressive Peoples National Party.
Eric Anthony (Tony) Abrahams had been a Rhodes Scholar at St. Peter’s College Oxford who returned to Kingston in 1970, when mainly a few hotels and none of them chain affiliates welcomed the same year-after-year winter clientele at places like Round Hill west of MoBay and Jamaica Inn in Ocho Rios. Negril was a bare start-up with only an unpaved road to Lucea, 24 miles north, from where a paved road connected to Sangster International Airport 40 miles east at MoBay.
That lack of easy access to Negril made its seven-mile beach all the more appealing to backpacking U.S. hippies who came year-round to surf and smoke ganja among the locals.
Tony was the rare tourism leader throughout the region who sought to
introduce visitors to middle class Jamaicans like himself, to the higgler entrepreneurs at the country’s ubiquitous public markets, to rural Jamaicans who became raftsmen when he introduced rafting on the Martha Brae River, and to other mainstays of hospitality — Meet the People programs and the Inns of Jamaica that he organized and marketed overseas. Tony enlisted hundreds of hosts into his program of hospitality-at-home, whose places opened doors into local life.
After the tumultuous election of 1980 and then as minister of tourism under Jamaica Labor Party Prime Minister Edward Seaga, Tony organized the cooperative Jamaican Association of Villas and Apartments (JAVA) — think of them as crossover boutique hotels, Airbnbs and inns. “Tourist arrivals rose 40 percent and ‘foreign travel receipts’ 56 percent, almost doubling the number of guest rooms on the island,” most properties family owned and staffed with cooks, housekeepers and gardeners.
Visitors immersed
Visitors at an expat family’s north shore beach resort, Strawberry Fields Together, learned about a Village Inclusive Plan that owners featured at their website. Guests could appear at a local school for sessions that introduced the kids to meet people they only knew from American TV that reached their village.
“Kids act the same everywhere: They stare, they swarm and they goof around, including vogueing for strangers’ cameras. Once out of the classroom, the children of Robin’s Bay Primary School were no different,” wrote an un-named reporter in an archived story for The Denver Post.
“Most of the residents of Robin’s Bay, in an uncommercialized portion of the northeast, work as farmers and fishermen. But [I] also learned that past graduates of the school have become lawyers, doctors, nurses, police officers and teachers. Among this year’s class [of 27], I met a potential pilot, a veterinarian and a soldier. But for that day, they were just kids, horsing around beneath a big blue sky.”
A meal for mankind
She tells of a time when the tourism office directed visitors to locally owned intown restaurants. Forty-year-old Rastafarian chef-owner Donovan Slythe of the Reggae Pot Restaurant in Ocho Rios served her, “smell[ing] of kitchen and was wearing a cap.”
Chef Slythe prepared plantbased Ital food, the cuisine rooted in Rasta beliefs.
“Eating healthy is a way of life. Your food should be your medicine, and your medicine should be your food,” said Slythe, who learned to cook from his mother. “We need to eat healthy to create a healthier nation and a well-being of people.”
Slythe sat his guest next to the restaurant’s canopied outdoor table, where he served the meal she asked him to choose. She recalls a “plate buckling under the weight of cubed tofu, a gluey brown stew and a mound of rice and peas (actually kidney beans). For a beverage, he presented a plastic cup of cherry juice (good source of vitamin C) and Irish moss (a seaweed with the same nutritional benefits as fish). Under his watchful eye, I dug into my meal for mankind.”
Brother Lion, another Rastafarian, who espoused a diet of raw food, “shimmied up a tree trunk and grabbed a handful of coconuts. On the ground, he cracked them open and passed around the milk and white meat.”
Tony was also litigious and full of himself
Tony wrapped himself up in libel lawsuits and dirty deals that led to his expulsion from government by Seaga, albeit with praise for his accomplishments. Already by 1980, chain hotels and all-inclusive resorts were stiffening the barrier between local life and hotel visitors.
Meanwhile, Jamaica was far from becoming the First World nation that current JLP Prime Minister Andrew Holness claimed for his country. Jamaica for a half century was falling into crushing debt to the International Monetary Fund. This was only partly the fault of domestic politics. The Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) in 1973 embargoed oil deliveries to the U.S. for its support of Israel in the Arab-Israeli War. Tourism fallbacks followed 9/11, and again after the Great Recession and during the Covid pandemic.
Manley failed in a misguided 1973 quest to seek a bailout from the USSR. Nothing came of his showboating except that he scared off thousands of businesspeople who fled to the U.S., their cash with them.
In turn, Seaga tried to turn Kingston’s Tivoli Gardens, allegedly the worst slum in the Caribbean, into a model neighborhood and political enclave
by allegedly displacing its PNP supporters, who formed a rival camp with the boundary that became a war zone. Gangs were armed. Each zone spawned its rival drug lords. The 1980 national election turned into a murder spree that made Jamaica the murder capital of the region. The gunmen spun out of control by their politician sponsors that many Jamaicans blame for the lawlessness that has led the U.S. Department of State to place Jamaica at the next to highest rank on its list of places to avoid.
The politicians no longer control the gunmen.
Into this vortex, the CIA spun its own destabilizing force that ensured the paramountcy of international debt repayment through reliance on mainly North American tourists.
Most damaging was the decision by the European Union in 2005 to reduce its subsidy for sugar grown in its former colonies by 39%. Tourism became Jamaica’s economic front-and-center. By 2022, Bartlett was boasting of 8,500 new hotel rooms coming online within five years.
Are the 12,000 promised jobs worth the environmental wreckage implicit in Bartlett’s assertion that “To successfully finish major investment projects in record time, an all-hands-on-deck, joined-up government and private sector approach is required.”
How this works was already well documented 30 years ago when talk first came up about a hotel in Pear Tree Bottom. (To be followed up in The Climate Traveler March 21.)
