The Sugar Islands (40 page)

My visit to the island coincided with the opening of the one-hundredth new industry that had been started to implement this policy. In a speech at the inaugural ceremonies, its Administrator, Teodoro Moscoso, explained the scope and purpose of the project.

‘There is,' he said, ‘an average of six hundred and forty-five of us crowded on each square mile of land, and we are labouring
under a lack of balance between resources and population density to a degree which is present in few areas of the world. Nowhere in the world can six hundred and forty-five persons per square mile subsist on a purely agricultural economy except at an extremely low level. The island is suffering from an industrial density of population and an agricultural production pattern. The land problem is something which we cannot change. We cannot stretch our land nor put into it minerals which are not there. What we can do is to adopt new techniques and learn new skills. The task in which we are engaged is to create the conditions for industry to develop and prosper, and a financial and social climate favourable for rapid economic development. We have brought a hundred new factories to the island.'

There are at the moment of writing some hundred thousand semi-employed persons in Puerto Rico. For only some fifteen thousand do the hundred new industries provide full employment. Another seven or eight hundred industries will be required. In order to attract capital from the mainland, there has been a remission of Federal income-tax for fifteen years. A great, great effort is certainly being made.

To attend the celebration of this one-hundredth industry, some sixty pressmen, publicists, and bankers were brought down from the mainland. I was invited to tag along. The junket was arranged to show us the type of industry that was being undertaken, and the type of island for whose benefit the project had been devised. It was also intended that we should enjoy ourselves. There were no customs formalities at the airport. On the contrary, while the baggage was being sorted out, frothing
daiquiris
were served. In our rooms awaited each of us a leather zip-fastening brief-case containing a great number of brochures and tourist literature, stamped with our own names, and in the centre, above the island's seal, with the title
Operation Bootstrap.

It was a three-day programme. On the first day a nine-thirty start sent us off to a china factory forty miles west of San Juan. An early lunch was followed by a second forty-mile drive in the opposite direction for the opening of the one-hundredth industry —a blanket factory. Five names appeared on the list of speakers and I anticipated a full two hours of oratory. To my surprised relief no speech lasted more than seven minutes, and we were at liberty to examine not only the plant itself but an exhibition of
the other ninety-nine new industries. Some excellent fish
hors-d'oeuvres
accompanied a rum-based swizzle. That evening there was a reception at the Governor's palace, where we drank sweet champagne under the stars.

The next day was given over to a picnic—a pig-roast at the Louquillo beach. Swimming and sunbathing, cock-fighting and local dances had been arranged. Ed Gardner was to stage a show with members of his Duffy's Tavern. Fate was unkind. The weather could not have been worse. It was one of those grey, windy days that contradict more often than one would suppose the unqualified superlatives of the travel folders. It actually did not rain a lot, but it was no day for sunbathing and scarcely one for seabathing. Our hosts' time-table was ruined. We had been invited for eleven, but it had not been planned to serve the meal until three o'clock. Owing, however, to the wind, the cold, and the grey skies, every guest on arrival made straight for the
daiquiris
. Ed Gardner lured us to his bandstand on the beach, but we went with glasses in our hands. It was soon apparent that by two o'clock at the latest an assault would have to be made on the six pigs that, transfixed on stakes, were roasting over open fires: those pigs had needed another hour.

For the Puerto Ricans, to whom pig-roasts are a part of their routine, it was no doubt a disappointing afternoon, but to a visitor like myself to whom it was a new experience, the occasion was both enjoyable in itself and interesting as an indication of the kind of life that Puerto Ricans lived.

For me that picnic was typical of the ten days I spent in Puerto Rico. Without getting the full enjoyment out of a pig-roast, I recognized how enjoyable one could be; in the same way, though I did not see the people or the place in the way that would have enabled me to write with any authority about the island, I recognized what there was to see and what I missed.

During the long week-end while the Press representatives were being entertained, I took a number of drives into the country. With the junket over, I attached myself to a documentary film team that was preparing a picture on the sugar industry. The expedition took me round the north and west of the island, and south as far as Ponce. I returned to San Juan by air. I saw the actual terrain; I saw how intensively each section capable of
agricultural exploitation had been developed; I realized the necessity for ‘Operation Bootstrap'; I saw how the north of the island differed from the south; I saw also how much the island had to offer to the visitor, the extent and beauty of its beaches, the picturesqueness of its mountain villages. I realized how little of the island you have seen if you have only seen San Juan. You might as well judge Ceylon from Colombo.

There are indeed certain resemblances, socially, between Colombo and San Juan. Each is a port. The lounges of its hotels are littered with the bustle of arrival and departure. Each is a large, prosperous, and important city whose residents have built up for themselves a personal and individual life, independent of and indifferent to the comings and goings of these visitors. In San Juan, as in Colombo, the tourist is conscious of an animated, busy life going on around him in which he has no part. San Juan possesses a number of hotels, at least two of which are classified
de luxe
. They were both booked solid. A number of the visitors were holidaymakers, staying some of them for a month. At the same time there is no resort atmosphere in either the Caribe Hilton or the Condado; each is self-contained, a world of its own. My room faced not upon the sea but upon a minor thoroughfare. All day long horns honked below my window. I looked out upon a series of apartment houses. An alien city lay about me. In Charlotte Amalie, Miami, Cannes, and Montego Bay the tourist feels that the whole locality has been built up for and is devoted to his tastes and needs, that the beaches, the bars, the night-clubs, the flowered terraces, the pools, the smart expensive little shops have all been put there for his pleasure. As indeed they have. There is no such atmosphere in San Juan. Though San Juan can sell you anything you need, it has no shopping centre. The smart shops are scattered through the town. On occasions, such as New Year's Eve, the old families of Puerto Rico will attend at the Candado, sumptuously attired in silk and taffeta and brocade, of an unmodish cut but beautifully embroidered; young Puerto Ricans will bring their girls to dine and dance there, but the real life of the city is staged in private houses.

A considerable effort is being made to develop the island as a vacation centre, but the effort, very wisely, is not being concentrated upon the capital. San Juan with its two or three first-class hotels is the most comfortable airport with which I am familiar. A
couple of days can be spent there very profitably, loitering through the narrow streets of the old city, visiting the Morro Castle— which is so capacious that a freak nine-hole golf-course has been laid out within its walls; as you lay the basis of a sun-tan, you can enjoy the best long rum-based drink that I have ever tasted, a fruit punch based upon the local Don Q rum and flavoured with pineapple. In the small restaurants of the old town you can sample excellent colonial dishes. If you have letters of introduction to any residents, you will be introduced into a pleasant social world of picnics and clubs and cocktail parties. But to get the distinctive flavour of Puerto Rico you need to get into the country and the country towns.

Once out of San Juan, America seems a long way off. Everyone speaks Spanish. Everyone looks Spanish. Every township with its plaza and cathedral has the feel of Spain. The houses are built on a Spanish pattern. When I was in Mayagüez, I visited the owner of the saltponds industry. His home could not have been less American: a bare wall with shuttered windows faced the street; a long narrow house ran through to the next block; the courtyard was open to the sky; there was a pianola.

Spanish customs are still maintained. In a town like San German you will see on Saturday and Sunday evenings the young men and women strolling in couples round the plaza, in opposite directions, eyeing one another. The double standard is maintained. While upper-class girls are strictly chaperoned, Ponce at least maintains quite openly a highly adequate
bordello
—a dancing floor with bungalows set round it, attractive hostesses and a bar that is unexpectedly embellished, not only with
Esquire
pin-ups but photographs of the New York Yankees—a rival ball team, as my cicerone put it. In Ponce I was entertained by one of the heads of Don Q rum. Born in Puerto Rico, married to a Puerto Rican, the son of a German immigrant, tall and blond, speaking with a German accent, he told me that as a young man, raised in a tradition that was half German and half American, he had rebelled against this system of strict chaperonage, but now as a father he endorsed it. Puerto Ricans may be American citizens, but they are leading a Spanish life.

There lies for the visitor the attraction of the island. If Cervantes were to return today, he might find himself less lost in Puerto Rico than in Barcelona. For over fifty years the Stars and
Stripes have flown over its squares, but those fifty years have to be set against four hundred years of Spanish rule.

I spent ten days in Puerto Rico. I did not, as I said, see either the places or the people that I should have done. But I saw enough to know what I had missed and whom there was to see. The island has a great deal to offer to anyone who gets into the country. It is an island to be explored. It provides another good reason for learning Spanish.

from
WHERE THE CLOCKS CHIME TWICE

Written in
1948

For
a long time I had felt curious about Dominica. I had been there twice—in 1929 and again in 1938. Of all the West Indian islands that I had visited, it was the one that I had liked the least; at the same time it was the one I was most anxious to see again; a contradiction that is typical of Dominica, whose saga is a long succession of inconsistencies.

Every fact about it is self-contradictory. The third largest of the British West Indian possessions, it supports one of the smallest populations. Though its soil is extremely fertile, only a small proportion of its surface is under cultivation. Though it possesses in Rupert's Bay a superb natural harbour, its capital stands at Roseau in an open roadstead. One of the loveliest islands in the world, its beauties are hidden for weeks on end by cloud. Its beauty has, indeed, proved a liability. Its beauty is an effect of mountains, and its mountains by attracting rain have deluged the interior with such floods that no road has been built across the island
¹
and no road has been built round the island. Two-thirds of the windward coast is cut off from the capital.

For many years the island has been in the red. Its ill-luck has been persistent, and its ill-luck has been accompanied by ill-management. In the middle of the eighteenth century, the island was put up for sale in lots by the British Crown. The sale realized a quarter of a million pounds. Not one penny of this sum was reinvested in the island. It was used instead for Queen Charlotte's dowry. In the eighteen-forties coffee was a highly successful product, but disease destroyed the crops. Limes were planted, and Rose's Lime Juice became an internationally accepted label, while planters on the windward coast produced a concentrated lime juice from which citric acid was extracted and which could be stored safely until an opportunity came for shipping it. In the nineteen-twenties, however, wither-tip disease damaged, in many
cases irremediably, the lime plantations, and the discovery in Italy of a synthetic method of producing citric acid made the marketing of the Dominican product no longer profitable. When the Panama Canal was opened, Dominica by its geographical position should have become the coaling-station for British ships, but because the capital had been built at Roseau instead of Rupert's Bay, owing to the malarial nature of the northern section, St. Lucia got the contract.

Before World War I, a Royal Mail steam-packet toured the island weekly, collecting cargo and carrying passengers. The service was not resumed after the war, and planters on the windward coast had to rely on schooners and on canoes. For weeks on end the sea would be too rough for schooners to put in to shore.

Work was begun on what was imposingly christened the Imperial Road, a broad-surfaced thoroughfare that was planned to link the windward and the leeward coasts. Heavy rains, floods, and mounting costs delayed, curtailed, and finally liquidated the enterprise. Then came the hurricanes of 1928 and 1930.

The windward coast never recovered from these hurricanes. One by one the big plantations were abandoned; there is not now a single plantation house between Hatton Garden and Pointe Mulâtre. The estates are worked spasmodically by peasant proprietors who ‘head' their produce across the mountains, supply local needs, or await the caprice of schooners.

During World War II, the saga of ill-luck continued. It was typical Dominican luck that the island through lack of a suitable air-base should have been cut off completely from the general atmosphere of war, should have made no direct contribution to the war effort, should have been so isolated from the main currents of American and English thought, receiving none of the mental stimulus of being allied with great events. At the same time, it suffered very definite war damage. It was also typical of Dominican luck that, situated as it is between two French islands, it should have had to accommodate several thousand refugees, only a very small proportion of whom were honest adherents of the Free French cause, who, demanding a daily meat meal, created a cattle shortage that still continues. The interior economy of the island, a very delicately adjusted organism, was seriously disturbed.