
"If all you want is sun and sea and sand, and drums and rums, you'll find one island very much like another." As a recognized expert on the Caribbean, Professor Sidney W. Mintz of the Johns Hopkins University offers this summary after thirty years' experience. "But," he goes on, "if you begin to meet the peo-ple, you'll find striking differences from island to island- -from Trinidad to Bar-bados, or Martinique to Guadeloupe.
The better you know them, the more different they become."
Those of us preparing this book have discovered the truth of his words. I met a Vincentian who spoke of his homeland's beauty with enthusiastic pride: "Oh, you really should see it!" I thought of him when I heard of its volcano's disastrous eruption in April 1979, and months later when I heard that its damaged land was green and productive again. One individual's patriotism had made that island unforgettable, distinctive among its sister isles.
"There's such a thing as the Caribbean personality- I believe that," a distinguished West Indian man of letters told me. "We've all known colonial domina-tion. And the climate gives us all one kind of life: an intimate, face-to-face life in the sun, a dramatic life in the open-like life in ancient Greece. But, again as in Greece, our differences are important to us. Many of the world's borders are artificial, political; but islands give you real boundaries."
Of course, the Caribbean world includes mainlands as well as islands.
Venezuela and Guyana, for example, are members of the Caribbean Conservation Association, a group working to preserve the beauty of the region. It tries, for instance, to coordinate measures for dealing with a major oil spill.
And I heard its president, John A. Con-nell, address an audience full of children.
That heritage stems in part from the Indians--the courteous Arawak and the formidable Carib who met the first explorers from Europe; but conquest and disease have left only a few Caribs to survive in the islands.
Europe's cultural bequests are as obvious as the tropical flowers and sunsets, and it is easy to see why some islands changed hands so often--why Guadeloupe in the 18th century might have seemed more valuable to Great Britain or France than Canada. Sugar in that age was like petroleum today: a luxury-turned-commercial-necessity, a source of enormous wealth. And when other regions could supply cheaper sug. ar, from cane or from beets, the Caribbean lost its old colonial importance.
Now its long-disputed colonies are taking their place among the nations, and entering an age of discovering themselves: a quest as stirring as the search for gold, as dramatic as any clash of galleons. I recognized it in a painting by my new friend Timothy Callender.
This canvas shows an idyllic scene, of ships with full white sails in a tropical harbor. Each mainsail has its emblem, a black star. As Timothy confirmed, the star evokes a dream--a vision of ships linking the West Indies and Africa on a course shaped by the trade winds.
One of the Caribbean's heroes planned just such a shipping com-pany-using steamships, of course in the early 2oth century. This was Marcus Garvey, who was born in Jamaica, worked in Harlem, and died in London.
His Black Star Line went bankrupt; but his vision lived, one source of the ideal familiar today as Black Pride. Charles McCarry has summed up the spirit apparent in Timothy's work: a mood of "vibrant self-respect." Painters, sculptors, writers, dancers, musicians artists and their audiences in the islands find this spirit a new inspiration.
Garvey's plan made New York a port of call for his ships because he took it for granted that the United States would continue to play a major role in Caribbean affairs. Something more than a distant alien power, it has been a prospect of opportunity. For generations, people of the islands have left them to look for better fortunes, and many have come north.
"Our people have the North American vision, an island Prime Minister told me. "Everyone has friends and relatives in the States or Canada, and that fact shapes our concept of a proper standard of living." Meanwhile, more and more visitors from the north seek out the loveliness of the Caribbean a fact that brings some complications with it.
One islander's wry comment gives an example: "All the hotel people tell me, tourists won't eat anything but North American food. And all the tourists I meet ask me, 'Where can we get good Caribbean cooking?" " That struck me because I had already found some: pungent pepperpot stew and luscious nutmeg ice cream.
Yet the point goes beyond comedy.
The Caribbean Tourism Research and Development Centre has taken on the task of finding out, for instance, how much of the money that tourists spend will drain right out of the islands to buy American steaks or European wines: Estimates range from go to 7o percent. Its director, Jean Holder, told me, "We know that we must rely on tourism to help with development, but we know that it isn't a simple matter at any level-from the national balance of payments to individual encounters.
"And I remembered the strikingly handsome fruit vendor who told me how strangers would aim a camera at her without even a greeting-"like you a monkey! It's no manners at all!"
Good manners, however casual, are keenly prized in small societies where all the people are well known to each other.
Our staff member Jennifer Urquhart noted an essential point in Dominica's capital, Roseau: "It's wonderful for someone from Washington, D. C.. with its immense bureaucratic jungle, to sit on a flower-sheltered balcony and have half a country's top officials stroll by and pause for a chat." A nation on this scale may seem too small to succeed in the contemporary world; and some very thoughtful people have questioned the value of the "mini-state," let alone its future.
But I remember a region of enduring beauty, of small islands with limited resources, of minor independent states full of ideals and restlessness and squabbles: What good could come of it?
To name only one thing, democracy. It was the little free city-states that gave the world "the glory that was Greece," a standard we still use to measure a free civilization.
The contemporary Caribbean has much in common with ancient Hellas. its sense of community in sports and art and religion. And the Caribbean has one thing infinitely better--unlike ancient Greece, it has escaped from acceptance of human slavery.
Now its statesmen and it's athletes, it's seafarers and it's dramatists, and all its citizens are seeking new dimensions of freedom. If they secure for themselves lives as happy as the good days they have offered so many visitors, none of the friends they have made could wish them better fortune.
Mary - Ann Harrell.
Managing Editor
From "Isles of the Caribbean", National Geographic, 1966.