ABSTRACT
Several themes dominated the international history of the Caribbean basin in the years between the end of World War II and the Cuban revolution: rising nationalism and the straining for decolonization; the continued migration and emigration of Caribbean peoples; and the preoccupation of the United States with a perceived threat of international communism in the region. There were as well other new developments in the region, one of the most significant of which was the gradual emergence of tourism as an important economic, cultural, and political phenomenon. Improved transportation connections, enhanced and larger-scale tourist facilities and active promotion by the U.S. and local tourist industry, increasingly made the Caribbean basin a tourist destination. Historian Jay Mandle indicates that Barbados was on the cutting edge of tourist development in the 1950s, passing a Hotel Act in 1956 and establishing a Tourist Board two years later. Within the British Caribbean, Jamaica lagged behind Barbados; British Guiana did not prove a popular destination, and Trinidad and Tobago did not encourage tourism. In the pre-1960s, with many individual exceptions, the majority of tourists were well-to-do, drawn to the gaming tables and nightlife of cities such as Havana or to the still unspoiled isolation of smaller villages, historic sites, and tranquil beaches prior to the onslaught of mass tourism in the subsequent decades. As Brenda Gayle Plummer has eloquently suggested in her treatment of Haiti, “among the North American cognoscenti, Haiti’s appeal related to a general revolt against the perceived materialism and conformity of U.S. life in the 1940s and 1950s.” Consistent with what would become a lamentable but predictable trend, regional governments in their efforts to induce tourist expenditures were torn between giving tourists whatever they desired and attempting to put a clean, positive face on their societies – such as the effort to require peasants coming to Port-au-Prince to wear shoes. In the coming decades tourism would have one of the most important cultural impacts of any other aspect of the foreign presence in the region. It is thus surprising that a volume on Caribbean culture published in 1955 would make no mention of tourism. 1
