Viewing a single comment thread. View all comments

red_pepper wrote

I worry countries that rely on tourism suffer from the resource curse. This is especially evident in the Caribbean, where 1. tourist enclaves like resort towns and cruise ships have a siloing effect on economic activity and development and 2. most tourist businesses are owned by foreigners or expats who pay little in taxes while taking money from the islands and invest it elsewhere.

7

[deleted] wrote (edited )

8

Pop wrote

Let's not forget that the US is an occupied territory itself

6

indi wrote

I grew up in the Caribbean, and on an island whose primary resource was (and probably still is) tourism. When I was young, the tourist industry was very different than it is today.

Back then there were basically no exclusive resorts. Some of the fancier ones were "exclusive-ish", in that if you just waltzed in off the street and wandered around, the security guards would basically harass you to move on... but if you were actually there for a purpose (and weren't causing trouble or harassing the guests) they would leave you alone. And it wasn't just a matter of the guards being nice; in fact the hotels were quite happy to have locals come in and use their facilities. Bars and clubs (inside the larger hotels) would welcome locals who came in and partied with the guests (because locals' money was just as good as tourists'), I think I swam in the swimming pools of just about every hotel on the island at one point or another and even went to events organized at hotel pools, and when I joined the tennis club at one school I attended, we walked over to a nearby resort to use their courts (naturally guests got first dibs, but I can't ever recall that taking up more than two courts, and they had three).

Mind you, I'm not saying things were perfect. If you weren't going to cause trouble you could walk into virtually any hotel on the island... but you had to look "civilized". In other words, you had to make it a point to look and act the way an American or European would expect... not the way you'd walk around "normally" when you were in primarily local-frequented areas. So yeah, there was definitely an aspect of imperialism involved. And a certain level of racism that kinda goes with it.

And tourists were encouraged to go out... just about anywhere on the island. There were tourist hot spots of course - like the botanical gardens, for example - which would be mostly frequented by tourists. But the majority of the spots tourists would go to visit - like the fish market, downtown with all the produce vendors, the department store which sold souvenir trinkets alongside furniture and everyday clothing, the harbour (right in the middle of downtown) - they were all places where locals would go to do their own business. It was just... normal... to be walking down the street in the city shoulder to shoulder with locals on their way to/from work, and tourists either off a cruise ship or staying at one of the hotels.

And that even extended to celebrities. Because, by law, there were no private beaches. It was simply illegal to block off the beach in any way. (It might still be; it's been a while since I lived there.) So there was nothing stopping locals from lounging on the same beach the people staying at the top-tier resorts were at. I actually bumped into several huge stars - Schwarzenegger around Terminator 2 time, for example - who were just... chillin' on the beach. And there was sort of an unspoken social rule for locals not to harass tourists, so the most you'd do is a wave if you happened to make eye contact. I didn't really appreciate it at the time - not until I moved to North America - but it was actually astonishingly egalitarian.

Once again, let me stress that I'm not saying any of this was perfect. Some beach vendors did harass tourists with high-pressure sales bullshit, so there was a cycle of crackdowns where police would patrol the beaches and give shit to anyone who "looked local" and seemed to be getting to close or too friendly with tourists. And there was always this unspoken undercurrent of imperialist undertone where the locals were the "lowers" and the tourists were the "betters"... and you weren't supposed to mingle too much with those outside of your class. For example, there was a big scandal at one point when a major R&B star started dating a... well, basically a beach bum (I don't know if he actually was a beach bum - I just got that impression from the coverage, and I am well aware of how biased the coverage was); while it was quietly acknowledged that there was a bunch of people who "preyed" on tourists as "vacation boyfriends/girlfriends" (sometimes in exchange for cash/gifts, sometimes to rack up your score, sometimes just for the thrill of it), it was just outrageous that a tourist/local relationship would be taken seriously.

So I'm not saying that things were perfect... but they weren't that bad. Things changed in the years since, though. The island has been mismanaged badly, and the economy is way, way down and crime is way, way up. That's meant most resorts have either folded completely or been bought by overseas franchises and so on. And most of them became much, much more exclusive, and much more hostile to locals using the facilities. Tourists are much less likely to just wander freely around the island, because of the crime, which has further tanked the economy.

I think u/Jessica hit the nail exactly on the head in their comment. There is good tourism and bad tourism, pretty much as u/Jessica described. And I observed mostly good tourism... not perfectly good tourism, but fairly good nonetheless... and it was wonderful. Going to parties as a kid, I'd rub shoulders with a revolving door of visitors from all over the world, and we'd trade stories and cultures and have fun together. And it was really a great equalizer, because whatever social stratification visitors may have had in their home countries, they were all just "guests" on the island - whether they were a celebrity or a salaryman back home, none of that really mattered on the island. And I presume the visitors had a good time, too, because I remember one of the boasts of the island's tourism industry was one of the highest (if not the highest) repeat-customer statistics in the world.

I can't give the final word on whether tourism can be ethical or not. I just wanted to give the perspective of someone who grew up as a local in a tourist destination. Tourism really made the island a better place; even ignoring the economic benefits, without it we would have been insular (no pun intended) with no real way for the locals (who were mostly too poor to travel) to experience other cultures. (That may be a moot point now, with the Internet and modern communication technology.) We also wouldn't have had as much motivation to recognize, and thus celebrate and preserve, our unique culture. I can't tell you whether tourism on a whole is ethical or not. But I do want to encourage you from thinking of the tourist destinations, and the locals there, as more than just victims. Yes, there is some level of victimization by imperialism from richer countries. But I think when tourism was done well, it did far more good for the island than ill.

4

red_pepper wrote

Thanks for your perspective! I don't disagree that there are good and bad types of tourism. I think, however, that the mismanagement that happened over the years is the resource curse. By relying on a single industry for income, the government has less incentive to invest in its people. Tourism can act as an important source of income in the short and medium term, but in the long term it seems to always have bad results.

I'm not an expert, though. Maybe there's a way to keep that from happening. I don't know. And certainly there are benefits to tourism, such as making people more worldly and opening up new opportunities. I just worry is all.

1

indi wrote

I think this is a case of "everything looks like a nail". The resource curse doesn't really apply in this situation... not without a whole lot of shoving square pegs into round holes and then squinting at the results.

In fact, tourism was an incredible benefit to the island, for at least half a century (and probably longer). Where things went wrong really had nothing to do with the tourism industry. If it were possible to continue as it had in the past, the island would be much better off than it is now.

What went wrong is a combination of political incompetence and corruption, and the disastrous effects of the financial collapse. I guess they figured relying too much on tourism alone was a bad idea, so for many years there was a concerted effort to become the money centre of the Caribbean... and most of Central and South America too. On an island small enough to walk across and back in a day (no exaggeration, I did it as a child, and it only took part of an afternoon) there were so many banks and other financial companies I don't think anyone was able to count them. The island is now a "tax haven". There are several buildings now where when you walk inside, there is a single desk with a secretary to answer the phone, and walls just covered with the plaques of hundreds... maybe even thousands... of foreign companies that, in theory, have their offices in that building. Some of them are big names, too, that you'd probably recognize.

While this wasn't great - just as anywhere else, that kind of industry only makes the rich richer, and does fuck all to help anyone else - things only turned bad when the financial collapse hit. It's not an exaggeration to say that pretty much destroyed the whole island's economy. That lead to two things: a sharp rise in crime, which naturally forced most hotels to turtle up, and generally caused a need to segregate tourists from the (crime-riddled) locals; and lots of locals losing their livelihoods, which led to many of them turning to foreign investors for cash, and thus selling off local properties. That's what turned the tourist industry sour.

So no, I don't agree that tourism was the cause of the island's woes. On the contrary, I think tourism could have saved it. It was other factors that turned the situation bad, and that hurt tourism and turned it from the "good" form to the "bad" form. Tourism was not the disease, it was the vital organ harmed by the disease. If it were possible to fix all the crime and for locals to buy back all the hotels and bars and stuff so tourism could bounce back to the way it was before, that would probably be wonderful for the island.

1