The island of Culebra, Puerto Rico

Culebra's airport

Culebra, a small island to the east of the main island of Puerto Rico, and one of its 78 "municipios" or districts along with the larger sister island of Vieques, is fascinating for a number of reasons. First, it is enough off the beaten path to have the feel of a remote place, but close enough to be accessible by ferry from Fajardo or by air from San Juan. Second, it boasts Flamenco Beach, one of the most beautiful beaches to be found anywhere. Third, there are interesting people there, including a small population from the mainland US that seems to have created a niche for themselves.

From a cultural standpoint, it has the Spanish language but is influenced by the culture of the English-speaking Caribbean in subtle ways, like when I listened to the radio there and heard a reggae concert. The reggae was sung in English, but the singer addressed his audience in Spanish. Another example of the mix was in the repertoire of local conga drummer Wiki Munet and his band WIKI Sound Machine, who plays at Mamacita's Restaurant in the island's lone town of Dewey (aka "Pueblo") but also plays with a religious music group at the local Catholic church. One of the rhythms he plays he calls "suki." I couldn't figure out what it was because it was the first time I had heard the name, but it may be a different way of spelling and pronouncing the French Caribbean dance rhythm of "zouk."

I met Wiki by striking up a conversation with him after Mass, and was immediately invited to the porch of his house after lunch to hang out with him and his family and neighbors, including the parish priest, and take a welcome cold beer to beat the heat. Wiki didn't want to play drums because one of his fellow musicians was off island, but he put on a CD of one of his performances at Mamacita's for us to enjoy.

Nothing is perfect, and the best reminder of that in Culebra are the mosquitoes. I didn't recall them being annoying at the beach, but I did get bitten on other occasions, so it's best to have repellent handy. However, the delights of Culebra far outweigh the itching of the mosquito bites.

Countrystyle Community Tourism experience in Jamaica

Shops in Mandeville

My wife Adriana and I went to Jamaica for a short visit from June 30 to July 4. Our visit had two phases: the first was our stay at the Sandals Carlyle in Montego Bay, and the second was a two-day tour in Jamaica's interior courtesy of Countrystyle Community Tourism. There were so many experiences wrapped up in such a short time that words fail to describe it adequately. It was evident to me that I would need some time to digest it.

This article will concentrate on our experience with Countrystyle. Diana McIntyre-Pike, who lives in Mandeville, the largest city in Manchester Parish (Jamaica´s administrative regions are called parishes), has spent more than 30 years of her life managing hotels and tours, was our host for the two-day tour. This customized tour was the result of quite a bit of preparation and communication over a two-month period, not to mention the fact that Diana and I first communicated via email in 2007 or so. Diana first welcomed us with a gift basket and also gave us some literature that highlighted the region´s attractions. The tour started from Montego Bay and followed the coast east to Falmouth, and then went toward the interior where the landscape changed frequently. First, after passing through some lowlands, we were confronted with the topography of the eastern end of the Cockpit Country, a hilly area that in some parts is still impenetrable. We passed through several towns on this eastern side such as Clark's Town, Clarence Town, and Albert Town. Diana found time to speak to a local herbalist who knew the medicinal properties of many of the area´s plants.

Albert Town is on the edge of the Cockpit Country in north central Jamaica.

Countrystyle Community Tourism director Diana McIntyre-Pike (left) with a local herbalist

After passing through this region, we noticed a few more changes in the surroundings. We first went to a lowland and back upwards toward Mandeville. The hills in this region featured some closed bauxite plants, a lot of new building of luxurious homes, and what looks to be a vibrant community. We stopped briefly at a plant that processed and packaged the famous Jamaican Blue Mountain coffee. Continuing to the center of town, we had lunch in a popular locale that featured meat and chicken patties.

I invited a friend from Kingston, Cheryl Ryman, to take time out of her busy schedule and join Adriana and me in Mandeville. Diana was very accommodating and tailored the schedule so that we could fit in Cheryl in part of the trip. (Cheryl is the Executive Director of Outameni Experience, a popular attraction in northern Jamaica that provides an introduction to Jamaican culture for visitors.) After we met up with Cheryl we headed south toward a small village in the vicinity of Cross Keys, Manchester Parish, called Resource Village. The area has historical significance for a number of reasons, among them the Taino presence prior to colonization, and the activities of Marcus Garvey, whose vision prompted the construction of a United Negro Improvement Association "Liberty Hall," now in disrepair but with the hope of getting funds to make it serve the community again.

Diana's goal for this stop was for us to have for lunch the Jamaican national dish, ackee and saltfish. Ackee is a fruit, but looks and tastes (at least to me) like scrambled eggs in this combination. Having a local fruit called jackfruit, which looks like breadfruit but is delightfully sweet and sticky, finished off lunch nicely.

Ackee and saltfish with bammy or cassava bread

As lunch was winding down, we watched a local African-inspired dance. The young people who danced in a circle were fun to watch. I was invited to participate, which took me out of my comfort zone, but I made the best of it :) . Cheryl is in black, second from the right, and felt right at home dancing with the group.

Resource Village residents perform a local dance with Cheryl Ryman 

Then it was time to return to Mandeville. The villa we were to stay in, called Mountain Top Villa, was located in an area called Avondale Heights, and this is one part of Mandeville where many of these new palatial houses are being built. The villa is very nicely decorated inside and has a great view of the surrounding area. We managed to squeeze in a brief visit to the house of Valerie Dixon, who organizes a Marcus Garvey Festival every February, involving the Resource Village community.

The next morning it was breakfast at the Mandeville Hotel. The poolside setting was very nice. I remember having a dish called mackerel rundown and enjoying our chat with Diana, Valerie, and Mildred Smith-Chang. Mildred authored a book called The Mask is Off, which offers a frank look at the myths and realities for Jamaicans who decide to move to the United States.

We headed west past the town of Spur Tree and onward where we would see the south coast of Jamaica. One location we saw was called Middle Quarters, where the trees provided a lovely canopy over the road and many vendors sold local products. Diana likes her guests to get to know the people they meet and remember them on a first-name basis, so we stopped at one stand run by a woman named Marcie. The specialty, aside from the local fruits, was pepper shrimp.

Marcie at her stand selling fruit and pepper shrimp

Our next stop, in Westmoreland Parish, was the small town of Beeston Spring, which has distinguished itself by providing an example of what local community tourism can do. An article in the Jamaica Gleaner describes the award that the town received in 2010 as "best town in Jamaica" (http://jamaica-gleaner.com/gleaner/20100828/news/news4.html) . The community works hard to provide income, ensure a clean water supply, build or repair structures, and other essentials, with the help of The Sandals Foundation, and much assistance from Diana in the area of training. We picked up Astil Gage, president of the Beeston Spring Community Development Committee, on our way to the town. Our stop was brief by necessity, but we did learn a few things about the community and managed to see the group "The Mighty Beestons" perform traditional Jamaican mento music. This time it was my wife who was invited to dance and leave her comfort zone.

"The Mighty Beestons," mento performers in Beeston Spring

We wrapped up our tour with lunch at Sandals Whitehouse, not far from Beeston Spring. We were able to appreciate the beautiful views of the south coast from the resort just in time before an afternoon rain. (The resort warrants an explanation of its own.) On our way back to Montego Bay, we followed a road that hugged part of the south coast before turning inward and towards the north.

The south coast of Jamaica as seen from Sandals Whitehouse

There were many things that made the trip special, among them conversations with Diana and her friends about the political and economic state of Jamaica, local culture and the efforts to promote it, along with details that would generally fall under the radar in a brief visit, such as the best brand of bottled water, the resort chains that support the community and those that don´t, or the development of Mandeville´s downtown area which is currently too small to accommodate its rapid growth. For just two days, it was remarkable, and a tour of this type could easily be extended to include other local attractions, as has been the case for guests who had more time than we did. There was also no question that after knowing each other virtually for several years, Diana and I would continue to correspond and look for other opportunities to help each other. It is amazing and inspiring to witness how Diana and others in her community give of themselves unselfishly to promote their people´s well-being and build bridges of understanding with those fortunate enough to visit Jamaica.

Welcome website visitors!

Last weekend, I shut down my website and now the domain name www.latinandcaribbeantravel.com directs to this blog which, for those of you who are visiting for the first time, I started in 2007. The look of the blog may be different, but I hope you enjoy the content here as much as you enjoyed the content from my website.

Attack on the Palace of Justice in Bogota, Colombia (1985)

My wife had traveled to Bogota in November 1985 to visit her family. At the time she was expecting our first child. I was back home in Philadelphia working but I expected to join her in two weeks. During those two weeks two unspeakable tragedies took place in Colombia. The first was the M-19 guerrilla group's attack on the Palace of Justice in Bogota, which faces the Capitol and the Cathedral along the Plaza de Bolivar. The second was the eruption of the Nevado del Ruiz volcano in the center of the country (about 100 miles away from Bogota), which claimed the lives of more than 20,000 people. You can imagine how worried I was, but my wife was well out of harm's way in both cases. When I finally did arrive in Bogota, I had occasion to visit the ruins of the Palace of Justice with my father-in-law. The angle of the picture isn't so hot, but in the back you can see the scaffolding where the army drove one of its armored vehicles into the Palace of Justice as part of its attempt to rescue the hostages and retake control of the building. There is a related article in Wikipedia at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palace_of_Justice_siege.

Two years later, my wife, daughter and I had moved to Bogota and rented an apartment. To sign the lease, I went into the building to the left of the Palace in this photo to meet with the lawyer representing the owners. While there, I asked him about his recollections of the attack. He had some opinions regarding the conduct of the guerrillas and the army, but the part I remember most was that he and others were trapped inside his office while the hostilities played out in the plaza. He said to his colleagues something to the effect of: "Well, we can't go anywhere the rest of the day. I have a bottle of whiskey, so let's finish it off."

A quick update

After five years of maintaining both a blog and a website on Latin American and Caribbean travel, I've decided to focus on this blog and will be shutting down my website in June 2012. My goal is to provide my readers here with more information so that following the blog is an even more rewarding experience. Thanks to all of you who have read my blog and provided so many favorable comments.

Susana Donoso, who participated in an educational exchange in 1947, reflects on her experiences

A search that took me over 30 years has finally come to a close. Back in 1978, I was rummaging around in the basement at home when I came across a high school Spanish textbook, "El Camino Real," that my brother had received from a neighbor. I turned to a chapter called "Una Aventura en la Buena Vecindad," which roughly translated means "An adventure in good neighborliness." It told the story of 33 Latin American high school students who were selected to travel to the United States, live with American families and attend American schools. It didn't give a date, but it said that it happened "not too long ago." The program was called the New York Herald Tribune Forum for High School Students (later known as the World Youth Forum).

There were several factors that made this exchange unique. First, this event received widespread media coverage in its day, as the program was sponsored by one of New York's leading newspapers. Second, Pan American Airlines brought the students to the United States. Third, the students had the opportunity to meet well-known personalities such as Juan Trippe, president of Pan Am; First Lady Bess Truman; Peruvian political figure Victor  Raul Haya de la Torre; and actress Ingrid Bergman. Fourth, the students had the opportunity to participate in a panel at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel to express their opinions about the United States, both positive and negative. Among the positives were the directness and friendliness of their hosts, but the students did not hesitate to mention that some of the Americans they met did not know much about Latin America. I was familiar with educational exchanges, as I was about to participate in one to Mexico in 1979, but it was evident that the Forum was something truly special. One of the students whose picture appeared in the textbook, and who participated actively in the panel discussion, was "Ecuador's friendly Susana Donoso."

In 1981, after returning from graduate studies in Bogota, Colombia, I decided to see if I could locate some of the students that participated in the program to interview them. This was a challenge in those pre-Internet days when I had to rely on libraries and microfilm collections, especially as the book did not provide a year for this particular program, and the New York Herald Tribune had closed its doors in the 1960s. I exhausted my local resources in Philadelphia and in 1984 went to the New York Public Library to do my research. After searching through the Herald Tribune archives, I did not come up with the particular Forum that I was looking for, though I found articles about other students who participated in the Forum in later years. A friend of mine, Mireya Cebamanos, did me the great favor of looking for one of the students on one of her trips to her native Panama, but was unsuccessful. In 1997, I stopped at Swarthmore College and decided to search in the New York Times archives, and finally found the year that the Forum took place. It turned out to be 1947. Internet searches at that time for some of the students proved to be unsuccessful. I would occasionally do a Google search as the years went on to see if I could find anything, but didn't come up with anything. On one of my trips to Bogota, Colombia, I searched the phone directory to find the name of the Colombian student who participated in the Forum, Rafael Moreno Castro, but it was far too common a name to stand out in the directory.

Finally, in 2010 I decided to do one more search on some of the students' names, knowing full well that those who were still alive would be about 80 years old. This time, searching for Susana Donoso, I found a genealogy that mentioned her name and some of her descendants. I was able to email her granddaughter's husband, whose name is Sebastian Donoso Bustamante and who works for a law firm in Quito, Ecuador. After several months of email exchange, we were able to nail down a date for the interview, which turned out to be Mother's Day, May 8, 2011. Shortly before the date, I learned that there was an alumni association for students who participated in the World Youth Forum during its history from 1947 to 1972. I was able to make contact with Dorothy Chen-Courtin, one of its past presidents, to inform her about the interview. Dorothy was eager to learn what the interview would bring, because 1947 was the first year that the Forum invited students from other countries. (There was a Forum in 1946 that featured students from the New York metropolitan area, so 1947 is counted as the first year of the World Youth Forum.)

Susana Donoso was celebrating Mother's Day at her daughter's house in Quito and her relatives set her up on the computer so that we could conduct the interview via Skype. I didn't have a webcam set up on my computer, but she had one on hers, so I could see how she looked today as an 81-year-old woman. She definitely retained the appearance she had in the picture taken of her in 1947, but with the added wisdom of a person who has learned a lot of valuable lessons in life. I found her to be optimistic, enthusiastic and candid, just as she was in 1947.

One of the questions I had for her, as one can imagine, was what her life has been like since participating in the Forum. The main event, from a career perspective, was that she landed a job as a secretary at the US Embassy in Quito in 1956, thanks in part to her participation in the Forum, and worked there until retiring in 1988. Nonetheless, she has kept up with world events since retiring from the Embassy and credits the Forum for fostering in her an interest in international relations, which in her opinion made a huge difference in her life, both personally and professionally. Out of all the major events that have taken place over the 64 years since her participation in the Forum, which include the assassination of John F. Kennedy, the voyages to the moon, Watergate, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the 9-11 attacks, the one event that has made the strongest impact on her was the election of Barack Obama as President. One reason for that impact may be that when she arrived in Miami in 1947 en route to New York and the Forum, she and the other students saw the "Whites only" and "Colored" signs that were a part of segregation in the South. She stressed that the election of an African American president was an event that likewise made an impression on many people in Latin America because for many years it seemed highly unlikely that it would happen.

I wanted to ask Susana if she felt that Americans were just as ignorant of Latin America now as they were in 1947, and she assured me that it was not the case. She recalled speaking before a Rotary club while participating in the forum, and the audience wanted to know if Ecuadoreans dressed in feathers and had clocks. She made an effort to be polite and still answer the question candidly, because she felt that it was precisely the goal of the Forum to do so. She also felt that her own country has progressed significantly, particularly in the increased roles of women and indigenous peoples in her society. Her family and I laughed good-naturedly as she tried to remember the name of the sneakers the natives wear - was it Reebok? The educational system in her country likewise has improved, with more opportunities for university studies for the population, and for women to get college degrees and embark on successful careers.

Susana remains, in her words, a friend of the United States, but she feels that in some cases the United States could do a better job in maintaining friendly relations with Latin America. One example is that oftentimes Latin American products encounter taxes and legal hurdles when there is an effort to export them to the United States, some of which she feels put an unnecessary burden on poor farmers and fishermen in her country. She also mentioned that the United States has political and economic competition in Ecuador that did not exist in 1947, particularly among European states, Arab states, and followers of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, and stressed the importance of working hard to maintain good relations.

Regarding the Forum, Susana told me that aside from the other student from Ecuador who accompanied her, she had not been able to stay in touch with the other students who traveled with her to participate in the Forum. She remains interested in learning about their whereabouts, and which ones are still alive and of sound mind. She hopes that the Forum's Alumni Association will provide her with that opportunity.

Exploring Latin Roots in Colorado and New Mexico

Old-fashioned drug store in Las Vegas, New Mexico

In the spring, I had a few days to cram in a visit to the areas of southern Colorado and northern New Mexico where the Latin presence is significant. I was delighted to find all manner of cultural sights and curiosities, including this drug store in Las Vegas, New Mexico, which is a few miles from one of the exits of I-25, which connects Albuquerque and Denver. The drug store boasted an old-fashioned soda fountain with all manner of memorabilia, but it also had an updated menu with the now-popular cold coffee drinks. Las Vegas also had a music store frequented by many locals, where it was possible to learn about the New Mexican musicians that keep Spanish-speaking traditions alive in the area.

Other places I visited in the area had similar surprises: San Luis, Colorado, with its Way of the Cross on a hill overlooking the town; Taos, New Mexico, located near several ski resorts and Native American pueblos; La Veta, Colorado, the northern entrance to the Highway of Legends that passes through the area of the Spanish Peaks; Trinidad, Colorado, on the opposite end of the Highway of Legends, featuring many restored buildings and the town's name prominently displayed on a sign on the top of one of its overlooking mountains; and Chimayó, New Mexico, called the Lourdes of America because of its fame as a site for healings, not to mention Albuquerque and its museums dedicated to Latin American and Native American cultures.

Chiles drying outside a store in Albuquerque, New Mexico

Two weeks' time would not have been enough to sample all that the region has to offer, let alone the few days that I spent there. Nonetheless, I left very satisfied with what I was able to visit, and met friendly people wherever I went.