by Tom Feiling
They returned with new cars and rolls of crisp dollar bills, which they spent on the modern household goods on offer at Rignier’s, the well-appointed, new department store that opened in North End. There were now taxis to ferry them between North End, Mount May, and San Luis, and trucks to carry their coconuts from the groves to the dock. By 1940, most of the groves were back in production; while it was too late to restore the trade with the United States, the growers found new markets for their produce in Cartagena and began shipping copra, oil, and bran, which the Colombians turned into soap.*2
Like the United States, San Andrés came out of the war flourishing. The Colombian economy was doing well too, and like many postwar governments, Bogotá expanded its remit to promote development and extend credit to the nation’s farmers. The first bank opened its doors, and the National Institute of Food Supplies opened a branch on the island. For the first time, the poor could receive subsidized food, which lifted the burden of helping them from the church’s shoulders. With prosperity, more islanders could afford to send their children to school on the mainland, and the number of bilingual islanders began to rise.
In spite of its proclivity to fratricide, Colombia is one of the few countries in Latin America not to have endured decades of dictatorship. But in June 1953, Lt. Gen. Gustavo Rojas Pinilla deposed the democratically elected government and suspended Congress. His rule lasted six years and was widely welcomed for giving the country some respite from La Violencia, the term used to describe the terrible wave of bloodletting that swept the Colombian countryside after the assassination of the populist liberal leader Jorge Eliécer Gaitán in 1948. Determined to restore order to a country buckling under the weight of the fighting between liberals and conservatives, the general appointed a cabinet largely composed of military men, and set about reforming the country’s constitution and revitalizing its economy.
Shortly after coming to office, President Rojas Pinilla visited San Andrés, the first Colombian president ever to do so. Bogotá was keen to put its relations with the islands on a new footing, he told the huge crowds that gathered to hear him speak. He made San Andrés a free port, where foreign imports could be landed without paying more than 10 percent tax. The free port was a boon to the urbanites of Bogotá, Medellín, and Barranquilla, who couldn’t resist the opportunity to buy American stoves, washing machines, and fridges at knockdown prices. So keen was he to entice them to San Andrés that Rojas Pinilla even offered free flights to anyone who booked accommodation on the island for more than five nights. It was a dramatic gesture but hardly a practical one, for the island’s only hotel was still just a blueprint. No matter, said the general; let them stay in the islanders’ homes. It would give mainlanders a chance to get to know the most isolated citizens of the republic, and the island’s women an extra source of income.
The Colombians came in their droves, for few of them had ever been on holiday before, and fewer still had ever left the mainland. They returned home with their precious white goods and memories of the vicarious thrill that came with stepping back in time to the era when San Andrés was ruled by piratas ingleses.
The duty-free business was also a boon to Colombia’s merchants, who rushed to the island to get a slice of the action. At the time, there was just one short street in North End: 20th of July Avenue, which was lined with two-story wooden houses whose owners had never heard of renting business premises. Few of them spoke more than the rudiments of Spanish, and most had grown up with the honorable business practices inculcated in the Baptists’ covenant. By contrast, the mainlanders were quite unscrupulous and hoodwinked their landlords into signing fraudulent rental agreements. In a rush of entrepreneurial innovation, the newcomers shipped in jacks to elevate the houses ten feet into the air, hastily erected concrete columns, and bricked up the space below. Within weeks of agreeing to rent his ground floor, the landlord found himself living over a shop with plateglass windows showing off all the appliances of the modern kitchen.
When the landlord realized how naïve he’d been, he sought legal advice from the island’s only lawyer. But Francis Newball Hooker only knew about contracts relating to the sale of coconuts, and besides, he had retired. His successor was his nephew Paulson Newball, who had none of his uncle’s scruples. Instead of coming to the aid of the beleaguered islanders, he connived with the newcomers, inserting clauses into tenancy agreements that ensured that the shopkeeper would assume ownership of the building at the end of his tenancy. His landlord could file a lawsuit against him, but that would cost him a great deal of money, which he invariably had to borrow. Once the case came to court, he found himself facing a continental lawyer, who was often on first-name terms with the continental judge, who invariably sided with the continental merchant. Before he knew it, the landlord was both broke and homeless.
The same combination of native innocence and foreign guile was apparent in the government’s development of San Andrés. General Rojas Pinilla ordered an expansion of the island’s airport, which involved multiple compulsory purchase orders. In some cases, the landowners sold up willingly, but much of the land for the new runway was appropriated without any kind of compensation. The general also ordered a tarmac road built around the island. It would mean the loss of a hundred thousand coconut palms, but he assured the islanders that the rewards would outweigh the losses. The construction of the International Hotel proved no less destructive. In excavating the ground for its foundations, the bulldozers destroyed a cemetery, and the bones of generations of islanders were tipped into the sea.
The desecration of the islanders’ heritage might have been easier to swallow if the free port had given them jobs. But they didn’t have the skills or experience needed to work in the shops and hotels springing up around them, and the new employers preferred to bring in their own staff. Many of them were of Syrian or Lebanese descent, and they recruited their workforce through family networks and political patronage. They came to dominate the retail trade, and before long, the houses and warehouses on 20th of July Avenue had been muscled aside by the duty-free shops of the Avenida 20 de Julio.
The development of the free port was a disaster, but it would be unfair to blame it entirely on the mainlanders. San Andrés’s wealthiest families were no less captivated by the rush to modernize than the government in Bogotá, and plenty of them willingly sold land that had been passed down from generation to generation since it was first apportioned by Tomás O’Neille. Besides, the free port brought some benefits: new docks were built, and a chamber of commerce was established. Rising land prices brought wealth to some, and as the standard of living rose, some migrant workers opted to return home from Colón and Cartagena. The men found work as taxi drivers and tour guides, while their wives got work as chambermaids and cooks, which gave them a measure of financial independence they had not known until then.
But for most islanders, the promise of the free port was quick to lose its luster, and it was with the bitter taste of betrayal in their mouths that they cursed the ‘panyaman.’*3 The politicians and their underlings had no time for their complaints, so they took their frustration out on the unfamiliar faces crowding their streets. But men accustomed to fighting with their fists were no match for the mainlanders, many of whom carried knives. Come Monday morning, the little island courtroom would be crowded with defendants lamenting the drunken brawl they had gotten into on Friday night. A new police station was built, and the governor of the island’s jail, which had been unoccupied for years, was soon complaining of overcrowding. The islanders had never felt the need to fit locks on their windows or bolts on their doors, but now both were considered essential.
Paradise had lost none of its allure for the mainlanders. Whether as tourists, shopkeepers, laborers, or salesmen, they came in their thousands, and newspapers on the mainland took to calling North End ‘the Colombian Coney Island.’ They were perplexed by the islanders’ complaints. Wasn’t development good for San Andrés? Wasn’t the island finally being brought int
o the fold of national life? Only a separatist or somebody with a perverse hatred for the fatherland could possibly object. When marches were organized to protest at the whittling away of the islands’ native culture, the Colombian intendente dismissed them as the work of ‘negros ignorantes.’
In 1953, the population of San Andrés had stood at 3,705; over the ten years that followed General Rojas Pinilla’s visit, it doubled (by 2014, it stood at over seventy thousand).6 As the demand for food went up, abundant and cheap seafood became scarce and expensive, and the huge shoals of fish that had once swum in the shallow waters of San Andrés Bay disappeared. The tourists were keen to try turtle meat, so the island’s fishermen caught them in ever-increasing numbers. When the number of adult turtles went into decline, they caught young turtles; then they too disappeared. As the demand for water went up, the water table dropped, and the island’s farmers started to notice that their fruit trees were producing less fruit. So they sold their orchards to the developers and abandoned the land for the town. As the population rose, the island’s classrooms became overcrowded, and the standard of education began to fall. Classes in manners and ethics, arts and trades, and agricultural instructions were dropped. Then the schools stopped teaching English, and Spanish gradually became the lingua franca of San Andrés.
The islanders had rushed to embrace the modern world at breakneck speed, but they were blind to the environmental and cultural destruction that development brought in its wake. It was as if they only appreciated the vivid beauty of ‘the sea of seven colours’ when it was captured on a postcard; by then, the phrase had became a slogan for the island’s tourist board, and it was too late. The same year, the office of the intendente was devastated by a fire. Bogotá had always opted for native Spanish speakers when there were positions vacant at the seat of island government, so few islanders mourned its destruction. But the intendente’s office had also housed the island’s archives, and the fire sent practically every scrap of written history up in smoke. It was assumed to be arson, but no culprit was ever charged. The same might be said of the fate of the island formerly known as St. Andrew’s: it had gone, and with it went all trace of what would soon come to be known as ‘the old Caribbean.’
* * *
Providence had always regarded itself as the older brother of San Andrés. There was certainly a racial dimension to the islanders’ haughty indifference to the modern world, perhaps on account of their island having once been an English colony. By 1953, however, the last white islander was on her deathbed, and Providence had become a largely mixed-race island. But it was still lighter-skinned than San Andrés, and the persistence of racial thinking created a small-minded obsession with hierarchy. At one end of the scale was the lauded minority of ‘white’ islanders, with their ‘clear’ skin and ‘good’ hair, most of whom lived at the top of the island. At the other end was the black majority who still lived in Bottom House and Southwest Bay.
Whatever their complexion, the islanders were still able to feed themselves with what they grew in the hills. But farming and fishing were the only resources they could draw upon. For a time there was talk of Providence becoming one of the cruise ships’ ports of call, but the island didn’t have a wharf capable of handling the arrival of such behemoths. As the connections between the islands and Colombia grew stronger, its more ambitious sons and daughters left for the mainland. Some found work with the oil companies that had begun drilling in the Magdalena Valley, while others sought education in the United States and went on to find work as missionaries, doctors, or teachers in the Baptist and Adventist colleges that were springing up across the Americas.
By 1953, the island’s population had dropped to less than two thousand, the lowest it had been all century. For many families, the only reminder of their absent son or daughter was the graduation certificate from an American college hanging on the wall. The monthly remittance, sent from the Colombian mainland or a small town in the American Bible Belt, helped them to maintain a relatively high standard of living, but the process of osmosis that drew the young and restless away from the old and settled seemed unstoppable. The island’s traditional wooden houses fell into disrepair, and the charm of a way of life that was disappearing elsewhere began to wear thin. In 1953, there were eight hundred seventy horses on the island, but just one motor vehicle: an old jeep that Elrue Archbold had brought back from the United States. Since the road running around the island was still little more than a rutted track, he used it to power the sugar mill when the cane-cutting season came around.
The government offered the islanders some compensation for their estrangement from the modern world. Following the hurricane that destroyed four hundred houses in 1940, they had had to rebuild their homes by themselves, but when Hurricane Hattie swept hundreds of houses into the sea in 1961, various government agencies stepped in to help. Like distant relatives remembering an aging and increasingly isolated neighbor, the mainlanders were prone to sudden outbursts of goodwill. Between disasters, however, they remained conspicuous by their absence.7
*1The Canal Zone was controlled by the United States between 1903 and 1979. It was under joint U.S.–Panamanian control from 1979 until 1999, when it was restored to Panama.
*2Copra is the dried kernel of the coconut.
*3Panyaman’ is a corruption of ‘Spanish man.’ The term became a common term of abuse in the 1970s, when the islanders began to assert their rights as members of what they called the ‘raizal’ population. Ironically, the word comes from the Spanish; it means ‘roots.’
[20]
‘Maybe They Don’t Know What Is an Island’
WHEN I TOLD ED THAT I wanted to explore the island’s hilly interior, he introduced me to his cousin Basha, who said that he would be more than happy to act as my guide. The following day, I walked up the path that led through Basha’s overgrown garden, past some discarded pallets mildewing in the long grass, to his shack. The place looked abandoned—just discarded food boxes and a pile of rumpled clothes on the rough wooden floor of a windowless hut.
Even islanders less rusticated than Basha made do with very little. Perhaps it was the beauty of their surroundings that allowed them to get away with so few belongings. They had no need of carpets, curtains, radiators, bathtubs, or the other essentials of life in colder climes. Nor did they have much in the way of cultural artifacts: maybe a TV, if only to watch the soaps, but no books, magazines, or newspapers. Even if they had wanted such things, there was nowhere to buy them. Few of them owned cars, and those that did had no need of a garage. What every house, apart from Basha’s, did have was a tiled floor. The gleaming floor was a status symbol and played the same role as the gleaming car does in the U.K.; it also made it easier to keep a place free of ants.
The old folks I spoke to often complained about the thieves of Freetown and Bottom House, but I couldn’t see what a thief might have stolen, at least until the advent of the mobile phone. There were none of the accoutrements of success to excite a neighbor’s envy: no flashy cars or designer clothes, no glossy magazines or ‘good schools,’ no charity events or garden parties. The lack of material goods meant that there was no shame in having—or doing—very little.
What grated was not the frugality of island life, but the terrible neglect and indifference that the islanders had fallen into. People still gave me their landline numbers, even though the phones had stopped working the previous April (since everyone had a mobile, I suppose the phone company couldn’t see the point in repairing the network). I encountered similar problems when I rented a little cabin in Smooth Water Bay for the second half of my stay. My landlady told me that she had had no mains water since the pipes that carried water from the dam on the other side of the island burst. That was six months ago, but she wasn’t bothered. “Water will come with the rain,” Annie said stoically, as she set a row of buckets under the eaves to collect the rainwater.
The chaos that characterized local government on Providence had its advantages, for n
obody feels bound by rules that aren’t enforced. The islanders didn’t need a helmet, lights, or a number plate to ride their scooters, and they used them to transport whatever they liked, be it an infant son, an ailing aunt, or a bottle of propane gas. The younger ones would tear up the road pulling wheelies and nobody did anything to stop them, and the only traffic warnings on the island were the graves of teenage daredevils that I saw in the cemetery in Freshwater Bay.
I heard Basha calling my name and walked back to the road to watch him bring his cows down to the field behind his shack. He went up into the hills twice a day, he said; once to take them up to feed, and later to bring them back down again. The herd’s owner spent most of his time in Indianapolis and only came back to the island from time to time. In the run-up to Christmas, he would be back to slaughter several head of cattle. Christmas coincided with the harvest festival, which meant baked beef, pork, and chicken, lots of sponge cake, and lots of bush rum.
We started up the hill, following paths made muddy by the cows’ hooves, through dense woods to the foot of a grassy hill, where the sun beat down mercilessly. Providence had become prosperous on the back of its fruit trees, but most of its orange and mango orchards had been cleared for cattle pasture. Breaching the first of the hills leading up to the Peak, we came to a lookout point and gazed across the reef to the electric blue water over the sand banks. The view was a balm, calming our minds and drying out our words. The volcanic rock of the Three Brothers Cays was rendered black by the white light reflecting off the sea, and I could only make out the silhouettes of the man-of-war birds that glided in and out of the shadows. The grass around us, which was yellowing at its tips, was waving like a sheet in the onshore breeze. The dry season usually began in January, but there had been little rain that year, and despite the occasional shower, deep cracks had appeared in the ground. As the heat rose off the land, it alternated with the breeze in warming and then cooling my skin. Would I ever live as tranquil, or as frugal a life again? I wondered.