ARUBA-TOURISM: A Changing Caribbean Culture

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Wesley Gibbings

ORANJESTAD, May 22 1998 (IPS) - In under 15 years, Aruba has become one of the more spectacular success stories in Caribbean tourism history, though decision-makers here continue to maintain a watchful eye on the social impact of prosperous, boom-like conditions.

Business leaders, for example, are hoping that with 100 percent employment and an attractiveness as a market for neighbouring Latin American workers, the former Dutch colony would not, as it grows, develop the worst symptoms of social decline.

So far, so good. Crime levels are way below Caribbean averages and poverty remains a barely visible phenomenon. But caution is being advised by some.

“We are now at the point where our economy should be consolidated,” says businessman, Roly Sint Jago. “But one of the constraints is that we have had a tremendous influx of foreign workers into our small community.

“When you have 10,000 foreigners in your economy, it puts pressure on your social situation,” he argues.

Most people here use approximately the same immigrant figures which amount to more than 10 percent of the total population of 85,000. The mix has led to a virtual Babel of languages and cultural cross- currents that extend way beyond Caribbean shores.

The official language is Dutch, but English, Spanish and the local dialect known as Papiamento are widely spoken and written.

“We have imported a lot of labour from other countries and this has changed the culture,” says senior government public relations official, Antonio Leo.

“This is really something that the people of Aruba are very much concerned about,” he adds.

The nature of the challenge is however nothing new. Aruba seems always to have been a diverse place. Until 1985, Exxon’s massive Lago Refinery along the south-west corner of the 193 square-metre island was the single most important income-earner, employer and centre of economic activity in the island.

With the refinery, established in 1928, came hundreds of immigrants from all corners of the English-speaking Caribbean and an economy that became the pride and joy of the Netherlands Antilles group.

The town of San Nicholas became a microcosmic Caribbean nation and there are even now plans to construct a Caribbean Museum there. It was at one time estimated that 7,000 employees during the peak activity of the plant in the 1940’s came from as many as 56 different countries.

That was until the Exxon pullout of 1985.

When Exxon departed, many Trinidadians, Grenadians, Jamaicans and other English-speaking Caribbean workers also left, but as tourism grew, an increasing number of Spanish-speaking Colombians and Venezuelans made the brief journey to the small, dry island on the shoulder of the South American mainland.

Now, once again, the social landscape of the island is undergoing a metamorphosis of sorts. Aruba has become one of the fastest growing tourism markets in the Americas and a far cry from the economic slump that accompanied the Exxon pullout.

One year after the closure of the refinery, a troubled Aruba became an autonomous part of the Kingdom of the Netherlands. It was a political arrangement that left the local executive with responsibility for all national matters except defence and external affairs.

Between 1985 and 1991, the year the refinery was re-opened under the auspices of the newly-constituted Coastal Corporation, this freshly- initiated autonomous territory pursued an economic fortune rooted in the fact that the island possesses some of the most beautiful beaches in the Caribbean.

“The crisis in Aruba marked the beginning of what was, for us, a lengthy process of trial and error,” Prime Minister Henny Eman says. And, the island’s tourism gambit seems to have worked.

In 1996, tourism contributed 74 percent of the island’s foreign exchange earnings and employed more than 14,000 persons.

The country has a gross domestic product (GDP) of 1.7 billion dollars and per capita income in the vicinity of 18,500 dollars.

The most recent human development estimates put Aruba in the top 25 countries of the world using the human development coefficient index as a measure.

With hotel rooms growing from 2,000 in 1986 to close to 7,000 in 1998 and tourist arrivals that reached a record 640,000 last year, the Eman administration says it wants to ensure that the gains from the sector reach everyone.

Sint Jago believes a warning flag should be waved when it comes to such issues. “The question is managing the social effects of our economic development,” he says.

“The challenge of consolidating our economy and keep it growing is a social one,” he says. “We should also look into the matter of pacing our development because there is also the issue of an over-heated economy.”

Be that as it may, tourism in Aruba is being jealously watched by the rest of the Caribbean. The island ranks 14th in the sector in the Americas. In the Caribbean, it trails only the much larger Dominican Republic, The Bahamas, Jamaica and Cuba.

“So far, Aruba is doing good in tourism,” Leo says. “We are increasing every year and the kind of tourism we get in Aruba means we hardly get any particular problem.

“But we have to be careful that we control the industry to ensure that problems do not develop,” he says.