Category: Travel

There is a place in Puerto Rico where a panoramic view of Olympus-like mountains, veiled by the shadows of clouds, encircles a town of oft-neglected interest and history. It’s a place where lush greenery grows as far as the eye can see and the golden hands of the sun touch every street corner. This place is called Coamo, just a short drive south of San Juan and northeast of Ponce traveling on route 14. The tranquil valley in which Coamo rests is largely unaffected by the hustle and bustle of the major Puerto Rican tourist centers and appeals to those who prefer “the path less traveled.”Located in the interior of the island, Coamo is a nature lover’s paradise. Driving along meandering country roads will get you so close to the feet of mountains that you can practically stick your hand out of the car window and touch them. Concrete homes painted in pastels of peach, lime, and lavender dot the terraced landscape like rugged steps, each one higher than the next. I was so transfixed by the towering majestic scene before me that a dull cramp settled at the base of my neck from looking up. But I was hypnotized. If you enjoy nature, as I do, consider bringing a neck brace. The tiny sedan in which my companion and I traveled whined like a stubborn pack mule as we coaxed it over the steep hills and dips that snaked before us.

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Once you’ve had your fill of back-road exploits, you can hit the heart of Coamo. The Plaza de Mercado is the center of activity. An endless stream of traffic pours through the narrow city roads, which are barely wider than one lane on a U.S. highway. Driving in Coamo is not for the timid. If you can drive here you can drive anywhere. The slivers of asphalt are always congested from 8:00 A.M. to 3:00 P.M. when the masses are out and about taking care of their business so they can hurry home and escape the maze of cars and people. Be forewarned that travel in this city is a free for all. Cars seem to only yield at stop signs, bullying their way into the rush of traffic. Blaring horns are a constant in a show of annoyance and defiance, but everyone seems to take it in stride much like riding bumper cars at an amusement park where you are always punching the brakes, hitting the accelerator, and swerving in and out of the path of impending collisions.

The shops in the plaza are sandwiched together along the strip. Here you will find furniture stores, gift shops filled with t-shirts, figurines, and Puerto Rican and American paraphernalia, as well as public markets filled with green vegetables and exotic fruits. These stores are somewhat small with little decorative flare but are well stocked, and the prices are relatively cheap (the lack of sales tax is quite encouraging to the wallet). It should be noted that items bearing the name “Puerto Rico” or the image of the island’s favorite animal, the amphibious coqui, are markedly more expensive.

Coamo is an amazing place. The third oldest city in Puerto Rico, it is steeped in history and rich tradition. Founded in 1579 by Cristóbal y Blas de Illescas, the town was originally called San Blas de Illescas. The current name comes from the Taino chief Coamey. At the centerpiece of the Plaza de Mercado is the famous Iglesia de Illescas, a Catholic church initiated by Friar Diego de Salamanca in 1616. It was the first church of its kind to offer religious service to the small community, and today it stands as the cornerstone of the city, with its blinding, pristine façade gleaming in the fierce Puerto Rican sun. The Coamo Museum is just a few yards away from the church. Within its walls are housed interesting facts about the town, the indigenous Taino culture, and of course the Spanish influence with regard to modern Puerto Rican culture.

Tradition is very important to the people of Coamo. While many cities in Puerto Rico are striving for a more modern, secular society, Coamo is searching for a time long past. This sense of nostalgia manifests itself in intriguing ways. In contrast to Ponce and San Juan, where you have elegant eateries and hotels, in Coamo you will find cozy cafes, open markets, and, if you are lucky, the town’s well-know snow cone maker, called a piraguero, utilizing the old method of making cones shaved from a block of ice, topped with delicious syrup and flavoring.

Another example of revival of the “old ways” is the celebration of the town’s religious heritage. The Catholic Church has been a major influence in Coamo since the city’s founding. Many in the community are seeking to reinvigorate the culture’s religious heritage, and the Rosario de Cruz is one facet of this movement. This spectacle takes place every Friday during the month of May. It alternates from one house to another in worship of Christ and the Virgin Mary. The Rosario is a mark of Spain on the city’s culture. It consists of traditional prayer songs accompanied by modern music, and the spiritual essence of the event is liable to move the most skeptical of hearts.

Coameños, as the residents of Coamo are called, come in a variety of shapes and sizes, but one thing they all seem to have in common is a zest for life and an uncontainable energy. They are a humble people, deeply religious and fun loving. I found them eager to answer questions regarding their home and, when they learned of my intent to write an article about their town, I was given many tidbits of interesting facts. For example, although Bacardi rum is prized on Puerto Rico, you can find a colmado (convenience store) selling the island’s second-favorite beverage, Coors Light, on just about every corner. I drank so much Coors Light during my stay in Coamo that I expect my first born to come out with the word “Coors” stamped on its forehead … but that’s a another story. I found the citizens of Coamo to be quite amicable and hospitable, and they will greet you, not with an informal handshake, but with a warm kiss on the cheek as if they’d known you for years. Don’t be surprised if you find yourself invited to a delicious lunch of ensalada de los pulpos (octopus salad) and fried plantain. By ingratiating myself with one family, I found myself working on their finca, a small farm, cutting espigas off of recao plants (an herb similar to cilantro; my back may never be the same). Nevertheless, the people are quite inviting. Impress them with your Spanish and make a friend for life.

After all that sightseeing and mingling with the locals, it was time for a little R&R. Coamo has that covered too. For golf fanatics, one must visit the beautifully kept Coamo Springs Golf Club and Resort. The eighteen-hole course is the only one of its kind in southern Puerto Rico. The weather is nearly always perfect and the fairways are from heaven. If golf is not your style, you can take a jaunt to the famous Baños de Coamo. Used by the natives of Coamo for its mythical therapeutic powers, the baths of Coamo are thought to be the “Fountain of Youth” for which Conquistador Juan Ponce de Leon searched so frantically. There are two entrances to the springs. One is for the public and is free; however, it not well maintained and is often crowded by the locals who use it as a meeting place to discuss civic events and politics. The other entrance is through the parador Los Baños de Coamo. The forty-eight-room hotel was once one of Puerto Rico’s most upscale resorts. Current rates range from US$62-$81 per night. The rooms are not luxurious by any stretch of the imagination, but the accommodations are fair considering the price. If you do not wish to stay at the hotel you can still take advantage of their baths for nominal fee.

So the next time you are looking for a vacation outside the norm that offers good people, adventure, history, and fun consider the path less taken and descend to the valley of paradise. Bienvenidos a Coamo.

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What Can We Learn From Cuba’s Two-Tier Tourism Economy?
Editor’s Note: A version of this article was originally published at Tidepool.org. It has been reedited and republished here with permission from the author.

Imagine a place where the bottom has just dropped out of the economy. The world market is glutted with the region’s main product, and relations with its biggest trading partner have gone south. Local economic planners put their heads together and decide that the bridge to the future lies in tourism, so they start luring visitors to the area, but they haven’t reckoned on the social upheaval that could arrive as a by-product of the tourist economy.

That synopsis echoes the experience of many towns in the region I call home, the Pacific Northwest, where salmon prices have plunged with the spread of fish farming, and lumber mills are hurting because of a glut of New Zealand plantation timber and trade disputes over government support for the forest industry. Some have put their faith in tourism as a pillar of the new economy here.

But this summary describes a different place equally well, a place that is several years further down that path than anywhere on the Pacific coast, and a place where a recent reporting trip brought me into close contact with the two-tier tourism economy: Cuba.

Irrespective of the Cuban government’s reprehensible jailing of political dissidents in recent months, the Cuban experience holds relevance for rural regions around the world, including the likes of my home, that are counting on visitors to lift their economies out of the doldrums where they have languished for the last several years.

Cuba decided to beef up its tourist traffic in the early 1990s, after the demise of the Soviet bloc cut the socialist state off from the favorable terms of trade it had received, plunging the country and its people into a state of economic turmoil that Fidel Castro termed “el periodo especial,” or the “special period.”

The Soviets had given the Cubans a stunningly good price for its sugar, accepting Cuba’s sugar in exchange for Russian oil. When the Soviet Union collapsed, Cuba found that selling its sugar at the world market price would fetch less than twenty percent as much oil as it had received before.

The “special period” began a devastating austerity program accompanied by severe shortages of basic food commodities. Havana resident Pablo Gutierrez,* a thirty-one-year-old art teacher, remembers times so lean that breakfast consisted of sugar dissolved in a cup of hot water. (*All of the Cubans’ names in this story have been changed to protect them from possible government reprisal.)

Thanks to the growth of tourism, the industry injected $1.9 billion into the Cuban economy in 2001, a tidy sum in this country of 11 million inhabitants. Tourism is now the largest source of foreign currency for the island nation, topping sugar and tobacco.

The success of tourism notwithstanding, the “special period” continues today in a milder form, with shortages of key commodities such as cooking oil and soap. Cubans receive a ration book that allows them to purchase a certain amount of basic staples at highly subsidized prices, to match the minuscule salaries that most employees receive–on average, the peso equivalent of US$15 per month. But the rations of many items are meager–one egg per week, for example.

“The ration book makes it to the middle of the month,” says Martina Reinosa,* a forty-year-old singer. “After that, one must invent.”

For some Cubans, these shortages have been softened by an influx of foreign currency. In 1993, Cuba legalized the possession of U.S. dollars, making the greenback legal tender alongside the Cuban peso.

The move was tinged with irony because the hard currency circulating in Cuba is issued by a government that has been trying for forty-four years to bring about regime change on this Caribbean island, by methods ranging from invasion and economic strangulation to outright assassination.

To add to the irony, nearly all of the dollars left behind by visitors had been exchanged from other currencies. Apart from Cuban emigrants visiting their families, just 80,000 of Cuba’s annual 1.8 million visitors come from the United States, thanks to the U.S. prohibition on most travel to Cuba. Instead, the majority come from Canada and the European Union. Indeed, Cuba may be the only country in the hemisphere where independent U.S. travelers still hold any novelty value for locals.

But introducing the dollar was an intensely practical choice, since many Cubans benefit from dollars sent to them by relatives in the United States. According to the U.S. State Department, more than half of all Cubans receive remittances from outside the country, totaling about $900 million per year. And the choice of the dollar was made before the introduction of the euro, which might have offered a viable alternative.

With dollars circulating in the country, a two-tier economy developed. Scarce imported goods–and even some of local manufacture, such as rum and coffee–can be had at dollars-only stores, but are hard to find or unavailable at peso prices. As a result, Cubans who earn only in the peso economy scrape by, while those with dollar incomes live more comfortably. This has widened the gulf between Cubans’ material standards of living, which for decades did not exhibit such yawning inequalities.

As an American hailing from a part of the country undergoing similar (if much less drastic) change, witnessing this economic divide gives me pause, and rightly so. Many rural areas on the Pacific coast of Canada and the United States have also seen the disparity among incomes widen in recent years. Old sources of livelihood have dried up, and new forms of income–arising from transfer payments from outside the region and from the service economy–have become more significant.

For instance, the region of southern Oregon and northern California known as Jefferson State has seen the share of residents’ income derived from nonlabor sources–such as pensions, rent, interest, and dividends–nearly double since 1969, to forty-four percent of all income. That plays the same role in the economy as the remittances enjoyed by Cubans with relatives overseas.

Apart from family largesse, the tourist economy is the main potential source of dollars for Cubans. Service workers still earn peso salaries, but they receive tips in hard currency.

One taxi driver piloting the ubiquitous three-wheeled motor taxis called “huevitos” (“little eggs”) spoke superb English–he turned out to hold a master’s degree in linguistics and had quit his job as a high school English teacher to take the wheel of a cab. Now he earns a comparable salary from this state-owned enterprise, but rakes in as much in an evening’s tips as he earned all week in the classroom. So many professionals have made similar choices that Cuba is experiencing a shortage of many skilled workers, prompting the government to establish academies that train students to become teachers and social workers straight out of high school.

Although the Pacific Northwest doesn’t face quite so extreme a situation, the parallels are worth noting. Communities bear a social cost when talented entrepreneurs harvest the tourist dollar through t-shirt shops, ice cream stores, and charter fishing, instead of building enterprises that serve local needs or yield higher-wage jobs in manufacturing or value-added processing. What’s more, many of the goods that feed the tourist economy come from outside the area, a factor that reduces the net benefit to the community from the tourist trade.

The two-tier economy of “tourist nobility” and “local serfs” can play out on the demand side as well.

In Cuba, tourists are charged higher prices as a matter of official policy for everything from bus tickets to live performances. For instance, the weekly concerts at Unión de Escritores y Artistas de Cuba (UNEAC; the official national union of writers and artists) cost Cubans a ten-peso cover charge (about US$0.40), while foreigners pay US$5. No use trying to speak Spanish well enough to pass–the lack of a distinctive Cuban accent is a dead giveaway.

The theory behind this is a version of the Marxist dictum, “from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.” Although it may seem odd that one customer is paying more than ten times as much as her neighbor in the next row, the two-tiered system can also be seen as a way to subsidize the provision of affordable culture and transportation to Cubans. It also serves to increase the harvest of foreign dollars that enable the Cuban government to buy needed supplies–from pharmaceuticals to petroleum–in hard currency. That harvest comes in other ways too, including steep licensing fees levied on those who house tourists in bed-and-breakfast arrangements in their homes.

The idea of putting a heavier touch on tourists than on locals isn’t a new one in the U.S. It has made its appearance in the Pacific Northwest and elsewhere, with suitable deference to the laws requiring all citizens to be treated equally. Hotel bed taxes “just happen” to fall on travelers, but not locals. Some towns levy a higher sales tax during the summer tourist season than the winter, charging year-round residents a lower effective tax rate than summer visitors. Ferry tolls, too, are higher in Washington state in summer than winter.

Considering the costs–from sanitation to emergency medical care–that a transient tourist population can impose on a town, such strategies are at times nothing short of essential. In fact, it can be argued that these taxes are more important in North America than in Cuba, because rents and home prices are free to float as high as the market will bear. This trend will drive out many locals unless countervailing steps are taken. In the ski town of Aspen, Colorado, for instance, some tourist revenue is diverted to subsidize rentals and home purchases for low- and moderate-income residents.

In most cases, however, these programs pale in comparison with the Cuban methods of “milking” tourists. (The beaches of Oregon, for instance, will never draw sun worshippers in the same numbers as the sands of the Caribbean.) But Cuban innovations in the harvest of the tourist dollar may hold valuable lessons even across different climates and economic systems.

That isn’t to say that coastal towns in British Columbia and Alaska (or any number of other similar destination communities worldwide) should perfect a system of charging outsiders tenfold what the locals pay, but if those who are steering the development of tourist economies in these communities are thoughtful, they may be able to diminish the problems of the two-tiered economy that a reliance on tourism threatens to bring with it.