The Power and the Money

Reason to fear

I worry about Venezuelan government spending.  I just don't believe that oil prices are going to stay this high for long.

I could be wrong, but one of the things I learned in Venezuela was that Belize started producing oil in 2006.  They quite literally found oil on some dude's farm.  Production is now up to 3,000 barrels per day.  That's about 15 trips per day for a typical tanker truck.

Even more strangely, Venezuela gives Belize money through Petrocaribe.  Chávez, I would think, gets even less out of his spending there than in the rest of the Caribbean. He is, in essence, giving away money to up global oil production with only a very small claim on the corresponding returns. 

So, nothing in the global scheme.  But when prices are so high that Belize gets into the oil industry, you've got a tidal wave of other producers waiting in the wings.  They'll be high-cost, of course, so given the increase in global demand the days of $20-per-barrel oil are over.  In fact, I'd bet that the days of $40 oil are over.  But I wouldn't bet on triple-digit prices being with us for much longer.

Strangely enough, I'd like to be wrong.  For the planet.   

Miami Dice

Congestion pricing.  The idea makes total sense.  Why allocate road space the way the Soviet Union allocated everything?  It makes total sense to charge for the privilege of taking up space on the road, and it makes even more sense to charge more when more people want to take up that precious space.

Which is why Florida is building the I-95 Express.  I-95 in Miami-Dade and southern Broward is currently five lanes:  four regular, and one HOV lane, which can only be occupied by cars with more than two people in them during peak hours.  The Express plan expands the freeway to six lanes, for "local," just like now, and two "express."  The express lanes are separated from the regular lanes by these little rubber tubes, with entrances and exits from the local lanes several miles apart.  In a few months, the Express lanes will be electronically tolled, using the Sunpass system. 

So this week they open this thing in Miami-Dade.  No charging, yet, it's a "test period," to get drivers used to the new set-up.  And why a "test period"?  Because, well:

Mayhem on I-95 as new lanes open
I-95 toll lanes cause chaos, crashes
New Express lanes on I-95 Causing Chaos For South Florida Drivers
Northbound I-95 Bedlam

 

 

Miami drivers, you see, are a little, well, self-centered.  And not very good.

Big day

My father and I (along with a slew of other friends and relatives) are in Trinidad at the moment for some very very very important business, after which I'll be travelling for a bit and posting only sporadically, if at all.

For those of you who don't know him --- and I plan to start posting a bit about his experiences when I return to the States --- here's a picture of the grand old man and myself:

See y'all later!

On the Beach

The coast of Hispaniola around Santo Domingo is, well, different. 

No, wait, that doesn't quite capture it.  This captures it.

It's not just the city proper; the coast looks like a crumbling plate from the air.  Can anyone explain what causes it?  Is this an intermediate stage between seafront cliffs and a real beach, or something else?

Why I was in the Dominican Republic

To gather historical data obtainable only in the Archivo General de la Nación.

If there's interest, I'll discuss what the project is about in a later post.  Right now, I'll say that the Archivo was a great place to work.  The staff is incredibly helpful, and the reading room is rather pleasant, although the air-conditioning system was one of the loudest I've ever run across.  Thankfully, the Archivo has its own backup power system, and therefore was only hit with one brownout while I was working there. 

There was one pleasant mustacchioed old fellow there, quite garrulous.  I think he was a professor or former professor:  he was always nattily-dressed in jacket-and-tie, and he was usually assisted by some rather younger women.  At one point he turned to me and asked, "Are you from here?"  I smiled and said no.  He nodded, and asked if I were from Mexico or the U.S.  I lied, of course, at which point he said to me, and this was as weird as it sounds, "In the time of Trujillo, things were orderly." 

I later got the opportunity to glance at the 1940s-era newspapers that he was reviewing.  I'm fairly certain that he wasn't looking at the ads, but I found this one too striking not to record for posterity.

Extranjero vecino, indeed.

Dolarización y pesificación en el extranjero vecino

The Dominican Republic, like much of the extranjero vecino, is economically-married to the United States.  Far more so, in fact, that any of the Russian Federation’s near abroad.  The U.S. absorbs 72% of the country’s exports and provides 48% of its imports.  Americans and Dominicans resident in the United States make up 38% of all tourist arrivals.  Finally, and most strikingly, the huge hole in the Dominican Republic’s trade balance left after export sales and tourism receipts is plugged by remittances from Dominican workers living in the United States — an amount equal to 7 percent of the country’s GDP last year. 

The relationship goes beyond mere commercial convenience:  under CAFTA, Washington effectively sets Santo Domingo’s investor protections, labor standards, and environmental regulations.  Eat yer heart out, Vlad.

Still, there is one way in which the United States is conspicuously absent from Dominican life — the main currency is the “gold peso,” not the greenback.  That also wasn’t always true:  between 1905 and 1946, the Dominican Republic used the dollar as its currency, and if anything, the economic relationship is closer now than it was then.  This brings up three obvious questions, of course.  Why did the D.R. reintroduce its own currency?  What effects did that have?  And should it go back to the dollar? 

I’ll try to take a stab at all three below the fold.

Interlude: Obra blanca

I may have a little more to say about the Dominican Republic, including an answer to Will's original query.  But first, a report from Miami.

Financial collapses take some time, you see.  And so, this 28-story condominium is still going up within spitting distance of the Sawgrass Mills mall, on the very edge of the Everglades.  Turns out that the architect screwed up the specifications for the awnings, which needed to be bigger.  And so, who you gonna call?

Right!  My older brother, pictured above, in the sunglasses.  (You can also see the back of my cousin Larry's head.)  My brother runs a contract air-conditioning company based in Fort Lauderdale.  Larry and his brother Jesse started the firm and still own it:  South Florida in the 1970s was the right place at the right time to start installing AC systems; they soon moved into service followed by contract manufacturing.  (How d'ya think I found out about the Trinidadian air conditioning industry?)  When I was a teenager, I spent summers cutting fiberglass for them at $5.00 an hour; $9.37 in today's devalued money. 

And so, when you need to airlift a 2000-pound slab of concrete 28 stories in to the air, Thermal Concepts is the place to go.

That helicopter was built for the Army during the Korean War.  More below the fold.

Movin’ on up

Here’s a brief primer on Dominican politics.  Leonel Fernández took over in 2004 in the wake of a severe economic collapse.  (More about that below the fold, with pictures.)  After cleaning up the mess Hipólito Mejía left behind, he’s presided over a fairly strong economic recovery.  He built a lot of infrastructure — most prominently, that subway line — and created programs to attract a boatload of foreign investment, particularly into tourism.  He also hiked taxes and privatized the phone company, pulling out a fiscal surplus in 2007.  Finally, he created Vamo’ Arriba — which quite literally translates into “Movin’ on Up,” presumably to a departamento de lujo en el cielo — a Dominican version of Roosevelt’s WPA that pays roughly $87 a month for three months in exchange for community service, cleaning out canals and the like, after which the recipient qualifies for a small business loan from a program called “Promipyme.”   

Fernández is currently tipped to win in the first round of the election on May 16th.  His opponent, Manuel Vargas of the Dominican Revolutionary Party (PRD), is popularly thought to have links to organized crime.  The PRD has struck back by accusing Fernández of using Vamo’ Arriba to buy votes and spending government money on his campaign.  In addition, the government faces strikes from doctors, teachers, and transport workers.  A demonstration on March 12th met water cannons, and teachers in the town of Bani have walked off the job claiming that they haven’t been paid in a year.

The graffito calls for a strike on April 9th. 

Some modern history. President Leonel Fernández succeeded Joaquín Balaguer in 1996. Balaguer wasn’t quite a dictator by that point, but neither was he a nice man: his Reformist Social Christian Party openly stole the 1994 election, forcing Balaguer to call new ones for ’96 or risk violence. So he called them, and Fernández (of the Liberation Party) trounced Balaguer’s hand-picked candidate.

Fernández got inflation under control and oversaw substantial economic growth, but couldn’t run for a second term. The Liberation Party’s nominee lost to Hipólito Mejía of the Revolutionary Party.

Mejía was a mess. He was a mess for a lot of reasons, but the main one was the collapse of Baninter, the country’s largest bank, in a bit of stunning fraud. The Central Bank decided to guarantee all of Baninter’s deposits, far above those required by law. To do that, it needed to print money to hand out to depositors. (It actually created deposit accounts at the Central Bank, but the effect was the same.) The Bank knew printing money would stoke inflation, so it simultaneously created and sold interest-bearing certificates in order to soak up the cash that it had printed to hand out to Baninter depositors. 

Dumping a mass of low-risk interest-bearing certificates on the market has a tendency to drive down the price of interest-bearing certificates … which is another way of saying that it has a tendency to raise interest rates. The reason is that debt instruments don’t really promise the bearer a fixed interest rate; rather, they promise a fixed coupon payment of some sort. The “interest rate” is that coupon divided by the market value of the debt instrument. Thus, when the price of debt instruments falls … yeah. 

The D.R. managed to hit the trifecta:  high inflation, higher interest rates, and a recession.  Fernández came back into office in 2004 with 57% of the vote in the first round.  His government, as I mentioned, managed to stabilize the economy (with the help of the IMF) and produced striking economic growth since then, although there are still a lot of questions about who’s benefitting.  A 2002 constitutional reform allows him to run for a consecutive re-election, and thus the current campaign.

Despite the growth, you can still see the results of the Baninter collapse in what Mexicans call “obras negras” scattered about the city.

... and ...

Mexico used to have a lot of obras negras in the late 1990s, but they’re gone now. We’ll see if places like Miami develop them in the wake of our own financial crisis.

Santo Domingo

This is a great city.  It’s also a horrible city.  Neither should be a surprise.

Sadly, I’ve been mostly limited to the central area this trip.  I’m here for work, not play.  The same was true of Puerto Rico, of course, but there I had more time to work in a more-organized and less-interesting archive. 

Central Santo Domingo — the Zona Colonial and Gazcué — have no areas of truly concentrated desperation that I could find tucked away within them.  Nor do they appear to have any areas of concentrated nice, the kind of wealth amid poverty that makes you want to don a Ché Guevara T-shirt and start hollering, “¡Hasta la victoria siempre!”

Traffic is chaotic, and it’s not helped by the guaguas, private minibuses that ply most of the city’s routes despite an attempt to establish a municipal bus system.  Nor is it helped by the paucity of signage — you need to navigate by vector in most parts of this town.  I do not know whether that is the cause of the effect of the fact that Dominicans appear to pay even less attention to speed limits, posted signage (when it exists), or traffic lights than Mexicans. 

Bienvenidos al extranjero vecino

I got into Santo Domingo at night, after a two-hour flight and a three-hour wait on the tarmac at Miami International.  Tornado alert.  No s**t — tornados.  In South Florida.  Not that they told us that — just anodyne “weather conditions” — but in this age of cellphones I could surreptiously call my brother and ask him what was up.  He told me “tornado alert” in about the same tone of voice that he’d use to say “alien invasion” or “Argentine hip-hop.”

The air conditioning on the plane was iffy, and the flight was packed, but otherwise it wasn’t bad as waits go.  One of the few advantages of being short is that coach seats on American Airlines aren’t as uncomfortable as they otherwise might be.  There were lots of kids (not babies, not toddler, kids) on the flight, maybe a full quarter of the coach passengers, and I found the resulting roar to be strangely soothing.  When they first announced the delay everyone stood up and started milling about, but once the slightly annoyed stewardess asked everyone to sit down I was surprised by the alacrity with which everyone took their seats and remained in them for the remaining two-a-half-hours of our wait.

The Aeropuerto Internacional de las Américas isn’t bad.  As with so many Latin American airports — albeit not Mexico’s not anymore — foreigners speed through faster than the locals.  There was a fellow at the front of the line guiding people to the immigration booths … but, strangely, he didn’t seem to speak any English.  I wound up translating for the woman ahead of me; he wound up letting us all go through without getting our ten-dollar tourist cards.  Here’s hoping I don’t regret that when I try to leave.

Customs, exit into a foyer filled with fast-food restaurants and ATM machines, and onto the taxi stands.  The fellow who drove me into town was fairly taciturn, although he did ask me if I was from Mexico. 

My accent options in Spanish are:  (1) generic unidentified foreign type, usually pegged as French for reasons I don’t pretend to understand; (2) gringo — or on a good day Costa Rican, the only Spanish-speakers that I know of who pronounce the “r” in a mushy American-English way and sometimes elid the Spanish “e” to something more like the “i”; or (3) exaggeratedly stereotypically laughably Mexican.  Which one I adopt depends upon neurological and biochemical factors beyond my control. 

The highway downtown seemed rather nice, but it was night.  We crossed over the Río Ozama and pulled off the cloverleaf onto the riverfront road, and we passed a sight that brought home that No Estamos en Puerto Rico …

It was a group of houses on the side of the road.  The doors were open, and you could see the family sitting inside with no electricity.  It wasn’t desperate, it wasn’t Afghanistan, it wasn’t even Chiapas.  But it was within spitting distance of the Zona Colonial, and it wasn’t where houses would even exist in most of the developed world.  It brought home the D.R.’s poverty. 

According to puchasing power parity, the D.R. isn’t all that much poorer than Mexico.  It clocks in at 78 percent of Mexico’s level.  According to my eyes, it’s much poorer.  There are more mendicants, and they are more aggressive.  There are fewer chain stores — poor Mexican neighborhoods have Wal-Marts and Oxxos and Aurreras; even wealthy Dominican ones do not, at least in the parts of the capital that I’ve seen.  The power cuts out on a daily basis.  Here in the capital city, the cars much older than in Mexico; even than in many provincial cities of Mexico.  People may complain about the traffic, but compared to the D.F., Guadalajara, or Monterrey, cars are scarce.  And too much of the inner city infrastructure is just wrecked.

(Carlos can verify how surprised he was at how many new cars were on the road in Mexico, even in relatively poor places like Zacatecas.  He can also verify how badly I drive, and how surprised I was to crash over a speed bump at 45 mph on an on-ramp in Zacatecas state.  While I’m at it, I’ll add that his first reaction to seeing the absolutely stunning paisaje of Durango and Zacatecas was, “What was Nicolas Trist thinking?”) 

This country isn’t a place of desperate poverty.  It certainly isn’t Afghanistan.  It’s much richer than Lesotho.  But despite three years of astounding economic growth, the country remains very poor, and its economic future remains uncertain.

I should have some things to say about the D.R.’s economic future, and much more to say about its past.  But since my muse isn’t here, let me turn that job over to you.  What do you want to know about the Dominican Republic? 

El estado dominicano

My muse has left me for this trip.  Literally.  Amma had to take an exam on Tuesday, and then she needed to be in Philadelphia on Thursday.  So I’m here in Santo Domingo by myself, trying to think of something to blog about when I should be getting some sleep.

The Dominican Republic and the United States have a very long and tight relationship.  The relationship is so tight, in fact, that I’m not sure that the country really fits into the typical American conception of “foreign.”  The Russians have a phrase for the former territories of the Soviet Union: the “near abroad.”  Well, America has its own extranjero vecino, and this country is part of it.  Which makes the United States, of course, the vecino extrajero of the Dominican Republic.  (Or maybe just the vecino extraño.) 

You see the relationship right at immigration, where a giant sign cajoles overseas Dominicans to register to vote.  Dominican-Americans form a key electoral bloc in this country, which is why the major Dominican political parties have offices in San Juan, Miami, and New York. 

The current president, Leonel Fernández, is running for re-election to his third (non-consecutive) term.  Below is a 1996 interview with Fernández from the Charlie Rose show, right after he won the first time.  He says interesting things, but the most interesting thing is the accent in which he says them.

I’m telling you, he could win election anywhere between New Haven and Trenton with that voice.   

Bienvenidos a Miami

It will be a nice city when they finish it.

Amma and I were there for Thanksgiving.  Most of my family on my father's side lives scattered between Coral Gables and Deerfield Beach; this particular holiday, a few even came over from California.  And so, I was reminded, yet again, that I actually spent a significant part of my childhood (before age seven, I should make clear) in the (not so) wonderful (un)scenic town of North Miami Beach.  A warning for Claudia:  apparently I gave my mother a horrible case of separation anxiety when I charged off to kindergarden without so much as a look backwards.  She'd been expecting fear and tears, not "Other kids!  Much chido!  Outta here."

No pictures of my mother or North Miami Beach.  But here is my father outside the best cigar shop in South (Miami) Beach. 

He moved back down in 2005, but he had previously lived in Miami in the late 1940s, some of which involved ... let's give that another post.

I end on a warning and a request.  The warning is that should any of the Europeans on this blog choose to visit Miami, do not bother to go to Little Havana (including Calle Ocho) unless you rent a car.  You will be very disappointed otherwise. 

The request is for holiday family get-together horror stories.  Any holiday, any get-together.  Anyone?

In a Free State

Did you know that Trinidad almost became part of the United States?

OK, that’s not quite true.  What happened was that at a summit at Camp Rapidan in October 1929, President Herbert Hoover told Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald that the U.S. would cancel Britain’s war debt in exchange for Trinidad, Bermuda, and British Honduras.  Hoover only wanted Belize in order to split it up between Guatemala and Mexico, and nobody expected London to part with Bermuda.  (Strangely, MacDonald drew the opposite line at the summit, insisting on retaining Belize but showing no objection to giving up Bermuda.) 

The real prize was, of course, Trinidad. Hoover had worked there, the place had oil, and its location was perfect.  Between Trinidad and Puerto Rico U.S. planes could overfly the entire Lesser Antilles (and Venezuela), pretty much turning the Caribbean into an American lake.

How much did Hoover offer, you ask?  Well, in nominal terms, a little less than £1.0 billion.  In 2006 terms, £44 billion.  And as a percentage of Britain’s GDP, the equivalent of £254 billion today.  Not a bad deal for the U.K. 

MacDonald, of course, eventually said no.  Hoover later wrote that MacDonald knew that Hoover had previously suggested a moratorium on war debts, and therefore the perfidious British saw no reason to pay off what they owed. 

But what if MacDonald had said yes?

A Geographic Inquiry

Is the greater Miami metropolitan area part of the Caribbean?

Newsflash: a most excellent election result

Well, I must say that this is good news, if it holds up.  But before I get to that, a picture of the suburban sprawl of the east-west corridor from a mountaintop monastery:

And now, the news:

PORT OF SPAIN, Nov 5 (Reuters) - Trinidad and Tobago's ruling party looked set to hold onto power after winning Monday's election for a new government in the energy-rich Caribbean country, preliminary results showed.  The results from the Election and Boundaries Commission showed Prime Minister Patrick Manning's People's National Movement winning 26 seats for control of the newly expanded 41-seat parliament.

In other words, the PNM won, but not by too much.  The magic number for most (but not all) constitutional amendments is 31, although it's nice to stay below 27, just to be sure. 

Of course, it isn't all good.  The UNC won the remaining 15 seats, wiping out the COP, which I think is not a good thing.  Mr. Panday's rhetoric, meanwhile, has ... well ... see for yourself:  “The people have lost and the 'mafia' has won. Crime has won, high prices have won and other problems in T&T have won since all of those things will continue. If that is what people want, well they will have it.” 

But what do you want, Canada?  Some sour grapes are understandable. I'll take the results.

A Million Mutinies Now

Trinidad goes to the polls tomorrow.  (Yeah, yeah, Tobago too.  Nobody who isn’t either from Tobago or employed by a multilateral lending institution could care less.)

The constitution has turned out to be an unexpected campaign issue.  The preamble, pictured above, is not the issue.  Rather, the issue is about the rest of the constitution — should Trinidad become more American, or stay British?  The government wants to adopt an elected executive presidency; the opposition accuses the government of trying to establish a dictatorship.  Ironically, the push for a U.S.-style presidency — and the American example is the one bandied about — came from groups worried that the current Westminster system gave the Prime Minister and ruling party too much power.  I won’t say whether events in the United Kingdom had anything to do with that conclusion in the (probably forelorn) hope of attracting commentary from our British readers. 

There wasn’t much evidence that the government took reform seriously — about all you could hear about the topic was from a goo-goo group at the University of the West Indies and two draft constitutions posted here.  But one of the opposition parties knew a good issue when it saw it.  One day, nothing, the next, accusations of “secret drafts” and cries of “dictatorship!” Much more fun than boring debates about the management of the Heritage and Stabilization Fund, or which highways should be widened, or whether it is better to hire lots more cops or lots and lots more cops. 

The irony, of course, is that by declaring that they’re against it, the opposition has made it more likely that it’ll happen.  Now if Patrick Manning wins the election he will — assuming his party gets enough votes — have a popular mandate to reform the country’s charter, something he never planned on until the opposition figured that it had an issue. 

The battle is between three parties:  the People’s National Movement (PNM), the opposition United National Congress (UNC), and the upstart Congress of the People (COP).  The big issue is crime, with taxes and constitutional reform coming up behind. 

Who are these parties?  Well, there’s the ruling PNM, created by Eric Williams in 1955.  Williams gathered a following based on a series of wildly-popular lectures he gave in downtown Port-of-Spain’s Woodford Square; his party united middle-class Afro-Trinidadians with the union movement.  Williams didn’t intend for the PNM to become the Afro-Trinidadian party, but considering as it was a group of Indo-Trinidadian politicians that he knocked out of power, that’s effectively what it became.  The PNM managed to survive the 1970 riots and strikes known as the Black Power Movement, and held on to power until 1986, by which point Eric Williams was five years dead. 

The Indo-Trinidadians, however, have had some trouble getting their act together.  Maybe not a million mutinies, but at least nine since 1956 — and that’s being conservative.  The first Indo-Trinidadian party, the Democratic Labour Party, suffered from continual internal splits.  It finally committed suicide by boycotting the 1971 election. 

Democratic Labour split into the Organisation for National Reconstruction (ONR) and the United Labour Front (ULF).  In 1981 the two managed to collectively win 37 percent of the vote — but because T&T uses first-past-the-post, the ONR managed to translate a 22% vote share into precisely zero seats.  (The ULF picked up 22% of the seats with only 15% of the votes.)  Realizing the problem, the two parties united as the National Alliance for Reconstruction (NAR) and won the 1986 election — helped by the fact that the economy was in free-fall by then, and it was clear to all that the PNM had clearly frittered away the fruits of the oil boom. 

You’d think that would be that, but the NAR government’s decision to pardon the organizers of the 1990 attempted putsch caused the Caucus for Love, Unity and Brotherhood to bolt the ruling party.  The CLUB renamed itself the United National Congress — I have expressed before and will again my admiration for the political brilliance of that name — and won the 1995 election. 

The new Prime Minister, Basdeo Panday, was many things, but a uniter was not one of them (I’m not sure he was all that much of a deciderer either) and widespread corruption caused the attorney-general to walk out of the party and  contest the next election under the Team Unity banner.  (I won’t.  I want to make the joke, but I won’t.  It’s too obvious.)  Team Unity won only 3% of the vote in the 2001 election, but that was enough to produce a hung parliament.  And so the PNM shimmied back into power in the 2002 election, just in time to enjoy the fruits of the second oil boom—which they do not, I must say, appear to be frittering away this time. 

You’d think that the Team Unity experience might have gotten the UNC to hang together, but you’d be underestimating Mr. Panday’s stubborness — and legal troubles.  Despite a series of corruption indictments, in Port-of-Spain and in London, Panday stuck with his party ... and that led William Dookeran (the former central bank head) to join the Team Unity mutineers and form the Congress of the People, which has tried to position itself as a cross-racial middle-class party. 

Except, of course, Team Unity’s leader, Ramesh Maharaj, has now decided to reunite with the UNC under Mr. Panday.  Why his corruption now is less intolerable than his corruption then is not clear to me.  You gotta love it.

So you’ve got a three-way election between the PNM, the UNC, and the COP.  There aren’t a whole lot of substantive differences between the parties.  The PNM’s platform is, basically, “Don’t mess with success.  Plus, we made higher education free.”  The UNC, conversely, is running under, “We made mistakes, but you really can’t trust the black people, and crime!”  The COP’s platform, meanwhile, seems to be, “In your heart, you know they both suck.” 

The COP would probably fritter away more oil revenues in other tax cuts (except for gasoline) while the PNM would build more stuff — Flyovers!  Railroads! Houses! — and the UNC would hire a lot of cops.  “The government is in league with the criminals,” says Panday, with ... ah ... not a whole lot of evidence to back that up.

Me, I suspect I’d vote for the PNM ... but that may be because pretty much everyone in Amma’s family intends to vote for the PNM.   

There’s been some violence—especially against COP candidates, one of whom was badly beaten in Laventille.  (“What was he doing in Laventille?” asks Amma.  “Uh, that was the constituency he was running in, baby,” I respond.  “I repeat,” says Amma, “What was he doing in Laventille?”)  There have also been some accusations of fraud, none of which are serious by American standards, but which the PNM government has taken seriously enough to invite in a 27-person Caricom observer team.  Caricom observation, in fact, seems to be becoming standard in the West Indies formerly known as British (plus Suriname), which underscores Doug Muir’s point that anyone who believes that international relations are anarchical is an idiot. 

I predict that the PNM will win Monday’s election.  While Trinidad’s poor performance in Transparency International’s corruption survey has become an issue, the government has done a pretty decent job of managing the oil boom and setting the country up for the post-petrochem future.  (Assuming, that is, that the Bolivarian Republic doesn’t make such a botch of things that there is no Venezuelan gas for Trinidad to use.)  Crime is a problem — watch this space — but the opposition has been pretty short on magic bullets, and the government has gained credit by making solid headway against the one violent crime that it’s actually fairly easy for an even quarterway competent government to fight:  kidnapping for ransom.    Finally, free higher education will get you a lot of middle-class votes who might have otherwise gone the other way.  Combine that play for the “agency brown” constituency with the PNM machine’s lock on poor Afro-Trinidadian votes and the UNC-COP split for Indo-Trinidadian ones, and you’ve got the potential for a landslide. 

The real problem is that a PNM victory, as mentioned above, will have the side-effect of making constitutional reform far more likely.  Trinidad gained independence under a 1961 Order-in-Council intended to give the “territory” self-government under the West Indies Federation.  Other than a few cosmetic changes in 1962 — changing “premier” to “prime minister” and the like — Trinidad remained under the 1961 order until 1976. 

The 1976 constitution replaced the Governor-General with an elected president, and created a wide range of executive officers independent of the Prime Minister.  The reason was the Black Power Revolution.  In the wake of the events of 1970, there was a widespread feeling that the executive’s power needed to be curbed.  A 1974 committee recommended that a President elected by a two-thirds majority of an electoral college consisting of Parliament and all local government councillors sitting together and voting by secret ballot replace the Governor-General.  The idea was that the President would both select the Prime Minister and appoint the heads of various independent organs, in order to reduce the prime minister’s overwhelming authority.  (Cutting ties with the Queen was a side-effect, but not the cause of the change.) 

It says something about Eric Williams, I think, that he pushed through reforms that limited his own powers.  Now, not all of them — the 1976 constitution created a presidency elected by a majority of both houses of parliament, not a separate electoral college.  And the new presidency proved to be more partisan than intended:  frex, the PNM president appointed a PNM government after the 2001 hung parliament.  But the new constitution successfully weakened the Trinidadian prime minister by quite a bit compared to his or her British counterpart without paralyzing the government.  (Lib Dems, y’all might wanna take a look at the Trini constitution, I think.) 

But now there’s the executive president proposal.  Two drafts are in circulation.  To be fair, I prefer Trinidad’s current system to a more American-style one.  (Canadian readers, feel free to express smug satisfaction, but note that we here in the great United States have better weather, better roads, and better hockey players.  Plus, your flag looks like a badly-designed corporate logo.  So go take your health care and your sane politics and your lower crime and all that and ... express smug satisfaction.)  That noted, the two drafts differ on whether the executive president would be elected by popular vote or by the parliament, and the government seems to favor the latter.  So regardless of your opinion about a fixed-term executive president, the idea of an executive president elected by the parliament seems like a disaster all around, the worst of all worlds, and I hope that it doesn’t come to that. 

In other words, the PNM deserves to win — but not by too much.

Interlude: Sovacar

It's always a great thing when you see the next generation give props to the older one ... and out-do them in the process.  I therefore present to you, direct from the island of Puerto Rico, the World's Greatest Video:

And here, for completeness sake, not-so-straight outta Brooklyn by way of Los Angeles, I present the Former World's Greatest Video:

This interlude brought to you by K Mal Goosto, the vidja king.  Enjoy!

Miguel Street

Or the Maracas Royal Road, as the case may be. This is where Amma and I are going to get married next June.

Welcome to suburbia, Caribbean-style.  Amma didn't grow up out there:  her family lived in the Belmont section of Port-of-Spain when she was growing up.  This house is a product of upward mobility and economic growth, not Latin American-style intergenerational economic aristocracy.  One sign of that (not visible in the picture) is that there is a chicken coop right off to the left outside the frame.  Yes, with actual chickens.  That lay eggs.  And occasionally get eaten themselves.

Amma was very disappointed to discover that most American suburbs will not let you keep chickens in your backyard. 

Here's a view of the neighborhood from ground level:

 

The above is really for you, Claudia, per your request in Washington. 

Interlude: Querido FBI

Yes, there are still two more posts in the Trinidadian series.  (Any guesses as to what they'll be titled?)  But right now let's take a step back to Puerto Rico.  In September 23, 2005, the FBI shot Filiberto Ojeda Ríos in a house outside the town of Hormigueros.  Ojeda was a leader of the independence movement; he was also wanted for a 1983 bank robbery in Connecticut.  In point of fact, he'd been caught for that heist, but his lawyers managed to tie the courts up in knots and keep his case from coming to trial for seven years, at which point they got him released on bail.  Ojeda cut off the monitoring bracelet and skipped town.  From hiding, he claimed responsibility for a 1998 bomb blast outside a branch of the Banco Popular, but many observers think he was just fronting --- the blast (which didn't hurt anyone) was most likely set off by angry workers protesting the phone privatization deal I alluded to in ¡Acuérdese del Álamo!

Anyway, witnesses reported that the FBI fired first, and the coroner's reports indicated that Ojeda bled to death over several hours.  This did not make people happy.  Better yet, the FBI managed to pick the very same day in 1868 that a group of independentistas launched a failed rebellion against Spain with the Grito de Lares. 

One result was this video.  You can see Puerto Rican independence flags with the ugly sky-blue canton and the flag of the 1868 rebels.  It's also got flow, and if you speak Spanish you can tell that these guys are the greatest thing to hit hip-hop since Eminem.  Hell, since the Fu-Schnickens.  Enjoy.

The Middle Passage

Is a nation more like a business or a family?

OK, now that I’ve got your attention, I’ll point out the obvious and confirm that the above picture is not from Trinidad.  It is, however, one zip code over from the old stomping grounds of Vincent Chase and the boys.  More relevantly, it’s in the middle of one of the largest Trinidadian communities in North America.

So, yeah, this post is about emigration.  The World Bank estimates that 361,596 Trinidadians live outside the two islands.  That number is so precise as to be obviously false, but it’s what we got.  Anyway, of that number, 55 percent live in the U.S. of A. (another 14 percent live in Canada), and of those who live in the United States, 13 percent live in Queens.  (Another 26 percent, of course, live in Brooklyn.  Yeah, Brooklyn!)

What can I say about the Trinidadian-born population of the United States?  68 percent of them are Afro-Trinidadian, 9 percent Indo-Trinidadian, and 4 percent Euro-Trinidadian, with the rest “mixed.”  The median household income is $40,168, or 90.4% of the median for the white native-born population.  Median full-time male wages are $33,000, or 90.0% of the U.S. median, while the same number for Trini females is $28,933 . . . or 108.3 percent of their native-born sistern.  Only 18 percent of Trini-Americans over age 25 have a bachelor’s degree or higher.   

Man, that bored even myself.  A (slightly) more interesting discussion below the fold.

A Flag on the Island

I had three more posts planned, but since the rightful owners are back, this will be the last one.  Interest in Trinidad and the West Indies seems limited, anyway. 

To an American unfamiliar with West Indian history, it seems strange that they aren’t one country.  The cultural differences are relatively small, the economic advantages obvious, and the geographic distances (save isolated little Belize, and to a rather lesser extent Jamaica) easily manageable. 

To an American unfamiliar with West Indian history, it seems equally strange that the islands aren’t part of the United Kingdom.  After all, their inhabitants wouldn’t have been there at all without Britain, their political traditions and institutions stem from the U.K., and both France and the Netherlands integrated their Caribbean colonies.  Hell, even the United States integrated its Caribbean colonies, giving Puerto Ricans citizenship in 1917 and Virgin Islanders the same thing in 1927.   

(The singular shameful non-British exception is Suriname, which the Social Democrats gleefully shoved out of the Netherlands on the basis of a one vote margin in the Surinamese parliament, against the wishes of 74 percent of the population.  A few violent strikes in Paramaribo provided a pretext, but the real reason was too many brown people moving to Holland.  By that “logic,” Dwight Eisenhower would have been perfectly justified in throwing Alabama out of the Union.  Ironically enough, foisting independence on the place managed to precipitate the very flood of migrants that the Dutch had hoped to avoid.  But I digress.) 

So what’s going on?  And what’s it got to do with the picture of the flags and the pretty lady? 

As with so many things, it turns out that it’s hard to say when the West Indies became independent.  The superficial story goes like this:  Great Britain created the West Indies Federation in 1958.  In 1962 the Jamaicans voted to secede, for reasons which had little to do with the Federation and everything to do with internal island politics.  After Jamaica pulled out, Chief Minister Eric Williams of Trinidad decided that he didn’t want a federation where Trinidad would pay more than two-thirds of the bills and possess more than two-thirds of the population but enjoy less than 40 percent of the seats.  Since Eric Williams was, in fact, Eric Williams, he summed it up with far more pithy arithmetic:  “Ten minus one equals zero.”  As a result Trinidad and Jamaica received independence separately, with Barbados and the smaller islands following along later. 

Except that the short version leaves out a key point:  Barbados, Jamaica, and Trinidad all gained de facto independence in 1944-49.   Britain kept some residual authority — although it’s not clear what — but in every way other than a seat at the U.N. all three islands (OK, Tobago makes four) were free countries by 1949. 

In other words, Britain decolonized and then tried to federate islands that barely traded with each other, shared no political institutions, and were ethnically distinct.  Political cultures also varied:  Trinidad had been deeply influenced by an invasion of tens of thousands of Americans, whereas Barbados was very self-conciously British and Jamaica possessed a long history of popular rebellion.

Eric Williams wasn’t against Caribbean union; he was just against Caribbean federation.  The reason was that a federation sans Jamaica would unacceptably compromise the rights of voters on Trinidad.  A Caribbean unitary state, on the other hand, he thought would be a fine idea.  To that end, Williams made an abortive attempt to annex Grenada in the late 1960s.  The attempt failed because it took a ¾ths parliamentary supermajority to change the T&T constitution, and few Indo-Trinidadian MPs were prepared to vote more blacks into the polity. 

Britain succeeded in shoving most of the smaller islands into independence under the rubric of the Organization of Eastern Caribbean States, which took over such minor functions as foreign relations, trade policy, the currency, the judiciary, and most business regulation. (The OECS flag looks like a record cover from 1973.)  About all the national governments retained was a seat at the U.N.—except for one brief inglorious flowering of left-wing Grenadian nationalism that ended in a somewhat urgent fury. 

The scattered islands that remained "British Overseas Territories" in name gained independence in fact.  Britain finally got around to granting its overseas subjects the right to U.K. citizenship in 2002, but in an ironic turnaround, that didn't work in reverse.  Frex, the Caymans continue to restrict British immigration.  Even more dramatically, Bermuda not only continues to restrict British immigration; it continues to maintain its own conscript army.  It makes you wonder why any of the islands even bothered to declare independence, other than continual British nagging.  (Did the British know that they would eventually have to extend the "right of abode" to the citizens of their dependencies, or was it some form of misplaced idealism?)  

A broader Caribbean Community (Caricom) linked the islands in what they claimed to be a common market, except that it was so shot through with holes and exceptions to be meaningless. 

And so, both the British Empire and Caribbean unity faded away.  Except that they didn’t. 

The Judicial Committee of the Privy Council remained the supreme court of appeals for all the West Indian nations.  That is, a panel of British judges enjoyed the power to overturn local decisions, issue judicial orders to elected governments, and interpret constitutions. 

I’ve never seen a study that tried to determine if the West Indies gained from this additional judicial certainty—I’m not sure how you could design such a study.  (Ideas?)  But it seems like it should matter, somehow.

For the longest time no one questioned the costs of keeping a supreme court in Britain.  The Privy Council could adjudicate election disputes, pension problems, and key constitutional questions with nary a nationalist natter.  Even when Trinidad got rid of the Queen in 1976, in the wake of the Black Power Revolution, it left the power of the Privy Council untouched. 

That is, until 1999.  In that year the Law Lords had the temerity to delay the execution of eight Trinidadian criminals convicted of massacring a family in their own home.  That got people angry.  Did Singapore put up with some bewigged British do-gooding liberals telling them who they could and could not flog?  No!  So why should Trinidad?  Prime Minister Basdeo Panday (UNC) began campaigning to replace the Privy Council with a Caribbean Court of Justice. 

In point of fact, the Privy Council did not abolish capital punishment.  Rather, it ruled that Caribbean states must abide by their own constitutions, legal precedents, and international agreements—no more signing on to human-rights bodies because they sound nice, not in the Commonwealth Realms, not!  The murderers of 1999 were, in fact, eventually executed.  (Trinidadians will tell you — usually in a self-disparaging tone — that they were executed in defiance of the Privy Council’s orders, but that turns out not to be true.)  But that didn’t stop PM Panday.

Which brings us to the flag-bedecked Caribbean Court of Justice building in the photograph.  It’s quite ugly, actually, a carbuncle in the northeastern reaches of downtown Port-of-Spain.  It’s ugliness is relieved only by its festive pink paintjob and the banners of the Caribbean states, plus Caricom’s colorful new flag. 

 

The comatose chimera of Caribbean unity lurched upwards from its long slumber with the signing of the Revised Treaty of Chaguaramas in 2001.  The Revised Treaty transformed Caricom from a sentiment into a common market:  the so-called Caribbean Single Market and Economy. 

“So-called” because the CSME isn’t quite “Caribbean,” even if you accept that Caribbean = Caricom:  the Bahamas stayed out and Haiti was kept out.  It’s also not quite a single market:  unskilled labor cannot move freely.  Nor is it really a single economy:  the 12 members retain 7 different currencies, three of which float against the U.S. dollar and one of which (Trinidad’s) is pegged only informally. 

The above aside, the degree of economic integration mandated by the CSME is nonetheless impressive:  free mobility of skilled labor, capital, goods, and services.  A common market, unlike a customs union, can’t work without some sort of judicial process.  It requires common rules on product standards, bank transfers, educational and professional qualifications, and a range of other issues.  Common rules, however, are only really common rules when they’re judged in a common way.

Thus, Panday’s dream of a Caribbean Court of Justice manifested in 2005.  The CCJ’s first function, however, was not to replace the Privy Council.  Rather, it was to adjudicate and enforce the CSME. 

That is not to say that the goal of replacing those crazy liberal judges in London with a panel of good God(s)-fearing Caribbeans was forgotten.  It wasn’t.  In fact, the reason that Amma and I ran into a group of young American lawyers eating mariscos and fliring with each other at a roadside restaurant out past Arima, almost all the way to Toco, is that they were in Trinidad working to broaden the CCJ’s remit and turn it into the Caribbean’s supreme court of appeals. 

The catch is that uniting the West Indies is a bit like herding cats.  The CSME and common passport may be up-and-running, but the CCJ shows no sign of replacing the Privy Council.  Only Barbados and Guyana have passed legislation making it their supreme court.

There is a pattern here.  Barbados has possibly the strongest rule-of-law in the region:  it doesn’t need a right of appeal to a British court.  Guyana, conversely, is so screwed up on so many levels that the Privy Council probably provides about as much extra confidence as a rubber duckie on the Titanic.  It’s the intermediate countries, the ones that maybe gain from having ties to Britain but maybe don’t, that seem to be holding back on severing the last concrete imperial link. 

Jamaica provides an example.  Its former prime minister, Edward Seaga, went so far as to call the Privy Council “the best court in the world.” Seaga’s party, the Jamaican Labour Party, remains opposed to ending its jurisdiction.  The JLP, I should add, narrowly won the 2007 election.

Ironically, the Privy Council struck down a Jamaican bill in 2005 that would have transfered the power of the Privy Council to the CCJ—the Council ruled that the change required a constitutional amendment.  That puts a big hurdle on any government wanting to junk the Council in favor of the CCJ:  it’ll need either a two-thirds supermajority in Parliament or it will need to call a popular referendum.   

Even more ironically, Basdeo Panday — the fellow who got the ball rolling — now screamingly opposes the elimination of the right of appeal to London.  Why?  He faces corruption charges in T&T over an undeclared British bank account, and he thinks he’ll get a fairer hearing in Brooklyn London.  All of a sudden the imperial link doesn’t seem so bad. 

I’m undecided.  On the one hand, why mess with success?  On the other hand, there’s something strange about needing a visa to visit your nation’s supreme judicial authority. 

I’m also undecided about Caricom.  Caribbean unity is a good idea — but I’m not sure that there are that many benefits to be had from economic unity without political unity in the context of such small countries.  They’re all far more tied to the United States than they are to each other.

I don’t really expect much commentary here; there aren’t a lot of West Indians in our readership, and I’m not sure any of this is interesting.  Still if anyone has any thoughts on the Commonwealth formerly known as British, or the odd phenomenon euphemistically called “regional integration,” I’d like to read them . . . and I’d still like somebody to explain to me how Trinidadian courts can read American cases as precedent.

P.S.  I really did accidently write "Brooklyn" instead of "London" the first time I posted this and none of my West Indian draft-readers noticed.  (Neither did I.) I’m sure there’s some sort of deeper significance to that. 

Beyond Belief

Hinduism isn't the only religion India brought to Trinidad, of course.  Twenty-thousand Muslims (20,007, to be precise) arrived in the great migration.   

For reasons that I don't know, the Muslim population grew slowly at first, numbering only 26,000 as late as 1922.  (Conversion to Christianity?  Reverse migration?  Undercounting?)  After that, though, it began to swell.  It's now about 68,000.

Most of the growth came from natural increase, but conversion played a role.  In 1922, Indo-Trinidadians made up the overwhelming majority of Muslims.  Today, they make up only about 85%, according to the Guardian newspaper.  The remaining 10,000 are Afro-Trinidadian converts or their children. 

And that's caused trouble.  Trouble worthy of the phrase "beyond belief," trouble that would be downright hilarious in a comic opera way if it hadn't gotten 40 people killed.  More below the fold.

Among the Believers

Trinidad is a very religious country.  It's also very British.  These two things interact in strange ways that I'm only beginning to understand.

I didn't think this was a particularly British country at first.  In fact, I made the mistake of telling that to a proudly patriotic and most un-British middle-aged Trini individual. 

Oh boy did I get a talking-to.  First, the proper term here is "English."  You can refer to "Britain" and "British" until you're blue in the face, and they'll come back with "England" and "English."  This is especially true of the Hewitt family, who have traced their last name back to a Scotsman who came to Barbados in the 1840s and married a local woman. (His children moved to Trinidad.)  "We were both colonized by wankers," explained a film buff who also shared Scottish ancestry.

Second, it was pointed out to me—at great length and with no small amount of passion—that the "English" heritage lives on.  The school system.  The uniformed kids.  The parliamentary government.  The Privy Council.  The driving on the wrong side of the road.  The architecture.  Cricket.  Soccer.  (Although by that last count, Bolivia has a strong English heritage.)  And the blurry line between the churches and the state. 

Consider the Hindu temple in Waterloo, on a pier extending into the Gulf of Paria.  It's at the end of a road that passes by suburban bungalows on one side and an abandoned sugar fields—probably slated to become future bungalows—on the other.  The entrance to the temple's parking lot is marked by a modest statue of Sewdass Sadhu, the grocery-store owner who in 1947 built the original temple on the site of what's now a parking lot. 

More below the fold.

A House for Mr Biswas

That’s it.  That’s Mr. Biswas’s house.  Right behind the white car.  The street now resembles Union Turnpike more than anything in the novel, but the house is still there. 

Between San Fernando and Port-of-Spain lie the towns of Chaguanas, Waterloo, and Couva, the demographic center of the country’s East Indian population. 

When the British finally got around to abolishing slavery, the sugar plantations decided to import Chinese and East Indian indentured servants instead.  The Chinese soon stopped coming, because their government insisted on free return passage for its nationals.  Only 1500 arrived, mostly from Guangdong.  They now form an influential but small community of about 15,000 — a fellow named Dereck Chin built the island’s first multiplex, and as already-mentioned the NGC is led by one Frank Look Kin.  The white population — mostly Syrian Christian, with a few Portuguese and the strangely-named French Creoles, who are neither French nor Creole — is about the same size.   

The Indians, though, arrived in massive numbers.  By the time all was said and done, 150,000 of them had made a one-way trip to Trinidad.  Their descendents make up 40.3% of the population, as against a Afro-Trinidadian share of 39.5%.

Racial divisions shape Trinidadian politics.  The Afro-Trinidadian party is the People’s National Movement, founded by Eric Williams in 1956.  The main Indo-Trinidadian party currently is the United National Congress, founded in 1988 amid splits in then-ruling National Alliance for Reconstruction (NAR).  I think it’s a brilliant name, enough to hint at its ethnic base without ruling out the possibility of gaining support across the racial divide.

That said, the racial divide isn’t as stark as it could be.  21% of the population is mixed, up from 18% in 1990 and 15% in 1980.  Unlike the Guyana formerly known as British, communal violence is unheard of in Trinidad.  You see Hindu flags outside houses in mostly African suburbs—did you know that Hindus mark various family and religious events by flying colored flags?  I didn’t—and you can spot Afro-Trinidadians liming in most Indo-Trinidadian neighborhoods. 

It helps that most Indo-Trinidadian links to India have faded away.  Nobody knows what village their ancestors came from—hell, they don’t even know the state.  The Bhojpuri language is pretty close to dead, and spoken accents in English don’t appreciably vary between racial groups.  (I’ll admit it: it’s kinda cool when you hear a white guy or a Chinese fellow bust out in pure Trini.) 

Last year I found myself watching the Ukraine-Tunisia World Cup match in a run-down little bar in the town of Waterloo.  Most of the people in the place were Indo-Trinidadian, and the (Indo-Trinidadian) female propietor had hung a Union Jack over the counter.  When I asked her about it, she said, misunderstanding my question, "Oh, that’s the English flag.  Meh daughter and grandchildren live there, and we get a lot of English visitors out this way." 

Alerted, I began to spot "English" and Canadian paraphenalia in the area:  bumper stickers, posters, ads for cheap flights.  But links to India?  Nobody even seemed to know that Mittal was an Indian company.  One fellow sensibly-enough guessed it to be German.   

Migration has brought Trinidad many things, but special ties to one of the 21st-century’s emerging superpowers doesn’t seem to be one of them.

North of south, or the economic consequences of Elliott Abrams

  Okay, here's the set-up. In 1903, the U.S. sponsored the independence of a mercantile breakaway region of Colombia in a strategically very intriguing location. The constitution of this new country permanently linked its new currency, the balboa, one to one with the dollar. In 1914, the Panama Canal was opened. Canal Zone policy did not allow sales to ships on credit. Banks in Panama filled the gap.

Jump-cut bone to space station here. Seventy years after, in a region whose major products were coffee, bananas, and death squads, Panama managed to seize this tiny bit of comparative advantage and leverage it into a national economy centered around financial services. Swiss-style bank accounts, generous corporate tax policies, and a major re-exporting hub, combined with the use of the U.S. dollar and the low inflation caused by the Balassa-Samuelson effect: all these things made Panama an attractive site for many types of business activity.

Small problem: Manuel Noriega. A scary guy, and I'm not talking about the acne. He was the chief of secret police for the charismatic leftist populist Chicago-influenced leader of Panama, General Omar Torrijos, and the guy who (in theory) was going to disable the Panama Canal if the 1977 treaty didn't go through; and after Torrijos's plane mysteriously crashed in 1981, Noriega quickly moved to consolidate power behind the scenes. Money laundering, drug smuggling, dogs and cats living together, mass kleptocracy. One of the cuter scams was that Noriega's associates ran the company responsible for security in the re-export zone. Guess how that worked.

Now, somehow Noriega had got on the bad side of Uncle Sugar. It's rather difficult to pin down the proximate cause, since the fellow had been messing with drugs and money since the 1970s, when he was heavy petting with the CIA, but whatever. Suffice it to say that by the late 1980s, Noriega had turned from “our bastard” to “liability” in the eyes of the Powers That Be. The change might even have been made in good faith. Manuel Noriega was indicted in a Miami court on February 4, 1988. On March 3, 1988, all the U.S. accounts of the Banco Nacional de Panama were frozen. The Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs, Elliott Abrams, gloated to the press about this neat idea, quipping like only an apparatchik can: “Noriega is hanging on by his fingertips. He'll be out of power in a week. Now we'll see who stole the strawberries.” But it was a neat idea, if not very well thought through.

Here's the thing: because Panama has no independent currency, it relies on dollar flows from the U.S. to maintain financial liquidity. Panama has no central bank. Balboa notes have only been issued once, in a bizarre episode in the early 1940s, and they were all cancelled. So the mechanism to maintain Panama's financial liquidity was deliberately cut off. When this happens on a widespread scale, it's called a depression. After all, as the history of the twentieth century tells us, nothing causes dictators to lose power more quickly than a depression. The BNP had to close its doors, and other Panamanian banks followed. It gets better. The BNP, while not a central bank, is the Panamanian clearinghouse for cashing checks. Since Panama had a modern, service-based economy, this made the next payday (March 14) problematic. A general strike quickly ensued. Noriega had an ingenious scheme: pay the workers in commemorative coins! This was nixed by the money mavens on hand. So, all in all, a lot of calamity, a lot of hardship.

Why didn't it work? It took Operation Just 'Cause (originally named Operation Blue Spoon, which I think is much cooler) to oust Noriega. The sanctions did manage to reduce the Panamanian economy by a third, maybe a half, for over a year, precipitating a decade-long jump in unemployment. But that doesn't mean much to a dictator. It's almost the definition: a dictator is a leader who is unresponsive to the popular will. But a major reason it didn't work was that the Panamanian financial system was remarkably resilient.

The Panamanian bankers weren't unsophisticated rubes fresh off the coffee finca. Some of them went to the University of Chicago. They had long practice finding loopholes and workarounds against Uncle Sugar's more anti-Panamanian rulings; they had a decades-long institutional history of doing this. So the government issued fractional pay checks which could circulate like bills of exchange, increasing the effective money supply. Noriega himself set up Eurodollar accounts using laundered drug money -- sweet of him, and part of the reason he's getting a French vacation -- so that the BNP could finally clear checks and credit card bills. Some banks issued CDs based on savings accounts, which were used for big ticket items.

In short, just as the Great Depression sparked a wave of industrial innovation in the U.S., the U.S.-engineered depression sparked a wave of financial innovation in Panama. The other reason is, private companies sent Panama a lot of dollars so their Panamanian enterprises could stay afloat. Texaco, United Fruit Brands, Eastern Airlines. Not a whole lot in absolute figures, but it helped at the margin. After all, politics is politics, but business is forever. (PS: Doug, I know the exact word that's tickling the back of your head -- Komarr.)

A Turn in the South

Point Lisas isn't the only must-see that Trinis will point you to.

Southern Trinidad’s central tourist attraction is a few miles south of San Fernando, in the suburb of La Brea, which is called that for the exact same reason as the eponymous neighborhood of Los Angeles.  It’s the "famous" Pitch Lake, the planet’s largest source of high-quality asphalt, what Trinidadians call the "eighth wonder of the world." 

If so, I wonder about the other seven, because Pitch Lake really resembles nothing so much as a badly-paved parking lot.  What’s the seventh wonder?  Newark? 

Hype aside, Pitch Lake is really neat, and worth visiting.  The surface is soft and warm, with tar right underneath a fragile skin and methane bubbling up.  Local kids bathe in the surphurous puddles—in fact, "swim" is a better word than "bathe," because some of the puddles are pretty damn deep—and workers dig up about US$50 million worth of asphalt every year. 

You probably won’t be surprised to learn that China buys half the output.

Finding the Centre

In a parallel universe San Fernando—"Sando"—is a cute beachfront town.  We don’t live in that universe.  It has nice enough suburbs, if a little ragged around the edges.  The city center though, not so much.  Downtown seems designed by a strip-mall developer told to worry about neither parking nor pedestrians.  But it’s certainly lively. Maybe a little too full of life, like an algae bloom.  Call it the anti-Ponce.

San Fernando, in the southwest part of the island, is Trinidad's second city.  As early as the 1950s, approximately half the city's workers worked in petroleum extraction or refining.  It's still booming.

So I suppose the city center is exactly what you’d expect from a boomtown that advertises a patch of boiling asphalt as its number-one tourist attraction.  I don’t know why I expected something more charming.  A modern air-conditioned bus runs there from downtown Port-of-Spain (for only 95¢!), down a modern highway, through modern sprawl.  Why wouldn’t downtown be equally modern?   

We were in San Fernando to visit Trinidad’s best Chinese restaurant.  To get to the restaurant from downtown we had to take a taxi.  

Taxis in Trinidad don’t work like taxis in most countries.  Instead of cruising for fares, they follow a fixed route, with passengers hopping in and out.  Something similar exists in Venezuela, called a por puesto. The difference is that in Trinidad all the street taxis follow fixed routes.  Look for the license plates beginning with a capital "H" for "hire," as opposed to "P" for "private."

Crowding into a car with total strangers is more intimate than packing into a minibus—here called a "maxi taxi"—or other form of public conveyance.  It makes for either extremely uncomfortable silences or great conversation, depending on everyone’s mood. 

In this case, it was great conversation.  The Chinese-Trinidadian driver was a garrulous fellow, and the three female passengers equally so.  When Amma told them that we were down visiting from the north, they reacted like we had just gotten off a jumbo jet from Canada instead of an articulated bus from Port-of-Spain. 

The south of Trinidad is rather more Indian than the north, and the Chinese minority is also much more visible.  The south also looks more prosperous, on average, but not significantly.  To  be honest, the differences aren’t that marked to an outside observer.  Perhaps the most notable, to me, was the prevalence of mixed-race groups of schoolboys. 

The "best Chinese restaurant in Trinidad" was all right.  Not great, but not authentic.  Which is to say, rather good.  Authentic Chinese food is an acquired taste that I have little urge to acquire ... something I share with, it seems, the population of southern Trinidad. 

I have thrice eaten authentic genuine Chinese food, once in New York, once in Hong Kong, and once in Philadelphia.  It was not fun.  Admittedly, ordering pigeon in Hong Kong was probably a mistake, but I've got no explanation for Philly other than that real Chinese food just doesn't taste very good to a Western Hemisphere palate. 

This does not apply to other Asian cuisine, although it may explain the Philippines.  Carlos? 

To conclude, I myself happen to prefer the second-best Chinese restaurant in Trinidad, which is located in a shopping mall right to the west of downtown Port-of-Spain, near the stadium.  If you’re ever in Trinidad, you can’t miss it:  it’s right next to a giant multiplex—the island’s first—and a Ruby Tuesday.  The food is exactly what you’d expect, and I’m not ashamed to say that I like it. 

Ah, Caribbean charm.   

The Loss of El Dorado

This post is dedicated to Bernard Guerrero.  And Carlos's aunt.

Trinidad is the sort of place when you ask somebody to show you the sights, they go out of their way to show you the industrial park.  "Point Lisas, mon.  Gotta see Point Lisas."  So we saw Point Lisas. 

It is quite impressive.  The place employs more than 11,000 people (about one out of every 50 working Trinidadians, not including ancilliary operations in the surrounding area) in a urea manufacturer, a chlorine producer, a lube-oil blending installation, a natural gas fractionation facility, 4 methanol factories, 10 ammonia plants, and one giant honking steel mill. 

The Point Lisas Industrial Estate (related to, but not quite the same as the eponymous port) started under the administration of Eric Williams, Trinidad’s first prime minister.  It could have been a poster child for the failure of 20th-century socialism.  The place took two decades to get running, and once it did its heavy industries managed to lose money at such a prodigious rate that the industrial park managed to play a large role in Trinidad’s debt-led economic collapse in the 1980s.

Past failure is not what makes Point Lisas interesting; certainly less interesting than its equivalents in (to pick two countries completely at random) Romania or Armenia.  What makes Point Lisas interesting is the place's present success, and what that says about Trinidad's economic and political future.

More below the fold.

The Enigma of Arrival

Let's turn to a different island. 

Trinidad!  This majestic isle, this historic land, this place of wonders, it grips the Western imagination with images of … of … of … uh … ah.

Isn’t Trinidad a city in Cuba?

No, Trinidad doesn’t occupy much of a place in the collective imagination of the English-speaking world.  Nor the Spanish-speaking one.  And while the plucky performance of the T&T team in the first round of the World Cup certainly changed my opinion of soccer, I really doubt that it changed too many people’s (lack of) opinion about Trinidad.

In recent travels I’ve tried to see how economic statistics translate into how things feel on the ground.  In the Philippines, for example, you could see the undervalued exchange rate in the low low prices, you could feel the screwed-up labor market in the prevalence of overmanned service businesses, and you couldn’t miss the impact of remittances in the form of giant McMansions sitting in the middle of otherwise impoverished slums. 

In Trinidad, the headline statistic would be economic growth.  Since 1995, the place has grown at an average annual rate of 8 percent—last year, in 2006, it grew twelve.  And this isn’t merely the dead-cat bounce of a once-rich petroeconomy:  GDP matched its 1982 high in 1999, only the fourth year of the boom.  The numbers are awesome.  They amaze.  They inspire.  Are they real?

An answer below the fold.

A Personal Warning from Che Guevara

The University of Puerto Rico could mostly be in California.  The architecture is not unlike that found on the campuses of Stanford, Santa Clara, UCLA, Caltech, and even parts of Berkeley.  But there are some things with little Cali equivalent:

Good advice?

The Never-Ending Story

 

I suppose I have to talk about the status debate at some point.

If you stroll out of the old city, the boulevards broaden and you’ll pass the impressive white dome of the Capitolio and its associated government buildings.  There’s a memorial to World War 1 veterans right to the south, where you can see Puerto Rican status debate in living color.  Quite literally. 

The Capitolio flies the flag that’s been official since 1995, whereas the monument flies the flag that was official between 1952 and ’95. 

Between 1952 and 1995, the canton on the Puerto Rican flag was the same navy-blue as the American flag.  Independence supporters, however, flew a flag with a lighter blue canton designed by Antonio Vélez Alvarado in 1892 at his apartment at 219 West 23rd Street.  That flag reversed the colors of the Cuban rebel flag. 

In 1995, the pro-statehood governor, Pedro Roselló, played an act of political jiu jitsu when he made the Vélez flag official.  Now anyone who flew the U.S.-blue flag was indicating that they favored statehood, while flying the Cuban-blue flag lost political significance.  Some nationalists started to fly flags with an even-lighter blue canton reminiscent of Ferdinand Marcos’s Philippine flag redesign.  That hasn’t exactly proved to be popular:  I've seen exactly one, in Bayamón, and I’m still not sure if it wasn’t an official flag that had simply been left out in the sun too long. 

None of it means that Puerto Rico is any closer to statehood.  Unless Congress forces the issue, I doubt that Puerto Rico will ever become a fully United state, even if it loses every single special benefit that its  Freely Associated status bequeaths.

What are those advantages?  Well, not a whole lot these days.  Corporations have lost their tax-exemption from investing here.  Individuals retain their exemption from federal income taxes, but the overall tax burden is only slightly lower, because Puerto Rican income tax rates are not low.  It collects a smaller percentage of GDP from those taxes than the federal government does on the mainland, but that’s because Puerto Ricans are poorer than mainlanders. 

Since Puerto Rican tax rates are not low, imposing federal taxes would create a very large fiscal burden.  Income taxes provide the island’s government with about 21 percent of its income, and would be difficult to replace. 

On the other hand, the problem is solvable.  First, the federal deduction for state taxes would eliminate about a quarter of the additional hit in total, and more for upper-income residents. 

Second, other taxes in Puerto Rico are lower than in most U.S. states, although a recent fiscal crisis prompted the imposition of a 5.5% state sales tax. 

Third, a State of Puerto Rico that lost the adjectives of "associated" and "free" would receive more federal revenue sharing.   (To be fair, the island already does pretty well on that tip.  Its "resident commissioners" don’t vote on the House floor, but they do in committee, and they’ve used their leverage quite effectively.) 

How much more is unclear.  The big gain would be come from Medicaid.  Puerto Rico Medicaid enrolled 938,000 people in 2004, 2.2 percent of the U.S. total, but the island received only 0.1 percent of the federal spending.  In theory, Puerto Rico could get up to $4 billion, gross.

In practice, it's net gain would be rather less than $4 billion, probably an order of magnitude less. The reason is that the Free State can define its own poverty line.  Puerto Rico’s eligibility requirements for Medicaid are therefore much tighter than on the mainland.  Bringing those rules in-line with the rest of the U.S. would force the state formerly known as "freely associated" to increase its own Medicaid spending, and therefore the taxes to pay for it.

Finally, under statehood individual Puerto Ricans would be able to benefit from the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC).  For the Britons reading this blog, the EITC is the U.S. equivalent of the working tax credit.  For non-gringo non-Brit readers, the EITC is a negative income tax that subsidizes workers who make below a certain threshold—currently around $7,000 for a single individual and $15,000 for a family with two children. The maximum benefit for a single person is $412; the maximum benefit for a family with two kids is $4,536.  (I managed to qualify in 1996.  I received $36.)  Above the threshold, the credit is phased out at a marginal rate of 7.7% for a single person and 21.1% for a family.

Given how low incomes are in Puerto Rico, a lot of people would qualify.  The estimates are that the EITC would almost wipe out the island’s net federal income tax liability.  (With a few small exceptions, mostly excises, Puerto Ricans already pay other federal direct taxes.) 

The catch is that there would be distributional effects.  Rich Puerto Ricans would lose.  (So would foreigners who own investments in Puerto Rico.)  Poor working Puerto Ricans would gain.  American taxpayers would see pretty much a wash, give or take a billion. 

It’s rarely wise to bet against the interests of rich people. 

But why aren’t poor working Puerto Ricans clamoring for a change in status?  The reason isn’t economic.  Rather, it’s that Puerto Ricans have managed to pull off the postmodern hat trick of being loyal to the United States while still not feeling American.   

Consider that the island, after proper vetting through the courts, has just re-introduced the rather meaningless category of Puerto Rican citizen.  Also consider, however, that any U.S. citizen resident on the island is eligible.  In the same vein, the Popular Democratic Party just submitted a bill to the Puerto Rican legislature would would require the island’s Secretary of State to inform Washington that Puerto Rico no longer wishes the federal government to represent it in international organizations.  Will it pass?  No.  Does the Popular Democratic Party want to it pass?  Hell, no.  Do they think that it’s a worthy bit of posturing?  Oh, yeah.  Does it mean that the Popular Democratic Party supports independence?  Absolutely, categorically, and unequivocally not. 

I suspect that Puerto Rico will remain an associated free state unless and until Congress tells them, "Become a full state or f—k off."  At which point they’ll become a state. 

The readers of this blog are an eclectic and intelligent bunch.  I’d really like to know what you think should be done about Puerto Rico's status.  A choice between independence and statehood?  A "compact of free association" a la the former Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands?  Nothing?   

Let's Talk about Roads

 

We have readers!  Chido, ¡y bienvenido!

For a person of my tastes, the photograph below is best appreciated to Mötley Crüe.  In a pinch,  Steppenwolf works.  And when feeling less Jurassic, most pop-punk will suffice, as will Kid Rock's "Son of Detroit" or anything from the Donnas’ first album.

So, roads.  In a blatant attempt to whomp up comments, I’ll start by quoting Jonathan Edelstein: 

[Super]highways have come to Puerto Rico in the past generation, and the main intercity routes are well maintained, but once you get off the autopistas, things get wiggy in a hurry. The two-lane roads that aren't quite wide enough for two cars, and the signs in all the wrong places and none of the right ones, are the least of it. Roads in Puerto Rico have a way of suddenly ceasing to exist or being closed without a warning or detour sign, and changing their names without apparent reason.

The city streets are even worse, with many of them built before automobile traffic and the shortage of off-street parking (even the hotels have postage-stamp lots) choking things off even further. The method of choice to control urban traffic - one-way streets - has been implemented without a great deal of rhyme or reason, giving urban driving a distinct similarity to a maze from the rat's point of view.

These were his first impressions.  Do they match mine? 

The rural roads, yes; the urban streets, no. 

Rural roads first:  they can get ridiculously narrow, just as Jonathan says.  Sometimes these tiny roads run through densely-populated exurbs, which can make for some amusing situations.  Now, not all the roads are like that.  In fact, most are not.  But plenty are, and that's not something you'll see much of in the continental United States. 

The signage isn’t particularly good, although it's not particularly bad either.  I only had trouble at that Route 10 detour that I mentioned in the last post.  I, however, have two advantages.  First, I’m accustomed to (if not quite skilled at) driving in signage-deficient situations.  Second, Amma is a truly excellent navigator.  In addition, you can easily buy superlative road maps in Puerto Rico (or download them into a GPS system), which is not true for many other places. 

I didn’t think the roads were that badly maintained.  We drove around the island quite a bit—not hard to do, since the entire place is only about 2½ times the size of Long Island—and there aren’t many potholes you could use to shelter a small family. 

That said, "good maintenance" is a relative concept, and I have very low standards.  I’ve driven in Trinidad, where the roads are worse.  I’ve also driven in Chiapas, where they are much worse—and often unpaved.  In fact, I’ve driven in Afghanistan, parts of which take "worse" to a whole 'nother level: imagine driving an armored pickup truck to the Pakistani border along a "road" consisting of the rutted tracks of the jingle trucks that preceeded you.   

My experience of the urban roads, however, is the diametric opposite of Jonathan's.  I thought that they were as good as New York and better than Boston. 

My guess is that Jonathan was talking about Old San Juan, not the rest of the city.  The thing is, Old San Juan is small.  You can walk across it in ten minutes:  by the time you hit Puerta de Tierra, the streets are as broad and modern as any American metropolis.   

The lesson, I suppose, is this:  when travelling to cities in the Western Hemisphere, you’ve got to visit to the suburbs.   

I have a request for our readers:  Any good road stories from outside your home country? 

Dáme mas Carolina

Roadside diners are fun. 

So is driving off-the-interstate in rural Puerto Rico.  At least for the driver.  Passenger, not so much.  Amma got carsick, which is not surprising considering the combination of the winding road and my driving.  I’m not a very good driver. 

I’ve wrecked two cars, one just recently.  In addition, Carlos has ridden with me across Mexico.  So we have evidence and witnesses to keep me from fronting on the Mario Andretti tip.

As a result, we detoured to the far straighter Route 10.  Unfortunately, Route 10 isn’t quite done yet, so we had to get back on 123 for a while at a jury-rigged intersection near a strip mall.  I missed the sign the first time around, but it was blindingly obvious on the second pass.

The cool thing was passing under the viaducts that will eventually turn Route 10 into an interstate-quality road.  Sadly, we couldn’t get pictures, but I’ll give you Amma’s reaction:  "A wonder that human beings can build such things!"

That was the beginning, but not the end, of our off-the-Interstate adventures around Puerto Rico.  I won’t go into all the details.  There are only a few highlights, anyway.  Roadside diners in Puerto Rico—they’re not diners, really, much smaller and usually open air—are great places to meet people, all of whom seem to have spent time in Brooklyn; the cows in the central cordillera are very well fed and very hostile; Arecibo is something every American should see before they die; and I drive like a chilango when I’m on the island. 

Puerto Ricans don’t like the way chilangos drive.  Being polite and patient people themselves, at least on the road, they don’t appreciate illegal left turns or the way I barging ahead to change lanes in stop-and-go traffic, and they don’t understand using your blinker to pass. 

Truth be told, I don’t like the way chilangos drive either.  I wish I knew what’s triggering my Mexico City driving instincts, because Puerto Rico doesn’t look like Mexico; Puerto Ricans don’t sound, act, or drive like Mexicans; and we’re not, you know, in Mexico. 

I’ve heard other Americans claim that Puerto Ricans are risk-taking, rude, and aggressive on the road.  I live in Boston, so my reaction to those claims is an unprintable two-syllable word beginning with the letter "p."   It's simply not true. 

Maybe it's living in Boston what's the problem.

We ended our road tripping in Carolina, a very nice suburb of San Juan.  To be fair, Carolina is a big place and it’s got some not-particularly-pleasant caseríos, but what’s not to like about hanging at the beach in Isla Verde? 

An African-American couple was getting married on the sand right in front of the hotel when we arrived.  It was a pleasant little ceremony; very few people, very good music. 

Amma enjoyed watching it, too, but she turned to me as I munched on (bad) ceviche and sipped a girlie drink of some sort, and said, "The preacher is wearing a maroon shirt [under a cream-colored suit] and a big gold chain."

And I'd been thinking that I kinda liked the idea of having the preacher wear that same outfit at our wedding.  Note to self:  thank God at least one of you has taste.   

¡Acuérdese del Álamo!

O sea lo más que cambia, lo más que queda igual. 

Just outside Ponce you can see a Cemex plant, one of the largest in Latin America.  Cemex, in a scheme to destroy one of rural Puerto Rico’s most unique roadside features, is trying to get permission to burn used tires for power.  The locals, as you can imagine, aren’t thrilled with the idea.  After all, the law mandates recycling tires—not burning them.      

In fact, it gets worse.  Not only have Mexicans taken over cement manufacturing and intend to steal the island’s valuable abandoned tires, they’re planning on taking over the phone company.  The phone company!  Privatized and sold to Verizon (then GTE) in 1998 under the Roselló administration, the company has patriotically failed to upgrade its DSL lines—or even install them—and has managed the all-American miracle of getting fixed-line penetration to decline from 74 to 61 percent.  All that and higher rates too! 

Now Verizon has sold the phone company to América Móvil, a Mexican operation.  The "América" is fooling nobody.  These are the same people who run Teléfonos de México—are you going to trust Carlos Slim to burn your tires and run your telecoms?  Not in Puerto Rico you’re not!  The business press is all over this Mexican malfeasance, this evil imperialism, this southern menace.  (Actually, I think it’s more like a western menace, since Puerto Rico is at about the same latitude as Cuernavaca, but close enough.)

Where’s Lou Dobbs?  The local press could teach him a thing or three, rhetorically-speaking.  Or, well, it could, if Lou Dobbs spoke Spanish.   

Crime and Punishment

 

We headed south from Ponce's central square—not helpful.  Dullness, and then burbs.  Might as well be in the crummier parts of northern California, except for the emancipation monument, the plaque commemorating the Ponce Massacre of 1937, and the Masonic temple.

Heading east was worse.  Dullness, then run-down burbs.  (Albeit clean!  This city is incredibly clean.  Have I mentioned how clean it is?)  A convenience store attached to a gas station—dimly visible in the left of the below photograph—was manned by bored female teenagers who doled out gum and Gatorade from behind thick metal bars.  The good thing was that the charming old façades hadn’t all been bulldozed, giving some parts of the near east side of downtown a friendly postapocalyptic charm.

But we also headed northeast in search of the Cross of El Vigía, a dramatic giant cross on a hill overlooking the city.  And so we wound up in the neighborhood of El Vigía.  And there we found a place that made the entire trip worthwhile.

 

El Vigía isn't bad, as slums go.  The houses are a hair short of actually falling down and have both electricity and indoor plumbing.  Kids rollerblade while housewives watch the streets.  They also brazenly spray paint their names on dumpsters, but who cares about dumpsters?  The ever-watching housewives do not appear to care about the dumpsters, and private property is not tagged.  The stray cats are scrawny and the dogs don’t bite, and in what other urban slum in America are you going to run into two kids riding a horse?  Plus, the cops lounge around outside a dinky pool halls and schmooze with the locals. 

It’s lively enough that you can kinda sorta forget the rattletrap construction or the abandoned buildings or the lack of anything remotely resembling a proper grocery store.  Now, I don’t want to exaggerate its liveliness—El Vigía is not East L.A.—but it lacks the depressing heat-death-feeling of, say, Bridgeport, Connecticut. 

In fact, it’s a lot like Belmont, Trinidad, where Amma grew up, only with far more street life and a bit more graffiti.  Plus a WIC office.  And here I’m invisible, while Amma is the American tourist who gets glances.  Which may of course also be related to the fact that she’s beautiful.   

I can’t help it, I’m an American.  Some cultures, men would fight those who dare scope their woman.  Others, they’d pretend nothing was happening.  Mine, though, well, we smirk right back.  Once, when I was in Mexico, I couldn't help noticing a scantily-clad passing woman at a café in the Condesa neighborhood. My acquaintance sitting across from me, an Anglo dude from West Texas, elbowed me and said, with a big proud shit-eating grin on his face, "That’s my wife!"

Americans.  We’re like that.

Thankfully, Puerto Ricans are like that too. 

Ironically, when we spotted the cops outside that run-down pool hall, I got nervous and started to cross over to the other side of the street.  Amma grabbed my arm and said, "Pumpkin, we’re not in Mexico.  This is the United States.  Relax." 

This tiny island with 1.3 percent of the American population manages to produce 10 percent of federal corruption convictions, but the end result of all that vigilance is that it enjoys an American-style police force.  Frex, officers offered to help guide us when they spotted us sitting at the Bayamón metro station, something unlikely to happen in Mexico.  Police professionalism explains the adherence to parking regulations—better than South Boston, I’ll tell you that—and the good driving. 

On the other hand, with 18,000 state police, 5,000 municipal cops, and 56,000 (!!!) private security guards, I’m not sure why Puerto Rico still has a homicide rate of 21 per 100,000.  Even Louisiana, where the NOPD was involved in a murder-for-hire scandal and pays less than the Puerto Rican State Police, only hits 13 per 100,000. 

We can add a serious mystery to Puerto Rico’s ugly architecture, incongruously-placed slum, and metric gasoline sales:  high crime.   

Any thoughts as to why that is?  I'm quite puzzled myself.

La Otra Perla

What, nobody was surprised at the "typical San Juan street scene"?  I don't believe it.

Well, it's time see Puerto Rico outside the San Juan metropolitan area.

"All else is parking," is what people from Ponce say about the rest of the island.  I call bullshit.  "Pearl of the South" works, if La Perla is your point of comparison.  Ponce is a life-sucking town.  All good humor sucked into a miasmatic sink of sadness and gloom.  Maybe it’s the tourbooks making you think it’s gonna be a charming place with a festive Latin center, rather than another all-American town whose suburbs have drained out its lifeblood. 

More below the fold, which I'm sure I've inspired you to click.  You know you want to. 

Quiero estar en América

   For reasons very clear to me, suburban houses in Puerto Rico are clustered more closely together than they would be in, say, South Florida.  For reasons not very clear to me—no snow, yeah, but that applies to lots of places—the houses all have flat tar roofs, making buildings that look fine from street level look pretty crappy from a passing elevated train.  Anyone have an explanation for this?

Exxon is called "Esso," and they sell gasoline by the liter.  Equally confusing.

So those are San Juan’s mysteries.  a small beachfront slum, crappy roofs, and the metric system. 

Me, I could live here.  Yes, indeed.

Below the fold is a thoroughly typical San Juan street scene, for your enjoyment and edification:

The End of the Line

The Urbantrain passes through Hato Rey, San Juan’s business center.  Hato Rey is a little reminiscent of Tyson’s Corner without the charm.  It manages to pack large numbers of office workers into a tiny space and make it unpleasant to walk more than 20 feet.  Miami tried to do the same thing, but they couldn’t build anything charmless enough to pull it off.

The route ends in Bayamón, in what will be a very cute town center someday.  Right now, not so much.  "Downtown" Bayamón is thoroughly American, but it’s the America of the 1970s.  Sort of like downtown Sunnyvale back in the day.  Parking lots, brightly-painted buildings, frighteningly clean sidewalks, a nearby mall, and an almost complete lack of human activity.  (The latter probably explains the clean sidewalks.)  The presence of two WIC offices, while a good use of my tax dollars, are a sign that land rents aren’t as much as they could be.

The action in Bayamón is at the mall, of course, or the suburban strips full of cutesy Swiss pastry shops and Condom World stores.  (No, really.) 

But like Miramar, I say give it time.  Downtown Bayamón is too cute not to be boutiqued, once Puerto Rico moves past it’s current position in the Yuppie stage of human history and arrives at the Bobo. 

That’s a Brooklyn Cyclones hat, by the way.  Nothing to do with the Commie stockings watching the forces of might and right gain on them in the A.L. East.  Only four games behind! 

Good Coffee, Great Music … It’s the Urbantrain!

Ah, the subway.  It’s only a subway for a brief stretch around the university, but whatever.  "Urbantrain" just sounds stupid.

The northern end is in Sagrado Corazón, near the ferry terminal to Old San Juan, and surrounded by empty lots.  In a burst of good sense that Boston would have done well to emulate, they use Metrocard machines straight outta Brooklyn instead of designing a brand new system that doesn’t work half as well. 

F—k you, MBTA!

Apologies.  But if you’ve ridden the T, you’ll understand.

The subway is a white elephant so far, with ridership running at about 30% of projections.  The fare is reasonable—$1.50 per ride—but that is twice the cost of the bus, and for those who can afford it, well, like the lady said in Singles: "I still love my car." 

Mayor Jorge Santini of San Juan (his name is omnipresent on billboards across the city) and Mayor William Miranda of the exurb of Caguas (the creator of the "Willie Tax") have approved a high-speed feeder line to run from Caguas down the median of Highway 52.  The line will then directly connect to the subway at the Cupey station.  The idea is to lure people coming in from the southern exurbs out of their cars.  That, they hope, would ease congestion on Highway 52 (or at least provide an alternative to sitting in traffic) and boost subway ridership, relieving the Urbantrain of its current boondoggle status.

What are your thoughts?

Dude, Where’s My Island?

Did you know that if you click on the pictures, a bigger sharper version will pop up in a new window?  I didn't.  FYI.

Above is a view of Santurce.  Or Miramar.  I'm fuzzy on the boundary.  Anyway, the moral of the picture seems to be, "buy now, if you can." 

Or not.  Did the Fed really directly purchase mortgage-backed securities yesterday?  Not a good time to invest in any sort of real estate.  Armageddon is a step closer.  Then again, socialism, in the form of central banks, will probably save us. 

But that's not the point of today's missive.  Today's missive is about why the Dominican Revolutionary Party has an office in San Juan.

It turns out that Santurce is ground zero for Dominican immigrants to Puerto Rico.  There are 33,000 Dominicans in San Juan, and an additional 28,000 in the rest of the Free State.   Since overseas Dominicans can vote, the PRD maintains a presence here.  The PRD got crushed in the 2004 election, so it needs all the support it can get, but in point of fact the Liberation Party and the Social Christians also have overseas offices here and on the mainland.   

The U.S. and the Dominican Republic have deep links, all the way back to President Buenaventura Báez's almost-successful attempt to sell his country to the U.S.  We invaded the place as recently as 1965.  (Foreign occupations never succeed?   You sure about that?)  And nowadays CAFTA has granted the U.S. almost total control over the D.R.'s trade and investment policies.  Combine the D.R.-U.S. relationship with Puerto Rico's geographic location, and the presence of a growing Dominican community on the island shouldn't surprise anyone. 

Tropical Walkabout

I guess Mexican politics isn't that interesting.  Back to Puerto Rico!

San Juan has a subway.  Strangely, it doesn’t quite make it into the old city.  It’s the best way to get to the University of Puerto Rico campus, however, so we’ve done a lot of walking (or bus riding) through the intervening neighborhoods of Miramar and Santurce. 

They’ve cleaned up the prostitutes from Miramar, at least while the sun is out, but the place has seen better days.  Much better days. The old hotels either either falling apart or abandoned, and the height of fine dining seems to be a Pizzería Uno shoehorned into a misbegotten attempt at urban renewal, Fort Lauderdale-style.  (Next to a Taco Maker, of course.)  The architecture is not-quite-Art-Deco tropical, so it’s easy to imagine a future Miramar in which the buildings have been rehabbed, the gang graffiti erased, and the offices of the Partido Revolucionario Dominicano represent a club-owners sense of irony rather than … well, why does the PRD have an office in San Juan?

It could happen.  Miramar is a neighborhood where old women and teenagers greet the bus driver by name as it meanders between the old city and the Sagrado Corazón subway stop.  It’s even got a little movie theater playing indie flicks.  But it ain’t there yet.

Same goes for Santurce.  It’s a little nicer, but not by much, and there are some abandoned buildings.  The Plaza de Mercado was disappointing.  It turned out to be small and utterly unfunky, populated by day by beer-drinking older fellows who claimed to be retired construction workers.  (Which, in fact, they probably are.  Many employees here retire at 55; and about one in eight people live on a pension of some sort.)  The fruit for sale was just fruit, like you can find in any Cambridge convenience store.  And the market was spotless.  Being in a country where the health and safety regulations are ruthlessly enforced is a good thing, of course, but it takes some of the romance out of food shopping. 

Welcome to Earthport!

And now, for the second installment in our continuing series about el Caribe.  Hopefully, this will keep you entertained and edified as the real owners deal with, well, life. 

 

Outside the walls of Old San Juan lies, well, mostly ocean.  But go east along the island, past the grandeur of the Capitolio, and you enter the unpleasantly named "Puerta de Tierra."  It sounds like something out of a science fiction movie.  It isn’t, unless the movie in question is Class of 1984.  It’s a run-down area full of housing projects, homeless shelters, and a Catholic school with a grand building in dire need of reconstruction.  But the Archivo General de Puerto Rico is there, and so am I.

Over on the north side of Puerta de Tierra there are a bunch of nice hotels.  A massive tourist complex is going up on the northeastern edge.  There are also a lot of signs advertising new high-rise condos but not a whole lot of condos themselves. 

The south side is mostly housing projects.  The first one on the island, El Falansterio, was built in 1937 and could be in Miami Beach ... architecturally-speaking, at least.  El Falansterio aside, Puerto Rican housing projects, called "caseríos," mostly look like they were built on an assembly line somewhere in central California and shipped here in a pod.  Most of the ones in Puerta de Tierra don’t look all that bad, until you notice the bars on all the balconies and windows. 

At least they demolished the tower projects back in 2000, as part of an urban renewal program that’s still underway.

In other words, the government got rid of the arrabales by building caseríos, and now they’re replacing the caseríos with condos. 

Viaje al Morro

Hi there.  Noel here.  I'll be guest-posting here from the Caribbean, while the rightful blog-owners are busy.

"I want to go back to San Juan … I know a boat you can get on!"  Most likely a ten-story tall gas-powered cruise ship these days.  Or, in our case, a packed American Airlines 757 out of Logan.  Strangely, it was an old 757:  scratched windows, frayed seat covers, worn rugs, and foam erupting from the interstiches of the overhead compartments.  It presaged San Juan.

San Juan looks modern from the air, but so do a lot of places.  The plane swoops in from west to east across the metropolis, but once you’ve stopped oohing at the roads—in most of the places I’ve been recently, the roads aren’t so great, if they exist at all—you start to notice the roofs.  Lots of corrugated tin.  Even more flat discolored tar.  Even the nice houses and the high-rises have crappy roofs.  Clumps of what was clearly once squatter housing line the river.  You can tell by the fact that the roads aren’t quite straight, and the houses not quite lined up:  they look quite solid in other respects. 

The airport is fine, functional, clean … but not quite modern.  In other words, it perfectly matched the plane we flew in on.  Tile floors, bare walls, and a fake colonial façade by an American info counter elicit chuckles rather than a sense of style or place.  It had been raining, and water gushed down from the upper level onto the sidewalk by the arrivals taxi stand.

The taxi, on the other hand, was a bitchin’ Chrysler 300M with a blinged-out grill and every mod-con you could want, thus proving that while I don’t like SUVs I am not immune to the siren call of environmental destruction, provided that it’s packaged correctly.  I want to make some sort of deep Galbraithian observation about the contrast between private affluence and public penury, but I can’t think of anything new to say.  Anyway, the driver was too funny.  He came straight from central casting, wearing a guayabera and a taxi-driver hat of the type that no mainland taxi driver has worn since 1982.  He made an endless series of unintelligible jokes and liked to yell "¡Ladrones!" whenever we passed a government building.

And so, along the crowded Route 26 freeway to Old San Juan.  Good road, by most standards.  (No shoulders in spots, and the traffic for the exit to the Minillas Tunnel backed up onto the main road.)  It doesn’t go quite all the way to the old city, but you wouldn’t notice the difference.  The road passes along the north side of the small island that contains Old San Juan on its western tip.

Once you get to the old town, among the narrow cobblestoned streets and the colonial buildings, with the occasional group of white-clad nuns and men in Panama hats, surrounded by the mellifluous sound of Caribbean Spanish, there, there you know, beyond any possible doubt, that you’re in the United States.