By Isabel Guzzardo

If the legacy of slavery shapes every facet of contemporary Caribbean society, tourism is one aspect where it is especially stark; tourism forms part of a racialized capitalist structure that maintains working-class Caribbean people serving foreigners, through the low-wage exploitation of their labor, both sexual and otherwise. In Puerto Rico, the violence of a visitor economy is being felt in new, devastating ways. In 2019, Laws 20 and 22 were consolidated as Act 60, called the Puerto Rico Incentive Codes. This policy lures foreigners to settle in Puerto Rico by offering 100% tax exemption on capital gains, dividends, and interest income.

Incentive regimes are not a new model in Puerto Rico. In the past, the government has offered industries tax exemptions. Two of the most visible benefactors were manufacturing and pharmaceutical companies. In both cases, once the tax haven expired, the industries left. And, in turn, they left devastation, joblessness, and economic insecurity in their wake. Despite the evident failure of this model of dependence on foreign capital, the neoliberal government is trying this again, this time targeting wealthy individuals, mainly investors and crypto bro

The results have been massively felt. As a colony, Puerto Rico does not have laws to protect its land and its patrimony, and does not prioritize the well-being of its native people. Native, here meaning natives of the Caribbean archipelago, as well as all those diasporic communities who came through forced labor and through the displacement provoked by capitalism. Instead, in the context of the debt crisis—a debt that “repays” Wall Street with school closures, and food and housing insecurity—it is foreign lives that are cared for and nurtured. 

Since 2024, 30,000 new Airbnbs have been registered in Puerto Rico. People with more than one property own 69% of the properties. Puerto Ricans are being displaced at alarming rates, and the ones who stay are finding their lives and possibilities increasingly threatened and their spaces encroached by visitors.  

I left Puerto Rico in 2016 to pursue doctoral studies. The year after, Hurricane Maria hit the island. I’ve witnessed how the debt, the hurricane, the privatization of the power grid, and Act 60 all formed a cyclone of disaster capitalism that have irrevocably shaped the island I knew. My intermittent visits have allowed me to notice these changes, including the changes in my friends. I’ve seen an anti-American sentiment grow. If UPR—a beacon of revolutionary, pro-independence sentiment, where I did my BA and MA, attempted to fend off American influence, now this seemed to be a more generalized feeling. My friends added names to the list of people who had left and they noticed how that absence was filled, not necessarily with tourists, but with wealthy foreigners that could boast about living in Santurce. We’d go to bars and restaurants, places we’d frequented for years, and watch entitled foreigners occupying space extremely comfortably.

Certainly, as Jamaica Kincaid says, everyone is a potential tourist of some place:

“That the native does not like the tourist is not hard to explain. For every native of every place is a potential tourist, and every tourist is a native of somewhere. Every native everywhere lives a life of overwhelming and crushing banality and boredom and desperation and depression, and every deed, good and bad, is an attempt to forget this. Every native would like to find a way out, every native would like a rest, every native would like a tour. But some natives—most natives in the world—cannot go anywhere” (18).

Therefore, as she describes, tourism must be understood within the context of colonialism and imperialism, where mobility, displacement, and the ability to stay are all shaped by proximity to power and capital. Tourism is never a neutral activity.

But what happens when tourism or traveling is a more lateral move—between Caribbean dwellers or between people from the Global South? Does that change anything?

What inspired me to study Caribbean literature was my utter shock, in an undergrad Caribbean literature class, at realizing how little I knew of my Caribbean neighbors. And this is by design: cut up, divided by different empires, we have never achieved the dreams of Betances, Martí, Cesaire, and others, of La Confederación Antillana, of a United Caribbean Front. CARICOM, whose primary purpose is to make the Caribbean palatable to Western capital, is a far cry from this.

Consequently, a lot depends on alternative networks and connections.

• Brigades to Cuba where we experience our revolutionary histories
• Literary Festivals where we read each other
• Carnival visits where we transform and liberate ourselves together
• Archival trips where we learn about each other
• Tourism, perhaps??
  

Certainly, trips to other Caribbean islands can be transformative for Caribbean people. One experiences strange familiarities and familiar differences. It allows you to see all the shapes and forms non-sovereignty takes in this region. You may find new depths to what being Caribbean means. 

I just recently met a Trinidadian at the West Indian Literature Conference, and she has kept me up to date with the on-the-ground protests against their government’s cooperation with the US and its war on Venezuela. We discuss our disgust with the Caribbean’s role as Empire’s laboratory. In Vieques, Puerto Rico, the US bombed incessantly and tested napalm, Agent Orange and depleted uranium, until the people forced the Navy to cease bombing in 2013. Nowadays, Puerto Rico is the ground that holds military aircrafts, and submarines, all pointing to South America. It is necessary for Caribbean people to be in touch, to cut through all of the West’s propaganda and our governments’ bending to Empire.
In considering the possibility of so-called “revolutionary tourism,” I wonder if there is travel, if there are routes, networks, detours, that can foster a Caribbean front.

Perhaps “tourism” which is drenched in extractivism and collusion with Empire can never be a tool for liberation. But I’m certainly interested in ways to meaningfully find each other, and to forge submarine connections that abolish the US Empire’s submarine war machines.