Is your tourism helping us?

Before sunrise, Marcia bends over the hotel floor with a mop, salt still clinging to her skin from the walk in. Tourists will arrive in a few hours to rooms that smell of lemon polish. They will see the sea, not the hands that scrubbed their view into existence. This is tourism in the Caribbean: inheritance and negotiation, survival and sovereignty, beauty and erasure.

Tourism is not neutral.

It is intimate, political, and unfinished.

For decades, governments across the Caribbean deliberately built tourism as the replacement for sugar, bananas, and bauxite. When preferential trade collapsed in the 1980s and 1990s, resorts rose where plantations once stood. European names stayed on Caribbean soil, stitched into hotel brands and gated beaches. What was once export agriculture became export leisure. The inheritance is clear: our economies were re‑engineered to serve outsiders, even as our people carried the labour.

By 2024, tourism generated over USD 68 billion across the region, about 35% of GDP. In Jamaica, it supports more than 350,000 jobs. In Guyana, visitor numbers surged past 450,000 in 2025, with government targets of 3 million by 2030. These numbers sound triumphant, but behind them are contradictions: jobs that stabilize households yet rarely build ownership; wages that feed families but rarely accumulate wealth; development that expands airports while displacing fishing villages.

The beauty is real. The sea is blue. The sand is white, but who can access it? In many islands, beaches are privatized, fenced off by resorts that market “all‑inclusive” experiences while excluding locals from their own shoreline. The music that bleeds from one space into another: dancehall in Negril, steelpan in Port of Spain, is packaged as entertainment. Tourists consume culture; workers reproduce it daily, often invisibly.

Hurricanes expose the fragility. When Hurricane Melissa struck Jamaica in 2025, it devastated the tourism heartlands of Montego Bay, Negril, and the south coast. Forty percent of GDP was suddenly at risk. Seventy percent of tourism assets were out of operation. Taxi drivers, craft vendors, hotel staff (tens of thousands) lost income overnight. Recovery was fast, but not painless. Diaspora visitors helped keep arrivals above one million in the months after, signaling confidence to international markets. Private hotel groups pumped in USD 15 million in care packages and loans. Workers cleaned sand‑filled rooms, rebuilt beachfront structures, and carried national pride on their backs. Tourism was revealed as a survival system.

Survival is not sovereignty. Foreign investment dominates ownership. Luxury marketing sells paradise, while local labour sustains it. The negotiation is constant: governments court international chains with tax incentives, while communities fight for eco‑tourism projects that keep income circulating locally. Guyana’s push for community‑based tourism is one attempt to shift the balance, anchoring “One Guyana” in eco‑tourism that ties development to rural livelihoods. The larger pattern remains: outsiders own the assets, insiders provide the labour.

For the diaspora, the question is sharper. When you return home, are you sustaining resilience or reinforcing dependency? Staying in family‑run inns, hiring local guides, investing in storm‑resilient guesthouses, these choices matter. After Melissa, diaspora fundraising raised millions for recovery. Diaspora visitors kept hotels open. Diaspora voices amplified stories of resilience. Tourism is what we negotiate with our own extended family abroad.

The myth is that tourism is a gift. The truth is that tourism is a bargain. It stabilizes economies, but it also locks them into vulnerability. It provides jobs, but it rarely redistributes ownership. It showcases culture, but it often commodifies it. It feels like development, but it can reproduce dependency. To call tourism the lifeblood of the Caribbean is accurate, but blood carries both oxygen and risk.

So, what must change? Not the existence of tourism, but its terms. Tourism must be community‑led, not just investor‑driven. It must preserve culture, not just package it. It must build ownership, not just wages. It must treat workers as carriers of philosophical weight:  the housekeeper before sunrise, the fisherman watching cruise ships pass, the grandmother remembering the beach before it was privatized.

Tourism is an inheritance. Tourism is negotiation. Tourism is unfinished. The question is whether tourism will finally belong to the people it most impacts.