San Juan

It is amazing how Americans can ruin a place. My mother spent part of the 1960s in boarding school in Hawaii, which had just become the 50th state in 1959. My mother complained that in a relatively short period of time, a rich local culture had been drowned out by the worst aspects of American culture- plastic culture and mindless consumerism. Meanwhile, more positive sides of American culture tend to transfer less readily. Puerto Rico seems an unfortunate example of the phenomenon my mother witness half a century ago in Honolulu, an outpost imitating in an exaggerated way stereotypes of the mainland. Before I went to Puerto Rico, lots of people who had already been there described it to me as "a dump." That is unfair, the place is not a dump, and there is not the squalor that you can find in other parts of the region. The old town is pleasant enough to walk around, and the fort is lovely. But it is utterly Americanized, in the worst way, in the almost desperate way that immigrants sometimes are aggressively nationalistic regarding their adoptive country. The food is very American, complete with ridiculously large portion sizes and dubious ingredients, everything is massive and tastes of nothing. the people, accordingly, are American sized. Even in the supermarket, everything is "extra large". My dad forgot a dress shirt for one of the formal nights on the cruises and we had to go buy one in the old town (at Marshall's, the nasty and cheap American chain). We had difficulty finding one small enough for him, and even when we did find one marked as being his size, it still appeared to be too big on him, but our shopping choices were limited since, as in the US, the centre has been emptied of anything resembling living space. All the shopping is done in the massive malls outside the city, and as in the US, you need a car to get to those. Not surprisingly given all this, the overwhelming mass of tourists on the island are from the mainland US, and they are indeed a scary bunch- fat, loud, rude and aggressive. In the hotel a man pitches a fit over the check out time, banging his fists and threatening people. I was shocked, not anticipating such behaviour, but the staff were clearly quite used to it, and called out the armed guard to deal with it- all this in a 5 star supposedly luxury hotel!

All this stood in sharp contrast to my last trip to the Caribbean, which was to Havana, the antithesis to San Juan in many ways. The two cities no doubt once shared a lot, the architecture and city lay out is very similar, as is the "traditional" cuisine, but Havana has been spared (or rid itself of perhaps I should say) some of the tackiness found in Puerto Rico. After the Revolution, much was relocated from Cuba to Puerto Rico, which now "prides" itself on having the Caribbean's biggest casinos, an honour Havana once claimed. I know Cuba has its problems, but walking around Puerto Rico made me recognise its strengths as well.