“Stopover Paradise”: Private Islands and the Cruise Industry in Caribbean Mass Tourism, 1977–2000

Beginning in the late 1970s, fast-growing multinational cruise lines began to lease land from Caribbean nations in to create private “stopover” beaches. These privatized nodes were uninhabited, off-limits to locals, and used only for daytime visits by cruise ships. Places like the Bahamas’ Great Stirrup Cay, or Labadie, a peninsula on the north coast of Haiti, provided the Miami-based industry with a powerful new control over the experience of “paradise” in the postcolonial Caribbean. For tourists, these private islands created an alluring aura of upper-class exclusivity, but they represented something larger for the cruise lines and for the wider history of tourism. As historians have recognized, Caribbean tourism has been a system marked by constant negotiation, resistance, and tension between tourists, locals, Caribbean nations, and the tourism industry. These contests revolved around access to social space like beaches; racialized and commercialized ideas of paradise; and everyday encounters between tourists and locals. These private islands came about as a result of tourism’s ambivalent relationship with Caribbean decolonization, after which Caribbean subjects more frequently sought to assert themselves on equal terms with tourists. By shuttling tourists to private, gated destinations, cruise lines could sidestep political unrest and conflicts between tourists and locals, providing their customers with that elusive commodity: a guaranteed experience. As such, they represented the cruise industry’s spatial approach to ensuring cultural and economic control over the practice of tourism in a postcolonial era, rendering the Caribbean a paradise devoid of its people.