Speaking at this week’s Caribbean Marketplace on Monday, President of the Caribbean Hotel and Tourism Association (CHTA) Nicola Madden-Greig, is quoted in last Monday’s Trinidad Guardian as saying that while countries in the region continue to battle with what – at least in some CARICOM territories – now appears to be a steadily worsening crime situation, the region, as a whole, appears to be a preferred destination for extra regional visitors, her assertion reportedly supported by information culled from data from a “survey at the Caribbean Travel Marketplace in Montego Bay Jamaica on Monday, which showed over 80 per cent of tourists felt safe during their vacations to the region.”
Here one might argue that Caribbean people residing abroad and returning home from years in the cold are much too busy ‘soaking up’ the various aspects of the ‘nice time’ for which some CARICOM territories have cultivated a unique expertise though it is difficult to turn one’s back on the enduring phenomenon of rising crime in some parts of the region. Here, it is not a question of whether or not visitors to the region are ‘grinning and bearing it’ insofar as the seeming worsening crime is concerned but whether there are parts of the region that are simply putting a brave face on what, in some instances, is an incrementally worsening situation, the policy makers in those territories having become wary of the likely impact of washing their dirty linen in the extra-regional market on which it is heavily dependent to keep them buoyant.