When Donald De Castro was a boy in the 1940s, mangroves lined the shore and cays in front of his family’s small waterfront home in the British Virgin Islands (BVI).
“We used to do a lot of fishing in mangroves,” the 86-year-old recalled. “They had snappers and they had different kinds of fish; we caught good fish.”
Far from slowing the pace of construction on Puerto Rico’s coasts to address climate change, as experts have requested, Gov. Pedro Pierluisi’s administration hit the accelerator to approve construction permits along the coasts.
Few places in Grand Cayman offer the expansive, open views of the Caribbean Sea like those seen from the top floor of The WaterColours condominiums.
To start, most places lack this elevation. On an island with an average altitude of six feet, it’s a luxury to take in the turquoise waters and white sand beaches from a 10th-story perspective.
Until recently, only this complex, a 2014 creation of luxury developer Fraser Wellon, and Kimpton Seafire Resort by the Dart group, the islands’ largest private landowner, had achieved such heights. That’s soon to change, but for now, this particular sea view, from the top-floor penthouse of the late Jamaican tourism mogul Ernest “Ernie” Smatt, remains one of Grand Cayman’s most elite. The complex is just one of dozens of luxury condominiums that have filled in Grand Cayman’s vulnerable coastline over the past decade. During the COVID-19 crisis, construction of such projects has accelerated, exposing the local population to serious climate change threats in exchange for properties most Caymanians cannot aspire to own in a lifetime.
The Beach Club Colony days were a different era for Cayman. In 1970, the Cayman Islands had just over 9,100 residents and many of those, in particular young men, spent their time at sea, working ships with the National Bulk Carriers, a multinational shipping company. The financial services industry was in its nascent days, as was tourism. In 1968, a stay at the Beach Club would have cost between US $10.50 and US $15.50 a night — a rate that included two meals a day. The 36-room resort was among Seven Mile Beach’s earliest accommodations, alongside the Coral Caymanian, Galleon Beach Hotel and La Fontaine, all since redeveloped.
Almost two years after the beginning of the pandemic, it remains difficult to know the number of COVID-19 deaths that have notably occurred outside hospitals in Guadeloupe and Martinique, which have 40% and 41% vaccination rates. Amid the COVID-19 vaccination, an insurrection has sparked.
The islands of the Caribbean are similar in their turquoise beaches that captivate tourists, but their handling of the pandemic has been full of contrasts. When the Cayman Islands had 81% of its population fully vaccinated against COVID-19 at the end of October 2021, Haiti, with 0.3%, was one of the three countries in the world with the least number of people vaccinated. And in Guadeloupe, despite having doses to spare, most of the population does not want to be immunized.
On Alfonso XII Street in the Punta Santiago, a coastal neighborhood in Humacao, 62-year-old Bermuda Vázquez points toward the beach that is blanketed with brown seaweed, known as sargassum. Although it was a day off in midsummer to commemorate the emancipation of slavery in the United States, beachgoers were nowhere to be seen. “The thing is that one is afraid of getting ill in that water with the sargassum that stinks. I’ve lived in this community all my life, and I remember when, on days like today, many people came to the beach. But you have to adapt to this sargassum,” Vázquez told the Center for Investigative Journalism (CPI, in Spanish).
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Third part of ‘Monsanto’s Caribbean Experiment’
American John Francis Queeny was inspired by a Puerto Rican woman to name, in 1901 in Missouri, the Monsanto company, which started as a pharmaceutical. Queeny named the company after his wife Olga, daughter of Emmanuel Mendes de Monsanto, who in turn funded the first steps of the corporation. This was to become a manufacturer of Agent Orange, the defoliant and herbicide that was tested in Aguadilla farms in the 50’s, and that was used in large scale to strip the jungle that under which the enemy of the United States hid during the Vietnam War. Today, Monsanto is the largest producer of transgenic seeds in the world, and uses Puerto Rico as a huge laboratory to develop genetically modified corn, soybean, sorghum and cotton. As an agricultural corporation, it occupies more than the 500 acres allowed under the Constitution, whose Article VI was intended to prevent monopoly and the displacement of small local farmers, as happened early last century when the sugarcane empire reigned, which Emmanuel Mendes Monsanto, funded in Vieques and in St.
