Articles > A Caribbean Primer

A 1978 New Yorker cartoon depicted a middle-aged couple talking over drinks: it bore the caption: 'Let's go to the Caribbean or someplace and give our brains a rest.' This is a little unfair, but it is true that one of the reasons that people love to go to the Caribbean is because the islands are deemed relatively culture-free and you can really relax. And compared to, say, Italy, Greece or France, there is indeed an absence of culture – in the form of churches, museums and ancient monuments – but there is a wealth of culture in other guises. Given that that culture is combined with one of the most agreeable climates in the world, some of the best sea you can hope to find and some of the friendliest, most easy-going people around, you are pretty much guaranteed to have a wonderful time in the Caribbean islands.

You will have an even better time if you make the effort to take on board some local culture. If you stay enclosed in your resort, safe, protected, such culture as you are exposed to will inevitably be a sort of watered- down, sanitised version of the real thing, laid on for tourists. Be brave, go exploring, and you will discover the real charm of the islands.

MUSIC Music is at the heart of much, if not most, of the culture of the islands. Reggae, which originated in Jamaica in the 1970s, is the best known of all Caribbean music, thanks to the incredible talent of Bob Marley, as well as a host of lesser-known musicians. Trinidad is the home of calypso, though there are calypsonians in the other islands. Calypso, in which the lyrics, often dealing with politics or local scandals, are so important, is much less known outside the Caribbean. Singers such as the Mighty Sparrow and David Rudder have managed to achieve an international reputation, though never on the scale of reggae stars. In the French islands, you can hear zouk, the sweet, West-African-influenced, electronicised music of the Antilles, which is a descendant of the traditional biguine (reggae is rarely heard in the French Caribbean; calypso, in which the lyrics are so crucial, not at all). On Sunday evenings, all Antigua gathers on Shirley Heights to hear steel pan, followed by reggae. Drinks and food are available.

There are festivals of other types of music, which take place throughout the year. St. Lucia has a jazz festival in May; Barbados has one in January. In Barbados, perhaps the most organised of the islands, Holders Season of opera and musical theatre takes place in the spring (dates vary) at Holders House, a former plantation estate. The Grenada Spice Jazz Festival this year runs from May 11-19 and opens with Byron Lee & the Dragonaires; the St. Kitts Music Festival takes place at the end of June and features four nights of calypso/soca, reggae, jazz and gospel music.

CARNIVAL Carnival is the big, local festival in the islands and Trinidad has the biggest, most flamboyant carnival of all, said to rival that in Rio. When I say 'local', I mean that it is for the locals, rather than for the tourists, which is not to say that tourists won’t or don’t enjoy it. Traditionally it takes place in the two days before Ash Wednesday, one final fling before the doom and gloom of Lent. Carnival proper begins at four in the morning with Jour ouvert (shortened to 'j'ouvert' and pronounced 'jouvay'), but even in the days before, you can feel the place heating up and throbbing with anticipation. Every night is 'fete', huge parties going on till the early hours, a mayhem of music and dancing and 'wining'. There are Calypso Spektakulas - five hours of calypso in one of the big calypso tents and performances of steel pan, given by huge bands consisting of several hundred musicians.

If you want to go to Carnival and especially if you want to ‘play mas’ (from the word ‘masquerade’ – to dress up in costume and to join in the festivities), you should go to Trinidad. Other islands have smaller, more manageable carnivals – such as Guadeloupe and Martinique, whose carnival starts on Epiphany and runs through Ash Wednesday – on Ash Wednesday, the people dress in black and white and coat their faces with white powder; Barbados where Congaline Carnival takes place in late April and where Crop Over Festival runs from July through August; in Antigua, carnival takes place on the first Monday and Tuesday in August so as not to clash with the main tourist season; in St. Lucia, it is in July, in Grenada in August and, in St. Kitts, it is on 1st and 2nd January.

FOOD The French islands are usually deemed to be more 'interesting' because of the French culture, which pervades – though it does help if you can speak some French. In many ways I prefer the English islands and certainly as far as music goes, but for food and general culinary interest, the French islands win hands down. In August La Fête des Cuisinières (the Cooks’ Festival) takes place in Guadeloupe with parades in Creole costume and more music. But the rest of the year, you can also be sure of eating well. Dishes to look out for include court-bouillon de poisson, blaff de poisson (both fish poached in a spicy broth); accras de morue (little salt cod fritters); boudin créole (spicy black pudding); colombo, which is a kind of Creole curry, and is usually made of goat (cabri) or chicken. You tend to eat less well in the English-speaking islands, unless you go to a smart (and expensive) restaurant where you will find ‘international’ cuisine. Otherwise the food is generally a crude version of American food (hamburgers, etc. - Kentucky Fried Chicken is extremely popular) or local dishes that tend to sit uneasily on the Western palate. A traditional speciality is salt fish and ackee; I’ve eaten turtle stew in Carriacou and crapaud (mountain frog) in Dominica. One of the problems is there seem to be far fewer fish in the sea around, say, Antigua than in Guadeloupe, though people in Antigua do say that fishermen come from Guadeloupe to fish in their waters.

Rum is the drink of the Caribbean, though many of the islands have their own beer (Carib, Hairoun - after the ancient Carib name for St. Vincent, Red Stripe in Jamaica, and so on – they all taste much the same). Wine is available everywhere in the French islands and in the better restaurants in the others.

The best rum of the Caribbean is supposed to come from the French Antilles and the rituals to its drinking are far more elaborate and formal than anything in the English-speaking islands. There are various grades of rum, but the two that you are likely to encounter are blanc or agricole, the white rum which purists drink and which has a strong slightly chemical smell, and vieux, which is rum that has been aged in wood for a number of years and looks and tastes rather like brandy. The classic way to take your rum is as a ‘petit punch’ or ‘ti punch’ in Creole - straight with just a little sugar or sugar cane syrup and a squeeze of fresh lime. It has an unmistakable smell and taste - simultaneously sweet and sour and powerful enough to bring tears to your eyes (Père Labat, the white rum of Marie-Galante, is 65% proof) and it makes the Planters’ punch [rum with fruit juice] that is drunk throughout the English islands seem insipid by comparison. If you ask for ‘un ti-punch’ in a bar or restaurant, the bottle, some wedges of lime and a bowl of brown sugar are brought to your table and you serve yourself.

SPORT Cricket is the national sport (and obsession) of the English islands and football is becoming increasingly popular. Visitors will find tennis courts, golf courses and facilities for a variety of activities to do with the sea: swimming, snorkelling, deep-sea diving, fishing, parasailing, wind-surfing, sailing, kayaking and boat trips (the two last on rivers as well, particularly in Dominica). The US Virgin Islands offer some of the best dive spots in the Caribbean, ranging from deep underwater canyons to ship wrecks and coral reefs. St Croix has an impressive coral wall running parallel to its north shore, offering the only true wall diving in the Virgin Islands. The waters of the Pillsbury Sound between St. Thomas and St. John offer several popular shipwrecks, encrusted with brightly coloured sponges and corals. The waters around St. Vincent & the Grenadines are also particularly good for snorkelling and diving, and sailors love to cruise from tiny island to tiny island. If you are not in your own boat, it is still possible to travel around by local boats, but beware of rough weather.

BEACHES The Caribbean has some of the most beautiful beaches in the world. My personal favourites are the pink sand shores of Barbuda; Vieux Fort and Anse de la Feuillère in Marie Galante; Dark Wood Beach in Antigua; the east coast at Bathsheba in Barbados; Coal Bay in St. Vincent and Friendship Bay in Bequia. The volcanic islands (in particular Martinique, St. Vincent and Dominica) tend to have black sand beaches, which heat up more than white sand. In Martinique the beaches in the south have white sand and those in the north black volcanic sand, but these have the advantage of being less popular and the water is superb. At Le Prêcheur where Louis XIV’s long-term mistress and eventual wife, Madame de Maintenon, lived for seven years as a child, there is a wonderful remote beach called Anse Couleuvre, accessible only on foot but deserted, with fine black sand and huge round boulders.

LEISURE Bird watching: there is a frigate bird sanctuary in Barbuda; the whistling warbler and the St. Vincent parrot are unique to St. Vincent, and the Sisserou parrot to Dominica.

Shopping: the more sophisticated islands have tax-free shopping.

Hanging out or ‘liming’ as it is known locally.

Botany: St. Vincent has wonderful botanical gardens, founded in 1765, where can be found a third generation sucker of the original breadfruit tree brought by Captain Bligh of the Bounty in 1793 from Tahiti. Dominica is known as the Nature Island of the Caribbean and boasts an amazing variety of flora and fauna.

In Martinique you can go to a cockfight, sponsored by different distilleries (every Sunday afternoon between November and April). You can also see fights between mongoose and snakes.

It is worth checking out the museums. Most islands have at least one museum. In Martinique at Le Carbet is the Gauguin museum. Le Carbet is where Columbus was supposed to have landed in 1502 and where Gauguin spent some months painting in 1887 - some four years before he went to Tahiti. Gauguin’s Martinique oeuvre has all been shipped off to museums or private collections in Europe or North America and here only indifferent reproductions (which do, however, reveal a landscape little changed since the nineteenth century) are on display - but Le Carbet itself is charming and there are a couple of good restaurants.

Napoleon’s Josephine was born in 1763 in Trois-Islets and the Empress’s childhood home is now a museum. The surrounding countryside is dominated by a huge golf course, ‘Le golf de l’Impératrice’.

The Museum of Antigua and Barbuda has a fine collection of pre-Columbian and colonial archaeology, as well as Viv Richards’ cricket bat, with which he scored the fastest century.

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