THE CARIBBEAN: Havens of Happiness

They arrived hot and tired, shedding platinum mink stoles and loosening neckties. Shoulders sagged under three cameras (black-and-white, color, movies). Hand baggage bulged with lotions, nostrums, Doctor Zhivago and Around the World with Auntie Mame.

On the Caribbean’s U.S. and British islands, which are both politically and isothermally hospitable, the winter tourist season was at its peak last week, and the peak had never been so high. “Don’t even mention Caribbean to me,” complained the New York manager of Happiness Tours. “Montego Bay, San Juan, Kingston. St. Thomas—all hopelessly jammed through April 10.”

Full Solarium. In Puerto Rico, two new luxury hotels raised the island’s room total to 2,300. But with the U.S. over its recession jitters and in a vacation mood, the total was not enough. The Caribe Hilton rented out its solarium, conference room and doctor’s office. No-vacancy signs were up in the Virgin Islands, now linked to Puerto Rico by a 40-passenger hydrofoil speedboat. Barbados, easternmost of the Windward chain, bustled; Trinidad impatiently awaited the completion of a $9,500,000 Hilton hotel.

“What well-educated natives,” exclaimed a Midwestern matron upon arrival in the old British island of Jamaica. “They all speak English.” (“What robbers!” she cried after her first taxi ride.) Everyone tried to fit in, and the first purchase was usually a hat—sometimes a yard wide, sometimes a yard high. But one visitor to San Juan, stepping briskly across the lobby of the Condado Beach Hotel in his floppy straw hat, checkered sports jacket, shorts, suede shoes and sunglasses, had a moment of self-doubt. “Do I look too much like a tourist?” he asked a friend.

The hotels helped the guests feel at home. At the top resorts, visitors with a yearning for a kosher dinner could get it—flown in frozen from Lou Siegel’s Restaurant in Manhattan. At the brassy Arawak Hotel in Jamaica, the planned games included both generations. While the children put on free “calypso” shirts and went for a donkey ride, the parents bet on crabs that had been painted red or blue and goaded into a sidewise race. In tonier circles, no help from the management was needed. The cafe society crowd at Montego’s Round Hill ($60 a day and up) howled as Guest Moss Hart played and sang his own off-color songs.

War Nerves. Amid the laughter and the happy clink of coin, revolutionary Cuba was as left out as a snowbound Kansas farm. Even after the casinos reopened (see below), war-scared tourists were so scarce that each big Havana hotel offered 40 to 50 free rooms to Miami travel agents as a come-on. Most of the $60 million annual revenue from tourism will be lost. The peaceful islands do not hesitate to capitalize on the trouble. “While other countries in the Caribbean undergo riot and revolution,” beamed the Jamaica Tourist Board last week, “Jamaica remains a haven of happiness in a troubled world.”