Downtown Isabel Segunda, capital of the Puerto Rican island municipality of Vieques.

PUERTO RICO
From bombs to eco-tourism

By  Larry Luxner


A year after US Navy’s exit, Vieques tourism is booming.

Since the early days of World War II, the U.S. Navy had used Puerto Rico’s offshore island municipality of Vieques as target practice, turning two-thirds of its territory into a vast artillery and bombing range.

But few people here were happy about it, and after years of protests, the island’s 9,300 people were successful in getting the Navy to pack its bags and sail into the sunset. On May 1, 2003, an enormous fiesta erupted when, for the first time in 60 years, local viequenses could visit once-forbidden beaches and reclaim the 135-square-kilometer (52-square-mile) island for themselves.

One year later, things have quieted down a lot. Deprived of its favorite bombing range, the Navy has even shut its enormous Roosevelt Roads Air Station on the main island of Puerto Rico. Cable News Network (CNN) has left, the Rev. Jesse Jackson has stopped making speeches here and Vieques no longer gets mentioned on the nightly news — or anywhere in the media, for that matter.

In fact, it is pretty much left alone, and that’s fine with most locals.

"The Navy oppressed us. Now we can finally enjoy our own beaches," said Nazario Cruz Viera, who at 94 is the island’s oldest inhabitant.

Cruz, taking his daily stroll on Red Beach along the island’s south coast, says he would like tourists to come, but not too many. After all, few people want to see Vieques turned into another St. Thomas or San Juan, with their accompanying hotels, cruise ships, advertising clutter and traffic congestion.

"We are pushing eco-tourism, low-key bed-and-breakfasts and centers for marine biology," said local activist Myrna Pagán. "Certainly there should be some good hotels, but they should not be on the beach and should not exclude locals. We do not want to see our coastline taken over by exclusive hotels."

That’s also the viewpoint expressed by José Suárez, executive director of the Puerto Rico Tourism Company (PRTC).

"Vieques represents a tremendous opportunity for Puerto Rico now that the bombing has stopped," he said. "The type of tourism we’re proposing for Vieques is different from what we want on the big island: more sustainable tourism that respects the environment. Not that we don’t do that on the main island, but we have an opportunity to preserve the beauty of Vieques — even the areas where the Navy was."

Local activist Roberto Rabín, whom the Navy used to equate with Fidel Castro and Che Guevara, insists the people of Vieques should be the ones who decide the fate of Vieques, not bureaucrats in Washington or even San Juan.

"We know better than they do how to develop this island," he said. "There are intensely wonderful possibilities and worrisome ones, too. We’re at a crossroads. If we want, we can make Vieques a model of non-violent civil disobedience and a model of sustainable development."

In fact, the Navy’s presence on Vieques was one of the few issues that have ever united all three of Puerto Rico’s major political parties, from independentistas on the left to statehooders on the right. Some protesters event went to jail for their occasionally violent protests.

But their cause went nowhere until April 19, 1999, when a Navy bomb killed a local security guard named David Sanes. That sparked an enormous uproar, eventually leading to a municipal referendum on what to do about the Navy.

The results of the referendum: only 29 percent wanted the Navy to stay, while another 3 percent supported an option backed by the Clinton administration and Puerto Rico’s governor at the time, Dr. Pedro Rosselló. But the overwhelming majority — 68 percent of viequenses — elected to kick the Navy out immediately.

As a result, at the stroke of midnight on April 30, 2003, the Navy vacated its last 14,000-acre parcel of land. But the property wasn’t turned over to the government of Puerto Rico, nor the municipality of Vieques. Instead, its deserted white-sand beaches and rolling, forested hills are being managed by the US Interior Department’s Fish and Wildlife Service.

For several years now, the PRTC has promoted Vieques and the nearby municipality of Culebra as the "Spanish Virgin Islands" — a marketing gimmick similar to the somewhat artificial designation of western Puerto Rico as "Porta del Sol".

"We’re promoting smaller, eco-friendly hotels, and we’re in constant contact with developers," said PRTC’s Suárez, a former manager for Wyndham Hotels & Resorts. He added that a recent Puerto Rican law offers 100 percent exemption from municipal and commonwealth taxes, as well as tax credits based on specific investments.

"Any development there is on Vieques will be small-scale. We don’t want any major developments there," Suárez said.

One example is the 16-room Hacienda Tamarindo on the south coast of Vieques, not far from the little fishing village of Esperanza.

Tamarindo’s owner Burr Vail came here 7 years ago after also considering Grenada, Tobago and Roatan, Honduras — and says all the controversy over Vieques only helped promote the island to tourists who would otherwise have never heard of the place.

Yet Vail worries for the island’s future.

"The mayor wants to bring cruise ships to dock along Mosquito Pier [a long pier just west of the airport that extends nearly a mile toward the main island]. These people spend an average of US$3 per visit and buy only T-shirts."

The US Navy dominated two-thirds of this island for decades and "saved us from all that crap," said Vail. "What remains now is for us to take advantage of that uniqueness. You can put high-rise hotels anywhere, but how many 15,000-acre wildlife reserves are there in the Caribbean?"