Going round and round In Puerto Rico
REFLECTIONS ON TRAVEL
Going Round and Round in
Puerto Rico
By Herb Hiller
The flunky in a
pin-stripe suit slouched against a wall outside the office of the
director of tourism. He was cleaning his nails with a switchblade knife. He
worked for the guys inside whose idea of tourism in Puerto Rico was to promote
more hotel casinos and Vegas-like crowds.
I was the
idealistic executive director of the Caribbean Travel Association, tilting at
the windmill that was turning islands throughout
the region into escapist clones of each other.
This was 30 years
ago. Puerto
Rico was more than just another postcard beach with golden sunsets. The
island enjoyed a rich tradition of arts that, like everything, was wrapped up in
the duality that gave character
to life there.
Puerto Ricans were pulled between their Hispanic
heritage and pragmatic lifestyles learned from the United States. Every cultural
circumstance seemed to intensify that conflict, none more than the restoration
of Old San Juan, which produced an outpouring of art that invoked the lost
cause of independence. That independence, almost realized a century ago, was
sacrificed instead to the expedience of Commonwealth status.
The
ups and downs of my own life resonated well with the ambivalence of the islanders. But the people in charge of tourism had turned me off their place.
At home, I cycled everywhere, but felt like I was
going nowhere. What I knew best was how to frame big pictures -- a skill in
positioning ideas that changed how people saw things. Swell! But no one was
buying, perhaps because I wasn't really selling. I didn't want to sell. I was on
my bike, but off my life's track. Tourism had badly turned me off so many
places.
Now I was back in
Puerto
Rico, this time cycling. It wasn't just because the roads in Puerto Rico were better than elsewhere in
the region. I decided that I had carried my prejudice against the place for too long.
I
needed to mellow out that good-guy bad-guy way of seeing the world. A week's
workout, I thought, might get me beyond my love-hate for the island and resolve
my own ambiguities at the same time.
I cycled through
towns where the intensity of life counted for everything. People lived one day at time,
figuring out life from
imagination and risk more than from the assurance of any bank account. Law and governance seemed to count
for less than street corner inflections and body language, a way of greeting the morning,
of kindness to children and elders, of regard for ancient ways and common
accord. You lived with the neighbors. It was they who reassured you about daily
order, about common gifts. They, too, who could make your life miserable, deprive you of reward if you
overstepped some unmarked bound of behavior. Life came across as an unwritten
book.
Even though I cycled
with minimum gear, as I pushed forward on mountain climbs the speedometer
sometimes registered "0." Reward finally came one day
as two fellows on a high mountain road eased alongside me, towing a horse behind.
"Amigo, what you training for?" one called out.
"Por la vida!"
I shouted back.
Later, as I flew
downhill, the one yelled out again, "Hey, what's your name?"
"Herberto,"
I yelled.
"H-e-r-b-e-r-t-o-o-o-o.
. .,”
he yelled back, my name echoing on the mountain wind.
Reward came again at
the Parador Hacienda Juanita in the mountain town of Maricao.
There, Rádames
Rivera, an artist, explained how he was working out the conflict between his
career in San Juan
and his loyalty to a brother who wanted him at the family inn in the country.
"It was very hard to
convince me," said Rádames. "I was a city man. Last
night before I went to sleep I felt anguish. I want to stay here but I
don't want to stay here. I think the anguish will pass."
I arrived in
Mayagüez on an evening when a city club was celebrating a hundred years of
popular music in Puerto Rico. Forty musicians sat on stage.
Official
introductions droned on: the reading of proclamations, each introducer in turn
introducing the next. They paraded their ceremony endlessly.
Four came on stage
at once. Dignitaries from the audience were asked to stand. Another speaker
was invited up. She motioned two more to join her. Each was photographed. At last the
musicians were introduced. Yet there followed not music, but a discourse on
music.
When the music finally began, trumpets poured
sound ripe and round as June mangoes. Propeller-age rhythms rocked the
auditorium. The sufferance of endless ceremony seemed bound up with life itself
as now, ceremony indulged, older men and women rose up and danced. Young people
joined in. The place came alive. I watched, alone and content.
When the music stopped, the crowd continued to
rouse the night. Rivers of excitement streamed out. I pedaled absorbed in the
tapering flow until, passing beyond farthest reach, calm returned. I cycled a
street beneath arches of colorful lights, the kind I remembered as a spellbound
kid that, on movie marquees, went round and round.
All photos © travelandsports.com 2002.
Used by permission of
Edelman Public Relations Worldwide
* * * * *
Freelance writer Herb Hiller is a former executive director of
the Caribbean Travel Assn., initiator of the Caribbean Tourism Research Centre
(now the Caribbean Tourism Organization) in Barbados, and a critical observer of
tourism in Florida. His "Guide To the Small & Historic Lodgings of Florida" (out
of print) won a Lowell Thomas Travel Journalism Award as best travel guidebook
in America. He is currently at work on an historical romance about Florida
Highway A1A for University Press of Florida.
