Roatan’s Beauty, Truth & Wisdom

The Honduranization of the Bay Islands (PART I)

On April 22, Bay Islanders ‘observed’ the 162nd anniversary of Queen Victoria’s official ceding of the Colony of the Bay Islands to the Republic of Honduras. The Spanish word that the Government uses for this anniversary is the devolución – which suggest that the Islands were ‘given back,’ as if Honduras had prior ownership.

Each year on this date, authorities meet in the park and give speeches in Spanish lauding the initiative of General José Santos Guardiola, who in fact was just doing as the Americans had told him.

I was saddened to see that no speeches were made in English that alluded to the recognition of the early British settlers from Belize, Jamaica, and the Cayman Islands. But this was no fault of the Central Government as much as it is the ever-increasing indifference of Bay Islanders to their own history, environment, and future. It’s an ominous sign of the almost complete Honduranization of the islands.

In 1989, I was accompanying British Historian and Professor Michael Duncan to St. Helene on a fact-finding mission while he was working on his paper for the Centre for Caribbean Studies at the University of Warwick. He was a fascinating man who passed away shortly after his paper The Gentle Art of Cutting the painter was published in 1990. In this paper, he shared some prophetic and frankly quite alarming thought:

In regards tourism, I was told privately by an Honduran official that they have now discovered the Bay Islands to be a goose that can lay golden eggs, but by the time they get visitors, they may have destroyed its customs and much of what made it special. There is also, at the same time, a persistent feeling in some Honduran circles that the Bay Islands should, at last, be assimilated linguistically, culturally and commercially (ie: Honduranized).

They have now discovered the Bay Islands to be a goose that can lay golden eggs.

If you take this in context, it was written before the main road was paved from Oak Ridge to French Harbour, before the international airport was built, before RECO, way before cruise ships, and before the development boom (which began around 1995). There were only a handful of Hotels welcoming international visitors in the Bay Islands: Bayman Bay in Guanaja, CoCo view, and Anthony’s Key, to name a few.

The population of the entire Bay Islands was 25,000, and the economy at this time was still based entirely on commercial fishing and Remittances from Islanders working as merchant seamen overseas. If someone was to suggest publicly at the time that Bay Islanders would have their culture slowly replaced after it dwindled away, and that favorite family recreational areas like the Pigeon Cays destroyed beyond repair, it would be considered dystopian. As a matter of fact, Michael Duncan’s words and the unnamed official’s prediction have eerily become our reality.

It is true we live in the most prosperous time in Bay Islands History, due to development and tourism, but we should ask ourselves if it is sustainable How long will it take before the hillsides, reefs, and water resources collapse, without adequate environmental oversight and impartial enforcement of the environmental laws? How long will it be before Anglo-Caribbean and Creole cultures drift into the past and are forgotten? Federal environmental laws are in place, however those hired to implement them are mainlanders with no vested interest in long-term environmental management and sustainability. The same applies with the police force who are all mainlanders and have no interest nor dedication to solving crimes or keeping the laws, because it is not their home and they are rotated out regularly.