There’s a chasm as large as any sweep of Caribbean sand between how we’d like to imagine a place became a dream holiday destination and the hard realities of what triggers such an Elysian “discovery.” As we loll on our sun loungers, we like to think that our sun-drenched retreat came to the attention of holiday-makers (but not too many of them of course) due to a discreetly placed travel feature in National Geographic or perhaps through its depiction in a novel by E. M. Forster or Paul Theroux.
The reality is, almost always, not nearly so organic and innocent. For the Caribbean island of Aruba, the shift from backwater to holiday brochure gathered pace in 1985 when the island’s oil refinery temporarily closed.
“The 1985 closing of the Lago (Exxon) and Isla (Shell) oil refineries in Aruba and Curacao…initiated a mass migration of poor and working class people from those ‘overseas countries’ to the Netherlands that has yet to cease,” wrote Michael Sharpe in his analysis of the post-colonial history of Aruba and the Dutch Antilles islands Dialectical Anthropology. “These events have prompted new discussions about the Dutch citizenship, migration, and political incorporation of Dutch Antillean and Aruba’s post-colonial citizens in the Netherlands.”
Though the closure of the refinery turned out to be temporary, it prompted a renewed economic effort to cement this small island, closer to the South American mainland than the United States, as the very definition of a “dream vacation” escape for holidaymakers from North America and Europe.
Colonized by the Dutch in 1636, Aruba has remained inextricably linked with the Netherlands ever since, barring a very brief period of rule by Britain during the Napoleonic Wars. Yet, the Dutch hadn’t raised their flag on an uninhabited island. The Arawak people had been present on Aruba since around 2500 BCE. Albert S. Gatschet, a Swiss American linguist best known for his records of Indigenous languages in California and Oregon, also attempted to document an Arawak culture that persisted in the face of colonial pressures.
“An old Aruba Indian, recently deceased, witnessed at the former Indian encampment at Saboneta the inhumation of a native female in one of the large conical ollas [clay pots],” Gatschet related in an 1886 issue of the Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, “her body being doubled up within the vase, and the head protruding through the orifice.” After that,
[a] smaller urn was…placed upon the head, bottom up, and the whole covered with earth. Several Aruban grottoes and rock-shelters yielded inscriptions and pictographs to the explorer, who considers their style as related to the pictography of the Orinoco and Apure countries. Fragments of pottery, hatchets made of shells and stones, are profusedly [sic] scattered around the ancient encampments of the native Arubans.
A short-lived gold rush in the 1820s brought some prosperity to Aruba’s mostly barren desert interior, but it was the discovery of oil a century later that truly marked the beginnings of the island as we recognize it today.
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Black gold also brought Aruba to the attention of the Nazis, as David J. Bercuson and Holger H. Herwig relate in their 2014 book, Long Night Of The Tankers: Hitler’s War Against Caribbean Oil.
Their discussion of Aruba is framed with an almost prelapsarian depiction of island life in the hours before the German attack:
Sunday, February 15, 1942, dawned bright and clear on Aruba. It was the middle of the dry season: blue skies, brilliant sunshine, perfect weather for picnics and beach parties…. Some headed straight for the pleasures of Rodgers Beach and Baby Beach, both safely inside the reef. Others searched out the fish markets at Savaneta, the island’s oldest town and former capital, for the Sabbath meal of fresh barracuda, crabs, sailfish, wahoo, blue and white marlin, or black and yellow fin tuna. Small wooden boats had come across the Caribbean Sea from Venezuela to sell their tropical bounty: avocados, bananas, guava, kiwi, mangoes, melons and Jalapeño peppers. Many Seroe Colorado residents lunched on fresh crab and fish, followed by lazy strolls on the beaches or along the high ground on the dry, bare island.
Frank Andrews, the Commanding General of the Caribbean Defense Command, was spending the night on Aruba when the Nazi U-Boat attacked. According to Bercuson and Herwig, Andrews’s aide, Captain Robert Bruskin, later recalled that
an explosion knocked me out of bed.… I looked out the windows. Flames were shooting straight up and seemed mountainous. The ship [Pedernales] just seemed to break apart. Flaming oil spread over a wide area under a steady wind. I could hear cries out in the water, which I learned were badly infested with barracudas.
The devastation of the German raid wasn’t fatal to the Aruban oil industry, however, and production after the Second World War increased to the point where, by 1986, just a year after the interruption of the refineries, confidence was high enough for the island to pull out of the Netherlands Antilles federation of Dutch Caribbean territories and obtain separate status within the Kingdom of the Netherlands.
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By 1985–86, the island was already a popular port of call for cruise ships and had tourism infrastructure already in place to a large degree. This explains “the swift and easy transfer to an alternative ‘engine of growth’—Tourism—once the petroleum ‘engine’ had been shut down,” writes economist Karl Theodore. The transfer was further supported by “the swift uncapping of alternative sources of government revenue to replace the discontinued contribution from the oil sector.” Other factors that helped lessen the economic blow included “the early commitment to, and delivery of, fiscal support by the Netherlands Government [and] the controlled reduction of expenditure by the Aruba Government.” Stress levels were also lowered by fairly relaxed immigration laws, Theodore writes, with “the siphoning of some of the unemployed labour force into the Netherlands under a non-restrictive immigration regime” doing much to help the cause. All these factors together led to “the early restoration of business confidence, based on the promising response of the Tourism Sector.”
The 1986 decision to leave the Antilles group was expected to be the precursor to full independence. But, somewhere along the line came a change of heart, as Gert Oostindie and Peter Verton describe in their quantification of the expectations of the locals on the future of Aruba.
“In the 1990s, the Netherlands accepted that the six islands with their 300,000-plus inhabitants will continue to belong to the Kingdom for an indefinite period of time,” they write. Simultaneously,
the Netherlands initiated a policy of close involvement in the administration of the islands. This new policy, as well as the question of mutual relations between the islands, is the subject of heated debates among politicians and administrators on both sides of the ocean.
One Aruban interviewed by Oostindie and Verton suggests why the rush to full blown independence shifted to a state of seemingly permanent abeyance.
“If we need help, the Netherlands is there,” he points out. “Who will help us if we are independent?”
For the time being, Aruba has a “half in–half out” relationship with The Hague: the Netherlands still controls defense and foreign affairs while the Aruban government handles internal affairs, a partnership which seems to be working. Yet, there has been one other attempt at an invasion in the last few years which hasn’t attracted nearly as much attention as the Nazi raid on the oil refinery
In 1999, boa constrictors were sighted on Aruba for the first time. How they arrived there remains a mystery. In an analysis of the “recent occurrence” and diet of Aruba’s boas, John S. Quick, Howard K. Reinert, Eric R. de Cuba, and R. Andrew Odum identified “at least three plausible scenarios.” It’s possible, they think, that “a natural invasion from South America” occurred.
“Aruba lies in rather shallow sea (180 m maximum depth) only 27 km from the Paraguana peninsula of Venezuela where B. constrictor is present,” they write. With the snakes living in such close proximity, they find it
somewhat surprising that B. constrictor did not historically inhabitant Aruba considering the colonizing capabilities of this species for even more distant islands from mainland sources (e.g., Dominica, Isla Margarita, St. Lucia).”
Another port of entry “could have been as stowaways in shipments of trees and other plants from South America” they note. Indeed,
[s]ince the late 1960s, numerous hotels and vacation resorts have been constructed along the leeward coast at the northern end of the island, and most are landscaped with a vast array of imported tropical trees and plants that are not native to the arid island of Aruba.
The third option will sound familiar to anyone who lives in Florida and is therefore thinking about Burmese pythons. It’s possible “that captive B. constrictor, originally held by local residents as pets, were intentionally released or inadvertently escaped into the wild.”
For the time being, it seems that wrangling over reptiles is an issue that’s taking up more time and effort than any renewed attempts to wrestle Aruba away from its European colonizer.
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