Come Again, Elizabeth?

As mainland St. Vincent builds out its tourist industry how do we build, and for whom does the value finally settle?

As VincyMas 2026 approaches and the drums find their rhythm, I find myself thinking about a calypso. I should confess my disqualification up front, I have no ear for music and cannot hold a tune. So I listen past the melody to the words, the lyrics are all I can keep. And the lyrics I keep returning to belong to Sulle, and a 1986 song he called Come Again Elizabeth. A classic, well, a classic for me.

The premise was simple. The Queen came in 1985, and the country was scrubbed, potholes patched, vagrants picked up and placed out of sight and fresh paint flung on every wall her motorcade might pass. Sulle, with the deadpan genius of the calypsonian, drew the only conclusion a watching people could draw. Come again, Elizabeth. Come again, and again because every time you come, we get something fixed. It is a joke, and also one of the most precise pieces of political economy this country has ever produced. Beneath the laughter sits a gentle, persistent question, have we learned to improve our home mostly when a stranger is expected at the door?

I raise it now because the door is opening wide, and for good reason. Mainland St. Vincent, for so long the quiet exception, a place the brochures called “unspoiled” partly because the jets could not land, is at last building out a tourism industry in earnest. The airport at Argyle did what airports do. Stay-over arrivals have crossed a hundred thousand for the first time. More than a billion dollars in hotel investment is promised along the leeward coast, with the prospect of thousands of jobs. After decades of watching the rest of the Caribbean draw prosperity from the visitor while we sat it out, there is nothing wrong with wanting our share. This is welcome, and overdue.

The question is not whether to build. It is how we build and where the value finally settles.

Consider this, some of the new resorts are rising on the grounds of former plantations. The resonance is not lost on the region’s tourism leadership. Only weeks ago, at the Caribbean Travel Marketplace, Antigua and Barbuda’s tourism minister, Charles Fernandez, cautioned that we cannot replace the sugar plantation with the hotel plantation, his concern being leakage, the quiet drain of tourism earnings back out of our economies through imported supplies and foreign ownership. The plantation, after all, was never merely a place. It was an arrangement, a way of organizing land and labour to serve an appetite somewhere else. The buildings change, the real question is whether the arrangement does.

Jamaica Kincaid, writing of her Antigua, put the human cost plainly, the tourist is shown a postcard precisely because he is spared the sight of the lives lived just outside the frame. The beauty is real and so, too often, is the neglect the beauty is arranged to screen.

We know the choreography. The road to the resort is paved, the road to the school waits its turn. The seafront the cruise passengers will stroll is immaculate, the village two streets behind it keeps its standpipe and open drain. We tend, instinctively, to the fence the visitor will pass and let the house behind it wait. Call it development by audience, the habit of building a set, performing on it, and dimming the lights when the guests fly home. It is a habit, not a verdict and habits can be broken.

Here is the insight I most want us to hold, because everything turns on it, we tend to get the causation backwards. We behave as though we must first make the country beautiful for the visitor, and that our own comfort will arrive afterward as a reward. But run it the other way. Build the country for the Vincentian, schools that teach, water that runs, streets a woman can walk at night, hospitals that heal, a seafront made lovely for no better reason than that we deserve loveliness ,and you will have built, almost as a by-product, a country the whole world wants to see. The tourist is the by-product of a good society, not its purpose. Nobody ever had to be persuaded to visit a place whose own people plainly love living there.

The proof is already in the streets. VincyMas was never built for tourists. It was built by us, for us, out of emancipation, out of the irrepressible need of a freed people to take the road and declare themselves alive. We did not design it as a product, we made it because we could not help it. And precisely because it is unmistakably, unapologetically ours, the world now buys a ticket to come and stand inside it. That is the whole argument, in costume and steel. Build it for yourselves, and they will come anyway.

So let me say the plain thing the calypso was too sly to state outright. We deserve nice things too. Not only because a guest is coming. Not only because a cruise ship is due but because we live here. The street light should work because our children walk under it. The beach should be clean because we swim there. The town should be beautiful because it is ours.

Sulle’s punchline was that we should keep inviting Elizabeth back, since she was the only one who could get the road fixed. With great affection for the calypso, and respect for the late Queen, we need not wait on her or her heirs. As the sod turns on that leeward coast, and I hope it turns well, and that the jobs are good ones, the question is not only whether the guest will be pleased. Of course we want our guests pleased, they will be. It is whether we are building a country we ourselves are proud to live in. Do that, build it for us, the way we built VincyMas and the world will want to come anyway.

So come again, if you like. But this time, we will have fixed the road ourselves.

• Professor C. Justin Robinson is Pro Vice Chancellor and Campus Principal, UWI Five Islands Campus