You went to cruise ships ports that are as a rule exceptional..which is why cruise lines go there.....I can assure you that while St Johns and Philipsburg and Georgetown are pretty cute and fairly safe that Kingston, Port Au Prince and to a degree Port of Spain(east) and so forth are not...even Nassau Crime wave here
there is however less dependence class in the West Indies because it has never been instituted like here and there wasn't the money
when I was in the Caribbean frequently from 79-92 I found crime to be worse in Jamaica, Trinidad, Dom Rep, Haiti, USVI...only in town, Cartagena and Barranquilla, Belize City...but not dangerous, Curacao a bit...Aruba none...Antigua a bit too...and Bridgetown was not so great.
Jamaica could be pretty hard in Kingston or St Catherine or Clarendon parishes
This was a long ago but extensive...the more rural the safer and friendlier
I understand cruise ships are now very big business with their own local momentum..like gambling..and probably do contribute so much to their pit stops along the way
Tropical Africa has a worse failure rate than the Caribbean I would say ...but not like Haiti. It's pretty rough. Some here will claim Botswana is all peachy but it's still unsafe compared to here. I worked in Sierra Leone...you had to be there.
Black culture is in failure mode worldwide and aside from a few individual exceptions the future looks bleak and culture wise they are worse off than when we "oppressed" them.
folks denying these glaring truths isn't going to ever help improve things...excusing them and creating dependence only worsens it
frankly I don't think all peoples are equal anyhow and withing groups some rise and some don't and some groups are laden with risers and others not so much
all the world's groups of peoples are on different timelines civilisation wise..we cannot make it all the same overnight but it seems to me we are only making it worse
the whatever bigotry of white paternalism has been replaced by white doubt and submission and acquiescence...is that better?
doesn't look so to me and it cripples us in issues far beyond just black crime and illegitimacy
I have one question though...why do people always have conversation which desire to thwart discussion of black issues by whites but at the same time harp about how what whites do or think about blacks is key to how blacks progress or regress?
Are we saying blacks sink or swim depending on how whites treat them? It seems that way and that is a big chunk of the problem.
During segregation...I was there at the end....black culture functioned good comparatively and didn't need whites to angst over them...is there something to learn there?
Take the segregation, leave the self determination....course folks worldwide self segregate largely...can't change that though our media and entertainment culture have sure tried
note the tone of your post entropy...blacks are failing because we voted for governments that ruined them...like they are pets with no self determination...it's all because of govt policy
yet whites like myself are expected to prevail in spite of govt influence like that foisted on businessmen by Obama...why the difference of perspective?
excusing blacks or denying apparent truths like Detroit or Memphis or NOLA or today's Chicago killingshere yet again does not work
I do agree though that back in my day I detected little black on white hostility in the Caribbean...it reared it's head a bit...never in Haiti though even when I was around violence...I felt it most in Kingston and on Johnny Cay in San Andres Colombia oddly....a place local blacks would have had scant experience with American whites
Thank you for the long and thoughtful post. However we may be mixing two different issues, crime and urban decay.
Crime exists everywhere to some degree. But most urban areas worldwide are getting better in terms of decay, not worse. That is in stark contrast with certain bigger cities in US which are getting worse.
Even in the Caribbean cities are not showing manifestation of urban decay. The American blacks are a unique phenomenon. May be it has something to do with mentality formed by slavery. When slaves got paid nothing for work, human tendency would be to do as little as possible. When I arrived in this country in the early 60’s discrimination against blacks was ubiquitous. I worked in Chicago, and it was the most segregated city in country. My colleagues would sell their house in a hurry when first black family moved in the neighborhood. As more whites fled, property values dived . Having never witnessed such phenomena in the country where I grew up, it was a mystery to me why people would abandon well constructed houses and flee in fear. I am guessing that caused sub-prime people to move in who had no money to keep up the homes and that was beginning of urban decay.