Polack Post: Caribbean Business – Killing The Golden Goose
By Peter Polack
Peter Polack
The mainstay of Caribbean businesses are usually tourism, remittances and some other, but lesser, industries. The tiny tax havens overwhelmingly rely on the financial sector and their underwhelmingly supported tourism pillar. Jamaica was even called Summerland on some postage stamps that are fast becoming obsolete like competent economic thought.
In recent times, events have revealed to attempts to kill the golden goose that reliably laid eggs every year, supporting the nations and even providing an opportunity to recklessly increase budgets, massively, every year.
For Jamaica and other tourist destinations, crime and murder are the greatest evils to tourism and foreign pensioners who have found great acceptance in Central America from Panama to Belize. The missing goose.
In Belize and other tourist stops there have been several instances of tourists being run over by watercraft, Cayman included, or hotel guests being asphyxiated by carbon monoxide such as the Bahamas and Belize. Cayman is even reluctant to post life guards on public beaches shown to reduce drownings in Jamaica. In some cases there have been murders and kidnappings or both.
Foreign visitors not only expect safety, but a vigilant law enforcement system applied to careless deaths.
Mass killings once unknown, are becoming a regular feature of Caribbean tourist destinations only exceeded by the American program of targeted assassinations. To the unaware this is not a novelty given the Colombian decapitation of guerrilla leadership in the past decades by air, land and river, even until recently.
The lady does protest too much, methinks.
Jamaican returning residents could have provided a greater and more sustainable pillar of the economy than remittances, an opportunity washed away by crime, bureaucracy and simple minded political incompetence. They are not alone compared to the Caribbean islands and CARICOM members also beset by joblessness, gang warfare, poor electricity grids and lack of economic diversification. The crime platforms.
It is the same in the tax haven mono economies, one of which recently began to pull in the welcome mat for successors to the same people who invented and grew their tax light economies. The Cayman Islands is a tax haven, that was invented, developed and maintained by mostly British legal professionals who came to Cayman in the independence years and convinced local politicians that a golden goose waited them. This was until recently when massive increases have been announced for their most precious sector. There are many other, cheaper tax havens who have quietly come of the grey list but recognize the real offshore source of this business.
The tax haven economies can disappear at the stroke of the American president’s pen.
Tax haven or flight capital is notoriously sensitive to poorly run countries and can disappear overnight by simply pressing enter.
A dead goose cannot lay eggs.
Notes
https://www.caymancompass.com/2025/11/15/anglin-announces-massive-fee-hikes
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/belize-american-women-died-carbon-monoxide-poisoning
https://www.caymancompass.com/2015/04/17/police-name-tourist-in-fatal-jet-ski-crash
Peter Polack is a former criminal lawyer from the Cayman Islands for several decades. His books are The Last Hot Battle of the Cold War: South Africa vs. Cuba in the Angolan Civil War (2013), Jamaica, The Land of Film (2017) and Guerrilla Warfare: Kings of Revolution (2019). He was a contributor to Encyclopedia of Warfare (2013). His latest book is a compendium of Russian espionage activities with almost five hundred Soviet spies expelled from nearly 100 countries worldwide 1940-88.
His views are his own.
