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Tuesday, 17 July 2007

Going through my Grenada pics to find shots of the ESPN guys (see entry below), I realized that I haven't been very good about posting stuff from the latter half of the West Indies trip. So to break up the monotony of me thanking most sentient beings and a few inanimate objects lately, I've knocked a few pics down to web size and present them here for your amusement before LoveFest '07 continues. (I still owe you Barbados, more Dominica, some Martinique, and gods know what else.)

So, a few glances at Grenada, which the US alleged in 1983 was building a communist airstrip, although the Grenadian government said it was primarily for increasing the tourist trade.

After landing at said airstrip, the first thing you notice is that said tourist trade is doing surprisingly well, despite the brutal 2004 impact of Hurricane Ivan, which damaged up to 90% of the structures on the island and wiped most of the nutmeg export crop into oblivion. Looking around downtown, you'd be forgiven if you didn't even notice.

With all the newly repaired tiled roofs, you'd also be forgiven if you thought you were on the Mediterranean and not the Caribbean. The place is spectacular, although if you look around a little, signs of the disaster are visible everywhere, usually in the form of missing roofs. Several churches are full-on Coventry in their not-there-itude.

The wipeout was perhaps most noticeable at the cricket ground itself, which you enter by walking directly through what's left of the previous national stadium.

The fancy new Grenada National Stadium is spectacular, the result of an infusion of hundreds of millions of yuan from the People's Republic of China.

(When did Red China become interested in cricket, you ask? When they realized that the UN votes of small Caribbean nations could be bought on the cheap, according to most Grenadians I spoke to. China and Taiwan have been bidding for West Indian goodwill ever since.)

I won't bore you with excessive amounts of sport here. But I gotta post pics of two of the greatest bowlers in cricket history. Here's Glenn McGrath, who has taken the most test wickets of any pace bowler in history, taking the very last catch of his career (he retired at the end of the tournament):

And here's Muttiah Muralitharan, the Sri Lankan spinner who will surely retire having taken more wickets than any bowler who ever lived. Murali's signature is the "doosra," which requires him to flip and rotate his wrist at a speed and angle that most human beings would be wise not to attempt. Here's Murali about to unspool his arm at high speed in full-on doosra mode:

Meanwhile, with Pakistan and India long eliminated, fans from the subcontinent weren't feeling particularly picky.

Still, there was reason to cheer. One of Murali's teammates, Farveez Maharoof, even had a maiden over. Several of them, actually.

This isn't actually as personal as it sounds; it just means he bowled well. What Farveez did after the match was his own business. That said, however, cricket-as-sex metaphors were adopted nationwide as part of a pro-condom, anti-HIV campaign whose posters were visible everywhere.

Note the complete lack of sermonizing about "not playing" or "saving yourself for the right batsman" or "keeping your ball shiny" or whatever. Good for them.

Also good for them: coming up with the most unlikely product name I believe I have ever seen.

I haven't used the words ecstasy and cholesterol together in one sentence since I gave up Philly cheesesteaks.

Meanwhile, Grenadians were deeply concerned about the tournament's impact on the island, given the possibility that a sudden influx of tens of thousands of visitors would further ravage a nation of only about 20,000 households. At one point, Grenada's government considered bringing cruise ships in to act as hotels for the overflow and even asking residents across the island to turn their homes into makeshift beds and breakfasts.

For one measure of how easily overwhelmed the island might have been, here's the Sendall Tunnel, the primary traffic artery from one side of downtown St. George's to the other:

That's meant to accommodate pedestrian traffic, too, as I soon found out the fun way.

Fortunately, the island held, even when sometimes it seemed the roads would never empty of fans.

Out of morbid curiosity, I climbed the hill up to Fort George, where Prime Minister Maurice Bishop and fourteen of his supporters were lined up and summarily executed during the 1983 unrest.

Somehow the basketball net seems to imply that many of the locals have moved on.

Surprisingly, though, the folks I spoke with -- at least the ones old enough to remember the tumult firsthand -- seemed split about 50-50 as to who the good guys were. In any case, there are more pressing issues, including the increasing money flowing in from real estate investors intending to turn Grenada into one big large high-end development for Europeans with (I like to imagine) high ends, large and developed.

The big question seems to be over how to manage the influx so the locals all benefit properly and aren't just turned into day labor on their own island.

It's surely not for me to say, but given the island's recent wipeout at the hands of nature, and considering the huge interest in the island from three global powers (not to mention Cuba and Venezuela, who also see Grenada as a possible source of leverage), retaining any sense of Grenadianismo (or whatever it's called) looks like a heck of a challenge.

Incidentally, back in the hotel, you find Cuban TV just as easily as you find CNN or FOX News.

The commie pinko broadcasts are actually a lot like their imperialist running dog counterparts -- not just in production techniques, scheduling, etc., but even in the notable framing and repetition of single news stories (not information, but stories, with good guys and bad clearly drawn for the viewer, eliminating any pesky need to think), browbeating the audience to maximize emotional response. (That day's One Big Story in Cuba was the US release of a guy wanted by Havana for attacking airliners and tourist hotels. Constant message: enemy big and bad; homeland valiant good underdog. This got similar play to your typical One Big Story in the US, such as the current assertion that Al-Qaeda is back and we should all be very frightened. Constant message: enemy big and bad; homeland valiant good underdog.)

Strange thought: after a generation of TV constantly repackaging itself into bigger faster louder kapowie, I can't even imagine what somebody simply reading a long series of dispassionate actual national news stories would look like, in almost any country. Zing! Bang! Sex! Death! Shiny!

The biggest difference between Cuban and US TV, actually, seemed to be Cuba's complete lack of advertising, which is even more extensive than you might realize -- not just no paid commercials and no product placement, but an absolute abolition of any glimpse of corporate logos or images of any kind. This was surprisingly disorienting, even to my own jaded eyes. I assumed I had realized just how bathed in logos our existence always is. Nope. This was the visual equivalent of a distant jackhammer stopping, leaving you pondering how much noise you usually live with.

Still, I never thought anyone could out-flag FOX News. I stand corrected.

After a while, Flag Lady went away and was replaced by Hugo Chavez of Venezuela, doing his red shirted fist thumping thing.

You kind of know where he's heading after the first three hours or so. Eventually, I flipped the channel over to a broadcast of I Dream of Jeannie from Paraguay.

I mention this because, hey, I Dream of Jeannie from Paraguay. I stuck with this for the night because the Spanish was easier to understand. Todavía estoy aprendiendo. Lo siento. Plus, preferring this over Hugo Chavez slowly droning about matters of international import makes me a total hypocrite for grouching about the packaging of news. So there. Whee!

Anyhow, back to Grenada. Despite numerous hardships, the island may have a great future. Certainly the government's recent ability to actually use post-Ivan foreign aid, rather than allow it to slip away via corruption or incompetence, is encouraging. And sure, Grenada may yet again become a mere pawn in superpower affairs. But maybe that's a ways off. The local office of the Organization of American States is still located upstairs in the back of a strip mall -- right under Glorious Hut -- and the sign isn't even spelled correctly.

While I was there, I got curious and tried to find out just how glorious a hut can be. Unfortunately, it was closed. So there may be even more glorious stuff in Grenada than I can yet imagine.