And it’s a good place to go if you want to retire, on a budget. You can live very nicely there for a little over $ 2,000 a month.

Until recently it was good place to go if you were a lionfish. A lot of them went down to the area three or four years ago and they’ve been gobbling up local fish stocks.

So Honduran fishermen are training sharks to hunt the unwelcome guest. Suffice to say, the island may no longer be a good place to retire if you’re a lionfish.

The answer to our quiz and the place where sharks are acquiring a taste for lionfish is the island of Roatan.

Photographer Antonio Busiello took a series of stunning pictures of the shark-training program near Roatan.

Sculpture marking the spot where Trujillo was shot (Photo: Tim Mansel)

But let’s get back to the 20th century. Dominicans haven’t forgotten Trujillo’s iron-fisted rule – nor his many victims. There’s now a museum opening dedicated to their memory. The timing is no coincidence: Trujillo was assassinated 50 years ago this weekend. He was gunned down by a group of men disgusted by the barbarity of his 30-year-rule. The new museum’s located in the heart of the Dominican capital we want you to name.

The answer is Santo Domingo. Some Dominicans are actually nostalgic for the days of Trujillo. Reporter Tim Mansel looks at competing memories.

Luisa de Peña shows me around the Museum of Resistance in the days before the opening. The museum, which opens in Santo Domingo on May 30th, includes photographs, documents and instruments of torture. The museum commemorates people who challenged 20th century Dominican dictators — in particular, Rafael Trujillo.

Antonio Imbert was one of Trujillo's killlers (Photo: Tim Mansel)

De Peña said in one two-week period in 1937, Trujillo ordered the massacre of 17,000 Haitians. He also eliminated political opponents.

“He would not only kill the person who opposed his regime. He killed the whole family,” she said.

Fifty years ago this week, Trujillo was shot dead after a dramatic car chase along a stretch of highway leading out of the capital. There’s a large monument that marks the spot where the gun battle took place. It ended with Trujillo’s body sprawled across the highway.

One of the men who carried out the CIA-assisted plot was Antonio Imbert, who was driving the car that day. Imbert is 90 now. He remembers pulling in front of Trujillo’s chauffeur-driven Chevrolet.

“Then we started shooting. And he came then in front of my car, so I shot him again,” Imbert said and added that he doesn’t regret what he did. “The only way to get rid of him was kill him.”

Imbert was the only one of Trujillo’s killers to escape reprisal. He hid in a friend’s house and emerged six months later a national hero.

Ajusticiamiento

The way Trujillo died is not controversial in the Dominican Republic, said Bernardo Vega, a historian and former ambassador to Washington. Dominicans even have a term for it — “ajusticiamiento” — a word that contains the Spanish word for justice.

“We Dominicans react very negatively when the people who killed Trujillo are called assassins,” Vega said, “because in Spanish, assassin is a very negative term. So ‘ajusticiamiento’ is a way to give it a positive twist. These are heroes who did this killing, and it was a good thing to do.”

Not everyone sees it that way. Some Dominicans feel nostalgia for the Trujillo era and for Trujillo himself. Jose Miguel Ventura said the country is plagued by crime and drugs, and it needs a strongman again, someone who will bring law and order.

“Trujillo was a good dictator,” he said, adding that the country doesn’t have crime like it does now.

Trujillo admirer Jose Miguel (Photo: Tim Mansel)

The organizers of the new Resistance museum want to make sure that that those times don’t return.

“Our slogan, like in other memorial museums, is never again,” Luisa de Peña said.

Pigeon Point (Photo: Reinhard Jahn)

You could get there quickly from the Northeastern Coast of Venezuela. Christopher Columbus passed by. The country gained independence in 1962 and thanks to its large reserves of oil and natural gas, this country has one of the wealthiest economies in the Caribbean.

The island also attracts visitors with warm beaches, plenty of beautiful wildlife under the sea, and festive Calypso music. So, where are we?

Tobago, one of the two main islands that make up the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago, is the answer. It’s also the site of the BBC’s Caribbean Service, which is making its final broadcast today. The World’s Adeline Sire speaks with the BBC’s Debbie Ransome there about signing off for the last time.

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• BBC closes its Caribbean Service
• World in Words: At the BBC, fewer languages and less influence?
• Tobago Tourism Association

McDonald Bailey (left), former West Indian athelete and coach, and Trevor McDonald, sports commentator of the BBC Caribbean Service in 1970 © BBC

The cuts: five BBC language services will close (Serbian, Albanian, Macedonian, Portuguese for Africa and English for the Caribbean). Seven more language services, including Mandarin Chinese and Hindi, will be cut back from radio to internet only. A further six services will stop transmitting on short wave.

It means an estimated 30 million fewer BBC listeners worldwide. Will people migrate to the web and to English language news, or will the BBC – and its news values – become less influential?

There was a huge amount of coverage of this story. Most people were critical of the cuts with the British government — rather than the BBC — receiving the blame (here and here for example). But in Britain there is a BBC-despising minority which offered its own spin.

For the pod, I picked some of the best pieces of the BBC’s own coverage: interviews with the director of BBC global news Peter Horrocks, former World Service director John Tusa, and British foreign minister William Hague. Hague heads the Foreign Office, which has presided over the BBC World Service.

I also interviewed Debbie Ransome, head of the axed Caribbean Service. The Caribbean Service could be seen as some broadcast throwback to the days when the World Service was known as the BBC Empire Service. But Ransome says the service is unique in that it is regional, and so rises above the interests of any single country. She says the other broadcast media in the region either take political sides, or play a lot of music and not much else.

So which global radio services will move in to replace the BBC? The pod’s last interview is with journalism professor George Brock. He says that services run by the Chinese and Russian governments are likely to benefit, especially in Africa and Asia. And they don’t have the same news values as the BBC. Where the Beeb is remarkably successful at maintaining its editorial independence, Brock says the Russian and Chinese operations are mainly mouthpieces of their respective governments.

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Bush House in London headquarters the BBC office (Photo: Matt Biddulph)

The BBC World Service began broadcasting in 1932 as the BBC Empire Service. Now, it is heard in 31 languages in addition to English. That’s about to change, though.

Wednesday the BBC World Service, which co-produces this program, outlined dramatic cuts. It represents a fundamental shift for one of the world’s best-known broadcasters.

The World Service is paid for by a grant from the British government, and that grant is being cut as part of overall government spending reductions. Wednesday Peter Horrocks, the director of BBC’s Global News, said it means losing a vast audience.

“I’m very sad to say that we estimate that about 30 million people out of the 180 million who use the World Service every week will lose the World Service as a result of these changes.”

Services in five languages — Serbian, Albanian, Macedonian and Portuguese for Africa and English for the Caribbean — will close completely.

Radio broadcasts in Mandarin, Russian, Vietnamese and a number of other languages will stop, though there will be online and cell phone services. Short wave broadcasts will be severely reduced, and some English language programs will be dropped. 


In the House of Commons Wednesday, opposition Labor Member of Parliament Denis McShane accused Foreign Secretary William Hague of ruining the World Service.

“He’s doing, in part, what no dictator has ever achieved,” McShane said, “silencing the voice of the BBC, the voice of Britain, the voice of democracy, the voice of balanced journalism, at a time when it is more needed than ever.”

But Hague said it is past time for the World Service to change its ways.

“The BBC is not immune from public spending constraints,” he said. “While any closures may be regretted, they would not have been necessary at all were it not for the inherited BBC pension deficit and the vast public deficit inherited from the previous government.”

World Service managers said the cuts are painful. Yet even they admit changing technology makes some services almost obsolete. The BBC’s Liliane Landor noted that the Russian service has an illustrious past, but she pointed to Monday’s suicide bombing at a Moscow airport as an example of why radio no longer matters so much in Russia.

“When these attacks happened, do you think people were thinking, I’ve got to wait to hear what the Russian Service has to say on radio?” Landor said. “No. People went immediately to a website and this is where they expected to find the latest information.”

That is one reason for the switch to distributing news via the internet or cell phone. Radio will still be heard in many parts of the world.

But a shrinking World Service will be forced to pick and choose just who hears what the BBC has to say.

• Gorbachev listens while being held captive
• 75 years of BBC World Service history
• The impact of the BBC World Service

Hawksbill turtle diving off Cozumel Island (flickr photo: Thomas Wiborg)

And offshore is the second-longest barrier reef in the world, after Australia’s Great Barrier Reef. It’s an undersea chain of coral reefs and rich sea floor that surrounds several hundred cayes, or islands. The World’s David Leveille tells us how this Central American country is taking a major step to protect its barrier reef.
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The 500 mile long Mesoamerican Barrier Reef runs from Cancun at the tip of Mexico’s Yucutan Peninsula all the way to Honduras. It’s considered one of the richest areas of marine life in the Caribbean. And smack in the middle is the Central American nation of Belize – that’s our answer.

Charles Darwin once noted the”remarkable” diversity of sea plants and animals in the Mesoamerican Reef. And now a century later, Belize has stepped up to protect its 200 mile stretch of the reef. Last week Belize imposed a complete and permanent ban on a type of fishing known as bottom trawling in all of its waters.

Margot Stiles, a marine scientist with the environmental group Oceana, says bottom trauling can be extremely destructive:

“Some people compare it to deforestation because not only do you catch the fish but anything that is on the bottom is knocked over by the weighted nets that get dragged across the sea floor so that includes coral or other sea floor habitats or other fish that you might not want that end up getting killed or thrown away”.

That haul often includes sea turtles, and marine mammals. The trauling ban goes into effect December 31st on the barrier reef and all surrounding areas of seafloor out 200 miles into the Caribbean. The government plan will also buy out a local fleet of big shrimp trawlers.

Stiles says that in turn should also help some other local residents, Belize’s small scale fishermen: “The traul impacts on the habitat and overfishing problems are now going to be ended and there’s really going to be direct benefit to all the people fishing from canoes and fishing hook and line and need access to those reef fish”.

The trauling ban is intended keep the Belize Barrier reef a healthy eco-system for fish and coral. But Stiles says a healthy reef also protects Belize’s reputation as a top diving and snorkeling destination:

“On a single day if you go out of southern belize near where the traul vessels had operated in the past you can spend the morning looking at tiny reef fish one of my favorites is electric blues stripes dive in and out of crevices or a whale shark spawning fish its just an unusual place migratory animals whales and dolphins coming thru. Alot of people sayy the Carribean is compleetely lost and trashed and there’s nothing left there, but Belize still has a little piece of healtthy reef.”

Stiles says many coastal areas around the world are starting to reconsider whether destructive fishing practices are the best way to get the most food for the most people. With its bottom trawling ban Belize joins Venezuela and Palau – they’ve also stopped the practice to protect their piece of underwater turf.

Read the Transcript
This text below is a phonetic transcript of a radio story broadcast by PRI’s THE WORLD. It has been created on deadline by a contractor for PRI. The transcript is included here to facilitate internet searches for audio content. Please report any transcribing errors to theworld@pri.org. This transcript may not be in its final form, and it may be updated. Please be aware that the authoritative record of material distributed by PRI’s THE WORLD is the program audio.

JEB SHARP:  Alison Hayes is Oxfam’s Policy Manager for Haiti.  She is in New York.  Alison, first before we talk about this survey of Haitians needs that Oxfam has been doing, just your reaction to that story.

ALISON HAYES:  I think the story sums up the desperation quite well.  Although the rain is due to start in April, the last few days when I left they had already started and the golf club camp that your colleague referenced is one of the worst examples of what can happen.  They built on a steep slope without adequate drainage and sanitation in the camp.  Everything runs downhill.  People at the bottom of that hill are in the worst situation and it is an area that has had landslides before, so this is one of the top priority sites for us to relocate to safer sites.

SHARP: Now Oxfam has been really pushing Haitians on what they need.  You’ve done a survey.  What are the most urgent needs now that Haitians are voicing?

HAYES: One of the most urgent needs is for shelter, for homes as your colleague referenced.  And the number one priority was for employment.  Jobs, jobs, jobs.  We know that before the earthquake there were one million unemployed in Port au Prince alone.  In the recovery effort coming up there will be lots of opportunities for employment whether it’s cash for work projects such as Oxfam and others are doing, paying people to help clear the rubble which will also help to create more space in the temporary camps.  And also, importantly, in the agricultural sector.  It’s been historically underfunded and under supported by the government and yet it accounts for 60 to 75 percent of the employment opportunities.  So we really need to support employment opportunities in the countryside because it will provide the employment, it will also reduce the dependency on food aid, which has been crippling to Haiti.

SHARP: And related to this, one striking thing from the poll was that it showed how little trust Haitians had in their own government and how much they feel NGOs are in a better position to help them.  But what are the implications of that going forward?

HAYES: I think it can be taken a couple of ways.  The way that Oxfam would like to explain it is that this is now a moment where we can change that lack of confidence.  If we can work with the government to facilitate them, to take more of a leadership role, and to be providing basic services to their people in place of international agencies, that would help Haitians to have more confidence in their government.  If the government were coming forward sooner and louder with their plans for the recovery, for example saying where the relocation sites are, that would help give more confidence to the people.  We want to take this as an opportunity to change that negative perception that some of the Haitians we interviewed felt.  The government can do that.  They have to be as transparent and accountable as possible.  And at the same time we, the international community here, are calling for that need to hold ourselves up to the same standards that we’re demanding of the government.

SHARP: Alison Hayes, there is a very important conference coming up.  What needs to happen there for Haiti?

HAYES: At the conference tomorrow, there needs to be a long term donor commitment to the future of Haiti.  The government need to be empowered to lead that program. If something is imposed from the outside, whether it’s a multi-donor trust fund or any recovery program that is not Haitian led and owned, it will not take root in the country.  Haiti is rightly a very proud country and very sensitive to perceived external interference.  So they really need to be leading it.  The donors need to give long term commitments so that the government can plan and budget wisely.  It needs to be the start of a process of dialogue with Haitian civil society groups who have been neglected in this process so far.  One of the reasons we did the survey is because the government has not been consulting it’s own people adequately.  So our survey and other things that we have done have been trying to be a small microphone for the Haitian voices into the donor conference tomorrow.

SHARP: Alison Hayes is Oxfam’s Policy Manager for Haiti.  She spoke to us from New York.  Thank you very much.

HAYES: Thank you.

Copyright ©2009 PRI’s THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI’s THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World’s Permissions Coordinator at theworld@pri.org.

Port-au-Prince, Haiti (Photo: ROBERTO SCHMIDT/AFP/Getty Images)

Given the scale of destruction left behind by the earthquake in Haiti, it might be hard to imagine a time when tourist travel to the Caribbean nation might be possible again. But in our Talking Travel podcast this week, Lonely Planet’s Paul Clammer and Robert Reid discuss how tourism might fit in to any future plan for Haiti’s recovery. Paul, who writes Lonely Planet’s Haiti guide, says the cruel irony is that, in many ways, Haiti was on the brink of becoming a truly up-and-coming tourist destination for tourists before the earthquake hit. He and Robert also assess Royal Caribbean’s decision to continue to dock their cruise ships in the northern Haitian port of Labadie in the aftermath of the disaster. They end with a look at the Haitian people and their resilience, and whether the earthquake has changed outside perceptions of Haitians and their nation.

Here are some helpful links from this episode:

• Lonely Planet: Haiti
• Paul Clammer’s Haiti update
• The Guardian newspaper: Cruise company boss says tourists helping Haiti quake relief effort
• CNN: Before quake, signs of hope for Haiti tourism
• New York Times: 2007 article on tourism in Haiti
• Helping in Haiti: Lonely Planet’s Thorn Tree travel forum
• Citadelle Laferrière: World Heritage Site
• New Orleans: Habitat for Humanity

Remember, you can subscribe to the podcast via RSS and iTunes. You can find The World on Facebook here, and Lonely Planet’s Facebook page here.

We’re both on Twitter, too: @pritheworld, and @lonelyplanet.

• www.calypsorosediva.com
• Wikipedia: Calypso Rose

Read the Transcript
This text below is a phonetic transcript of a radio story broadcast by PRI’s THE WORLD. It has been created on deadline by a contractor for PRI. The transcript is included here to facilitate internet searches for audio content. Please report any transcribing errors to theworld@pri.org. This transcript may not be in its final form, and it may be updated. Please be aware that the authoritative record of material distributed by PRI’s THE WORLD is the program audio.

MARCO WERMAN: All across the United States there are celebrities.  Not the kind of people who regularly grace Hollywood gossip shows or people magazine.  These are people who are celebrities in their home companies.  But move to relative amenity and the hope of a better life here in America. For today’s Global Hit I would like to introduce you to such a person.  She lives in New York City and is a musical legend in her native Trinidad and Tobago.  Along with Harry Belafonte she introduced Calypso to listeners far beyond the Caribbean.  I have the chance to meet McArtha Sandy Lewis earlier this year.  I know not exactly a household name but her stage name should ring a bell.

CALYPSO ROSE: I am McArtha Linda Sandy Lewis otherwise known as Calypso Rose.

WERMAN: And McArtha, I understand was a name that was given to you because somebody in your family must have admired Douglas Macarthur the famous American general.

CALYPSO: My mother.

WERMAN: What did she like about him?

ROSE: In the late 30′s and early 40′s, I was born in 1940.  When the war was going on it appears that General Macarthur they used to be dropping leaflets in Tobago.  I was born in Tobago.  About what was going on in the war.  And at night the planes would come and drop the leaflets and drop food and rice and all different things so she loved that.  So she says this baby I’m carrying if it’s a boy I’m going to call him Macarthur.  And if it’s a girl I’m going to call her McArtha.  M-C-A-R-T-H-A.  And there I came.  So that’s how come I got the name McArtha.  [LAUGH]

WERMAN: So Americans were dropping rice and food and leaflets during Trinidad and Tobago during the war.  Was that to win the hearts and minds of the Trinidadians?

ROSE: Of the Caribbean people [LAUGH] yes.

WERMAN: So tell me where the name Calypso Rose came from.

ROSE: It was given to me by a tent manager.  When I see a tent manager in Trinidad and Tobago they have what you call the Calypso tent.  The Calypso tent where I put kind of a season, a lot of Calyposians go and do their new compositions.  And the two tent managers they say, “Now we gonna change your name.  And we go call you from today Calypso Rose.”  Calypso is identifying the island of Trinidad and Tobago and Rose is the mother of all flowers.

WERMAN: A lot of entertainers think long and hard about picking a stage name.  You were given a stage name were you happy with it?

ROSE: Oh yes, I was happy, indeed I was happy.

WERMAN: I think a lot of Americans think about Calypso and they think steel pan and they think parties.  But Calypso has a very strong social, kind of observational tradition.

ROSE: It has been.  Years ago before I start singing “you can buy news people” so the Calypsonians they used to create and write Calypso so we could hear.  And say, “Oh, like the envision [FOREIGN LANGUAGE] Pharaoh when the world was greener and all this thing with  this be writing Calypso and then we used to know what was going on in the other world.  But now that things have changed immensely that the [SOUNDS LIKE] media for the public.

WERMAN: Why not?  What changed?

ROSE: They are not writing anything more to make the public aware consciously of what is happening.  In politically, economically, or Calypso to make you laugh like that.  Look, I have written a lot and lot of calypso’s and one of the calypso’s I’ve been questioned lately, “A Man Is a Man”.  Why did you write that calypso “A Man Is a Man”?  2 girls in an argument, an argument on the pavement, 2 little girls were in an argument, the argument on the pavement.  They been arguing about a man.  Whatever will it be like when they become a woman.  So I join the conversation, they asked me to give them my opinion, so I tell them look, a man is a man.  The man is [SOUNDS LIKE] faced like a frying pan.  Oh be a man oh man a cool man.  Any man, could give you satisfaction.”  Now this is something that I have created and by bringing it to reality people are saying, “Oh you know that is true.”  Women are speaking true of man, so why must you pick and choose a man, when a man is a man?  So I said there’s no distinction.  Whether the man be one foot or one hand he could still make you happy.  [LAUGH]

WERMAN: That’s a very modern feminist statement.

ROSE: Thank you very much.  Today Calypso tend to have lost all of those flavors.  The people still want Calypso and that is what I intend to give them ’till I die.  Give them Calypso.  “[FOREIGN LYRICS IN CALYPSO SONG]”

WERMAN: That is Caribbean legend Calypso Rose, I spoke with her in her apartment in Jamaica, New York where she’s lived for the past 26 years.

ROSE: “When Calypso’s rose was small, mommy, mommy used to make me [INAUDIBLE] says before you get my ring she will choose the man for me.  Take the women out because every man in the hospital she said, she can’t [INAUDIBLE] where I tell she a man is a man…”

Copyright ©2009 PRI’s THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI’s THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World’s Permissions Coordinator at theworld@pri.org.

Photo by Lonely Planet's Rachel Lewis

For the second episode of our new travel podcast, The World and Lonely Planet take you to a country where Americans are technically barred from traveling – Cuba. OK, technically, it’s not the US State Department that stops US citizens from going, but rather the US Treasury Department that makes it a crime for Americans to spend money there. Read more here. The travel ban has been in the news again recently. Critics and supporters of the ban were on Capitol Hill for hearings on lifting the ban. Critics contend that allowing Americans to freely travel, and spend money, in Cuba will only line to pockets of the government, specifically Fidel Castro and his brother Raul, who is now Cuba’s president. Has anything changed under Raul’s rule? That’s the topic of a new report by Human Rights Watch, entitled “New Castro, Same Cuba.” In our podcast, you can hear Lonely Planet‘s Robert Reid and Tom Hall talk about the practicalities of traveling to Cuba, and about the millions of Europeans who can and do spend their money on the island. You’ll also hear about how online travel company Orbitz has launched an Open Cuba campaign to get the US travel ban lifted. So, would more person-to-person contact between American tourists and Cuban locals help to ease tensions between the two governments? It’s a tricky and tantalizing question, as you can hear in our latest podcast.

Our music this week is a track called ” El 4-5-6″ by a group called Los Brito, from the album Si Para Usted, Vol. 2.

Can you name the island yet?? Ok maybe a couple more clues are in order: So, this island is famous for its Blue Mountains that are home to Blue Mountain coffee.

At the western end of the island there’s Bluefields Beach where you can grab an ice cold Red Stripe to quench your thirst.

That’s the local beer. It goes best with something called jerk.

Photo: Caroline Ford / Wikipedia

We’ll stop in for lunch when we return with the answer…

It’s a roadside stand along the southern coast of Jamaica. Jamaica is the answer to our quiz today.

This is where you’ll find Omar, a 26 year old Jamaican. He’s standing over the fire in a sawed off oil drum. Omar’s cooking up traditional Jamaican jerk.

Omar cooking Jamaican jerk. Photo: Mariana Schroeder

Reporter Mariana Schroeder stopped in for lunch and sent us this postcard:

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