A few years ago, there was an attempt to give young Curaçaoans a real foothold in tourism — a project built around performing arts and entertainment, with participants learning to build instruments authentic to the island's own culture and then to play them. It produced a handful of music groups still performing that repertoire today. What it never produced was a lasting bridge to the hotels the young performers were meant to play in.
The cooperation simply wasn't there. Hotel management showed little enthusiasm; the project never ran through the tourism board, which may explain why it never caught hold. The result, as he sees it, is a familiar and avoidable one: without a real link between culture and tourism policy, hotels keep offering visitors generic ‘limbo show’ entertainment borrowed from elsewhere in the Caribbean rather than anything that actually belongs to Curaçao. Everyone loses in that arrangement — the tourist gets something inauthentic, and the Curaçaoan performer gets nothing from tourism at all.
A people must be able to identify with its own culture, but the hotels are not open enough to it. There is no communication.
He points to the tumba, a dance with roots stretching back to slavery, as exactly the kind of thing tourists actually want to see — and exactly the kind of thing many Curaçaoans have quietly decided isn't worth showing. There's a widely shared instinct, he says, that whatever comes from outside the island must be better than what's already here. Leave that instinct unchallenged, and pieces of the culture simply devalue themselves out of existence.
Young people feel the gap, even if they rarely say so outright. Events organised specifically for them go under-attended, which he reads less as apathy than as quiet criticism. The ones who do speak up ask pointed questions: why isn't culture taught alongside tourism in schools? Why aren't they given real chances to perform for the visitors their island depends on?
He's wary of how easily young people get written off in the media as a problem to manage rather than an identity still forming, particularly on an island going through both a financial and a cultural crisis at once. Education, he argues, has to do double duty — teaching culture back into a generation that's drifted from it, while also folding real tourism literacy into the curriculum.
Underneath it all sits a deeper resentment few people voice directly: a sense that tourists come to take rather than exchange. Topless sunbathing has pushed many locals off their own beaches; paid entry to others keeps Curaçaoans away almost entirely; residential resorts built for wintering foreigners now occupy some of the island's best land, land locals increasingly can't afford. For a young person already uncertain of their place, he says, that's one more reason emigration starts to look easier than staying.
He's not against tourism — far from it. He'd simply like it built on something sturdier: a population that shows up for the harvest festival and the tumba the way it shows up for carnival, and a policy that treats culture as the foundation of tourism rather than an afterthought to it.
“Tourists want to visit,” he says. “We ourselves do not always realise that this island is worth a visit.”