Places in the Sun

WE had to cut corners, but we did it," boasts Dick Clarage, manager of Clarages, the newest hotel on Jamaica's fashionable Montego Bay. "I knocked lunch off the menu, cut the plush stuff to the bone." By such economies, Clarage last week managed to offer the bargain rate of $42 a day for a double room, and the tourists crowded in. This year, throughout the Caribbean, which is the U.S.'s favorite winter vacation land, tariffs are stiff and takers plentiful. More than 1,000,000 tourists will visit the area, spending $260 million. "Good heavens, yes," said a Manhattan travel agent last week, "it's the biggest year ever--up 25%."

The hearty core of the crowd is made up of Miami Beach veterans, propelled farther south by their own growing prosperity and a taste for the new. With conspicuously unnecessary mink stoles in hand and taste buds braced for rum swizzles, they are descending in the greatest numbers on Puerto Rico (which expects a 300,000-tourist, $50 million year), the Bahamas (260.000), Jamaica (200,000) and the Virgin Islands (180,000). And since they expect the new to be somewhat familiar, a gaudy burst of accommodations is going up to greet them.

Banana Daiquiris. In Jamaica, the 176-room Arawak Hotel, built just two years ago, is already outpaced by this year's Marrakech, which boasts 200 Grecian-style rooms with gold-tasseled pillows and family-sized sunken bathtubs; seven less flamboyant hotels will open in Jamaica this month. Off-the-track Ponce, on Puerto Rico's south coast, is finishing a new five-story, 170-room hotel of sweeping balconies and the standard airy grillwork. In the Bahamas, where hotel space is at a premium, buyers are snapping up cooperative apartments.

The annual competition for elaborate drinks is also on, with honors likely to go to Jamaica's new 128-bed Colony, which features a "mad concoction of rum, kirsch and fresh strawberries." The Virgin Islands offer nothing more inventive than a banana daiquiri, but at St. Thomas' new Black Patch Bar customers get a free, sequined pirate's eye patch to go with their drinks. In Puerto Rico's capital, San Juan customers are jamming Nicki's Downbeat Club, where the featured item on the menu is the "jazzwich," a sandwich of pastrami and corned beef.

Discovery Voyage. With the coming of the crowd, the more practiced set of Caribbean habitues has set off on a determined search for the unspoiled and the undiscovered--often to find that the undiscovered is jammed. Samples: P: More than 80 airline flights a week touch down on Merida, Yucatan, carrying tourists headed for the two luxury hotels in the area. The tourists, happily mixing fun and archaeology, take on arduous guided treks through the jungle to the splendid, empty Maya ruins of Uxmal (pop. 800 years ago: 160,000) and Chichen Itza. Most talked-about features of the trip: the precipitous pyramids and a tour of a hall called "The Nunnery," adorned with a long row of phallic symbols. Also magnetic: a 60-ft.-deep well, an astonishing hole in Yucatan's flat lime stone cap, where (the guide says) the Mayans sacrificially drowned virgins laden with gold jewelry.

P:At La Parguera, a quiet (pop. 400), unspoiled Puerto Rican fishing village across the island from bustling San Juan, the dedicated fishermen staying at the small but first rate Villa Parguera set forth each dawn for handsome catches of tarpon, sailfish and marlin.

P: A weird bargain this year is Fidel Castro's Cuba, which rebates one-half of plane fares (cutting the round trip from New York to $71.50) and slashes hotel rates so that $14.95 buys three days and two nights with one fancy dinner and floor show. But guests must endure anti-U.S. sloganeering in a country that is armed to the teeth; a bellhop in the Hotel Nacional, proclaiming his loyalty to Castro, recently led two tourists to a broom closet and proudly showed them the submachine gun that he keeps there for emergencies. Most cruise ships have boycotted Havana, and the 26.900-ton M.S. Italia last week canceled all five stops there this season.

P: Some 140 miles away from tourist-packed Montego Bay, Canadian Biscuit Millionaire Garfield Weston next month opens without fanfare the 18 cottages that make up Frenchman's Cove, screened from the view of the vulgar by a wall of hand-cut stones lapped by a well-bred surf. Frenchman's Cove (formerly known as Fairy Hill) shuns advertising, carefully picks the guests who will occupy its lime stone cottages, where the roofs are of copper and the furnishings run to mahogany and Dior blue. No car will pass the portals (but golf carts are furnished), and no umbrellas will be allowed to clutter the white sand beach where Princess Margaret once enjoyed an "unforgettable" picnic. "We want Mr. U.S. Steel to feel his house is his very own," explains Weston's son Granger, who is in charge. The chef has been imported from Weston's London department store and gourmet shop, Fortnum & Mason's. The tab: $2,500 per couple for two weeks, after which, says Granger Weston, "they will forget about money entirely; everything they can think of will be on the house: a private plane, champagne for breakfast, anything." P:In Haiti, seasoned guests jam Port-au-Prince's Grand Hotel Oloffson, a ramshackle, gingerbread palace built in 1885 by onetime Haitian President Tiresias Sam and now run by a squat, moody French expatriate named Roger Coster, who married a Haitian girl, gave up freelance photography, moved to the island in 1948. Coster's rates are moderate (from $24 a day double, with meals), his walls are lined with the world's best collection of Haitian primitive art, and his weekly floor show, which he calls "a melange of art and sex, satisfying to the soul and pleasing to the senses," stars the best folk singers and dancers in Haiti. The principal danger for tourists is Coster himself, who openly reviles the "Coca-Cola crowd" (budget-minded tourists), the "spaghetti" (most middle-aging matrons) and the "Martians" (cruiseship visitors). But Coster will stay up all night with favored guests (Charles Addams, Gwen Verdon, Sir John Gielgud) telling tall tales and pouring free drinks.

Waiting List. Confident of the push of U.S. prosperity and growing leisure time, other islands up and down the Leeward and Windward group are waiting to be discovered. Land values on St. Croix in the Virgins have skyrocketed to $10,000 a beachfront acre. The growing popularity of chartered yachts (which often cost less per person than first-class hotel rooms) is spreading the boom through the desert islands from Deadman's Chest to Fallen Jerusalem, from Great Ragged to Monks Island and the Witnesses.

Last week, while the stoles and diamond pinkies glowed and flashed at Montego Bay, stern-chinned U.S. tourists were also riding rowboats through the surf to Saba, a 5-sq.-mi. Dutch-owned dot in the Lesser Antilles, where the only attraction is a tropical rain forest and a quaint Dutch village set inside the crater of an extinct volcano. Said a tourist official in Trinidad, which is moving from the undiscovered to the popular class: "Our problem is not how we can promote tourism, but how we can control it."

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