Tourism has been good to him, he says plainly. It built businesses he can point to from where he's standing — the jewellery shops selling gold and coral to Americans who find it cheaper here than at home, the bakers now supplying hotels, the laundries washing hotel sheets, the building suppliers profiting from the constant construction. A new hotel is going up in Otrobanda. Work is being done on the Kura Hulanda. Almost every sector, he says, touches tourism somehow.
Land prices have risen along with it, though he's careful not to blame tourism alone. The economy was already worsening, and government taxes pushed costs up further. It's a tangle, he admits, not a straight line.
The beaches tell their own story. Roughly eighty percent are privately owned, mostly by families and old plantation holders, and many of those owners simply neglect them. After Hurricane Lenny tore through, the government tried to repair what it could. As a representative of the taxi drivers' union, he went out himself to inspect the damage and report back — part of what he sees as the union's real, if constantly re-earned, role: a partner the government consults, but only because they keep insisting on a seat at the table.
We are seen as a serious partner, but we have to keep fighting for it.
Business used to be simpler. There weren't as many tour buses then. Locals rode them; tourists took taxis. Now the buses — increasingly double-deckers imported from the Netherlands — are his biggest competitors. He has no issue with the large operators running their own buses from the cruise ships under proper permits. What angers him is the unregulated overflow: private buses pulling up at the harbour to pick up passengers for ordinary transport into town, technically against the rules, rarely checked. When there's only one ship docked, he feels the loss directly.
The harbour itself seizes up on cruise days. His taxi can't move. Nothing can — not an ambulance, not a fire truck. As a union they've taken the problem to the police: build another road, he argues, and restrict downtown access to taxis at certain hours.
Underneath the traffic complaint sits a harder one. Most businesses on the island, he says, are foreign-owned. It's difficult for Curaçaoans to plant a flag of their own — not only because of how permits are handed out, but because of something closer to home. If he opened a bakery and a white foreigner opened one beside him, he's certain most islanders would buy from the foreigner first, simply for being foreign.
If a fellow islander gets more chance, then we will not accept it. On other islands there is more solidarity.
It's a pattern he'd like to see broken. Curaçao has everything it needs, he insists — it just needs to do right by it. Aruba, by comparison, markets itself far more aggressively and thinks more ‘touristically’, investing three to four times what Curaçao does.
Some complaints from tourists he agrees with entirely — particularly about Isla, the refinery sitting improbably in the middle of the island, which leaves many residents with breathing trouble. Others touch on matters he'd rather see handled quietly: limited legal prostitution, mostly involving women from elsewhere in the region, and a drug problem that occasionally puts taxi drivers like him at risk simply for not knowing what's in a passenger's suitcase.
What he keeps coming back to, though, is togetherness. Two hundred taxis operate on the island; his union counts a hundred and thirty-five members, and he's trying to bring in the rest. A unified union, he believes, is what makes them worth listening to — in a business where, as a self-employed driver, you're otherwise entirely on your own.
“We just have to do it right,” he says. “Because tourism is our first source of income.”