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PUBLISHED| OUR — Three Letters, One Enormous Question: Who Owns Jamaica’s Beaches?
I learned to swim in Portland.
Not in a hotel pool.
Not in a private club.
Not behind a resort gate.
Not after producing a credit card, presenting a passport, paying an entrance fee, or asking somebody’s permission.
I learned to swim in Jamaica’s sea.
My grandfather, Lester Maylor, and my godfather taught me—in the rough-and-tumble way Jamaican boys of my generation were taught such things. The water below Turnbull’s could be unforgiving. The instruction was hardly what one finds in a modern swimming academy.
But I became a good swimmer.
And I went to the beach. Frequently. It was normal.
I grew up in Portland, Jamaica, a place abundantly blessed with sea beaches and river beaches. During summer vacations, I spent time in Clarendon and Trelawny, where the same assumption prevailed. I went to the beach several times a month unless I was sick.
Why? Because I was Jamaican. That was the qualification.
I did not need a membership card.
I did not need a hotel booking.
I did not need to be classified as a “visitor.”
I did not need to ask whether the beach belonged to somebody who had more money than my family.
I was Jamaican. The sea was there. I went to the beach.
That childhood proposition was so ordinary that I never thought of it as a legal proposition at all. Nor did I imagine that, six decades after Independence, I would have to interrogate the legal meaning of that simple childhood fact.
But here is the extraordinary historical irony that has increasingly troubled me: if the recollections of older Jamaicans are correct, and as Ambassador Byron Blake has reminded me, there was a time when Jamaicans had greater practical freedom to the sea—even during colonial rule—than many Jamaicans experience today in an independent Jamaica.
Think about that.
Colonial Jamaica.
Independent Jamaica.
And somewhere along that journey, the ordinary Jamaican’s relationship with the sea became more complicated. That deserves more than nostalgia. It deserves an explanation.
The Jamaican Anomaly
I have carried my Jamaican habit of “going to beach” across the world.
In Barbados, Antigua, Barbuda, Trinidad and Tobago, Grenada, St Lucia, St Kitts and Nevis, and St Vincent, I went to the beach. In Haiti, I experienced the waters around Jacmel and the rivers of the Artibonite. In the Philippines, I went into the East China Sea and enjoyed the paradise of the Hundred Islands cluster among people for whom entering the water was part of ordinary island life. In Hawaii, I went to the beach and rode surf on the Big Island. In Guyana, I swam in extraordinary black-water rivers with Guyanese friends and explored the Takutu, eventually walking ashore in Brazil. And in Ethiopia, while working there as a UNIDO hydro-power consultant, I went swimming in the Blue Nile—twice, in two different places, many hours away from Addis.
Think about that.
A Jamaican could travel to remote parts of Ethiopia, find the Blue Nile, and enter it like an ordinary human being. He could go to the Philippines and swim among Filipinos. He could go to Haiti and swim around Jacmel. He could go to beaches throughout the Caribbean. He could enter the water in these places without experiencing the elemental act of swimming as some peculiar privilege requiring him first to solve a legal riddle.
And nowhere in that enormous personal geography did “going to beach” feel as constitutionally, politically, and administratively strange as it has increasingly come to feel in Jamaica.
I have therefore begun to wonder whether Jamaica is the outlier.
And that should embarrass us. Deeply.
Because the problem is not that Jamaica has no beaches. God gave Jamaica an embarrassment of them. The problem is that Jamaica has developed an embarrassment of legal and administrative arrangements around access to them.
And here is the part we should stop evading: much of this is not the work of some foreign power.
It is ours.
Our Government.
Our laws.
Our policies.
Our institutions.
Our ministers.
Our administrations.
Our choices.
Who Created the Problem?
It is tempting, whenever Jamaica confronts an uncomfortable consequence of tourism development, to invoke “foreign interests,” “international competitiveness,” or the supposed requirements of the global tourism industry.
But Ambassador Blake’s observation deserves to be taken seriously: no foreign government or international organisation, so far as this issue is concerned, forced Jamaica to create this predicament. We did. And we continue to make it more intractable.
Nor is there convincing reason to assume that protecting public access to beaches is inherently incompatible with tourism. Many of the countries in which I have freely gone to the water are themselves heavily dependent upon tourism.
They have hotels. They have resorts. They have foreign visitors. They have investors. They have environmental concerns. They have property rights.
Yet their citizens and visitors can still have a meaningful relationship with the sea.
The issue, therefore, cannot simply be “tourism versus access.” That is too convenient. The real question is what kind of tourism we have chosen to build.
Can we welcome visitors without disinheriting hosts?
Can we attract investment without making Jamaicans strangers to Jamaica?
Can we create premium tourism without creating a population that must look at its own beaches from behind fences?
And can we stop pretending that every demand for public access is an attack on investment?
Blake makes another important observation from his own extensive travels: he has walked on beaches in numerous countries where tourism is central to the economy and has neither been challenged by security guards nor seen local people treated as intruders.
There is a simple wisdom in what he recalls hearing in Jamaica: “The beach belong to we.”
That sentence may be grammatically non-standard. Politically, however, it is extraordinarily sophisticated.
When the Calypsonian Answered the Developer
And here is where Ambassador Blake’s phrase becomes more than an observation. It becomes history. It becomes music. It becomes resistance. It becomes the Caribbean speaking to itself.
Across the water in Barbados, the legendary Barbadian calypsonian Anthony “Mighty Gabby” Carter understood the danger before many policymakers were prepared to admit it.
In 1982, as proposals associated with Jack Dear—then a corporate lawyer connected with the Barbados Board of Tourism—raised the prospect of beach privatisation, Gabby did not produce a policy paper. He produced a calypso. He called it “Jack”.
And he did something that Caribbean calypso has always done at its most powerful: he took an apparently technical policy dispute and stripped it down to the bone.
Who belongs here?
Who gets to bathe?
Who gets to decide?
Who owns the beach?
And what happens when the people who live beside the sea are told that the sea is increasingly somebody else’s?
The official Barbados tourism history records that Gabby’s song was a direct response to the proposed privatisation of beaches, that it won the 1982 Crop Over Road March, and that the privatisation did not happen.
That is not merely musical history. That is political history.
And the refrain that emerged from it was devastating in its simplicity:
“Jack don’t want no black people bathing on his beach… Tell Jack I say the beach belong to we!”
Five words at its core: The beach belongs to we.
No legalese. No consultancy report. No international competitiveness study. No investment summit. No glossy tourism brochure. Just ownership reduced to its most elemental human claim.
We live here. We belong here. The beach belongs to us.
Gabby’s genius was that he understood something governments and developers can sometimes forget: a beach is not merely real estate.
It is memory. It is childhood. It is livelihood. It is recreation. It is culture. It is citizenship. It is where generations of people learn to swim, fish, sell, play, court, fornicate, quarrel, sing, and simply exist.
And when a people begin hearing that they may enter the place only on somebody else’s terms, the dispute ceases to be about sand. It becomes a dispute about belonging.
That is why “Jack” matters so profoundly to Jamaica. Because Gabby was not singing only about Barbados. He was singing about a Caribbean vulnerability—the vulnerability of tourism economies whose greatest natural asset is also the inherited living space of their own people.
The danger begins when the visitor is treated as a customer and the citizen begins to look like an inconvenience.
Gabby’s response was not anti-tourism. Indeed, one of the song’s central insights was precisely the opposite: tourism is vital, but tourism cannot become more important than the people whose navel strings are buried in the land.
That distinction should be engraved above every Caribbean tourism ministry: Tourism is vital. But it cannot mean more than the people.
And here the Barbadian calypsonian reaches across the Caribbean and grabs Jamaica by the collar. Because we are still arguing about the same thing nearly half a century later.
Different island. Different laws. Different politicians. Different hotels. Same question: Who gets the beach?
The Law and the Irony
The Beach Control Act of 1956 vests rights in and over Jamaica’s foreshore and the floor of the sea in the Crown and provides that no person is deemed to have rights there except those derived from, acquired, or preserved under the Act.
The Act was enacted in colonial Jamaica when the tourism industry had only begun to take root. Its historical purpose, as Blake suggests, deserves closer examination. It is entirely plausible that the legislation was intended, at least in substantial part, to prevent private developers from establishing uncontrolled claims over Jamaica’s foreshore and seabed.
There is a bitter irony here.
A colonial government could conceive of legislation placing the foreshore and floor of the sea under Crown control while assuming, however imperfectly, that such control was being exercised in the public interest.
Independent Jamaica inherited that legal architecture. And what have we done with it?
We have used the authority of the State to license, regulate, designate and, in some circumstances, facilitate forms of access and development that can leave ordinary Jamaicans wondering whether the sea beside their own country is actually theirs to enter.
That is extraordinary.
And it becomes worse when environmental consequences are considered. When buildings are permitted to come hard up against the sea, when natural coastal systems are altered, when accessways disappear or become functionally inaccessible, the issue is no longer simply whether somebody can swim.
It becomes a question of what we are doing to the coastline itself. We are not merely controlling access to nature. We are reshaping nature while simultaneously restricting the people’s relationship with it. That is a much larger public-interest problem.
“OUR”
There is that little word again. “Our.” Three letters. One enormous question: Who is “our”?
The word appears innocuous. It is not. “Our” is possessive language. It tells us that something belongs to a group. And Jamaica has become extraordinarily fond of using “our” when selling itself:
Our beaches.
Our sand.
Our sea.
Our sunshine.
Our paradise.
Our hospitality.
Come and enjoy. Come and swim. Come and bathe. Come and relax. Come and spend. Wonderful.
But then the Jamaican asks:
Where may I enter?
Who controls this beach?
Can I walk along the shore?
Can I bathe here?
Is there a public accessway?
Am I trespassing?
Do I need permission?
Must I pay?
Who gave whom the right to decide?
What happened to “our”?
That is not a trivial grammatical question. It is a national question.
And Jamaica’s own policy history makes it worse. The National Environment and Planning Agency (NEPA) has acknowledged that public access to the foreshore and sea has been a recurring and sensitive issue and that earlier management policies involving exclusive licences resulted in Jamaicans being barred from some of the country’s finest beaches.
The stated policy objective has included removing any vestige of real or implied discrimination against Jamaicans in the enjoyment of their national heritage.
Stop there. Read that again.
Jamaicans were barred from some of Jamaica’s finest beaches. In Jamaica. And the State knew enough about the problem to put the removal of such discrimination into policy.
So we cannot honestly pretend that exclusion is some imaginary grievance invented by angry Jamaicans. The State itself has recognised the problem. The State itself has documented it. The State itself has attempted to address it.
And yet we are still having the argument.
The Tourism Excuse
This is where we need intellectual honesty.
Nobody seriously arguing for public access to Jamaica’s beaches should be required to argue against tourism. Tourism is important. Investment is important. Hotels are important. Foreign visitors are welcome. Private enterprise has a legitimate place in Jamaica.
But tourism cannot become a doctrine under which the Jamaican becomes the person who watches other people enjoy Jamaica.
Nor should “international competitiveness” become a magic phrase that ends every conversation. Competitive with whom? Barbados? Antigua? Grenada? St Lucia? St Kitts and Nevis? Mauritius? Hawaii? The Philippines?
Many of these places are tourism-dependent. Many have confronted the same tensions between investment, conservation, property, recreation, and public access. Yet they have found ways to maintain a public relationship with the shoreline.
Jurisdiction | Legal / Policy Framework | Public Beach Access Status |
Mauritius | Public Domain Framework | Shorelines are non-alienable public domain; beaches cannot be converted into exclusive private enclaves. |
Hawaii (USA) | Public Trust Doctrine | Public transit corridors guaranteed along all shorelines; commercial obstruction is illegal. |
Philippines | Statutory Shoreline Easements | Explicit statutory easements along shores reserved for public recreation, navigation, and fishing. |
Barbados | Coastal Zone Management Act | Public access preserved by statute and custom; explicit protection of lateral passage along the shore. |
St Kitts & Nevis | National Conservation Framework | Statutory rights in and over beaches vested explicitly in the public domain. |
These countries have not thereby ceased to be tourist destinations. So perhaps the Jamaican question should not be: “How much public access can tourism afford?”
Perhaps it should be: “What kind of tourism are we prepared to build?”
A Word About Safety
There is another point from Ambassador Blake that deserves serious consideration. If a beach is conspicuously empty of local people, perhaps one should ask why.
The absence of Jamaicans from a beach is not necessarily evidence that Jamaicans have been excluded. Sometimes it may be evidence that the beach is dangerous.
Local people often know things that maps, brochures, and investors do not. They know where the rip currents are. They know where the undertow becomes treacherous. They know where sharks have appeared. They know which stretches of coastline are safe for children and which are not. They know where the rocks conceal hazards. They know which river mouths become dangerous after rainfall.
There is therefore an important distinction between a beach that Jamaicans do not use because they have been denied access and one that they do not use because generations of practical experience have taught them not to.
Public access must never mean reckless access. Safety is legitimate. Environmental protection is legitimate. Coastal conservation is legitimate. Private property rights are legitimate. Commercial activity is legitimate.
But none of these principles should become convenient vocabulary for making Jamaicans strangers to their own sea.
The Beach Cannot Become a Spectator Sport
We have spent so much time perfecting the language of tourism that we sometimes forget the citizen for whom the country supposedly exists.
The beach is ours when we advertise it.
The beach is yours when you pay for the room.
But whose is it when a Jamaican child wants to swim?
That is the question. And it is an especially painful question for me because I have seen alternatives.
I have stood on beaches across the Caribbean. I have swum in the Philippines. I have entered the waters of Hawaii. I have swum in Guyana’s black-water rivers. I have gone into the Blue Nile in Ethiopia.
These are not entries in a passport. They are memories of belonging.
In all these places, I was not merely looking at water. I was entering it. People bathed. People swam. People talked. People fished. People played. People belonged. The sea was not merely a photograph for a tourism brochure. It was part of life.
And then I come home. To Jamaica. To the country whose greatest international tourism asset is the very water that surrounds us. And I discover that the Jamaican relationship with that water is legally more complicated than the childhood relationship I inherited.
That is the part that hurts. Not merely because I want to swim. But because of what the legal uncertainty symbolises. It says something about how we have come to think about our own national patrimony.
We have become astonishingly good at monetising what belongs in the public imagination.
The beach becomes a tourism product.
The coastline becomes a development opportunity.
The shoreline becomes an investment frontier.
The sand becomes an amenity.
The sea becomes a selling point.
And the Jamaican becomes the stakeholder who must negotiate access.
No. Something has gone badly wrong.
What Should We Do?
The answer need not be revolutionary.
Legislative Modernisation: Parliament can modernise the Beach Control Act of 1956.
Statutory Lateral Access: Jamaica can establish an explicit statutory public right of lateral passage along the foreshore, subject to legitimate safety, environmental, and conservation restrictions.
Protected Landward Corridors: There should be meaningful, marked, and maintained landward accessways from public roads to beaches, particularly where coastal development occurs.
Public Trust Architecture: Jamaica can establish a coherent public-trust principle for the shoreline, requiring tourism developments to demonstrate how public access will be preserved before development approvals are granted.
National Access Register: Existing accessways should be inventoried and protected, blocked pathways reopened where the law permits, and an authoritative national register published identifying public bathing beaches, access points, and operating conditions.
And, most importantly, Jamaica should stop treating public access as a favour. It should be a matter of law.
The objective is not to open every inch of every coastline indiscriminately. Nor is it to require every private landowner to surrender legitimate property rights. Nor should every beach become an uncontrolled public playground.
The issue is simpler and more fundamental: Should the Jamaican citizen have a clear, enforceable, equitable, and practical relationship with the shoreline of Jamaica?
I say yes. And I say the law should say it too.
The Final Pronoun
I have finally discovered something my grandfather Lester Maylor never had to explain to me.
When he taught me to swim, he taught me something far more important than how to stay afloat. He taught me that I belonged in the water. He taught me, without saying it in legal language, that the Jamaican sea was part of my Jamaican inheritance.
That lesson was so powerful that I carried it across continents—to Barbados, Antigua, Barbuda, Trinidad, Tobago, Grenada, St Lucia, St Kitts, Nevis, St Vincent, Haiti, the Philippines, Hawaii, Guyana, Brazil, and the Blue Nile in Ethiopia.
I went to beach. I went to river. I went to sea. I went because water was there and I was human. But more than that: I went because I belonged somewhere.
And Jamaica taught me that first.
That is why discovering Jamaica’s predicament now is not merely intellectually interesting. It is painful. It is personal. It is embarrassing.
The Jamaican child who learned to swim because he was Jamaican may have enjoyed a more generous practical understanding of Jamaica’s beaches than the Jamaican citizen is legally assured today.
That is not progress. That is not development. That is not a tourism success story. That is beachwise Jamaican backwardness. And after 64 years of Independence, it is an embarrassment.
A generation ago, my grandfather did not need to explain to me the legal status of the sea. He did not need to tell me whether an international investor approved of my presence. He did not need to consult a tourism strategy. He did not need to produce evidence that my presence enhanced Jamaica’s “visitor experience.”
He simply taught a Jamaican boy to swim.
Perhaps the law has become more complicated because we have forgotten something very simple: The sea is not merely an asset. It is part of a people’s inheritance. And the State is not merely a proprietor. It is supposed to be a trustee of the public interest.
So, Minister Bartlett, Ministers of Government, Members of Parliament, policymakers, lawyers, planners, tourism interests, and all those guardians of Jamaica’s supposed national patrimony:
Please, for once, let us get the pronoun right.
OUR. Three letters. One enormous question: Who is “our”?
If “our” means the Jamaican people, then kindly give the Jamaican people a meaningful legal right to behave like people who belong to the inheritance you so proudly advertise to everybody else.
Do not tell us merely that the beaches are ours. Make them ours.
Do not sell “our” sea to the world while leaving Jamaicans to negotiate the meaning of “our.”
Do not invite foreigners to discover paradise while Jamaicans discover paperwork.
Do not allow tourism to become the industry in which the host is progressively made a stranger.
And please do not tell the Jamaican child that the sea belongs to him only after the State, the hotelier, the licence-holder, the developer, the adjoining landowner, and the bureaucrat have finished deciding whether he may enter it.
Because I have been going to the beach all my life. My grandfather taught me to swim before he ever taught me the vocabulary of property law. He did not teach me to ask whether I belonged in Jamaica’s sea. He simply put me in it.
Perhaps that is the lesson our laws have forgotten.
I would rather not need permission to discover that I am Jamaican.
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