Welcome to the Caribbean, Mon

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    Work all night and I drink da rum
     Daylight come and me wan' go home
     Stack banana 'till de mornin' come

    Daylight come and me wan' go home
    —Harry Belafonte, "The Banana Boat Song".[1]

    A chain of tropical paradises mostly between Florida and South America. The Caribbean is known for cruises, beaches, resorts, and the occasional Pirate infestation. Beware of The Bermuda Triangle, while you're at it, too. Includes Puerto Rico, Jamaica, Virgin Islands, Bermuda, the Cayman Islands and others.

    Calypso or rhumba music is constantly being played, there's free fruit everywhere, everyone is constantly drunk and/or high, and may have a pet parrot. Nobody does any work, they just sit on the beach sipping fruity little drinks with umbrellas out of coconuts. At night, the careless or unlucky might see a voodoo ceremony.

    Pirate attacks have to be dealt with, even in modern times. Except now they use machine guns instead of cutlasses and are less romanticized.

    Excludes Cuba (since circa 1959) and Haiti. Jamaica is a specialized case, mostly due to a perceived abundance of Reggae and Rastafari folks with a penchant for the "Wisdom Weed". The Bahamas is often mistaken for Jamaica much to the chagrin of both countries' citizens. This is despite, however, a minority of Rastafarians in Jamaica.

    If you find white people here in contemporary times they're likely to be sitting on a yacht, playing croquet or cricket, or lounging around in white suits and reading a newspaper in the lobby of a hotel that's seen better days.

    Also known as The Spanish Main. Because it used to be full of Badass Spaniards and their loot.

    Examples of Welcome to the Caribbean, Mon include:

    Advertising

    • The commercials for Malibu rum seem to invoke this trope, despite the fact that Malibu is located in California. The rum itself, however, was invented in Curacao.

    Comic Books

    Fanfic

    Film

    • Pirates of the Caribbean, obviously. Named this trope's redirect.
    • The movie Captain Ron, at one point, has the protagonist's children partying in a festival on an unnamed Caribbean island while their parents are arrested for smuggling revolutionaries onto the island. Later, they run afoul of the "Pirates of the Caribbean", as Captain Ron calls them, and get their boat stolen at gunpoint. (This movie was made before the Disney movie trilogy, so viewers will awkwardly hear the children's dad saying Captain Ron "went to Disneyland too many times").
      • Pirates of the Caribbean existed before the movie trilogy, as a ride in Disneyland. Just to clarify.
      • The movie was filmed in Puerto Rico.
    • Captain Blood is set in the Caribbean; Jamaica and Tortuga are particularized.
    • Cool Runnings
    • The fictional nation of San Monique from the James Bond movie Live and Let Die.
    • At the end of The Silence of the Lambs, Dr. Lector has escaped to an unnamed island and saunters off into the crowd of locals as the credits roll.

    Literature

    • Neil Gaiman's Anansi Boys, played straight. (Yes. Neil Gaiman played something straight.) Well, kind of. Apparently people in the Caribbean are mad about country music, and hand out limes to passersby. Although Fat Charlie was only given the lime because he expressed disbelief that limes grew there, so he was given one. Other than that no limes were handed about, except by Fat Charlie himself who became unusually attached to the lime, and proposed to Daisy with it. It Makes Sense in Context.

    Live Action TV

    • Harry Maybourne escapes to such a place in one epsiode of Stargate SG-1.

    Music

    • The song "Kokomo" by the Beach Boys.
    • The Andrews Sisters' classic "Rum and Coca-Cola" is about American tourists in Trinidad.

    Since the Yankee come to Trinidad
    They got the young girls all goin' mad
    Young girls say they treat 'em nice
    Make Trinidad like paradise
    Drinkin' rum and Coca-Cola
    Go down Point Koomahnah
    Both mother and daughter
    Workin' for the Yankee dollar

      • Actually, the song in question's really by the Trinidadian calypsonian Lord Invader. It was plagiarised by an American man when he heard the song in Trinidad.
    • Steel drum music is another bit of Trinidad & Tobago culture that is commonly used as a generic "island" music cue in popular culture. Notice that "Kokomo" uses steel drums and mentions a dozen tropical locales but not Trinidad or Tobago.
    • Parts of the album Waiting For Cousteau by Jean Michel Jarre which was recorded on the island of Trinidad include a big local steel drum band. "Calypso" even comes with a somehow Caribbean groove.
    • Great Big Sea sang "Penelope," about a Jamaican bazaar worker who moves to Chicago to become a domestic and to search for her lost uncle. She goes back, secure in the knowledge that the slow-paced life in the tropics is far better than the frantic concrete mess that is The Big City. Can be seen as an analogy for Newfoundlanders moving to big-city Canada and longing for home.

    Toys

    Theatre

    • Sky and Sarah's trip to Havana in Guys and Dolls (pre-Castro, of course).

    Video Games

    • The Monkey Island series uses this, since it owes a lot to the original Pirates of the Caribbean ride, or vice versa. The fourth game actually features Guybrush trying to save the Caribbean from being converted into a tourist's paradise by a conniving Australian businessman.
    • Sid Meier's Pirates!
    • The trolls of World of Warcraft seem to blend both this trope and Mayincatec. The Darkspear have Jamaican accents and practice a fantasy equivalent of voodoo, while other tribes practice blood sorcery similar to human sacrifice and convene around ziggurats.
    • Tropico takes place in a more modern Carribean, with you as a dictator of a Banana Republic.

    Web Comics

    Web Original

    Western Animation

    • Tale Spin spans the world, but the main locations of Cape Suzette and Louie's are definitely in a very Caribbean or South Pacific setting.
      • Probably the South Pacific, since the show is apparently based on Tales of the Gold Monkey.
      • And in one episode they visit Panda La.
    • The Chip 'n Dale Rescue Rangers episode "Battle of the Bulge" features three fruit-devouring, evil-doing Jamaican fruit bats complete with the matching accent.
    • In a Codename: Kids Next Door episode, the hamsters go on a vacation at Jamaica's KND sector. One of the operatives there is your stereotypical Jamaican who hilariously seems to be the only one who can stomach Lizzie's horrible cooking.

    "It's PIE time, mon! ...o.o That be some GOOD pie, mon!"

    1. ↑ You may recognize it from a certain movie that didn't take place in the Caribbean...
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