I am trippin' here but a while back you mentioned a book about the good bad and ugly about tourism in Jamaica. I read it at the time but can't find the copy. It was very insightful. I recently read Below the Water Line, the good bad and ugly about cruising.
Maybe someone else know the book of which I speak.
Might have been "To Hell With Paradise: A History Of The Jamaican Tourist Industry"?
http://www.amazon.com/Hell-Paradise-Jamaican-Industry-American/dp/0822958236
A very informative look at some of the reasons tourism in JA is what it is today.
"The steamships that carried North American tourists to Jamaican resorts also carried U.S. prejudices against people of color. “To Hell with Paradise†illustrates the problems of founding a tourist industry for a European or U.S. clientele in a society where the mass of the population is poor, black, and with a historical experience of slavery and colonialism. By the 1990s, tourism had become the lifeblood of the Jamaican economy, but at an enormous cost: enclaves of privilege and ostentation that exclude the bulk of the local population, drug trafficking and prostitution, soaring prices, and environmental degradation. No wonder some Jamaicans regard tourism as a new kind of sugar.
Taylor explores timely issues that have not been previously addressed. Along the way, he offers a series of valuable micro histories of the Jamaican planter class, the origins of agricultural dependency (on bananas), the growth of shipping and communications links, the process of race relations, and the linking of infrastructural development to tourism. The text is illustrated with period photographs of steamships and Jamaican tourist hotels."