It seems that this post, shared in the Melia Cayo Coco guests-run FB group, seems to have gotten me blocked. Ahhhh, social media. 😀
Christmas Day 20-24, Melia Cayo Coco, Cuba.
Story behind this luggage tag. Our last one so we're feeling nostalgic.
In the early nineties Doreen Jones, a travel agent in Burlington, discovered the Cayos, from Guillermo in the west to Santa Maria and the others to the east.
She not only started recommending the area once the first resort opened in 1993, but then created a forum on, and remember this was the early/mid nineties, Sympatico.ca.
It was a welcome and much needed antidote to the loonie travel agents and the gusanos in Miami who did whatever they could to discourage travel to Cuba.
Remember, back then the Miami lunatics, with the US government turning a blind eye (at best. At worst, facilitating, as with the bombing of a Cuban airliner on a flight to the Bahamas) were regularly coming down in high speed boats and running along the beachfront, shooting up hotels with heavy machine guns and rocket launchers. If you've been to Veradero you may have seen the monuments, hidden away because they might have discouraged tourism, to hotel workers who were killed on the job by those fuckwits.
On our first trip to Cuba in 1990 we thought the light show on the beach was fab until we walked down to the waterline and saw the searchlights, talked to some of armed women soldiers looking out to sea. The night before we arrived our hotel took a bunch of 12.7mm rounds. A window smashed and a dozen big chips out of a wall. As did other hotels as the speedboats went from one end of the hotel strip to the other. The idea was to discourage tourism.
Doreen worked hard to counter that by flogging Cuba's nascent tourism industry in Canada. A real pioneer. We're pretty sure she didn't make much on her sales as she was always off to travel shows etc and speaking on panels or making presentations at a time when no one wanted to travel here except a select few, usually people like us who had a political interest in eroding the effect of the US blockade.
Her forum on Sympatico she called Happy Faces as the symbol was then popular. It became her motto. Be happy, deal with things like, LMAO, bartenders who were working from photos of margaritas and thought the white stuff on the rim of the glass was sugar, an understandable mistake in Cuba. Lol. Ask about the lovely bar on the top floor of the Dupont mansion in Veradero for more on that. Lol
She curated, though the term was not then in use, posts on the Happy Faces Form so that the lunatics in Miami couldn't make any headway. For twenty years it was the place to go if you wanted the straight poop on the Cayos. If you posted something about tourists being behind barbed wire and beaten to a pulp for trying to walk off your resort she was on it.
We, Geri Sheedy and i, were long-time Happy Faces. Back then we'd have meet-ups at hotel ls and no matter which hotel you were at or what time of the year you went, there would be ten to fifteen and once about thirty Happy Faces at dinner. Resorts would treat you extra-specially and arrange private dinners with the manager, all thàt kinda stuff. Talks about the state of tourism, future plans, that kinda stuff.
Truth be told the talks were a bit boring but the twenty year old rum warmed over a candle and the discounted cigars made them worthwhile.
The Sympatico web service eventually got shut down by Bell. In her seventies Doreen, with help from her son, learned to code (this was before WordPress etc) enough that until about 2013 she could manage her own website.
TripAdvisor killed traffic to her site. A tremendous shame as TripAdvisor is not curated and while it is not generally recognized, it is a battleground between different hotels etc which trash each other without anyone curating postings on it. Google some of the companies that will trash your competitors if you are in the hotel biz if that seems a bit odd to you.
Facebook groups with knowledgeable and committed admins like the ones here are Doreen's inheritors, even if they have never heard of the Happy Faces forum or website.
Doreen is now in her mid or late 90s. We are occasionally in touch. When here in Cuba, at a resort or an hostale we drop her a line and though now blind she gets back to us and wants to know about the food, the service, the state of the buildings, how much smaller the plane seats are than they were in the nineties (ugh) and whether staff like Melvin who when she was thirty years younger helped open what is now the Muthu Colonial in 1993 are still around.
A beery old man's thoughts on a day when it is too hazy to get out there and work on my tan.
On a more serious note, I like to do what i can to make sure that the work Doreen and a very few others like her did to make out stay here just a bit more enjoyable, or, hell, possible, is not forgotten.
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