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The Punta Cana Trap: How the Caribbean’s $7 Billion Tourism Engine Runs on Empty

Punta Cana was never a town. It was a closed-loop financial apparatus, built on cheap land, imported concrete and total isolation. For thirty years it worked because mass tourism is an industry that explicitly trades in predictable containment: taking the customer to a private airstrip, transferring them directly to a Spanish-owned enclave, feeding them calculated calories and flying them out before they noticed the country they had been standing on…

The illusion of buried treasure: The botija myth in Dominican DNA

There is something deeply fascinating about our people’s ability to turn financial hardship into a living mythology. If you examine the famous legend of the “botijas” closely—those supposed treasures buried by grandparents in the yard behind the house—you realise that it is nothing more than the Caribbean version of the search for El Dorado. It is a narrative adapted to a country that, for generations, distrusted its governments and the volatility of the local currency more than the very ground beneath its feet…