The Caribbean

Hotelkeepers all over the Caribbean last week raised their rates to winter levels, officially opening what promised to be the rum-punch belt's splashiest sin-and-sun season yet. Wide-open Havana, nonchalantly bent on pleasure despite a running revolution against Dictator Fulgencio Batista, offered visitors the biggest hotel built there since 1930. Jamaica also welcomed tourists to a new hotel, the island's biggest yet.

Swank & Slot Machines. The 20-story 400-room Havana Riviera (up to $40 a day for a double room) is a modern-style palace with egg-crate façades, wall-to-wall marble, a 78-cabaña pool and ornate saloons. One of its prime functions plainly is to house well-heeled amateur gamblers in soporific luxury and feed them efficiently to the hemisphere's swankiest casino, a domed, elliptical hall with gold-leafed walls, 85 slot machines and 17 tables for craps, blackjack and roulette. One effect was to attract to the opening a fortnight ago the largest collection of permanently established floating crapshooters seen east of Las Vegas, plus dozens of big-time Miami Beach horseplayers.

The casino at the Havana Riviera brings the Cuban capital's tony gambling spots to ten, all authorized by free-and-easy laws aimed at making Havana a strong Eastern competitor for the West's Las Vegas. Batista's government lent $6,000,000 toward the $14 million that the hotel cost. Exactly who supplied how much of the rest of the money is a deep secret; the directors include Toronto Hotelman Harry Smith, Edward Levinson of Las Vegas' Fremont, and a Cuban Senator whose brother happens to be a Cabinet minister.

Swimming & Sand. Jamaica's six-story 176-room Arawak (up to $58 a day for double with meals) is designed for aficionados of Miami Beach styling: rippling concrete, bright colors, polygonal swimming pool, straw-and-mahogany décor. Its planner was Morris Lapidus, architect of Florida's Fontainebleau, Eden Roc and Americana, who likes his hotels to "tickle and amuse.'" The $4,000,000 Arawak is set on Jamaica's smart north shore in sunny palm groves between a high, green range of mountains and the azure Caribbean, has a white sand beach. Owners: an international group headed by Toronto Mining Broker Albert N. Richmond.

The openings were only part of a spate of new Caribbean hotels. On Feb. 24 the $22 million, 630-room Havana Hilton will open, with a casino. Already running in Havana is the $6,000,000 252-room Capri. Puerto Rico will soon inaugurate the 359-room, ocean-front San Juan Intercontinental. In Jamaica the Arawak's record for size will stand only until next year, when the 200-room Marrakech will open on the north shore. Chief Minister Norman Manley foresees that tourism, now earning Jamaica around $25 million a year, will jump to 500,000 visitors and $100 million in revenue by 1962.