Tattered Paradise … Azúcar’s Trilogy Ends!

In this concluding tale of the trilogy, Azúcar learns painfully that her tropical paradise, which she helped create upon becoming regional director of the tourist resort expansion project, is deceptively flawed and dangerously tattered. The results are grave, affecting not just herself, but also the island’s entire population –most especially the island’s massive work force comprised of contracted laborers recruited from across the Caribbean. Azúcar had hoped that the historic cycle of economic, socio-political exploitation and oppression had at last come to an end.

But now Azúcar agonizes that her idyllic island has been transformed into North America’s new garment district .. . with all its characteristic sordidness, inhumane working conditions and reprehensible exploitation of human souls. However beneficial and modern the concept of globalization presents itself, and a conceivable escape from the island’s traditional barbarism, the new assembly plants established around the island --- but particularly the island’s largest and most controversial operation located in the border zone and whose site harbors a terrifying historical reminder for everybody --- has a subjugated labor force of shamefully underpaid and abused workers, mainly young uneducated women and vulnerable under-aged girls. These very profitable multinational operations can only be described as undisguised tropical sweatshops. Have the island’s ancestral gods abandoned these workers trying for a third time to liberate themselves from this latest obstacle in the seemingly endless struggle for a better life?