Caribbean Salaries

At La Brea in the southwest there is a lake of natural bitumen roughly forty hectares across that you can walk out onto. It has been dug out and shipped abroad for road surfacing since the nineteenth century, and it refills from below faster than anyone has managed to empty it.

Trinidad has produced oil since the early 1900s and natural gas since the 1970s, and the gas is the part that shapes the economy now. It feeds liquefied natural gas for export plus a petrochemical estate at Point Lisas making ammonia and methanol for world markets. It is why energy and engineering salaries here look unlike those anywhere else in the region.

The steelpan was worked out in Port of Spain neighbourhoods during the 1930s and 1940s by people hammering discarded oil drums into tuned playing surfaces. It is the rare case of an entirely new acoustic instrument appearing within living memory, and the tuning is still done by ear and by hand.