Barbados: the climate of success: this small Caribbean nation plans to lure a large sector of the tourism market, while opening opportunities for foreign investors.

• Author: Luxner, Larry

BARBADOS which in early June will host the thirty-second General Assembly of the Organization of American States, is one of the tiniest of OAS member nations--and by far the most densely populated. Yet even though 275,000 people call this 166-square-mile island home, translating into an astounding 1,658 inhabitants per square mile, Barbados feels anything but crowded. Cruising along a rural, two-lane road in St. Andrew, one of the island's eleven parishes, it's hard to imagine a more remote place in the Caribbean. Wide vistas of golden sugar cane, an occasional abandoned windmill, and a bright blue sky characterize this place, where people drive on the left (this is "Little England," after all) and the natives are known as Bajans.

Barbados is also famous for its stunning plantation "great houses," white-sand beaches, mysterious caves, and expensive Mount Gay rum.

Indeed, as the travel brochures claim, Barbados really is a land of remarkable contrasts, from the craggy, desolate Atlantic coastline in the north to busy Bridgetown in the south--all on an island only twenty-one miles long and fourteen miles wide.

Originally settled by Arawak peoples moving north from South America's Orinoco region two thousand years ago, Barbados (whose name in Spanish means "the bearded ones") was essentially uninhabited by the time sixty white settlers and six African slaves arrived aboard the William and John in February 1627.

By 1639, the white population of Barbados stood at eighty-seven hundred, and by 1660, Barbados was completely deforested, with more than 90 percent of the island already devoted to the cultivation of sugar cane and other crops. The island's unusual flatness--a contrast to the mountainous topography of neighboring islands like St. Lucia, St. Vincent, and Dominica--also permitted the development of an extensive road network that endures today.

"The island developed with astonishing rapidity, becoming the most prosperous seventeenth-century insular colony on the globe," write the authors of the travel book Barbados: Just Beyond Your Imagination. "The initial basis for capital accumulation was the growing and export of tobacco, which in the very short run proved immensely profitable, and laid the foundation on which subsequent economic activity was to build."

Largely thanks to its isolation in the eastern Caribbean, Barbados was never seized by French, Dutch, or Spanish forces, and is the only island in the entire Caribbean that remained under the British flag right up until independence in 1966.

This year, as Barbados marks the 375th anniversary of its colonization, its people have much to celebrate: a 98 percent literacy rate, an unbroken tradition of democracy, and an exceptionally high standard of living.

And despite nearly thirty-six years of independence from Great Britain, the island still enjoys a delightfully British atmosphere. A statue of Admiral Horatio Nelson graces Bridgetown's National Heroes Square, and afternoon tea remains a custom for many hotels on the west-coast Caribbean shores of St. James parish. The Anglican Church and that most English of sports--cricket--are both taken very seriously in Barbados, whose citizens place law and order, and God, above almost everything else.

Sir Courtney Blackman, who served as Barbados's ambassador to the United States for five years, from 1995 to 2000, attributes his island's success to its "remarkable" political stability.

"Since our independence, recrimination against the white minority [estimated at 4 percent of the total population] has been minimal," he says. "There's never been a political killing in Barbados. Even before independence...