(okay my fellow JAMAICANS, i mean no harm in the title so please don’t form your hands into a gun and pretend shoot me).

when people think of the most popular place in the Caribbean, they usually think of JAMAICA first. thats cool. i mean some of the most profound icons have come out of JA, like BOB MARLEY (although he makes me think of my white friends who burn incense and smoke ganja) and THE WET T-SHIRT GIRL. you know the girl i’m talking about…

the ever so classic travel advertisement for JAMAICA of the curvy west-indian lady in a throbbing and soaking wet red t-shirt which reads JAMAICA…always stood out to me as looking like a TRINI. i mean, i know we can all somewhat look similar – but there was something in her eye that said to me “my roti isn’t empty, it has some dal in it”.

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(i’m sure when this image was posted in travel agencies across the world, the fathers of every family who had to take their clan on vacation was SOLD on JAMAICA.)

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just like i guessed it, i researched and found out she was in fact a TRINIDADIAN!

as the story goes…

“She is Trinidadian Sintra Arunte-Bronte…

who caught the eye of a photographer from Doyle Dane, an American advertising company commissioned by the JTB to do the poster, as she stood outside the hotel, now known as Le Meridien Jamaica Pegasus. Sintra was dressed in a close-fitting orange, brown and gold knit top, with a low scooped neckline. The photographer was scouting for a woman who could portray the beauty of an island woman and she was game.”

“It took seven and a half hours to capture the right effect. The photographer said to me, ‘Sintra I want you to think of the most beautiful thing or person while posing’. I thought of a Jamaican man I had fallen in love with from the first day I set my eyes on him. That picture was dedicated to him and will be for the rest of my life,” she said.

The impact of the poster immediately triggered a number of fairytale events in Sintra’s life and continue to do so today. A boat owned by a wealthy Montegonian, John McConnell, was named after her, so too was a race horse and two years ago a Swiss company named one of the watches from the Rado line, Sintra.

So where has Sintra been all these years?

She runs a successful destination management company, A.J.M. Tours, in her homeland Trinidad. Her company handles air and ground charters, as well as tours between Trinidad and Tobago and a charter from New York to Tobago with 112 passengers every week. She is more voluptuous now and still turns heads whenever she walks into a room.

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mhmmm. i know everyone and their mama has tried to re-inact this photo, but since i’m TRINI and i like JAMAICAN boys (well actually, BOYS period) i may be able to pull it off correctly.