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Ben Stubenberg
ALLi Author Member
Location: Turks and Caicos Islands (the)
In 2011, I left my government job in Washington D.C. and moved to the Turks & Caicos Islands. The move had been a long time in coming. Almost half a century since I had lived on St. Croix in the U.S. Virgin Islands in the mid-1970s where I taught high school English and wrote for the local newspaper. As a private pilot back then, I took the opportunity to visit just about every island in the West Indies and later spent months living and working in Martinique and Haiti. The Caribbean seeped easily into my veins.
As a feature writer for the Turks & Caicos magazine, Times of the Islands, I explore the region's rich and turbulent history and chronicle unfolding developments. These ever-changing, always-alluring islands and the people who inhabit them are my passion and reason to wake up in the morning.
Growing up in vastly different cultural environments from Hawaii, where I was born, to Oslo, Norway, to the San Joaquin Valley of California allowed me to move easily between different peoples and landscapes. Sometimes as an outsider looking in, sometimes as an insider granted access to tell a story.
In October 2024, I published my first book entitled The Jamaican Bobsled Captain: Dudley "Tal" Stokes and the untold story of struggle, suffering and redemption behind Cool Runnings.
Ben Stubenberg's books
The Jamaican Bobsled Captain: Dudley “Tal” Stokes and the untold story of struggle, suffering and redemption behind Cool Runnings
The Jamaican bobsledder who never gave up! At the 1988 Winter Olympics in Calgary, the Jamaican bobsled captain, Tal Stokes, lost control of the four-man sled he was piloting and crashed violently while millions watched on TV. As skulls slammed the ice for twenty-one perilous seconds before the sled came to a stop, a calming clarity settled over him. Instead of walking away just glad to be alive, Tal internalized the experience and committed himself to reaching the pantheon of Olympic bobsledding, whatever it took. In the run-up to the Olympics, the improbable sight of Black men from a tropical Caribbean island entering a white winter sport had seized the public’s imagination and struck a chord. Five years later in 1993, Disney Studios released Cool Runnings, a feel-good film very loosely based on their quixotic quest. The Hollywood version shaped an enduring image of the Jamaicans as funny, lovable, try-hard,...