Subic Bay at Luzon island, the Philippines, is a former United States naval base. In its heyday from the 1950s to the 1970s, it was the Americans’ largest military facility in the Western Pacific.
Subic Bay served as a logistics hub and port for the US Navy. Together with the nearby Clark Air Base, Subic served as the Americans’ projection of military power in Southeast Asia.
In 1991, after the Mt. Pinatubo eruption, the Philippines and the United States did not renew the lease treaties of both Clark and Subic. In a matter of months, the Americans left and turned over ownership of the bases to the Philippine government.
The Philippines immediately declared Clark and Subic as ‘freeport zones,’ in which authorities granted tax incentives to firms doing business in the former bases. Factories and duty-free stores sprouted at Subic and Clark as a result.
Subic Bay, more than thirty (30) years later, had become a….what? One cannot figure out what Subic had become. The former naval base has a deepwater port which loads & unloads merchandise for export & import. It has companies, big & small, with manufacturing & logistics operations. It has shops selling duty-free products. It also has recreational places, such as a golf course, safari, an aquarium, scuba dive spots, a horseback-riding ranch, a rainforest, and a beach. There are also several hotels, residential condominiums, a yacht club, as well as private enclaves.
Subic had become a mix of so many things, such that one couldn’t figure out what it was. Was it an industrial free-trade zone? A duty-free shoppers’ paradise? An eco-tourism site? A very large resort?
And because it tried to be so many things, Subic had no one identity. It was like a person who had multiple personalities—no one knew which was real.
Subic didn’t draw crowds and instead had become a sparsely populated place. Business was mediocre at best. Locators who manufactured and did logistics there did not really expand. New investments year to year weren’t too much, nothing to boast much about.
Nearby Clark was a bit luckier. Thanks to its growing airport, people identified Clark as a viable alternative versus Manila for travel to and from Luzon island. Subic, however, remained almost anonymous as people were clueless about what the former naval base was or could be.
The lesson from Subic was that when one markets a place, one should develop an identity for it. One shouldn’t promote it as several things. Subic is a free industrial zone; it’s a duty-free shoppers’ locale; it’s an eco-tourism site; it’s a recreational area; it’s a private get-away-from-it-all residential place. When one says it’s all these, one gets the impression it’s trying hard and it becomes none of the above.
What is Subic? Time won’t tell. Only people who have stakes in it, if there are any, will.
Ellery's Essays 