The U.S. Virgin Islands, an unincorporated territory of the United States, sit in the northeastern Caribbean about 1,750 kilometers southeast of Miami. The three main islands are St. Thomas, St. John, and St. Croix.

The territory uses UTC-4 year-round, officially Atlantic Standard Time, which is permanent. No daylight saving. This means in summer, when the US East Coast moves to EDT (UTC-4), the USVI is temporally synchronized with the mainland. In winter, when the East Coast falls back to EST (UTC-5), the USVI stays at UTC-4 and gains an hour of separation from the US mainland.

The Danish past

Before the United States purchased the islands from Denmark in 1917, they were the Danish West Indies. The purchase price was $25 million in gold, making it one of the larger per-acre real estate transactions in history. The United States wanted a strategic naval base in the Caribbean as German submarine activity threatened Atlantic shipping lanes during World War I.

The islands had been Danish since 1672 (St. Thomas) and 1733 (St. Croix). Charlotte Amalie on St. Thomas grew into one of the busiest ports in the 18th century Caribbean, a free port where merchants from across Europe traded goods including, notoriously, enslaved Africans.

The Danish colonial period left architectural heritage visible throughout Charlotte Amalie: warehouses, churches, and the old fort that now houses the local government.

Rum, rum, rum

The USVI is home to a significant rum industry, most notably the Captain Morgan distillery on St. Croix and the Cruzan Rum operation on the same island. Sugar cane was the original colonial economy; rum was what you made with it. The molasses-to-rum trade was one of the legs of the Atlantic triangle.

Modern USVI rum benefits from a complex Federal excise tax rebate arrangement that has periodically funded a substantial portion of the territorial government’s budget. The territory’s rum producers have navigated federal tax policy as attentively as any Silicon Valley startup navigating regulatory frameworks.

The solar case for UTC-4

St. Thomas sits at 64.9 degrees West longitude. UTC-4 puts solar noon at about 12:23 PM local time, reasonably close to accurate. The sun rises around 6 AM year-round and sets around 6 PM, with minimal seasonal variation at 18 degrees North latitude. DST would be pointless, and the USVI has rightly never bothered with it.

Sources