I've figured out the hotel's WiFi. It's not the slowest Internet connection in the world; it's the slowest SSL in the world. In other words, they're not really throttling the Internet per se. But somewhere between here and the U.S., someone is only letting through a very few secure packets.
The genius of this is that things like restaurant reviews (think: TripAdvisor.com) come up normally. But just try to get your email, check your airline reservations, or heaven forbid, get to your bank's website. It's excruciating.
Normal port-80 traffic is running about 500 kbps. That's not especially fast, but it's not painful. But SSL traffic is getting to my laptop at 100 kbps peak speeds and 30 kbps average speeds. Let's party like it's 1999! W00t!
Further, I can't tell where the bottleneck is. Anyone from here to Miami could be throttling SSL: the local Sint Maarten ISP, the hotel, the government of Sint Maarten, the government of the U.S....there's no way to tell. It's just like the Chinese firewall, maddening, inefficient, almost certainly deliberate, but too difficult to diagnose to ever find the right face to punch.
I have a very simple problem to solve that my hotel's WiFi is preventing me from solving. That makes me very annoyed. This will, I assure you, go on my Trip Advisor review.