The False Dawn of the Left
WHEN JIMMY CARTER TOOK OFFICE, Washington's distaste for Third World intervenionism was at its height. The debacle in Vietnam and he Church Committee hearings on CIA operations mere fresh...
...Towards One Caribbean-The Declaration of St.George's," Bulletin of Eastern Caribbean Affairs, Vol.V, no.3 (July/August 1979...
...We wanted to have the Cubans thinking along the same lines as the other Caribbean countries...
...Barbados and Antigua denounced the appearance of an "unconstitutional" regime...
...This administration has gone damn far to be friendly to Cuba, and we've gotten 12,000 Cubans in the Horn of Africa for it," one unnamed official raged...
...A second Grenada was clearly still some way off...
...But the promise of the party's radical young leadership was short-lived...
...Manley had better luck than Burnham in building ties to the Soviet Union, which gave only meager aid to Guyana and regarded its leader as a dubious socialist ally...
...It soon set up an nter-Agency Task Force on the region, headed by Deputy Assistant Secretary of State John Bushnell, and hroughout 1977 dispatched senior officials on wellmublicized Caribbean tours...
...While the old Black Power-based groups were evolving in new directions, several of the older labor parties were also tilting leftwards...
...commentator, Abe Lowenthal, shrewdly recognized that: These [Caribbean] countries are satellites in search of an orbit...
...The new Administration also committed itself to generous direct aid...
...The Manley government also signed trade pacts with Hungary and Yugoslavia, and strengthened commercial ties with Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, the German Democratic Republic, Poland and Romania...
...Conventionally, the shift to the right in Carter's foreign policy is pegged to events in 1979 in Nicaragua, Afghanistan and Iran...
...In April 1980, Eugenia Charles' arch-conservative Freedom Party trounced the divided Labour opposition at the polls...
...In light of the outspoken support for Cuba's Africa policy from states such as Guyana and Jamaica, the Carter Administration began to see Caribbean appeals for "ideological pluralism" and diversified foreign relations as a U.S...
...Cited in Thomas J. Spinner Jr., "The Emperor Burnham has Lost his Clothes: Guyana's Political Life in Disarray," Caribbean Review, Vol.IX, no.4 (Fall 1980), p. 8 . 25...
...Since 1972, Compton had overseen a major expansion in the small island's industrial capacity, opening new plastics and garment factories, electronic component assembly plants and breweries, as well as an Amerada-Hess oil refinery and a 150-acre industrial free zone...
...REPORT ON THE AMERICAS N 24In a series of island elections from 1979-1982, the modest showing by radical groups exposed their inability to emulate the NJM's success...
...Lucia and Dominica, where left-leaning governments took office under chaotic circumstances...
...In Jamaica, with Manley's overtures to the socialist world, came the growth of a Marxist wing within his PNP...
...By early 1978, the thaw in U.S./ Cuban relations was flagging...
...The glue which held the old two-party system together began to come unstuck, as the governing labor parties found they could not keep their rank-and-file supporters in line indefinitely by blaming British colonialism for underdevelopment and promising welfare improvements they could not pay for...
...It was a chilly evening, and a stiff breeze off the harbor helped keep the numbers down...
...Indeed, Burnham and Manley both identified vigorously with Cuba's own foreign policy in the mid- to late-1970s, particularly its active military policy in Africa...
...Under pressure from his national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Carter decided to get tough and reassert traditional U.S...
...As opposition to his eccentric rule grew more widespread, the self-appointed "Colonel" John resorted to force to silence it...
...Since 1951, Island politics had been dominated by Eric Gairy, who, after Grenada's independence in 1974, had made an increasingly violent and arbitrary travesty of the Westminster model...
...The Caribbean islands' desire to find what Williams called the region's "fundamental unity and distinctive identity" dovetailed with Cuba's own changing priorities...
...attitudes...
...by 1982 the figure had risen to $136.9 million...
...Now, in 1985, his MNU was a chastened group of survivors...
...Caribbean Policy in the 1980s (Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1984), p. 6 . 2. Author's interview, Bridgetown, Barbados, January 30, 1985...
...The leftist Dominica Liberation Movement Alliance came in last with a modest 11...
...Wall Street Journal, April 1, 1980...
...warships made 125 calls to 29 Caribbean seaports...
...The Cubans also offered direct aid in the form of technical assistance, qualified personnel and scholarship programs...
...inside half an hour, his government had capitulated...
...As its reliance grew on aid from socialist and radical non-aligned countries such as Iraq, Syria, Algeria and Libya, it felt an ever greater need to convince these donors of its revolutionary credentials by adopting "principled positions" on foreign policy issues...
...U.S...
...From July 13-16, 1979, representatives of Grenada, St...
...It was the first time a U.S...
...Lucia, too, saw a rapid collapse by the Left...
...Private capital continued to dominate the economy, which remained based on cash-crop production and tourism...
...The debacle in Vietnam and he Church Committee hearings on CIA operations mere fresh memories...
...It went on to declare support for the New International Economic Order, endorsed "an independent and non-aligned approach to foreign policy relations with all countries," and opposed "imperialism in all its forms...
...Jamaica and Guyana immediately declared their support for the PRG...
...Within months, the ripples seemed to have spread to neighboring St...
...Lucia and the French island of Guadeloupe under party-to-party arrangements.x In March 1980, France accused Cuba of being behind strikes and riots in Guadeloupe and Martinique...
...3. Time, October 22, 1979...
...T HE RED DAWN THAT CARTER FEARED, however, was a false one...
...On January 29, 1981, at his first press conference as president, Reagan hailed the Seaga victory as "a great reverse in the Caribbean situation...
...See, for example, Michael Massing, "Grenada Before and After," The Atlantic Monthly (February 1984), especially p.86...
...Author's interviews with former senior PRG officials, St.George's and Grenville, Grenada, February 1985...
...In the course of 1980, U.S...
...The St.Lucia Labour Party was the natural beneficiary of the discontent and ousted Compton at the polls in 1979...
...These included siding with the Soviet Union in U.N...
...Vincent as the next Caribbean domino to fall...
...AFTER THE DEATH OF CHE GUEVARA, the Cubans made overtures to a number of Caribbean leaders," recalled Errol Barrow, leader of the Barbados Democratic Labour Party and the island's prime minister from 1961-1976.2 "We decided to open diplomatic relations because we had a community of interests over questions like sugar prices...
...We're all very disillusioned...
...But the perception of left-wing brushfires in the Caribbean islands, and their ties to Cuba, was crucial to the changing foreign policy climate in Washington...
...As the decade wore on, the Eastern Caribbean groups, and others like Walter Rodney's Working People's Alliance (WPA) in Guyana, shed their purely ethnic outlook and adopted more clearly socialist and nationalist ideas...
...From St...
...Kitts-Nevis to Barbados, a conservative backlash picked off one Eastern Caribbean island after another, leaving revolutionary Grenada quite isolated...
...But a one-note anticommunist campaign proved enough for Milton Cato's St...
...Though Caribbean leaders shed few tears for Gairy, and eventually came to develop a modus vivendi with Bishop, they had little sympathy with the PRG's unpreThe NJM was a political hybrid cedented seizure of power...
...The best known local exponent of the theory was Ralph Gonsalves-later the charismatic leader of one of the strongest small island groups, St...
...One point on Habib's agenda was a possible multinational seaborne patrol force in the Eastern Caribbean...
...Cuba alone had ten and the USSR eight.' Several small islands eagerly embraced relations with Cuba...
...And they found a natural kinship with some of the more politicized members of the Rastafarian faith, which was a magnet for island youth in the 1970s...
...Agreements signed in April 1975 provided for joint development of Guyana's fishing industry and civil aviation...
...He adopted the Jamaican leader as a favorite son, to the visible annoyance of other Caribbean politicians, and welcomed him as the first head of state to visit the White House...
...See Vaughan Lewis, "Los EEUU y el Caribe: La potencia dominante y los nuevos estados," Nueva Sociedad, Vol.LVI-LVII (November/December 1981...
...For an analysis of the crisis see Earl Bousquet, "An Analysis of the Present Struggle in St.Lucia," Bulletin of Eastern Caribbean Affairs, Vol.VI, no.1 (March/ April 1980), pp...
...The Miami Herald, November 27, 1979...
...in 1976, the Booker-McConnell sugar operation...
...they sent tractors, condensed milk and prefabricated factories...
...Seraphine proved almost as erratic as his predecessor, trumping John's money-making schemes with one of his own: selling Dominican passports to Iranian exiles for $10,000 apiece through a Los Angeles company...
...After the death of Seaga: "making freedom work" Jamaica: voting amidst violence Rodney, Maurice Bishop exclaimed, "If the best of our Caribbean sons can be cut down in such a manner, this can usher in a new sinister phase of Mafia and CIA-type approach to politics...
...A couple of town drunks kept up a steady barrage of heckling...
...Though many Administration officials came to regret the abrasive tone of Ortiz's visit, it set the tone for Grenada to become trapped in a vicious circle of hostilities with the United States...
...The Administration was convinced it faced the specter of a hostile axis reaching from Cuba to Nicaragua, by way of Grenada and the Eastern Caribbean, down as far as Guyana and Suriname, where a left-wing military regime had seized power in February...
...It abandoned earlier help for armed revolutionary groups in Latin America, and instead sought to break out of its isolation through diplomacy...
...so were we...
...Trinidad and Barbados both maintained correct diplomatic relations, but did little else...
...With an effective monopoly of power, Burnham conducted a sweeping nationalization program, which placed 80% of the economy in state hands...
...That in turn only ensured greater hostility from an already suspicious Washington...
...It had mounted its first challenge, between 19681973, under the banner of Black Power...
...The NJM did not reject elections...
...But for Bernard [Coard] it was very simple...
...administration had focused on the Caribbean islands for non-military reasons...
...Coard announced, "We don't want to have only a 'representative democracy,' which means that once every five years you go the polls and mark your x, having been given enough rum and corned beef at the local rum shop...
...The best summaries of the subject are Andres Serbin, "La evolucion de la ideologia de la izquierda caribena," Nueva Sociedad (San Jose, Costa Rica), No.61 (July/August 1982) and Serbin, "Las experiencias recientes del socialismo caribeno," Nueva Sociedad, No.63 (November/December 1982...
...Rather our ecurity concerns in the Caribbean are increasingly political in nature...
...4. Anthony Maingot, "Cuba and the Commonwealth Caribbean: Playing the Cuban Card," Caribbean Review, Vol.IX, no.1 (Winter 1980), pp...
...2 2 - 2 7 . 22...
...Abraham F. Lowenthal, "The Insular Caribbean as a Crucial Test for U.S...
...Vincent, St...
...In the climate of incipient detente, Trinidadian Prime Minister Eric Williams urged the OAS in 1970 to reconsider its ostracism of Castro...
...The GNP's election record against Gairy was insipid, and the group had no stomach for the radical option of removing Gairy by force...
...He also played his anti-communism to the hilt, with a flamboyant expulsion of the Cuban ambassador and a break in diplomatic relations with Havana...
...0 St...
...Policy toward the Caribbean: Recurring Problems and Promises," in Jack W. Hopkins, ed., Latin America and Caribbean Contemporary Record (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1983), pp.79-89...
...supremacy in the Caribbean Basin...
...That fell to the second opposition group, Maurice Bishop's New Jewel Movement (NJM...
...Though the United States may have found its protege, Burnham, unpalatable, it kept off his back out of fear that the alternative-Jagan's pro-Soviet PPP-was worse, a fact that Burnham turned adroitly to his advantage...
...T HE CARIBBEAN LEFT IN THE 1970s seemed a ferment of different trends and tendencies...
...and ceding sovereignty over the northern tip of the island to U.S...
...The Cubans are guns for hire, and they'll go anywhere...
...The Miami Herald, August 11, 1979...
...This released the small Caribbean island nations from the vise of East-West tensions, and for the first time endorsed their wish to relate to Cuba normally as a Caribbean neighbor rather than an alien enemy...
...Cited in Robert A. Pastor, "U.S...
...Five years later, in the darkened market square of Kingstown, St...
...There, John Compton's United Workers Party, an avid proponent of the "industrialization by invitation" model, had held power from 1964-1979...
...9. The Miami Herald, March 14, 1980...
...The main conclusions of the election observers' report are reprinted in Guyana: Fraudulent Revolution (London: Latin America Bureau, 1984), pp...
...They have no compunctions...
...The Carter Administration gave its iew Caribbean policy high visibility...
...The Cubans told us we were crazy over the Afghanistan vote," said another ex-PRG official...
...The alarm began when Cuba dispatched combat troops to crush a Somali invasion that threatened the socialist regime in Ethiopia...
...Grenada's domestic policies were more modest...
...He promised an economic revolution on the islandsweeping deregulation of the economy, selling off state-owned companies, increasing export incentives and overhauling the tax system...
...Instead of forming parties, they built political support through communitybased organizations-youth, church and co-operative groups...
...Vincent Labour Party to win a sweeping victory...
...In 1971, Cuba had for the first time endorsed the Soviet doctrine of peaceful coexistence...
...Newsweek, March 13, 1978...
...South, January 1981...
...7 The comment was a revealing one...
...none of them had been battle-tested in the arduous conditions of Gairy's Grenada...
...It now had the most fervent of ideological allies in Jamaica, the traditional bellwether of the rest of the English-speaking Caribbean...
...Western institutions lauded the pragmatism of Finance Minister Coard...
...More per capita assistance began to flow into Jamaica than into any other country, with the exception of Israel...
...In October 1972, four countries-Jamaica, Guyana, Barbados and Trinidad & Tobago---opened diplomatic relations with Cuba...
...George's began to look more like anomalies than trend-setters...
...Maurice Bishop Speaks: The Grenada Revolution 1979-83 (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1983), pp...
...The Antigua Caribbean Liberation Movement (ACLM), under the charismatic one-man leadership of Tim Hector, had risen to prominence by exposing the corruption of the ruling Bird family in the racy columns of its newspaper, The Outlet...
...Back in 1971, the region had only two socialist country missions-a Cuban consulate in Kingston, Jamaica and a non-resident Soviet ambassador to Guyana...
...As in Dominica, the divided laborites were easy prey for Compton, who was returned to office by a landslide in May 1982.2' 0 Antigua proved the worst electoral showing for the Left...
...Most were Grenadians, but contingents also came from Antigua, Dominica, St...
...In Dominica and St...
...In an angry radio broadcast on April 13, Bishop retorted: "No country has the right to tell us what to do or how to run our country or who to be friendly with...
...In December 1975, Guyana allowed Cuban transport aircraft en route to Angola to refuel at Georgetown airport...
...C UBA'S WARMEST FRIENDSHIPS WERE with the social democratic PNP government of Michael Manley in Jamaica and Forbes Burnham's Guyana...
...Walter Rodney's Working People's Alliance (WPA) was the target of a series JULY/AUGUST 1985 25Mare Nostru z4 Am Mare Nostrum of government attacks during 1979-1980, and on June 13, 1980, Rodney himself died when a bomb exploded in his car...
...Sally Shelton, later to be Carter's ambassador to the Eastern Caribbean, explained that this meant a "willingness to tolerate economic models which are not necessarily our own and which we would not advocate, but with which we are prepared to live...
...By 1980, the number had swelled dramatically...
...The signatories of the July 1979 Declaration of St...
...Already Washington had won a breathing space in the smaller islands, and could work with a string of reliable friends to stave off the region's chronic economic decline before it could lead to renewed political turmoil...
...In 1980, Jamaica had received only $12.7 million in U.S...
...8 2 -83...
...In Jamaica, Cuban aid had been devoted to popular social welfare programs for the poor which had brought prestige to Manley's PNP...
...In 1976 it made a good showing against Gairy in alliance with Blaize's GNP, and Bishop became leader of the parliamentary opposition...
...Jamaicans in turn travelled to Cuba for secondary and higher education, cultural exchanges and athletic training...
...Young, a black diplomat who had travelled widely in the region, was an especially successful image-builder...
...After Seaga's Washington trip, Reagan asked David Rockefeller to assemble a blue-chip group of corporate executives to give Jamaica technical advice and speed up the flow of private investment to the island...
...One State Department official commented with alarm, "There could be one, two, three Grenadas down there before we know it...
...In the summer of 1979, many had seen Gonsalves as a rising star, and St...
...Grenada's NJM was a hybrid of many of these Caribbean-wide tendencies, and grew out of the merger of several different groups...
...1 - 5 . 13...
...A close race was predicted...
...2 " I N MICHAEL MANLEY'S JAMAICA, TOO, socialism ran aground amidst chaos...
...During the 1980 election campaign, rampant political violence between rival street gangs left 745 people dead...
...Seaga's victory was the high water mark of the region's rightward shift over the previous year, and offered the incoming Reagan Administration a unique showcase...
...Politically, the PRG had a limited tolerance for internal dissent, and an undisguised contempt for the shortcomings of "Westminster hypocrisy...
...The Left won a solid if undramatic 15% of the vote...
...He told Bishop that Washington "would view with displeasure any tendency on the part of Grenada to develop closer ties with Cuba...
...Promising to still the chaos and turn the economic slump around, Seaga took 51 seats out of 60 in the Jamaican parliament...
...Carter soon fixed on the 7aribbean Basin as a critical arena to play out his luman rights policy and his willingness to coexist with Fhird World nationalism...
...Reagan was personally elated by Seaga's victory...
...The PRG felt itself surrounded by enemies, became morbidly sensitive to criticism from abroad and identified Cuba as its only dependable ally...
...St...
...They found a theoretical framework for their beliefs in the "non-capitalist path of development...
...also Latin America Regional Report: Caribbean, September 5, 1980...
...The speakers were a mixed group: an eloquent Rastafarian agronomist, a quiet social democrat who admired Jamaica's Michael Manley, and party leader Ralph Gonsalves, a fiery populist orator...
...Therefore, we had a duty to defend them...
...In the pre-dawn of March 13, 1979, NJM activists seized Gairy's True Blue barracks...
...national security problem...
...They may become part of the Cuban orbit, but not for military reasons...
...Burnham's already suspect populism was further tarnished by his harsh response to a fresh current of leftwing opposition in the 1970s...
...But Compton was notoriously insensitive to the casualties of his forced-march industrialization program, passing a harsh Public Order Act and cracking down hard on protests by unemployed youth...
...They made a sharp break from the heritage of "laborism" and the old school Fabian socialism of their predecessors...
...After 1975, when the first hints surfaced of covert destabilization of Jamaica by the Ford Administration, Cuban largesse toward the island grew strikingly...
...He offered what the Grenadians saw as a miserly $5,000 in aid, and took the opportunity to deliver a harsh lecture...
...And in a Freudian slip that hinted at the shape of things to come, Reagan declared, "This opens the door . . . for us to have a policy in the Mediterranean...
...Seraphine also moved quickly to purge left-wing members of his cabinet...
...Cuban aid to Guyana was oriented more prosaically toward technical personnel exchanges and training programs...
...Vincent, too, would follow the trend...
...In Washington, where the mid-term political mood of the Carter Administration was shifting sharply to the right, many officials began to say the same...
...Now, a new generation of leaders arose, often educated at British and North American universities and forged not by the labor struggles of the 1930s and the fight for independence, but by the new realities of the Cold War, non-alignment and Third World nationalism...
...5. The Wall Street Journal, March 22, 1976...
...The quality of their leadership and organization proved weaker...
...This was distinct from the pro-Soviet Jamaican Workers Party (JWP), which together with Cheddi Jagan's PPP in Guyana was one of the only bastions of Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy in the English-speaking Caribbean...
...The centerpiece of Carter's Caribbean policy was an attempt to normalize relations with Cuba...
...Soon, both Argentina and Peru broke OAS sanctions against Cuba by resuming trade ties...
...so were we...
...7 - 1 0 and 44-49...
...A third, which accelerated the Marxist character of the NJM, was Bernard Coard's Organization of Revolutionary Education and Liberation (OREL), officially a study group but in effect a party within the party...
...2 0 As the 1980 U.S...
...A second thread was Unison Whiteman's Joint Endeavor for Welfare, Education and Liberation (JEWEL), which aimed to undercut Gairy's support in the countryside by setting up rural cooperatives...
...The Carter Administration began to acknowledge that the warm ties which had developed during the 1970s between Cuba and several English-speaking Caribbean countries had more to do with pragmatic diplomacy than ideology...
...laundering oil for the South African regime...
...Policy," in H. Michael Erisman, ed., The Caribbean Challenge: U.S...
...On one side was Herbert Blaize's Grenada National Party (GNP) and the so-called "Committee of 22," with members drawn from the Chamber of Commerce, the Lions and Rotary clubs, organized labor and the churches...
...The NJM's success inspired groups in the other islands, who decided to test their strength through the ballot box even after the Grenadians had turned to arms...
...Paul Dijoud, French minister of overseas departments and territories, declared that, "International communism is on the march in the Caribbean, and Cuba is the staging post for Soviet action...
...Vote-catching had never been the ACLM's priority...
...One was Maurice Bishop's Movement for the Assemblies of the People (MAP), whose early roots lay in Black Power, and which admired the Ujamaa system and Cuba's Committees for the Defense of the Revolution (CDRs) as alternatives to the Westminster model...
...8. Caribbean Contact, November 1981...
...Amiassador Andrew Young, Secretary of State Cyrus Vance and the president's wife, Rosalynn...
...Burnham's PNC was universally blamed for the outrage, and the president for life-already distrusted by most Caribbean governments-now became a pariah to the regional Left as well...
...Lucia, the result was factionalism and the emergence of new, left-wing labor parties...
...They were under attack by imperialism...
...Vincent's elections in December 1979 were the first hint that the domino theorists in Washington had overreacted...
...In the same October 1 speech, Carter announced the opening of a Caribbean Joint Task Force headquarters at Key West, Florida...
...3 0 - 3 1 . 11...
...For two years, island government was paralyzed by acrimonious leadership conflicts, and in April 1981, the radical faction, led by Deputy Prime Minister George Odium, broke ranks...
...Government ownership did nothing to boost productivity or growth, and key industries fell into decline...
...But Hector's gadfly style and the ACLM's devotion to single-issue politics made it more of a watchdog or pressure group than an organized party...
...George's and issued a combative 20-point declaration...
...An 11-member international observer team reported that the election was a "clumsily managed and blatant fraud designed to perpetuate the rule of President Forbes Burnham...
...Vincent's United People's Movement (UPM...
...See Lindel Smith, "The Antigua General Election 1980," Bulletin of Eastern Caribbean Affairs, Vol.VI, no.1 (March/April 1980), pp.11-22...
...Three days later, the People's Revolutionary Government (PRG) opened formal diplomatic relations with Cuba...
...Seaga wrote off Manley as "the deceased client of the Cuban state, as a proxy for Marxist ambitions and intentions in the area...
...it garnered just 4% of the April 1980 election vote, as the veteran Vere Bird's Antigua Labour Party increased its majority...
...In addition to developing Antigua as a tourist haven, the Birds' adventures included using the island as an arms transshipment point, hosting the mysterious weapons-testing activities of the Canadian Space Research Corporation, and a series of juicy corruption scandals...
...All that harsh rhetoric-it was totally unnecessary," lamented one former member of the NJM central committee...
...These ties gave the English-speaking Caribbean new diplomatic leverage, and offered a way of escaping total dependency on the United States...
...Burnham's appeal to Havana lay less in his waferthin commitment to socialism at home than in his radical rhetoric on foreign policy...
...Within days of the election, police easily put down a minor armed revolt on St...
...In October 1968, Jamaica was shaken by riots after the government expelled Guyanese historian Walter Rodney...
...THE 1979 REVOLUTION IN GRENADA WAS A stone thrown into a deceptively calm pond...
...It was widely assumed that St...
...1 8 3 - 1 9 2 . 7. Hilbourne A. Watson, "United States Foreign Policy toward the Caribbean," Third World Diplomacy, Vol.1, no...
...Jamaica also gave strong rhetorical support to Cuban aid for the Angolan MPLA, which Manley hailed as "honorable and in the best traditions of all those who care for African freedom...
...investors for use as a free port...
...ference Todman, Carter's assistant secretary of state "or inter-American affairs, explained that, "We no onger see the Caribbean in quite the same stark miliary security context that we once viewed it...
...The Jamaican Prime Minister made his first trip to Moscow in April 1979...
...One U.S...
...After an hour of speeches, perhaps 40 listeners had gathered, most of them curious youths...
...6. Manley's reasoning is laid out in his memoir, Jamaica: Struggle in the Periphery (London: Writers and Readers Ltd., 1982), pp...
...The enthusiasm for Cuba, however, was far from universal...
...26 THE FALSE DAWN OF THE LEFT 1. Cited in H. Michael Erisman, Colossus Challenged: U.S...
...Barbados was particularly cool, and refused to accredit a resident Cuban mission in Bridgetown or send a Barbadian head of state to visit Havana.' Some small island leaders indulged in frequent verbal hostilities against the Cubans, notably Prime Minister Milton Cato of St.Vincent and the patriarch of Antiguan politics, Vere Bird...
...The Caribbean, where it had never sponsored armed attacks, was fertile ground for new friendships...
...They included U.N...
...In 1971 and 1975, he took over the country's main bauxite holdings...
...national liberation movements vere enjoying sweeping successes on the battlefield, nd new-found moral prestige...
...Anything that's going to feed hungry people," he said, "anything that aids in rural development and anything that stabilizes population growth-the [U.S.] government can live with it, whatever it's called...
...Both Guyana and Jamaica were deep in unpopular talks with the IMF at this point, and heightened rhetoric over foreign policy was a logical way for them to defuse discontent at home...
...More than that, however, the newly independent nations, faced with intractable economic problems, found Cuba a useful model...
...T HEY SAW GRENADA AS THE FIRST flashpoint...
...They rejected not only the Westminster system and its social democratic offshoots, but classical Marxism too, which they saw as a European phenomenon...
...Policy in a Volatile Region (Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press 1984), pp.183-197...
...Havana's foreign assistance programs featured what the Caribbean most urgently neededhealth care, literacy, school construction...
...Throughout the 1970s, diplomatic links between the Caribbean and the Soviet bloc increased...
...Gairy's GULP faced two sets of opponents...
...The Carter Administration, reeling from the fall of Somoza in Nicaragua in the same week, responded by recalling former diplomat Philip Habib from retirement and sending him on an emergency tour of the English-speaking Caribbean...
...It announced that, "The three governments . . . recognize that popular democracy, respect for the rights of workers and social and economic justice for the masses must be their] main objectives...
...Dominica's brief interim government, which contained two radical cabinet ministers, proved only a temporary answer to an abnormal situation...
...1 (Winter 1982...
...in 1970, the "February Revolution" in Trinidad came close to unseating a government...
...Chile and Mexico backed his appeal...
...Between 1979-1981, 300 Eastern Caribbean youth accepted scholarships to study in Cuba...
...In a short time, a series of loosely organized groups sprang up-the Movement for National Liberation (MONALI) in Barbados, the Antigua Caribbean Liberation Movement (ACLM), the FORUM group in the Eastern Caribbean...
...Throughout the late 1970s, the Labour Party government of Prime Minister Patrick John had tried to rescue the island's basketcase economy through an ever wilder series of scams-offering the island to the United States as a submarine base...
...Moscow, unlike Cuba, also granted a long-term loan to finance the purchase of Soviet-made goods...
...Finally he fell to a constitutional coup, which placed Oliver Seraphine in power as interim president...
...We call this 'five-second democracy.' "'" Instead the PRG promoted a network of mass organizations and participatory organs such as parish councils, under the central direction of the NJM, which increasingly defined itself as a Leninist party...
...Under siege by the IMF during his second term, Manley had every interest in diversifying Jamaica's trade and aid relations, and saw the Soviet bloc as a vital buffer against IMF pressure.' The Moscow visit yielded a long-term agreement for Jamaican aluminum exports to the USSR, and joint accords on sea navigation and fisheries...
...elections approached, the days of Andrew Young, and tolerance for "ideological pluralism" were a distant memory...
...23 It was not the first vote that Burnham had fixed...
...votes on Afghanistan, and making flamboyant gestures such as offering to send 500 Grenadian troops to fight in Namibia in May 1980.2 Most survivors of the debacle now agree that this rigid diplomacy courted disaster by needlessly raising the profile of a near-defenseless microstate...
...If the Cubans succeed, it will be because Cuba is able to convey a greater sense of social and economic integration, a greater sense of nation-building and a greater ability to employ people...
...Ambassador Frank Ortiz arrived in St.George's less than a month after the takeover...
...Henry S. Gill, "The Foreign Policy of the Grenada Revolution," Bulletin of Eastern Caribbean Affairs, Vol.VII, no.1 (March/April 1981), pp...
...The October 30 vote, five days before Ronald Reagan's defeat of Jimmy Carter, presented a polarized choice between the democratic socialism of Manley's PNP and the aggressive free-market principles of the JLP under Edward Seaga...
...Lucia and Dominica gathered in St...
...Instead, they looked to the example of Pan-Africanism and the conceptions of "African Socialism," such as the Ujamaa village assemblies of Tanzania, finding parallels in the tradition of village councils in islands such as Grenada and Dominica...
...The traditional parties approached the vote-and independence-divided: the Left was unified...
...After Prime Minister Forbes Burnham's quixotic decision in 1970 to dub himself a Marxist-Leninist and Guyana a "Cooperative Republic," Guyanese-Cuban relations also grew close, if less effusive...
...Vincent, a rally of the Movement for National Unity (MNU) drew a sparse crowd...
...Twelve socialist JULY/AUGUST 1985 21Mareo O e ANostrum Mare Nostrum countries had opened missions of various levels in the English-speaking Caribbean...
...Cuban advisers built housing units and small dams, high schools and sports facilities...
...In 1968 he had resorted to faked overseas and proxy votes to ensure his election, and in 1978 had himself declared executive president for life after a fraudulent referendum...
...To do so, he concocted a brief flurry around the "discovery" of a brigade of Soviet combat troops in Cuba-which had in fact been there for years...
...2 THE LARGER CARIBBEAN EXPERIMENTS IN socialism also foundered by the end of the decade...
...Left-wing groups in many of the islands, often sharing common roots with the NJM and drawing their main support from disaffected youth, tried to emulate the Grenadians' search for alternatives to the Westminster system...
...In December 1979, trade unionists from 15 Caribbean countries attended a labor conference in Havana...
...The watchword of many Caribbean leaders at this time was "ideological pluralism," and Young embraced the concept outspokenly, even where it conflicted with traditional U.S...
...Vincent's Union Island...
...Elections in December 1980 were the last blow to Guyana as a socialist model worth imitating elsewhere in the region...
...Cuba also exported cement to Guyana despite a domestic shortage...
...the turnaround of a nation that had gone certainly in the direction of the Communist movement...
...Afghanistan was a REPORT ON THE AMERICAS 22revolutionary government...
...We are not in anybody's backyard...
...The same month saw 800 marines storming the beaches at Guantanamo, and special Dominica's Charles: "learning to neg properly" envoy Habib holding the third in a series of meetings in London to plan joint U.S./British responses to Caribbean economic and security problems...
Vol. 19 • July 1985 • No. 4
