Laboratory Conditions
Surely it is a crime against nature and civilization that Jamaica, Barbados, Dominica, Antigua, the Bahamas and other of the British-American islands should be allowed to die of dry rot because...
...The Adams plan, said one Western diplomat, was "a complete non-starter, absolutely ludicrous...
...A new diplomatic corps-modest in size, but highly competent-arrived in Grenada, where U.S...
...aid during 1985 and a 50% rise in tourism, spurred by the exchange rate and a slick advertizing campaign in the U.S...
...Lucia, work for some...
...It symbolized its commitment to Grenada's recovery with visits to the island by both George Bush and George Shultz...
...The 300-man Barbados Defense Force, which included 80 riflemen, would be regarded as a "strategic military reserve...
...In the words of OECS General Secretary Vaughan Lewis, "The reinforcement of local security systems leads to an upsetting of the balance between the various socio-political sectors...
...forces during World War II, North American culture has found a ready audience in the English-speaking Caribbean...
...Our adversary is the Soviet Union, and our weapon is the truth...
...Carl Stone, "Seaga is in Trouble," Caribbean Review, Vol.XI, no.4 (Fall 1982...
...disbanding of the sugar cooperatives set up under Manley...
...The Wall Street Journal, April 5, 1985...
...In the first seven months of 1985, parliament met just twice...
...The World Bank granted $95.8 million, the IMF a threeyear commitment of $698 million and other Western donors more than $350 million...
...David Harrison, "English-Speaking Caribbean Less Developed Countries (LDCs): Growth and Development of the Manufacturing Sector," Bulletin of Eastern Caribbean Affairs, Vol.IX, no.6 (January/February 1984...
...In the same year, IMF austerity demands cost a further 6,000 public sector jobs...
...Its leadership was aging, its appeal to the large youth vote nil...
...Lucia St...
...Rose, chief economist of the CDB...
...Of the 250 remaining U.S...
...Exxon's 60-year-old oil refinery on the Dutch island of Aruba and United Brands' huge Costa Rican banana plantations closed...
...But they were less ideologically driven than Seaga, who had been portrayed by the Reagan Administration as the Caribbean's high priest of free-market principles...
...Under pressure from the IMF, creeping devaluation has dragged the Jamaican dollar down from 1.79 to 5.50:1...
...I don't think there is any other part of the world," commented one U.S...
...The GDM based its strength on the personal appeal of its leaders, Mitchell and Francis Alexis...
...Ten million is a March 1985, Admiral Wesley McDonald, commander joke," said St...
...The deepest signs of change within the parliamentary system are in Dominica, where Eugenia Charles' Freedom Party arose in 1968 as an aggressive new defender of free enterprise, and in St...
...As Gordon Lewis adds so eloquently, to believe that the English-speaking Caribbean can avoid "the Latin American habit of soldiers grabbing power" is just "a charming conceit...
...The legitimacy of the ruling parties will erode, and as it does a new force is likely to come to the fore-the new U.S.-created security forces...
...there is no such restraint on abuses by privately owned companies, with all their politically useful fringe benefits...
...2 6 After Seaga's election, AID greatly expanded its Kingston mission, and in November 1981, an OPIC delegation with 24 U.S...
...Already, the cracks are showing, as the old rules of consensus politics gradually break down in the weakest links of the island chain...
...Yet perhaps the rudest shock was the decision by the Rockefeller Committee to disband...
...Most observers agreed that the young Brizan, a cautious reformist, was the alliance's main vote-catcher...
...of free-market principles, went on, "The CBI will CBI: The Myth of Taiwanization mean nothing to us unless we get a substantial amount and get it early, to develop our infrastructure and our Why this continuing anxiety about military matters...
...comments on the WPA from Guardian-Le Monde Weekly, November 4, 1984...
...In the more developed islands-Jamaica, for example, or Trinidad-high operating costs were the deterrent...
...Despite the islands' poverty, part of the Westminster legacy is a relatively high literacy rate and well-developed press and communications systems...
...Their per capita income, $1340 in 1981, had slid to $923 by 1984...
...Percentage Jan-Sept 1983 Jan-Sept 1984 Increase Barbados Eastern Caribbean Antigua Dominica Grenada Montserrat St...
...Even AIFLD's Caribbean program director acknowledged that his advice to investors is, "If you're running away from the United States to escape labor unions, forget it...
...February brought a five-month shutdown of Alcoa's bauxite plant and sweeping layoffs in the state railroad and banana companies...
...John, Adams' successor as Prime Minister of Barbados, put his finger on why that may remain an elusive dream for the Reagan Administration...
...Even U.S...
...See Financial Times, November 27, 1984...
...The most incisive writings on the subject are by John Spicer Nichols...
...Lucia's John Compton in a typical comin chief of the U.S...
...Seaga's Ministry of Industry and Commerce, which was expected to act as a clubby liaison point between government and the powerful Jamaica Manufacturers Association, instead became "a battlefield of frustrations, accusations and counter-accusations.''2 By the summer of 1982, the use of private-factory capacity was down to just 39...
...An expanded diplomatic presence was the first step...
...keep a close personal eye on even the smallest of its Compton, one of the region's most zealous disciples charges...
...Everybody's (New York), July 1982...
...While Blaize quietly accepted AID direction, Brizan spoke of expanding state aid to agriculture and declared that "pure free market economics cannot work here...
...The traditional Westminster regimes remained viable because they relied on inass support...
...In 1981, the economy registered a modest 2% growth rate after years of steady decline, and inflation plunged from 23% to only 4.1...
...Several Caribbean leaders, for their own domestic reasons, have found it expedient to buy into Reagan's "Looney Tunes" anti-terrorist script...
...The pressure extended to the Inter-American and Caribbean development banks, which were urged to block loans designed to rehabilitate state-owned concerns...
...Now he came right out and admitted, "We are not a country that has large-scale capital resources that can indulge in a totally free economy...
...The finishing touches were put on the ugly, new, fortress-like embassy on the hill above St.John's harbor in Antigua...
...The United States," Simmonds told delegates, "does have a great problem on its doorstep on which it places great importance--the problem of Central America...
...Navy announced it would conduct "Our people will say to us, their leaders, that you are joint maneuvers called "Exotic Palm" in St...
...Chamber of Commerce, the endowment placed special emphasis on the Caribbean...
...FBIS-LAM, February 7, 1985...
...Business Committee for Jamaica...
...4. The Miami Herald, March 18, 1982...
...Vincent Guyana Jamaica 128.7 25.8 44.4 186.2 Trinidad & Tobago 994.7 202.8 31.2 5.9 0.1 0.4 0.9 15.8 5.4 2.7 49.7 330.3 1,024.0 57.6%' 20.50% 11.9% 77.4% 2.9% (U.S.$ million) 1984 Exports CBI Exports Under CBI As 1984 % 10.9 3.6 0. I 0.0 0.0 0.0 2.3 1.1 0.1 40.0 5.4% 11.5% 1.7% 14.6% 20.4% 3.7% 12 1 5.1 0.5% Source: Digested from figures provided by U.S...
...The IMF and World Bank demanded savage cutbacks in public sector jobs and a freeze on government expenditure...
...The entire "Caribbean Basin" policy was based, after all, on the conviction that the islands and the mainland could be seen as a single entity with the same needs...
...T HE CONTRASTING STYLES OF LONDON and Washington were symbolized by their roles in building the island police forces after the invasion...
...But Manley declared a PNP election boycott, accusing the JLP of breaching an agreement not to hold elections without new voting lists...
...Kitts, and Grenada proposed to join after its December 1984 elections...
...It is even possible to walk the mile to Bridgetown's new, harbor-side industrial park, tour the air-conditioned offices of the new data processing companies, and feel that the future may, after all, hold stability and prosperity...
...The Washington Post, January 27, 1985...
...It offered little but temporary, AID-financed road gangs to relieve the crushing weight of unemployment, which ran as high as 35-40...
...On this level at least, the Reagan Administration may have succeeded in its goal of stamping a single political identity on the diverse countries of the Caribbean Basin...
...Kitts St...
...T HE CODE OF CONDUCT DECREED BY Washington since 1981, and acted out in the theater of Grenada two years later, means that any government that disdains elections may now expect invasion...
...This would facilitate rapid direct intervention by U.S...
...market than evidence of the much-touted "Taiwanization" of the Caribbean...
...no work for others 1984 elections, slashed jobs in the civil service and either closed several important state-owned enterprises set up by the PRG or starved them of capital-at the U.S...
...But] the string of islands which is the Caribbean, the soft underbelly of the United States, is every bit as important...
...Seaga's most remarkable volte-face, however, was to admit after the January riots that "pure" free market principles could never work in Jamaica...
...Latin America Regional Report: Caribbean, March 29, 1985...
...Vincent, St...
...This sets the basis for the coup and counter-coup syndrome...
...LABORATORY CONDITIONS 1. The Miami Herald, February 4, 1984...
...military found its patience tried by Britain's low-key approach, in particular a British decision to put a 1.2 million program for coast-guard docking and maintenance facilities out to commercial tender...
...The CPF remained on Grenada until the island's own 550-member police force had completed training, and talks on the future character of the regional defense system had ended...
...Brizan had said it...
...military personnel were already installed in the old Holiday Inn...
...A 1984 study by a Barpass Congress swiftly...
...Lucia...
...Author's interview with Michael Donovan, Caribbean Program Director, AIFLD, Bridgetown, Barbados, January 31, 1985...
...economic advisers, and their visible desire to hold Brizan's reformism in check, fanned this latent conflict...
...In Reagan's Washington there is no real distinction between Castro and Manley, a fastidious electoral politician who once declared, "I am opposed to communism, passionately...
...At the same time there was a concerted effort to dismantle the public sector...
...In Grenada, the figure fell to just 7...
...military...
...Jamaica's nightly International News Highlights relies heavily on U.S...
...See The Washington Post, January 27, 1985...
...The massive direct aid recommended for Central America by the Kissinger Commission in February 1984 added fuel to the fire...
...2. Heritage Foundation Backgrounder, October 1983...
...By July 1985 the once supportive Grenadian Voice complained in an angry editorial that Blaize had "disregarded parliamentary democracy," and questioned his survival...
...Even in Antigua and St...
...the phased withdrawal of U.S...
...He was the author, with Virginia Valenta, of "Leninism in Grenada," Problems of Communism (July-August 1984) and is now editing a book summarizing the findings of an August 1984 conference on "Soviet-Cuban Strategy in the Third World After Grenada...
...stockpile when the slump in world demand hit the industry...
...Vincent...
...In 1984...
...Michael's Cathedral in Barbados and believe for a moment that the old order bequeathed by the colonizers will endure...
...New investments in the Caribbean have also been more than wiped out by the exodus of foreign corporations-in textbook JULY/AUGUST 1985 i 39Mare Nostrum obedience to market forcesduring 1984 and early 1985...
...Washington eventually rejected the proposal for a standing army, and the last talk of the idea disappeared when its promoter, Tom Adams, died of a heart attack in February 1985...
...Despite the enticing 15-year tax holidays which every island offered, new investment was sluggish, except for a recent trend toward garment and electronic assembly plants in St...
...A threatened pro-U.S...
...And the more extravagantly the system promises salvation to an angry population, the more crippling is its failure...
...All this gave Washington a unique opportunity to consolidate and expand its influence, and to present Grenada and Jamaica as showcases, where the superiority of the American Way could be demonstrated under near perfect laboratory conditions...
...investors had adopted a wait-and-sec attitude...
...Throughout the region, manufacturing remained a tiny segment of economic activity...
...See Gordon Lewis, "The Lessons of Grenada for the Caribbean Left," Caribbean Contact, July 1984...
...Green Beret teams conducted six-week SSU training cycles with the cadets on their home islands...
...has made a major political investment," said Morse...
...in the 1960s, they won twothirds...
...warships...
...Officials argue, finally, that the Caribbean has had some success in drawing investment away from the Far East...
...Others September 1985, involving the SSUs, the Barbados were angered by the miserly allocation of direct aid to and Jamaica defense forces and U.S...
...Under a $15 million grant allocated to Grenada in November 1983, the SSUs received an impressive array of equipment, unprecedented in Eastern Caribbean history: M-16 rifles and submachine guns, grenade launchers and small arms, telecommunications systems and radio equipment, vehicles and uniforms...
...advisers arrived to draw up new tax, investment and banking laws...
...Jonathan Friedland, "Grenada: The Business of Invasion," Multinational Monitor, Vol.V, no.7 (July 1984...
...On "Exotic Palm," see FBIS-LAM, July 15, 1985...
...The state had the desperation of small-island leaders, who hoped taken the lead in building infrastructure not out of any Reagan would reward their extravagant support with ideological preference, but because generations of more generous handouts...
...the jobless total climbed again...
...AID alone devoted almost $800 million to CBI-related projects in 1984...
...Our victory was through a mixture of Blaize's ability to stabilize and the presence of younger leaders to guarantee we wouldn't go to the far right...
...14,000) the Marpin Television Company, the local cable monopoly, has begun to influence local politics, offering Eugenia Charles' Freedom Party a regular one-hour slot each week...
...People's Action Movement in 1980 spelled the demise of the St...
...Vincent, the old parties met a string of defeats...
...truth about the English-speaking Caribbean that eluded Much of the early praise for the CBI had been born of the economic ideologues in Washington...
...Radio Marti is its best known face, but it is only the tip of the iceberg...
...Though the economy was much larger, the problem was the same as Grenada's: "We don't really have capitalists here," commented one Jamaican, "we have bazaar merchants...
...they will in the end have to become something like offshore states of the United States...
...The other, a nutmeg bottling plant owned by a Virginia businessman, had a workforce of just 32...
...The Reagan Administration, sensing a willing and captive audience, has seen the Caribbean as a prime testing ground for its notion of global ideological warfare...
...equipment and British methods...
...31...
...S TIME WORE ON, MORE DEFECTS IN THE Caribbean leaders had assumed that the CBI would I CBI became apparent...
...now, with the obliging civilian government of Herbert Blaize duly installed, Grenada's moment in the limelight was over...
...Meanwhile, teams of U.S...
...Blaize unveiled a 1985-1986 budget full of wideranging tax relief for the private sector and reduction on import duties...
...church-backed agricultural mission on the grounds that it was plotting to overthrow the Bird government...
...7' Pirate satellite dishes have appeared on even the smallest and poorest islands...
...2 Within a month of the invasion, the Reagan Administration persuaded Congress to fund and support the National Endowment for Democracy, which Reagan had announced to the British parliament in June 1982 as an effort to "encourage free and democratic institutions throughout the world through private sector initiatives...
...Reagan's verbal savagery against Manley in 1981 is proof enough that more radical critiques will be dismissed as communist...
...George's and Blaize's own uncontested power base on the somnolent island of Carriacou...
...A team of U.S...
...On the smaller islands, poor communications and unreliable utilities were a powerful disincentive to investors...
...Bernard St...
...A first-year aid blitz of $57 million cleaned up invasion damage, finished the Point Salines airport, repaved some of the main highways and "revitalized" power lines and water pipes...
...And only a shade over 6% of the $4.7 billion in total Caribbean Basin exports to the U.S...
...But imports from 121 other Third World countries with similar tariff privileges were up by 28...
...Embassy's behest...
...The victory of Kennedy Simmonds' pro-U.S...
...The second noticeable sign of Washington's influJULY!AUGUST 1985 35Mare0, AeNostru Mare Nostrum REPORT ON THE AMERICAS 36 ence was ideological...
...Both the Americans and the British were horrified at the idea...
...In Roseau, Dominica (pop...
...I think we can compare this Grenada situation," he said, "with the kind of situation that faced Europe after the Second World War . . . We call for a kind of Marshall Plan for Grenada...
...South Korea opened an embassy in Barbados in 1983, and in the same year a flurry of activity in Miami led to a Hong Kong investment monitoring office, a South Korea Trade Center and an office of the special trade representative of the Philippines...
...Pausing for a moment, he corrected himself: "Or should I say those are programmed societies...
...Their arguments are rooted in more than geopolitical pragmatism: they find common ground with 44REPORT ON THE AMERICAS 44 REPORT ON THE AMERICASthe belief of Caribbean Social Democrats that socialism and electoral democracy are essential companions...
...Caribbean Contact, April 1984 (Charles...
...Vincent, where the 1984 election win by James Mitchell's New Democratic Party finally eclipsed the old labor party, the SVLP...
...Figures on Jamaica are drawn principally from Washington Report on the Hemisphere, December 14, 1982, and Peter L. Berger, "Can the Caribbean Learn from East Asia...
...an export-oriented growth strategy...
...He then held a pre-election meeting with Reagan, emerging with a further $25 million in aid and the assurance of sweeping new purchases of surplus bauxite...
...Concerning the future of these islands, there is but one hope and one end, and that is political and commercial annexation to the United States...
...A bipartisan initiative guided by the AFL-CIO and the U.S...
...FBIS-LAM, April 3, 1985 (Blaize...
...By the time Secretary of State George Shultz visited Grenada and Barbados in February, the idea had blossomed...
...Seaga had requested a fresh loan of $180 million and for the second time in a year was requesting an IMF "performance waiver...
...New from EPICA...
...On economic policy, there was sharp divergence...
...Nowhere did it account for more than 12% of GDP...
...Since the occupation of Trinidad by U.S...
...Vaughan A. Lewis, "The U.S...
...Agricultural output declined...
...By the end of September 1984, the CBI had yielded exports worth $39.64 per capita in Barbados, $18.10 in Jamaica and a mere $6.14 in the Eastern Caribbean...
...Manufacturing gave jobs to only 10,000 of the Eastern Caribbean's 560,000 people...
...and an opening up of the economy to foreign imports, which soon flooded the stores and streets of Kingston with new Toyotas and VCRs...
...These recruits, who received basic military instruction and weapons training, were eventually to constitute permanent 80-member SSUs in each island, as the permanent core of an Eastern Caribbean Security System...
...but Washington has changed the rules of the game almost overnight...
...It also repeated its demand that Britain help out as a junior partner, but the relationship was dogged by what one British official called the "problem of interface between U.S...
...network material...
...S EAGA'S ABILITY TO MOBILIZE SUCH heavy initial loan support eased Jamaica's immediate foreign exchange crisis and its ability to service the growing debt...
...television property rights, the stipulation is limited to stopping piracy by state-owned stations...
...The Military: Jeopardizing Traditional Assumptions On the military front, too, Washington seized the moment, and found an especially eager fellow haymaker in Barbados' Tom Adams...
...A well-organized labor movement had achieved what were respectable wages by Third World standards...
...Surely it is a crime against nature and civilization that Jamaica, Barbados, Dominica, Antigua, the Bahamas and other of the British-American islands should be allowed to die of dry rot because of tariff laws...
...Yet there is no reason to suppose that Caribbean leftists will follow in the Grenadians' footsteps...
...The New York risk-analysis firm of Frost and Sullivan predicts that Manley's return "would be unwelcome to the Reagan Administration, and might even lead to covert attempts to discredit him and erode his public support...
...The serious work of regional defense was to be left in the hands of the U.S...
...Seaga's program depended from the outset on a massive infusion of foreign capital, and he pursued the search doggedly...
...Investors again saw it as a remote, poorly equipped backwater...
...In a 1983 speech in Texas, Seaga condemned Manley's PNP regime as "the most unproductive, frightening and unforgettable in our history" and vowed, "There is no better example than Jamaica to illustrate how the forces of personal motivation, of enterprise and of freedom of choice combine to generate economic growth...
...Simmonds' appeal was pitched shamelessly at the U.S...
...public sector...
...The old Westminster parties have long been in decay...
...See inter alia, his "Wasting the Propaganda Dollar," Foreign Policy, No.56 (Fall 1984), pp...
...Throughout 1983 every key economic indicator fell, and annual growth returned to zero...
...Adams, the main architect of the plan, now took it a stage further, proposing "better and bigger military forces' '--nothing less than a standing army with a sweeping mandate...
...He told an interviewer, "I can't compete with the Far East in organization-those are dictatorships...
...complained Marius St...
...Though U.S...
...The Eastern Caribbean Security System (ECSS) that remained in place was centered on the SSUs and the newly equipped coastguard forces...
...The increases had more to do with the strength of the dollar and expanded U.S...
...The U.S.," said one diplomat, "would have had the Navy Seabees in and out to do the job in six months...
...investment since 1981 was less than $100 million, a severe disappointment...
...Mitchell's doubts about Westminster rule, and his refusal "to spend hard-earned cash to build any regional army while Vincentians need food and proper health and education," will probably define the outer limits of Administration tolerance...
...The interim government, which nominally ran Grenada before the December REPORT ON THE AMERICAS 40...
...and CPF forces was scheduled for completion by the end of September...
...Even a further $145 million in U.S...
...Exclude the small but lucrative electronics export sector in St...
...But as 1983 dawned with the bados-based AID economist cast severe doubt on the bill still bogged down in committee, they began to potential for growth in the region's manufacturing secNo more Grenadas, no more Cubas REPORT ON THE AMERICAS v 38tor...
...Even as he hailed his success in halving its fiscal deficit to meet IMF demands, he acknowledged that the inflow of foreign loans could not bail Jamaica out forever: "The level of help we have been getting to close the gap is not sustainable for more than a couple of years...
...The region's false hopes had inept and lethargic entrepreneurs had refused to shoulbeen fanned by some loose talk from Edward Seaga, der the responsibility...
...The United States willingly played its part in aiding-and publicizing-the capitalist renaissance...
...Though one of the CBI's many conditions is a written assurance by local governments that they will not infringe upon U.S...
...VOA plans to spend $50 million on as many as 11 new transmitters in the region: near Costa Rica's Nicaraguan border, in Belize, Antigua, Grand Cayman, Grand Turk and Marathon Key, Florida...
...The regular police could be seen on traffic duty in St.George's, resplendent in black trousers with red piping and white colonial pith helmets bearing the royal crown seal, while the SSUs, dressed in combat fatigues, trained in off-limits areas under extreme secrecy...
...One, the New Jersey-based Ingle Toy Company, employed 78 people making toys from scrap wood...
...business leaders in tow arrived with Reagan's personal endorsement to "match-make" between the needs of investors and Seaga's development priorities...
...The private sector, domestic and foreign, was to rebuild Grenada...
...message has been relayed to even the smallest islands...
...is the biggest joker of all...
...Visitors from Singapore, Taiwan and Japan have all shown interest...
...In any case, direct aid was not a major part of the true gospel of privatization...
...embassy spoke of 70 or more applications "in the pipeline...
...boats...
...By this time, cracks were already visible in the coalition New National Party (NNP) government that had been hastily stitched together to ward off the specter of Eric Gairy...
...media, has not arrested the slide...
...Even if these voices came to power, and played the game by the strictest electoral rules, there is no guarantee that they could escape the wrath of an Administration which has placed such stifling limits on permissible dissent in the Caribbean Basin...
...We are involved in a war of ideas and of credibility," declared International Communications Director Charles Z. Wick during 1982 congressional hearings on the Voice of America (VOA...
...In the 1950s, the old union-based parties used to win 80% of all elections...
...The machinery, both military and ideological, is already in place for authoritarian solutions...
...By the fall, he was also in trouble with the IMF-the very conflict that had proved fatal to Manley...
...The U.S...
...The continued survival of Grenada's fragile experiment speaks less of its success than of its protagonists' dread of failing to make the showcase work...
...If the pressures on the Westminster system are accelerating, the blame lies less with Cuba or the Soviet Union, than with the Reagan Administration's decision to treat the region as an East-West battleground, which has imposed strains on the islands and their parties that they were never designed to resist...
...4 Wick controls a $750 million budget for propaganda, which he aims to direct at target audiences "with the velocity of a projectile...
...Lionized like a new Duarte or a second Alfonsin by a Western press desperate for centrist heroes, the aging Blaize has predictably failed to deliver...
...From 19821984 the Reagan Administration spent around $2 billion on the CBI...
...We have entered a period of caution and quiet breakdown...
...But Alexis was widely mistrusted: one promiJULY:'AUGUST 1985 i 41Mare Nostrume Mare Nostrum Bauxite Is threatened by company closures nent businessman described him as a "gangster," who would be "capable of Forbes Burnham-style state terror if he ever came to power...
...FBIS-LAM, January 30, 1985...
...The anger of unfulfilled expectations has grown as the promised economic miracle has slipped ever further from Jamaicans' grasp...
...Before the year was out, both plants had closed, blaming marketing problems in the United States...
...If anything, the figures tended to support the supply-side adage that a rising tide in the U.S...
...values...
...Dominica's Eugenia Charles was quite explicit that local forces could do no more than "hold the beaches" in the event of outside attack...
...Reynolds Metals and Alcoa both announced they were pulling out of bauxite mining in Jamaica, while Gulf+Western left its sugar holdings in the Dominican Republic-and their 37,000 employees-for greener pastures...
...Kitts and St...
...imports from the region...
...Vere Bird, last survivor of the old union-party bosses, has handed real control over to his more "modern" son, Lester...
...Kitts, where the old sugar plantation economy lasted longest and where labor party dominance was therefore most tenacious, change has come...
...Since July 1984, Barbados has carried four hours each weekday of the Cable News Network's Daybreak program...
...Washington continued to see Barbados as a key actor, and announced plans to install a command communications center in Bridgetown for coordination between U.S...
...Kitts Labour Party after 30 years of power...
...media programming is often carried round the clock in the Commonwealth Caribbean, complete with original advertizing...
...As social discontent grows more dangerously polarized, the response will surely be greater authoritarianism...
...during the 1970s, barely half...
...Johnson also commented that, "Without CBI, I doubt if Reagan would have had the invitation to go into Grenada...
...The new government opened an Industrial development Corporation in February to keep pace with its neighbors...
...With a second elected term, the upturn in the U.S...
...Where, then, were the Eastern Caribbean islands to compete...
...The 350-strong multinational Caribbean Peacekeeping Force (CPF) on Grenada was composed of cadets from Grenada, Antigua, Barbados, Dominica, St...
...Atlantic Fleet, paid a surprise visit ment...
...Seaga's election image as an efficient technocrat dissipated fast, and Carl Stone's opinion polls--the most accurate barometer of Jamaica's national moodshowed his public approval rating plummeting...
...Multinational Monitor, Vol.6, no.6 (May 31, 1985...
...a currency devaluation and credit squeeze...
...Unemployment eased a fraction from 27.4% to 25.9...
...The U.S...
...Lucia and St...
...3 (Summer 1983...
...The goal of the areawide project," according to a VOA official, "is to make the Voice of America available from the Eastern Caribbean to the Pacific on medium-wave frequencies...
...Yet the shattering psychological impact of the Grenada invasion means there will be no early effort to break the mold...
...The Miami Herald, September 9, 1984...
...Midgett, Eastern Caribbean Elections...
...Los Angeles Times, May 24, 1984...
...Gross external debt rose by almost a third, and a 1980 trade deficit of $80 million soared to $400 million in 1982.27 Ironically, the first protest at Seaga's economic shock treatment came from private enterprise...
...CBT Information Center 1984 year-end figures not available by country at press time...
...T HE ELECTIONS, HOWEVER, PROVED TO be merely a Catch-22...
...But a note of panic began to creep into Blaize's appeal for funds...
...Total U.S...
...And in the small islands that needed it most...
...And the Administration is engaged in negotiations with at least eight other regional governments, including each of the Eastern Caribbean states.' The VOA relay station in Antigua is a sign of things to come...
...Within that expansion, the heaviest concentration of new funding is for the VOA Caribbean Basin Project...
...Small island governments will be guided by their new sense of where they stand on the geopolitical chessboard...
...The second member of the NNP alliance was the National Democratic Party (NDP...
...After the Grenada invasion, the ultra-conservative Heritage Foundation recommended sending the islands printing presses, newsprint and money-clandestinely if necessary, in countries such as Guyana-to permit the "free flow of ideas and the promotion of democratic policies as alternatives to the Cuban model...
...This support was conditional on a program of "structural adjustment" which Seaga described with pride as "the most intensive adjustment of any economy anywhere in the world...
...It found few bright spots in the Eastern Caribbean...
...Author's interview, Bridgetown, Barbados, January 30, 1985...
...As the impact of the U.S...
...The year could not have started worse, when gasoline price rises in January led to riots that left ten dead and hit the one sector of the economy-tourism-that was performing well...
...The standard explanation was that foreign capital would hold back until after the December elections...
...Mitchell has declared himself "quite disillusioned with the Westminster system that was bequeathed to us" and says he might prefer "what goes on in France and Germany...
...By the summer of 1985, Seaga was in deep trouble, beset on one side by a general strike and demands from a revitalized PNP for fresh elections, harassed on the other by ever harsher economic news...
...Since 1967 it had been reduced to a lackluster opposition, with a party bureaucracy in St...
...The pervasive presence of U.S...
...Kitts, Dominica, St...
...In the party's ill-defined program, the main goal was "the development of both the rich and poor of Grenada...
...In July, Eugenia Charles won re-election in Dominica after an ugly campaign in which she accused the Labour Party opposition of running a "communist regime," financed by Cuba, Libya and North Korea...
...Ted Morse, AID director on the island after the invasion, spelled out the message...
...Unless otherwise noted, all quoted material from Grenada is from author's interviews, February 1985...
...If the government of Grenada can stand up to totalitarianism and say 'so far, no further,' then that gives great confidence...
...Jamaica: Great Expectations Edward Seaga's Jamaica has, if anything, been an even more severe casualty of stakes set unrealizably high...
...security reflex...
...Caribbean anger came to a head in July, when 15 regional leaders attended a conference in Columbia, South Carolina...
...Vincent...
...He told theJanuary 1984 congress of his Barbados Labour Party that, "An element of land forces should be included in the two-year old regional security pact...
...The worst casualty of this syndrome will be Seaga...
...so had Compton...
...It's got to at least double or triple, if not quadruple, the audience...
...But Barbados, with its two centrist parties and a House of Assembly that dates back to 1639, is the exception...
...But this was a short-lived spurt...
...And even AID's best-laid plans could not change the nature of the Grenadian private sector overnight...
...Amidst the clamor of internal debate and recrimination which has plagued the Left since October 1983, the most eloquent voices are raised in favor of what the democratic Marxists of Guyana's Working People's Alliance call "a strong dose of good old-fashioned pluralistic democracy...
...N THE MIDST OF THIS PREDICAMENT, THE Grenada invasion came like Manna from Heaven for Seaga, who calculated that he would profit from a snap election before the social impact of the latest round of IMF talks filtered through...
...8. Foreign Broadcast Information Service (FBISLAM), January 24, 1984...
...The first six months of the program, starting January 1, 1984, showed a 17% increase over 1983 in U.S...
...British police trainers took up residence in Fort Rupert and set about drilling Grenada's basic police force...
...Seaga called the election for December 15, 1983, two full years before it fell due...
...Cited in Bernard Diederich, "The End of West Indian Innocence: Arming the Police," Caribbean Review, Vol.XIII, no,2 (Spring 1984...
...Instead, it knows that its survival is guaranteed A harsher new age of geopolitics by a powerful external force...
...Though no Caribbean troops took part in the Grenada fighting, Adams saw the invasion as a vindication of the Regional Defense Force proposed in 1982...
...The next year brought a sharp devaluation of the Jamaican dollar...
...government need no longer delve into its traditional bag of tricks to accommodate mass demands...
...9 Grenada's Fragile Experiment The Administration had placed its main bets, of course, on the controlled experiments of Grenada and English-Speaking Caribbean Exports to the United States 1983-1984 and the Effect of the Caribbean Basin Initiative (CBI) after January 1, 1984 Country (U.S...
...The decision to dismantle import controls on a range of locally produced goods-which Manley had imposed to conserve foreign exchange-harshly exposed the uncompetitiveness of local business...
...Learning to Beg Properly It is still possible to stand in the tranquil English churchyard of St...
...In late 1984, for example, the prominent Sovietologist Jiri Valenta, of the Naval Postgraduate School's Department of National Security Affairs, toured Grenada, Barbados and Dominica to speak on the communist threat, as a U.S...
...companies braved the island in 1984, and they were scarcely Fortune 500 material...
...For Keith Mitchell, a leader of the third alliance party, the small Grenada Democratic Movement (GDM), "an older figure like Blaize was necessary because none of us younger NNP leaders was well known enough to get 36% of the vote like Gairy...
...the CBI's leading advocate, who had spoken of up to $3 billion in direct U.S...
...Under the Bishop government, the party had simply ceased to function, though it was not banned...
...Interview with "Son" Mitchell by Gary BranaShute, Caribbean Review, Vol.XII, no...
...Only two U.S...
...but the most pathetic may be Blaize, from whom it was never fair to expect much in the first place...
...6. Los Angeles Times, February 25, 1985...
...Barbadian Foreign Minister Louis Tull agreed that U.S...
...OPIC officials arrived in January 1984, at Reagan's personal request, to assess suitable investment projects and recommended a training program to encourage the Grenadian private sector to focus on international markets...
...Though it had aroused the interest of 600 firms, only 13 had ended up investing in Jamaica...
...and the Caribbean: Issues of Economics and Security," Caribbean Review, Vol.XI, no.2 (Spring 1982...
...The Wall Street Journal, March 18, 1985...
...Streams of postwar migration to the United States, and equally large streams of affluent tourists in the opposite direction, have speeded the openness to U.S...
...The U.S...
...1 2 9 - 1 4 0 . 5. The New York Times, December 26, 1984...
...The United States not only pumped large amounts of direct aid into Jamaica-over $200 million by the end of 1981-but gave other kinds of extraordinary economic support, including the purchase of $54 million worth of unneeded Jamaican bauxite for the U.S...
...Multinational Monitor, Vol.IV, no.3 (March 1983...
...This sweeping plan soon ran up against local realities...
...The main conflict of goals was between Blaize and Brizan, who was briefly a member of the New Jewel Movement in 1973...
...Lucia and Jamaica...
...As a consequence, internal security became the only logical purpose for the newly created elite SSUs...
...official in the region, "that receives a similar quantity of outside programming in its own language...
...Founded as a middle-class party in 1955 by a U.S.-trained dentist, the GNP had tasted its brief moment of glory in power in the late 1950s and early 1960s...
...Administration officials and private sector backers bravely defended the CBI's track record...
...That's just something that one country can abto Barbados, Dominica and St...
...For Grenada, Dominica and tiny Montserrat, the CBI produced a resounding zero (see table...
...officials admitted privately that this shotgun wedding would be fortunate to last until 1987...
...conflicts inevitably turned inward...
...8 Adams thought such a force might cost less than $10 million, unless it required helicopters, and need involve no more than 1,000 men, including Coast Guard forces...
...Washington Report on the Hemisphere, May 15, 1984 (Tull...
...My feeling is that one regional army rather than a number of national armies would give us an additional safeguard...
...Quantity, rather than quality, has been Wick's watchword: two-thirds of the 1983 budget of the United States Information Agency (USIA) was earmarked for building new radio transmitters...
...There is a lot of pressure to make Grenada a totally unregulated economy," and impose an "alien and impractical economic system...
...Kitts, with 13-channel cable TV, may find themselves watching ads for car dealerships in Chicago...
...Alone, they are not viable...
...Seaga found himself at the head of an unprecedented one-party parliament, which PNP graffiti called the "Bogus Government...
...The Eastern Caribbean states recognized that their forces alone could play only a limited role in regional defense...
...Robert T. Hill, 1898 These places can't get along without outside investment, outside technology...
...The first year figures also highlighted alarming disparities within the region, and confirmed the worst fears of the Eastern Caribbean islands...
...At present, most such broadcasting is on short-wave frequencies and reaches a limited audience because relatively few people own short-wave receivers...
...Seaga's divestment program had often seemed contradictory: under his rule, Jamaica had actually nationalized its major sugar estates and an oil refinery...
...Department of Commerce...
...In the meantime, the United States provided aid to each island's coastguard in the form of 32-ton, deepwater patrol boats equipped with 50-mm machine guns...
...The New York Times, July 29, 1984...
...But Seaga was too shrewd to deny the economic implications of the crisis...
...Again, the loudest protests came from the most loyal allies, like the conservative Kennedy Simmonds of St...
...Latin America Regional Report: Caribbean, March 30, 1984...
...lobbies had most fiercely opposed...
...The group which had signed the Roseau Memorandum was expanded to include St...
...The State Department announced plans for small diplomatic stations on St...
...million) Exports to U.S...
...The experience of Grenada and Jamaica suggests that even the most slavish of U.S...
...Kitts and St...
...allies will find no panaceas in the private sector...
...There might, perhaps, be standing garrisons in Antigua and Grenada, at either end of the island chain, as well as a permanent headquarters in Bridgetown...
...official declared confidently just weeks after the Grenada invasion.' The Caribbean Left and the arch-enemy Cuba had been vanquished, conservatives now held power in all the islands and the U.S.-lcd invasion was widely praised in the region as a "rescue mission...
...Value of CBI Per Capita $39.64 $6.14 $1.33 $43.40 $8.87 $0.79 $18.10 $5.54 Jamaica...
...AID contracted Coopers and Lybrand to find prospective investors to ease the island's way into the CBI...
...Exports to U.S...
...Guvana is not a beneficiary of the CBI...
...Others dismissed local businessmen as "invoice capitalists" or "mattress money men"-certainly not the stuff of which the CBI was to be made...
...Far from stepping out of line, they will mute any criticism of Washington and, in Eugenia Charles' words, "learn to beg properly...
...Eternally optimistic, the U.S...
...Meanwhile, a sizeable AID mission set up shop on the Carenage, St.George's lovely harbor front...
...3. Valenta is Coordinator of Soviet and East European Affairs at the Naval Postgraduate School's Department of National Security Affairs...
...The old civilities of the British West Indies will not be easily restored after Grenada, which thrust the islands into a harsher new age of geopolitics...
...Viewers in St...
...His visit sorb in a year, and he's offering it to seven counserved notice that the local superpower intended to tries...
...3 0 In the most recent elections in Grenada, Dominica, St...
...If it doesn't work this time I'll wash up on your shores...
...economy lifts all Compton's St...
...demand than with any intrinsic merit in the CBI...
...Some ridiculed it as "a merchant cartel that marks up everything 200...
...7. Author's interview, February 1985...
...Yet this is more a sign that Asian investors have found the CBI a useful back door into the U.S...
...from food processing factories, tourism entrepreneurs and computer assembly plants, but the truth was that the dollars were not flowing...
...In all, Jamaica received just under $600 million worth of loans in 1981, Seaga's first year in office...
...Kitts, and "increased relations between Caribbean governments and private sector organizations...
...And on March 30, 1985, newly elected Grenadian Prime Minister Herbert Blaize acknowledged that the role of the Eastern Caribbean states was no more than that of "a sort of bushfire put-outers...
...Blaize had proved the only leader acceptable to Washington, but his Grenada National Party (GNP) was a spent force...
...Third, and perhaps most serious, was the question of foreign investor confidence...
...The NDP will find a home," Blaize warned, "as long as they don't twist it around the way it was under Bishop...
...WHAT OF THE CONSERVATIVE ALTERNAtive...
...There was now talk of a force of 1,800 troops, and the figure of $100 million was informally bandied around...
...officials agreed that Barbados should be the keystone of any future plan, they were unwilling to relinquish security matters to a force whose coordination and command structure would be impossibly complicated...
...help would be needed for "the surveillance of territorial waters, adjacent coasts and air space...
...This would excuse Jamaica for failing to meet economic targets imposed by the IMF as preconditions for continuing Special Drawing Rights worth $477 million...
...Lucia in jokers, and the U.S...
...Information Service-sponsored "Ampart" (American participant).' Airwaves: "Our Weapon is the Truth" The Reagan years have also seen a dramatic invasion of the Caribbean airwaves...
...forces in the event of a future Grenada-style operation...
...Investors want elections, security, infrastructure: we will give all three...
...Forces Caribbean Command and ECSS member states...
...There was also a growing expectation that other NATO forces might become involved, and in November 1984, Barbados Defense Force commander Brigadier Rudyard Lewis chaired talks on forJULY/AUGUST 1985R)Zt4 e 4h Ameicas Mare Nostrum mal defense links between the Eastern Caribbean and chide Washington for the delay...
...noncombat troops on Grenada, all but 25 Green Beret SSU trainers flew out in June 1985...
...T HE COMMERCE DEPARTMENT'S FIRST FIgures on the CBI's progress did little to quell anxiety...
...9. Author's interviews, January-February 1985...
...Yet it was hard not to sympathize...
...In the war of ideas, the U.S...
...20 Security and elections moved along nicely, but the commitment to infrastructure was more questionable...
...In April, Antigua barred entry to a U.S...
...This is the last go-round...
...see also table of election results in Emmanuel, "Elections and Parties...
...Seaga, sure of outside support from Washington, sternly dismissed the January protests as the work of extremists: the rioters' tactics were reminiscent of those laid out in a "communist handbook" in his possession, entitled How to Sabotage an Economy...
...Kitts, and the last figure falls to only $2.44...
...So did the lack of a real parliamentary opposition after the NNP's 14-1 seat win...
...market represented CBI-related duty-free goods...
...But his appeal fell on deaf ears...
...Since much of that figure was accounted for by 1.500 resentful soldiers of the disbanded People's Revolutionary Army, unemployment was viewed more as a security problem than an economic one...
...Caribbean Review, Vol.XIII, no.2 (Spring 1984...
...Blaize has dealt with a divided cabinet of dubious loyalty largely by ignoring it, making policy alone with the U.S...
...Also, the mounting foreign exchange crisis caused endless bottlenecks in the granting of trade licences...
...But as other islands demanded equal treatment, Washington scaled down its future commitments...
...Embassy...
...His inability to work miracles, as one leading Grenada businessman told The Miami Herald, may have drastic consequences: "If this government doesn't make it, we have no other choice...
...I don't know of another case where so much talent was REPORT ON THE AMERICAS 42JULY/AUGUST 1985 43 43 JULY/AUGUST 1985 brought into one small country," said David Rockefeller of his U.S...
...But in objecting to the CBI's subverFor one, hope of stabilizing regional security through a sion of the public sector, Compton grasped a simple CBI-inspired economic upsurge seemed ill-founded...
...Kitts...
...Green Berets from Fort Bragg N.C., known as "Security Advisory Control Teams", handled the elite paramilitary Special Service Units (SSUs) on each island...
...recession led to extensive layoffs in the bauxite industry and 30% cutbacks in aluminum production, Jamaica's net foreign exchange reserves dropped over 20%, despite the continued high level of foreign borrowing...
...Shultz promised that Washington would study the idea, but was clearly dubious about its cost...
...Both AID and local politicians of every stripe agreed that the textile and garment industry was the prime candidate-precisely the portion of the CBI that domestic U.S...
...6 The Reagan Administration, characteristically, called upon the private sector to shoulder part of the burden in this war of ideas...
...economy might help his economic program bear fruit...
...Charles complained, NATO...
...For Brizan, the GNP had "a couple of alright people, but mostly they are too elitist and tend to lack a certain touch with political realities...
...T HE TENDENCY TO CRY "COMMUNIST" AT all opponents is a growing reflex in the Englishspeaking Caribbean, another symptom of the acute stress affecting the region's Westminster system...
...2 Local societies would accept their subordination, yet at the same time be sufficiently militarized internally to jeopardize the traditional assumptions of the Westminster system...
...The modernization process suggests to the military a sense of their own particular status as the only virtuous sector-as the guardians of the system...
...its four hours of programming nightly to the Eastern Caribbean go out not on FM, but on the universally received AM frequencies...
...The likely fate of a re-elected PNP regime in Jamaica is the best yardstick...
...formed in January 1984 by teacher and historian George Brizan...
...Stacked against the $429.6 million in exports generated by the CBI from January-September 1984 were the costs of getting the program underway...
...By 1984, there was a veritable crescendo of demands from Antigua, Barbados and Jamaica to have textiles reinstated...
...Peter Johnson of Caribbean/Central American Action cited new investments in Haiti as "the jewel in the CBI's crown," as well as winter vegetable exports from the Dominican Republic, electronic assembly plants in St...
...Peter Johnson, Caribbean/Central American Action, 1984 "I 4. T'S TIME TO MAKE HAY WHILE THE SUN I is shining," one senior U.S...
...on the standing army, see The Miami Herald, January 28, 1984, and The Barbados Advocate, February 9, 1984...
Vol. 19 • July 1985 • No. 4
