Britain's Empire, America's Lake
IN THE BRITISH WEST INDIES, AFTER emancipation from slavery, the old sugar plantation owners grudgingly agreed to share their legislative powers with an assertive new middle class. This...
...Here, the union/party chief was Sir Alexander Bustamante, an eccentric who carried a six-shooter on his hip and, during the May 1938 sugar disturbances, climbed the pedestal of Queen Victoria's statue in the Kingston parade grounds and declared himself champion of his oppressed brethren...
...Now strongly challenged by unified opposition, the National Alliance for Reconstruction (NAR...
...The two approaches clashed head-on, and with U.S...
...colony of Puerto Rico was "the dungheap of the Caribbean...
...in power since 1956...
...backyard...
...ed., 1976), p. 2 2 0 . 7. See Edward Chester, The U.S...
...But sugar was king in the Leeward Islands of Antigua and St...
...per capila income: $798...
...Lucia and labor disputes on the sugar plantations of British Guiana in 1935...
...Vincent (1979), Antigua (1981) and St...
...The islands were to have control of their own affairs except for foreign policy, internal security and defense...
...The preponderant presence and relationship of the United States in the region virtually insures such nationalism will to some extent take on an antiAmerican character...
...Before London could catch its breath, strikes and riots erupted in the other colonies: a revolt against increased customs levies in St...
...military personnel in the Caribbean Basin by 1960--excluding those stationed on the U.S...
...dissertation, 1974), p.44...
...I am proud of our graduates in British Guiana," he said...
...transnational corporations swarmed over the English-speaking Caribbean...
...watch on Caribbean radicalism: "All nations in the Caribbean, and especially the independent English-speaking states, are searching for new ways to overcome the obstacles to their economic and social progress...
...when ousted by conservalive Kennedy Simmonds...
...We suggest British haste in getting rid of a festering problem is callous," the paper wrote, furious at "Britain's determination to continue with independence--even if it must be 'celebrated' in a cloud of tear gas...
...Instead, the Labour opposition under Clement Attlee received a sweeping mandate, and Britain embarked on a radical social democratic experiment, based on nationalization' and the creation of a welfare state at home and decolonization abroad...
...The plum was Antigua, which was asked to revive its old role for the British imperial navy as the strategic "hinge" between the Leeward and Windward Islands.' 7 The 1961 pact allowed the United States to open a naval base on the island for use in oceanographic research and submarine surveillance, and an air force base for electronic tracking and "launching test vehicles...
...and center-lef Democratic Labour Party (DLP...
...The British Labour Party pressed for the democratization of the Caribbean colonies...
...Paper prepared for the Conference on International Relations of the Contemporary Caribbean, San German, Puerto Rico, April 22-23, 1983 (San German: CISCLA, 1983...
...Jagan won the election narrowly...
...The smaller Eastern Caribbean islands, however, lagged far behind...
...DLP is led by former prime minister Ermrol Barrow...
...CADORIT, Report of the Second Conference (Bridgetown, Barbados: Advocate Co...
...But the riots forced a long, hard look at the state of colonial rule, which shocked elite opinion...
...Even so, there were 22,000 U.S...
...Cheddi Jagan, The West on Trial: My Fight for Guyana's Freedom (London: Michael Joseph, 1966), p.146...
...William Bramble of Montserrat, Robert Bradshaw of St...
...John...
...Third, the Theberge group asserted that the problems of the Central American mainland, the island nations and the states bordering Caribbean waters should be seen as a single strategic entity-the "Caribbean Basin...
...In 1938 they returned home, Manley to form the People's National Party (PNP) and Adams the Barbados Labor Party (BLP...
...The territories-Newfoundland, Bermuda, the Bahamas, Jamaica, Antigua, St...
...3 - 1 3 . 8. Douglas Midgett, Eastern Caribbean Elections, 1950-1982, Development Series No...
...What happened next was described by Drew Pearson in The New York Post.' 4 President Kennedy, "having been badly burnt in the Bay of Pigs operation," and facing an election in 1964, had the "haunting worry that British Guiana would get its independence from England in July 1963 and set up another communist government under the guidance of Fidel Castro...
...As U.S...
...Main opposition is Eric Gairy's Grenada United Labour Party (GULP...
...Eric Gairy's Grenada, however, was not to be deterred long by the argument that microstates were not viable entities...
...Ambassador to London John Gilbert Winant observed, "The rights and powers it conveys are . . . probably more farreaching than any British government has ever given anyone over British territory before...
...Should we buy the West Indies...
...GUYANA Independent: 1961: capital: Georgetown: population: 803.000: per capita income: $697...
...Kitts (1983...
...Instead, Britain called fresh elections in 1964 under an altered system of proportional representation designed to block Jagan...
...The British saw which way global winds were blowing...
...Dream Come True...
...The discovery of high-grade bauxite on the island in 1942, and the first elections under universal suffrage two years later-which the JLP won in a landslide-gave the polemic broader ramifications...
...investments in the Caribbean, Britain provided its own tug to the right in 1951, when its Tory government was returned to power...
...Cold War values prevailed throughout the 1960s, as the small, weak colonies declined "the spurious position of East-West neutrality" and accepted "the role of ally in the defense of the Western Hemisphere...
...Vincent, Dominica and Antigua...
...The stronger power relentlessly displaced British commercial influence...
...per capita income: SI.062...
...Though they were only sketchily organized into political parties, labor union candidates swept the board in all six islands...
...Norman Manley supported the opening in 1952 of the Caribbean Area Division of the Organizacion Regional Interamericana de Trabajo (CADORIT) in Bridgetown, Barbados, and in the same year expelled a "Marxist caucus" from his PNP...
...anti reflect 1982 estimates...
...Vincent Agricultural and General Workers Union as the basis for his People's Political Party...
...Bustamante vocally espoused the cause of private enterprise, and offered his BITU as a model of Caribbean unionism, promoting partnership between labor and capital...
...The bitter rancor between the two men, who were half cousins, at first lay as much in personality as in politics, but Bustamante soon made the dispute ideological...
...ocratic People's National Party (PNP...
...IN 1942, HOWEVER, BRITISH SOLDIERS were again on 24-hour patrol in the streets of the main Caribbean cities, on watch this time not for striking sugar workers but for German U-Boats...
...The JLP harangued Manley's "foreign ideas," especially after the PNP declared its commitment to socialism in 1940...
...ONE OF THIS MOVED THE JOHNSON, Nixon or Ford Administrations, preoccupied with events elsewhere, to pay special attention to the Caribbean...
...In the Windward Islands such as St.Lucia, St.Vincent and Grenada, plantation sugar had given way to an independent peasantry in the 19th century...
...See Roger Fontaine, Cleto di Giovanni Jr...
...And with war, the United States again turned its eyes to the region...
...His opponent in 1961 was his former PPP colleague Forbes Burnham...
...This time Burnham won, and he has been in power ever since...
...5 But the British government was in fact more interested in realpolitik than in rhetoric...
...4. Lewis, Union-Party System, citing The Times (London), May 25, 1935...
...The Fabians' emphasis on labor union freedoms and welfare programs seemed to offer a model for the new Caribbean nationalism, within a parliamentary framework that felt safe to Westminster...
...A month later, Winston Churchill made an urgent personal plea to Roosevelt for 50-60 second-hand destroyers...
...Two-party system dominated by cenctr-right Barhados Labour Party (BLP...
...Lucia, St...
...Kitts, St...
...It would be a grave mistake to simply place it on a par with other areas of the Third World...
...Riots in Jamaica in 1968, after the conservative JLP government barred the entry of Guyanese scholar Walter Rodney, and a major Black Power revolt in Trinidad in 1970, suggested the system was in deep trouble...
...When France fell to Hitler on June 22, 1940, the United States saw its hemispheric security at risk, and Congress swiftly passed the National Defense Act, authorizing the sale of non-essential naval and military equipment to friendly governments...
...Drew Pearson, "Washington Merry-go-Round," The New York Post, March 22, 1964...
...control, and few Caribbean leaders stood up to the pressures of JAMAICA Independent: 1962: capital: Kingston: population: 2.228.000;: percapita income: SI.428...
...The reforms encouraged by Lord Halifax had awakened desires that Crown Colony structures could never satisfy...
...1983...
...In most cases, union and party shared the same structures and officers...
...Many of the legal escape valves of migration to Britain or the United States also began to close...
...GRENADA Independent: 1)74: capital: St...
...The system would remain legitimate as long as it could go on meeting its promises, and as long as there was bipartisan agreement on how this could happen...
...His eccentricities may have embarrassed other Caribbean leaders, yet in essence Gairy was very much of a regional type...
...For Jagan fell victim to the Cold War not once but twice, and the weapon that felled him second time around was organized labor...
...Like Gairy, each found that charisma and patronage worked better than traditional organization...
...WINSTON CHURCHILL WAS THE POPULAR hero of Britain's victory over Nazism, and his Conservative Party had every reason to expect success in the July 1945 general election...
...Relatively influential left-wing movement divided between Ralph Gonsalves' Movement for National Unity (MNU) and Marxist United People's Movement (UPM...
...Nation's Eastern Flank Thus Made Almost Impregnable...
...18REPORT ON THE AMERICAS REPORT ON THE AMERICAS 18Under a military agreement signed in 1961, the United States received extensive basing rights, including the right to operate a Long Range Navigation Station (LORAN) in Jamaica...
...Left-wing third party is Antigua Caribbean Liberation Movement (ACLM) led by Tim Hector...
...military influence in the region, to plug the holes that developed as the British relinquished their colonial grip...
...Lucia and St...
...The Antigua Trades and Labour Union, led by one-time Salvation Army officer Vere Bird, gave rise to the Antigua Labour Party...
...The political culture of two-party Westminster-style democracy was the ideal guarantee of a "safe zone" in the U.S...
...Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, U.S...
...Resentment was fed by the belief that the main beneficiaries of labor party rule had been the islands' entrepreneurs...
...Some of these states may well become intensely nationalistic and develop revolutionary movements...
...The Fabian Society demanded an end to the "imperialistic relationship" with the Caribbean, and the United States was happy to cooperate...
...who heads alliance of People's Action Movement (PAM) and small secessionist Nevis Reformalion Party (NRP...
...Kitts Labour Pany (SKLP) held power 1952-1980...
...In April 1963, a violent 11-week strike rocked the Jagan government, "secretly inspired by a combination of U.S...
...and left-wing Progressive Labour Party (PLP) of George Odlum...
...In return, he offered Washington full use of eight British colonies as naval and air bases...
...Gunboats were always on hand, but the urge to shape colonial society in London's image bred a certain political realism and produced reforms from above...
...British marines sailed into Basseterre harbor aboard H.M.S...
...While Gairy launched his Grenada United Labour Party (GULP) from his GMMWU base, other union boss/party leaders followed suit...
...3 The paradoxical fact that Jagan also fervently believed in the electoral system counted for nothing...
...Over a 10-week period that fall, first-time voters flooded to the polls in Grenada, St...
...Lucia...
...JULYIAUGUST 1985 Il L I I j ., . i...
...Labor unions became a key channel for U.S...
...KITTS-NEVIS Independent: 1983: capital: Basselerre: population: 45.000...
...Leander...
...Labor opposition fragmented into the St...
...Lucia and Bermuda to the United States...
...It produced the most resilient two-party system in the English-speaking Caribbean, but also the most violent...
...German sub14REPORT ON THE AMERICAS REPORT ON THE AMERICAS 14"The slums of the Empire" marines slipped right into the small harbors of the Eastern Caribbean islands, shelling shore targets and sinking cargo ships at anchor...
...In a world beginning to flirt with detente, these three ideas were years ahead of their time...
...The Tories were as anxious as the Eisenhower Administration to depoliticize the Caribbean unions and shield the Westminister system from threats as they held out the carrot of slow decolonization...
...5. Ibid., p.96...
...Union activity was limited, and the Dominican Labour Party was formed only in the late 1950s by the expatriate British Fabian, Phyllis Shand Alfrey.' I F THE ANTICS OF A GAIRY OR A JOSHUA often seemed like village intrigues, the same trends were writ larger in Jamaica, whose politics serve as a traditional matrix for the smaller islands...
...In the same year, Jamaica opened its Industrial Development Corporation, and between 1943-1970, with U.S...
...For the mediocre bureaucrats who occupied each island's Government House, "the long tradition of metropolitan equation of the West Indies colonies with naval bases and military outposts catering to 'home interests' meant that security considerations invariably preceded welfare considerations...
...The authorities jailed Gairy...
...BARBADOS Independent: 1966: capital: Bridgetown: population: 254.000: per capita income: $2.373...
...Political leaders rose to power by winning labor and voting rights...
...Opposition to Charles is Labour Party of l)Dominica (LPD...
...Washington saw them through the prism of Cuban-inspired security threats...
...I 17Repo4r o: the Aum rcas Mare Nostrum the Cold War...
...When the GMMWU contested the October election it took 69% of the vote, and six out of eight seats on the Legislative Council.' Gairy's style, which one Barbadian politician described as "simple emotion and a large measure of hysteria," went down well with the large number of poor agricultural workers in small islands like Grenada...
...The total cost to the CIA, working through the American Institute for Free Labor Development (AIFLD) was $1.2 million-as much as AIFLD's entire annual budget...
...Dominant party is Antigua Labour Party (ALP) led by Bird family...
...Workers Party of Jamaica (WPJ) of Trevor Munroe enjoys some support...
...The revolution shattered the myth of U.S...
...Grenada's election, the first in the series, followed eight months of tumult...
...Kitts-and it was in St...
...capital: St...
...Central Intelligence Agency money and British intelligence...
...This system of restricted franchise, known as Crown Colony rule, was a peculiarly British form of carrot-and-stick...
...T HE REGION SOON LEARNED THAT ANY attempt to change the prevailing political model from within would rapidly bring it into conflict with the United States...
...At its 1955 congress, CADORIT called for a federation of "free and democratic unions" in the West Indies and promised "protection against communist infiltration and subversive elements...
...official, St.John's, Antigua, February 13, 1985...
...Between 1970-1980, the Caribbean workforce increased by nearly 400,000, two-thirds of them aged from 15-24...
...The English-speaking Caribbean was also dotted with important, if smaller, bases, which formed a network of listening posts to monitor ship and submarine activities, and later to track aircraft and satellite movements...
...9. See Patrick Emmanuel, "Elections and Parties in the Eastern Caribbean: A Historical Survey," Caribbean Review, Vol.X, no.2 (Spring 1981), pp...
...Political life dominated by People's National Movement (PNM...
...dismay at Britain's flight from the Caribbean...
...even sympathy actions in placid Barbados...
...Led by Prime Minister Eric Williams until his death in 1981, when succeeded by George Chambers...
...When British Guiana's 1961 elections came around, Britain showed that its acceptance of the new U.S...
...The "Big Four" moved to independence in quick succession: in 1962, Jamaica and Trinidad, in 1966, Barbados and Guyana...
...Lucian economist Sir Arthur Lewis dubbed the new approach, which was modelled explicitly on Puerto Rico's Operation Bootstrap, "industrialization by invitation...
...Kitts and George Charles of St...
...agricultural production was in decline, and neither tourism nor manufacturing seemed able to take up the slack...
...It staged Caribbean war games in 1938, and by March 1939 talk of annexation had revived...
...Main opposition party is social dcm...
...When the dust had settled, 29 were dead and 115 wounded...
...See John Mordecai, The West Indies: The Federal Negotiations (London: G. Allen and Unwin, 1968...
...Lucy naval base...
...Lucia and St...
...Author's interview with U.S...
...Edward Gonzalez, "U.S...
...Britain suspended the constitution and annulled the elections after concluding that the victorious People's Progressive Party (PPP) of Cheddi Jagan "accepted unreservedly the 'classical' communist doctrines of Marx and Lenin...
...per capita income: S2.776...
...In 1921, Lord Halifax reported to the Colonial Office that, The whole history of the African population of the West Indies inevitably drives them towards representative institutions fashioned after the British model...
...Prime Minister Harold McMillan stuck to his part of a secret bargain with Kennedy, using the strike as a pretext to deny the colony its independence...
...John's: population: 77.000...
...cut weekly wages in the sugar islands from $2.50 to $1.50.' Sugar workers struck and rioted...
...The Miami Herald, January 26, 1974...
...Former Prime Minister Lloyd George derided the islands as "the slums of the Empire," and The Times wondered "whether 300 years of British administration [have] produced a race of touts, cadgers, beggars and prostitutes...
...They faced a bleak outlook, for by the early 1970s the built-in limits of the Puerto Rico/ Westminster marriage were apparent...
...Newsweek's ecstatic headline ran, "Swap of Destroyers for Bases Makes U.S...
...alliance of Grenada National Party (GNP), New Democratic Party (NDP) and Grenada D)mocratic Movement (GDM...
...Britain had already granted Jamaica universal suffrage in 1944...
...Main opposition party is pro-Soviet People's Progressive Party (PPP) of Cheddi Jagan...
...in turn, the leaders of the new island labor movements found ideological inspiration in laborite socialism and Britain's Trades Union Congress...
...Events in British Guiana (later Guyana) in October 1953 were an eloquent test case of the limits of British tolerance in the context of the Cold War...
...A Royal Commission headed by Lord Moyne spent six months in the Caribbean in 19381939, taking evidence from participants in the riots...
...Under the West Indies Act of 1967, Britain granted limited autonomy-' 'associated statehood' '-to Antigua, Dominica, Grenada, St...
...in power since 1976...
...Small pro-NJM grouping survives as Maurice Bishop Patriotic Movement (MBPM...
...Main opponent is St...
...The "destroyers-bases deal" was the first step in the militarization of the English-speaking Caribbean...
...The protests targeted British rule, white supremacy and the plantation system...
...Washington intended to remain neutral in a European conflict but expected to patrol the Caribbean in wartime...
...the protests became anti-colonial as well as anti-planter...
...Estimates of population and income vary widely...
...In 1971, a group of scholars at Georgetown's Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), headed by James D. Theberge, produced a special report entitled Russia in the Caribbean...
...There was a corresponding increase in U.S...
...World War II interrupted the orderly transition that began with trade union reforms, moved through the formation of political parties and universal suffrage and would eventually culminate in independence...
...The other tiny associated states followed Grenada's lead by fits and starts: Dominica (1978), St...
...December 1984 election won by IHerbert lBlaize's New National Party (NNP...
...hegemony in the region went as far as endorsing CIA action in a British colony...
...policy toward the Caribbean...
...Though successive administrations had called for an end to colonial rule, they were nervous about allowing a strategic vacuum to develop, especially now that the Bootstrap development model and Westminster rule faced a radical competitor...
...Atlantic Fleet, had proposed the annexation of Jamaica...
...On the Jamaican bauxite industry, see Sherry Keith and Robert Girling, "Bauxite Dependency: Roots of Crisis," NACLA Report on the Americas, Vol.XII, no.3 (May/June 1978), pp...
...TRINIDAD AND TOBAGO Independent: 1962: capital: Port of Spain: population: 1.076.000...
...Others followed in their footsteps...
...Niblack, commander of the U.S...
...First, the CSIS report declared that, "The Caribbean has always been associated in the minds of friends and enemies as the mare nostrum...
...now, in 1951, constitutional reform brought full voting rights to all the Eastern Caribbean islands...
...Kitts, in January 1935, that the storm broke, after the Tate and Lyle Co...
...space program...
...For PNP leader Norman Manley, "Busta" was "a fascist and a dictator.'" 0 The conflict between Manley and Bustamante's Jamaica Labor Party (JLP)-which broke from the PNP in 1943-defined the course of Jamaican politics for the next half century...
...FDR called it "a good trade" and compared it to the Louisiana Purchase...
...L.ucia Labour Party (SIP...
...And it saw the need for a forceful U.S...
...Lewis, Union-Party System, p.110...
...D REW PEARSON WAS CORRECT IN SENSing that Washington saw the decolonization of the English-speaking Caribbean as the possible harbinger of a second Cuba...
...4 Britain's immediate response to the protests had been military force, but now it showed greater wisdom and restraint...
...Bustamante and Manley, and their peers in other islands, believed that the way to satisfy rising demands was by promoting industrialization based on foreign investment...
...They strengthened security links with Britain and the United States, joined the OAS and generally stuck to a pro-Western orthodoxy...
...and Six Strategic Outposts (New York: Kennikat Press, 1980), pp...
...military had seen the Caribbean as an "economy of force" area, where a relatively meager number of bases and troops could protect vital strategic interests...
...Stung by the suggestion, British officials shot back that the U.S...
...In each colony, the British Governor called in aircraft, warships and the marines...
...the result of unification of four groups including left-wing Dominica Liberation Movement (DLM...
...Jamaican sugar workers and dockers struck in 1937 and 1938...
...The British JULYIAUGUST 1985 15Mare Nostrum A Mare Nostrum sent in troops...
...Lucia followed the same pattern of labor-based "one-manism...
...U.S...
...George's...
...Young island leaders like Norman Manley of Jamaica and Grantley Adams of Barbados were in the forefront...
...T HE BREADTH OF THE ACTIONS MADE IT obvious that sugar alone was not the issue...
...A 1951 editorial in The Times concluded that, "Over two-thirds of the globe, no treaty can be signed, no alliance can be forged, no decision can be made without the approval and support of the United States government...
...He once confidently boasted that if he told his supporters to vote for a dog, they would do so without question...
...Problems were dealt with on an ad-hoc basis, and no special regional strategy was enunciated, because none was thought to be needed.' 9 But from a quiet corner of academic Washington, still some distance from the centers of power, came a bold call for a new Caribbean security policy...
...LUCIA Independent: 1979: capital: Castries: population: 119.000: per capita income: SI,071...
...Even before the outbreak of war, it had secretly leased limited military facilities in Trinidad, St...
...Even as liberal a New Dealer as Rexford Tugwell, governor of Puerto Rico, suggested that the United States should occupy the British islands for strategic reasons...
...T HE VIABILITY OF THE WESTMINSTER system in the Caribbean is embedded in its own origins...
...officials had sporadically cast covetous eyes on the English-speaking Caribbean since the turn of the century...
...police opened fire on the crowd and three were killed...
...They kept their electoral support by promising economic improvements and expanded social welfare benefits, according to the model they had learned from Britain...
...Like Gairy, Bustamante claimed his support lay with the "black men" of the countryside, whom he organized in the Bustamante Industrial Trades Union (BITU...
...In 1950, Trinidad showed the way by passing its "Aid to Pioneer Industries Ordinance...
...Figures shown are taken from Tom Barryl...
...a sugar strike in St...
...Street fighting between party loyalists became an ugly fixture in Jamaica's political culture...
...2 Grantley Adams, acting as the willing servant of Whitehall, worked to keep the unions in line in the small Eastern Caribbean islands...
...Ruled since July 1984 by centrist James "Son" Mitchell's National Democratic Party (NDP...
...Ruled from 1964 until his death in August 1985 by Foribes Burnham of People's National Congress (PNC...
...The 10-member West Indies Federation of 1958 collapsed after just four years...
...Conservative Jamaica Labour Party (JLP) in power since 1981: Prime Minister Edward Seaga...
...In London, they met with members of the influential Fabian Society, devoured Victor Gollancz's Left Book Club publications and paid homage to Sir Stafford Cripps, the intellectual mentor of the Labour Party's left wing...
...Vincent Labour Party (SVLP...
...To win re-election, the union/ party made promises they could not expect to keep...
...The deal also indicated that the British were in retreat in the Caribbean...
...Strategic Interests in the Caribbean Basin...
...DOMINICA Independent: 1978: capital: Roseau: population: 74,000...
...vigilance narrowing the space for alternatives, Caribbean governments minimized the risk of giving offense...
...VINCENT AND THE GRENADINES Independent: 1979: capital: Kingstown: population: 128.000: per capita income: S657...
...While the U.S.-based Christian Anti-Communism Crusade pumped funds into the right-wing United Force party, the AFL-CIO channelled money to Burnham and trained his union leaders in the United States...
...In 1967, the Air Force acknowledged that Antigua was the southern pivot of the Eastern Test Range, a crucial element in the U.S...
...Before the year was out, Roosevelt allocated $75 million in emergency defense funds for construction at the eight sites...
...Only Dominica, the most impoverished of the islands, broke the rule...
...led by Michael Manley...
...The Moyne Commission report was not the whitewash many had expected, but a frank recognition of grievances recommending the legalization and encouragement of labor unions, and a further extension of voting rights...
...T HE BALKANIZATION OF THE ISLANDS made their dilemma worse...
...Second, it stressed that the growing reach of the Soviet blue water fleet and latent social unrest in the region were two sides of a single threat...
...markets replaced British ones, and U.S...
...mainland.' 6 Regional "force projection" rested on a triangle of key installations-Roosevelt Roads in Puerto Rico, Guantanamo in Cuba and the Panama Canal Zone...
...Vincent, a coal strike in St...
...Progressive Labour Movement (PLP) of George Walters held power 1970-1976...
...Until 1935, Britain had paid scant attention to the Caribbean...
...Prime Minister Eugenia Charles' right-wing Dominica Freedom Party (I)FP) was re-elclted for second term in July 1985...
...February 1951 had seen an unprecedented general strike led by Eric Gairy's Grenada Mental and Manual Workers Union (GMMWU...
...The wave of foreign investment had peaked...
...After World War II, the U.S...
...3 - 1 5 . 12...
...per capita income: SI.649...
...government financing, Kaiser Aluminum, Reynolds Metals and Alcoa invested some $300 million in Jamaican bauxite...
...Within just 133 days of the territory's first free election, the Colonial Office announced that it "felt it necessary to send naval and military forces to Georgetown with the utmost dispatch...
...If a single image summed up the Caribbean islands in the 1970s, it was a street corner crowded with youth, fully enfranchised but unemployable...
...regional supremacy...
...Lucia, Trinidad and British Guiana-stretched from Canada to the South American mainland...
...Two years later, a general strike in Trinidad...
...the protest grew...
...As they approached independence, the former colonies saw their future problems in terms of commodity prices, access to markets and foreign aid...
...The radical populist Ebenezer Joshua used his St...
...In spite of sacrifices and hardships, they kept their places in the front line of a difficult and, unfortunately, sometimes bloody battle...
...He attacked the PNP as a party of the middle class and the "brown men...
...We shall be wise if we avoid the mistake of endeavoring to withhold a concession ultimately inevitable until it has been robbed by delay of most of its usefulness and all of its grace...
...Only a decade later would they come to seize hold of the core of U.S...
...An angry editorial in The Miami Herald was typical of U.S...
...By 1935 the sugar industry, lifeblood of the island economies, faced collapse under the twin assault of beet sugar competition and global depression...
...led by businessman Julian Huntc...
...AIFLD chief Serafino Romualdi felt it was a sound investment...
...In Puerto Rico at this time, weekly sugar wages ranged from $3.75 in the field to $6.78 in the factory...
...Beth Wood and Deb Preusch, The Other Side of Paradise: Foreign Cnro)l inr the Caribbean (New York: Grove Press...
...per capita income: $883...
...In 1917, Rear Admiral A.P...
...Few had expected each of the tiny Caribbean states to press for independence alone, but efforts to unite them made little headway...
...Working People's Alliance (WPA) is third partly...
...Vincent...
...After a referendum in 1962, the largest colony, Jamaica, decided to go it alone...
...ANTIGUA AND BARBUDA independent: 1981...
...Later, Democratic Senator James Reed of Missouri suggested "obtaining" the whole of the British West Indies, including Trinidad, the "Gibraltar of the Caribbean...
...Yet nobody in Britain was prepared for the near revolution that swept through the islands in the 1930s...
...Lucia housed an electronic tracking facility, Barbados the small St...
...The naval base at Cienfuegos in Cuba, said the report, had the "potential to improve Russian capability to maintain a naval force (particularly submarines) in Western Atlantic/Caribbean waters...
...They demanded democracy and national sovereignty...
...population: 11l,000...
...While Washington was keen to expand U.S...
...asked a headline in The Christian Century...
...Kitts followed in 1952...
...Ruled from March 1979-October 1983 by New Jewel Movement (NJM), ousted by U.S.-led invasion...
...13, undated, pp.7474, University of Iowa...
...John Compton of the United Workers Party (UJWP) was prime minister from 1964-1979 and 1982 to the present...
...References BRITAIN'S EMPIRE, AMERICA'S LAKE 1. Gordon Lewis, The Growth of the Modern West Indies (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1968), p. 1 0 3 . 2. Cited in Eric Williams, From Columbus to Castro: The History of the Caribbean 1492-1970 (New York: Harper and Row, 1970), p. 4 7 0 . 3. Patrick A. Lewis, A Historical Analysis of the Union-Party System in the Commonwealth Caribbean 1935-1968 (University of Cincinatti, Division of Graduate Studies, Ph.D...
...1 4 - 1 7 . 10...
...Each in turn used his original union base to form political parties after the 1951-1952 elections...
...The social crisis that had been brewing since 1935 had been about more than wage disputes, and with mass enfranchisement came a natural pressure for the new generation of labor leaders to move into the electoral arena...
...The BLP's Tomn Adams was prime minister until his death in February 1985: succeeded by Bernard St...
...See Williams, Columbus to Castro, p.444...
...Ltd., undated...
...The charges were not without foundation: a central assumption of Fabian socialism was that salvation for the masses lay in the cool wisdom of a leadership elite...
...and Alexander Kruger, "Castro's Specter," Washington Quarterly (Autumn 1980), p. 4...
...Amidst riots, strikes and a business shutdown-and with a British frigate on standby in St.George's harbor--Gairy led the island to self-government in February 1974...
...For the moment, the CSIS report staked them out as the special concern of the ideological Right within academic circles and the national security bureaucracy...
...6. Dexter Perkins, The United States and the Caribbean, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, rev...
Vol. 19 • July 1985 • No. 4
