Stormy Seas

...What industries have been established on the islands are really nothing more than assembly plants designed to take advantage of one commodity: the cheap labor of non-unionized Caribbean workers who put together imported components into Maiden-form bras or Rubik's Cubes which are then reexported to the United States...

...With the defeat of the progressive Manley government in Jamaica and the self-destruction of the Grenadian revolution, Cuba again stands alone...

...Barry, Wood, and Preusch let the facts, and the actors, speak for themselves, as they paint a grim mural of a region tottering on the edge of bankruptcy, ravaged by grinding poverty, dominated by agricultural and mining conglomerates, and policed with brute force by the United States...

...market on reduction of state participation in the economy and rolling back of measures designed to control the activities of foreign capital...

...Except in Cuba, efforts by some governments to get a better deal in the late 1960s and 1970s collapsed...

...These are trying times in the Caribbean...

...Governments are kept in line by investors' threats to move to another, more "hospitable" island, and labor is kept in line by government repression...

...There is little optimism in this volume...

...The long awaited sequel to Dollars and Dictators: A Guide to Central America, this book, The Other Side of Paradise, will not disappoint its readers...

...As in the Nineteenth Century, the region "still consumes what it does not produce, and produces what it does not consume...

...The Other Side of Paradise reflects this state of affairs...

...In Guyana, the promise of nationalization soured after heavy political interference by the corrupt government of Forbes Burnham led to worker dissent and inefficient management...

...bilateral aid and preferential access to the U.S...

...In Trinidad, a major oil producer, nationalization was welcomed by the failing subsidiaries of British Petroleum and Shell, but the government of Prime Minister Eric Williams avoided touching the profitable operations of Amoco and Texaco...

...Tourism is, however, merely the most obvious case of an industry built to please outsiders rather than serve the local citizens...

...Despite its constant posturing, Washington dares not invade Cuba, say the authors, for, among other things, that would involve stripping "every other theater of operations of conventional forces, including Western Europe and the Persian Gulf...

...corporations and further depress Caribbean living standards...

...These efforts contributed to the destabilization of the Manley government and its electoral loss to Edward Seaga in 1980...

...Tourism, the region's largest single industry, has made the region a "paradise" for the American elite and middle class...

...The only bright spot in the area is Cuba, which has achieved undeniable progress in living standards, literacy, health, and social equality...

...Exercising the same meticulous scholarship, tight reasoning, and controlled style which marked the earlier volume, authors Tom Barry, Beth Wood, and Deb Preusch present a comprehensive guide to the real Caribbean which will be a standard reference work for progressive writers and organizers for some time to come...

...Now sinking under an external debt of more than $18 billion (excluding Puerto Rico's and Cuba's debt), the Caribbean is rife with desperation...

...The plantation economy is alive and well in the Caribbean, and while classical slavery has been outlawed, "wage slavery" has created conditions that rival Marx's depiction of Nineteenth Century English working-class life...

...Walden Bello (Walden Bello is an associate fellow of the Institute for Policy Studies and principal author of "Development Debacle: The World Bank in the Philippines...

...It has also "caused far-reaching damage to the national psyche by rewarding obsequious behavior with employment and tipping and by withdrawing rewards from, and thereby effectively punishing, those islanders who lack the talent for servile behavior...

...The result is a deepening ambivalence among islanders which manifests itself in what tour operators deplore as "service with a snarl...

...Thus, Washington increasingly resorts to the big stick...

...response...

...But even here, the dead hand of the colonial past continues to constrain the present: Despite valiant efforts at diversifying the economy, Cuba continues to be dependent on sugar for 80 per cent of its export earnings...

...It is unlikely, however, that the "magic" of the marketplace will achieve anything more than raise the profits of U.S...

...The forces of the status quo come across as too formidable, the proponents of change too disorganized and demoralized...

...Agriculture, banking, industry, and mining—sectors dominated by transnational firms—are all marked by the persistence of the colonial pattern of externally oriented development...

...Alarmed, the Reagan Administration has responded by predicting increases in U.S...

...Industrialization is a joke...

...In the aftermath of Reagan's "splendid little war" in Grenada, this mood is understandable...

...Moves by the progressive government of Michael Man-ley in Jamaica to gain tighter national control over the bauxite industry by imposing levies and nationalizing bauxite-producing lands provoked retaliation from the bauxite and aluminum monopolies in the form of slowdowns, production cutbacks, and an international disinformation campaign blaming the government for increases in the price of aluminum...

...The "Caribbean Basin Initiative" is one prong of the U.S...

...The invasion of Grenada in October 1983 was preceded by a Washington-sponsored military build-up among Caribbean client-states which saw military assistance to the region increase seven times between 1979 and 1983...

...In fact, Cuba is more dependent on a single export than any other Caribbean state...

...The authors cite the findings of the London-based Anti-Slavery Society on the life of Haitian sugar-cane cutters in the Dominican Republic: They work seven days a week from four in the morning to six in the evening, receive $3 a day, and are crammed into small, crowded, dark rooms furnished only with iron bedframes...

...One cannot help but feel, however, that the combination of debt, depression, and repression is driving the region to a flashpoint of desperation that will make the revolutionary and reform movements which swept the Caribbean in the 1960s and 1970s appear as mere dress rehearsals...

...Nonetheless, prospects for change in the near future appear to be dismal for the rest of the region...