The Castroization of Grenada

Silk-soft beaches, the whisper of palms, islands rising like murmurs on all sides, and cricket-crazy boys in tattered kneepants fishing from rust-colored reefs over which the heron dive at sunset. Something of the sort surely constitutes the average tourist’s cliché of the Caribbean, and the cliché certainly exists. Even Castro’s Cuba has not been able to change the physical beauty of this region— yet. But it is trying hard to change the political complexion of these islands, and the first question to ask is how Cuba came to pose as a local Galahad when for years it never showed the slightest interest in its neighbors.

A few years ago John Toland, then an Under Secretary of State for Caribbean Affairs, published a demographic conspectus of the ex-British Caribbean from Jamaica to Guyana—for island status is not a sine qua non for a Caribbean country, as witness Belize, Surinam, and Guyana. Toland estimated 60 per cent of this population to be under 15 years of age. This is probably a conservative estimate. To start with, then, it must be said that the woes of this lovely area are somewhat self-inflicted. Regionally, too, there is a disinclination or inability to organize, as the many failed inter-island groupings have shown: the rapidly moribund Federation of the West Indies after the war; then Carifta; then the St. Vincent Treaty, with Premiers Mitchell of St. Vincent, Compton of St. Lucia, and Gairy of Grenada trying to set up a union of goods and people; and, most recently, the strident 1979 St. George’s Agreement, supported by Jamaica’s Michael Manley when it seemed that a new group of Marxist politicians was erupting in the Windwards. All these are mere pieces of paper now. It should be conceded’ however, that this inability to organize is a characteristic of insularity and evinces a certain pride; Tobago is currently trying to secede from Trinidad, as Barbuda from Antigua.

KC

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Keith Charles

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Silk-soft beaches, the whisper of palms, islands rising like murmurs on all sides, and cricket-crazy boys in tattered kneepants fishing from rust-colored reefs over which the heron dive at sunset. Something of the sort surely constitutes the average tourist’s cliché of the Caribbean, and the cliché certainly exists. Even Castro’s Cuba has not been able to change the physical beauty of this region— yet. But it is trying hard to change the political complexion of these islands, and the first question to ask is how Cuba came to pose as a local Galahad when for years it never showed the slightest interest in its neighbors.

A few years ago John Toland, then an Under Secretary of State for Caribbean Affairs, published a demographic conspectus of the ex-British Caribbean from Jamaica to Guyana—for island status is not a sine qua non for a Caribbean country, as witness Belize, Surinam, and Guyana. Toland estimated 60 per cent of this population to be under 15 years of age. This is probably a conservative estimate. To start with, then, it must be said that the woes of this lovely area are somewhat self-inflicted. Regionally, too, there is a disinclination or inability to organize, as the many failed inter-island groupings have shown: the rapidly moribund Federation of the West Indies after the war; then Carifta; then the St. Vincent Treaty, with Premiers Mitchell of St. Vincent, Compton of St. Lucia, and Gairy of Grenada trying to set up a union of goods and people; and, most recently, the strident 1979 St. George’s Agreement, supported by Jamaica’s Michael Manley when it seemed that a new group of Marxist politicians was erupting in the Windwards. All these are mere pieces of paper now. It should be conceded’ however, that this inability to organize is a characteristic of insularity and evinces a certain pride; Tobago is currently trying to secede from Trinidad, as Barbuda from Antigua.