Caribbean Review

TEIEW(

SPFRIHG 1988 .O.
VOL. XVI FIVE DOLLARS

JAMAICA'S APPROACH TO INDEPENDENCE RACE AND ECONOMIC POWER IN
JAMAICA THE HASSLE AND THE HUSTLE OF A MINIBUS RIDE THROUGH
KINGSTON CUBA'S INHUMANITY TOWARD CUBANS ROMANCING THE
DICTATOR THE TEXTUALITY OF PAINTED SURFACES

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FrVIEW

Cover
Circo del solitario,
by Cuban artist, Carlos Alfonzo
(8' by 10', acrylic on canvas,
in the collection of the artist).

"Jamaica has not taken
independence lying down." See p. 4.

In this issue

3
Crossing Swords
Toward Resolving the Debt Crisis
By Rt. Hon. Edward Seaga

4
Creative Politics
Jamaica's Approach to Independence
By Anthony John Payne

10
Race & Economic
Power in Jamaica
Toward Creating a Black Bourgeoisie
By Carl Stone

13
Jamaica's Jews
A Review by Michael Hanchard

15
Higglering in Kingston
Entrepreneurs or Traditional
Small Scale Operators?
By Elsie LeFranc

18
The Hassle and the Hustle
A Minibus Ride Through Kingston
By Patricia Anderson

22
Jamaica Well-Told
Tales From the
Land of Look Behind
A Multi-Media Review
by Richard A. Dwyer

24
Cuba's Inhumanity
Toward Cubans
A Review by Jorge I. Dominguez

25
Romancing the Dictator
A Review by Irving Louis Horowitz

28
Carlos Alfonzo
The Textuality of Painted Surfaces
By Ricardo Pau-Llosa

38
First Impressions
Critics Look at the New Literature
Compiled by Forrest D. Colburn

44
Recent Books
On the Region and Its Peoples
Compiled by Marian Goslinga

"It is a problem of falling in love not
with Cuba but with a Cuba devoid of
Cubans." See p. 25.

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British Capitalism
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The Legacy of Eric
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Barbara L. Solow and
Stanley L. Engerman,
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Modem scholarship on this
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and Slavery. These essays
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Sheridan, Howard Temperley,
Barbara L. Solow, Gavin
Wright.
Studies in Interdisciplinary
History
$29.95

Imperial State
and Revolution
The United States and
Cuba, 1952-1986
Morris H. Morley
A provocative and compelling
piece of scholarship rich in
both theory and history...
Through extensive research in
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revealing, confidential
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the relentless United States
effort to manipulate, isolate,
and destroy the Cuban
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Founded n Puerto Rico n 1969

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Spring 1988

EDITOR AND PUBLISHER
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Vol. XVI. No. 1

Five Dollars

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Carl Stone
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Gregory B. Wolfe

Caribbean Review, a quarterly journal dedicated to the Caribbean, Latin America,
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2/CARIBBEAN REVIEW

MINORITIES

AND POWER IN

A BLACK SOCIETY

THE JEWISH COMMUNITY OF JAMAICA

Carol S. Holzberg
University of Massachusetts
The Jews of Jamaica constitute a wealthy,
powerful, and privileged white minority able to
shape national policy through a successful
translation of economic success into political
influence. Dr. Holzberg traces the progress of
the Jewish community in Jamaica from the
16th century through the present as she
exhaustively examines all elements of its
unique odyssey within the larger black society.

ISBN: 0-913897-04-3 $17.95
PLUS $1.50 FOR SHIPPING AND HANDLING

STHE NORTH-SOUTH PUBLISHING CO.
P.O. Box 610
Lanham, Maryland 20706

Crossing Swords

Toward Resolving the Debt Crisis

By Rt. Hon. Edward Seaga

he importance and threat of the
international debt crisis is thrown
into clear relief when put in the
context of "the global village." This
village, in which we all live together,
is being made smaller and smaller, we
are told, by the acceleration of progress
in modern transportation and telecom-
munications. It is not often realized,
however, that we are also tied together
by economic interdependence in gen-
eral and by the explosive threat of the
burgeoning crisis of international debt
in particular.
In dealing with this debt crisis, the
least promising beginning is to try to
apportion blame. From the aftermath
of the first oil crisis, oil-importing
Third World countries borrowed heav-
ily with the intention of offsetting the
dramatic cost increase to their econo-
mies. Some oil exporting countries also
borrowed on the basis of expectation
of continued oil export buoyancy. On
the other hand, multinational banks
loaned recycled oil surpluses to those
borrowing countries, with fluid ease.
Unfortunately, as events unfolded, the
1980s have been unkind to the realiza-
tion of both borrower and lender alike.
Underdeveloped countries, including oil
exporters, find themselves with an op-
pressive hangover of debt servicing that
threatens the fulfillment of their socio-
economic plans. The multinational banks,
on the other hand, find themselves
overexposed to international debtors in
terms of obligations which they cannot
realistically expect to be liquidated on
schedule.
The explosion of debt and the debt-
servicing burden affects all underdevel-
oped regions but is particularly acute
in Latin America and the Caribbean.
For many of these countries, gross debt
service ratios now exceed 60% of the
total export receipts. If the flames of
the international debt crisis are not
suffused effectively, creatively and
quickly, the total international economy

stands to suffer extensive dislocation
before any sort of sustainable recovery
becomes a possibility. If we do not ex-
ercise our collective responsibility to
share the burden of solving the prob-
lem, it will not be possible in our
village to save anybody's mansion from
the fire that threatens to consume the
humblest hut.
Between 1981 and 1986, the world
economy particularly the developing
market economies as a whole experi-
enced the most severe and prolonged
recession since the 1930s. From 1980
to 1985, growth of per capital output
was 1.5% per annum as compared to
3% in the 1970s. Between 1980 to
1983, growth was below 1% per annum
and was actually negative in 1982. This
negative trend had a magnified effect
on developing economies. Stagnant
world trade reduced their trade opportu-
nities and export prices. The dollar
prices of primary commodities fell by
over 300% between 1980 and 1985,
while the dollar value of LDC exports
in the latter year were 15% below their
value in 1980.
These realities, when superimposed
on a debt burden which yielded a debt
service ratio in the range of 25 to 57%,
points to an accumulated crisis in the
developing world. In response to this
crisis, many developing countries have
adopted adjustment policies aimed at
reestablishing equilibrium in their ex-
ternal accounts while creating the con-
ditions for resumed growth. Between
1980 and 1985, there were each year
an average of 47 countries with an IMF
adjustment program as compared to an
average of 13 countries per annum in
the previous decade.
For many countries, significant cor-
rection has taken place at great cost to
their socioeconomic fabric. These ad-
justments have invariably been effected
with a sharp contraction in imports,
combined with attempts to mobilize
exceptional financing from the external

community. Neither route is sustainable
or desirable for the medium term; while
the former compounds growth restraints
and compromises welfare considerations,
the latter aggravates the debt problem.
The ability of the developing world
to meet the necessary welfare consid-
erations, while servicing their external
debt, requires real economic growth.
Priority must be given to achieving
sustainable economic growth in the
medium term. Growth will require ade-
quate external financing. For middle
income developing countries with high
debt service burdens and limited room
for additional indebtedness, some addi-
tional flow of external resources will
provide the room necessary to maneu-
ver in implementing a growth-oriented
strategy.
The resumption of a growth path
must be the fundamental objective. With-
out basic reforms in international debt
management directed at growth and
welfare, the economic prospects of the
developing world will continue to be
blighted with obvious negative interna-
tional consequences.
The gravity which is now recognized
to be structural not merely a problem
of illiquidity is taken as given. The
structural nature of the problem is
inherently linked to both inadequate
earnings, arising from the depressed
levels of international trade, and the
high built-in levels of debt servicing
which rigidly restrict debtor nations
from reducing expenditures without con-
comitantly reducing resources for growth.
While it is recognized by debtor
nations that the ultimate solution is to
Continued on page 30
Crossing Swords is a
regular feature of Car-
ibbean Review. The
views expressed are
soley those of their
authors. The Rt. Hon.
Edward Seaga is prime
minister of Jamaica.

CARIBBEAN REVIEW/3

Creative Politics

Jamaica's Approach to Independence
By Anthony John Payne

J amaica celebrated 25 years of
independent statehood on 6
August 1987. Its political expe-
riences during that quarter-century have
been, by any standards, extraordinarily
vivid. Although only a small island of
some two million people, Jamaica's
affairs illuminate many postcolonial di-
lemmas of the Third World as a whole.
What is it about Jamaican politics since
1962 that is worthy of general atten-
tion? I suggest a four-part answer. First,
Jamaica is one of the few recently
independent Third-World states to have
maintained a working democratic sys-
tem. Second, it is one of the few such
states to have successfully generated a
sense of nationhood. Third, it has ex-
perimented more than most with vari-
ous strategies of economic development
ranging across the ideological spectrum
from left to right. Fourth, it has actively
sought a role in international politics.
In short, Jamaica has not taken inde-
pendence lying down.

Sustained But Strained

Jamaica's democracy is especially nota-
ble when viewed in a Third World
context. Consider some of the norms
of political life in Jamaica. Five com-
petitive elections have been held since
independence; elections have not been
grotesquely rigged as, e.g., in Nigeria.
At least three major political parties
currently exist, two of them having
fought each other for control of the state
for more than 40 years. Freedom of
thought, expression and assembly are
well established. Parliament survives
Anthony Payne teaches politics at the Univer-
sity of Sheffield. This article is from his new
book, Politics in Jamaica, to be published
by St Martins Press (N.Y.), Christopher
Hurst (London) and Heinemann (Kingston).

and functions. Political leaders volun-
tarily relinquish office in the face of
electoral defeat, and former leaders
have not been hanged by successor
regimes as, e.g., in Pakistan. To take a
nearby Caribbean example, prime min-
isters have not been put up against a
wall and murdered as in Grenada. The
bureaucracy and judiciary are not sub-
ject to excessive or unreasonable politi-
cal interference; indeed many honorable
and dedicated public servants work
long and hard in the service of the state.
There has not been a military coup.
Nor is there torture or a secret police.
In all these respects, Jamaica is quite
unlike much of the developing world.
Nevertheless, one should not become
too lyrical; nearly all these points need
some qualification. For example, Jamai-
can politics are violent. Some 750
people died in political conflicts during
the months leading up to the 1980
election, including a government minis-
ter shot by a gunman. Although this
was an exceptional event, both the
major political parties the Jamaica
Labour Party (JLP) and the People's
National Party (PNP) have a long
history of organizing their own political
gangs to defend their supporters' access
to state patronage. The implements of
violence were confined to the knife and
machete until the 1960s, when the
growing involvement of Jamaicans in
the illegal export to the United States
of marijuana (ganja) made the gun part
of the political process.
Other features of the country's demo-
cratic apparatus have also been strained,
and a list of political offenses is easily
assembled. The governments of both
parties gerrymandered constituency
boundaries during the 1960s and 1970s.
The PNP government passed an ex-
traordinary Gun Court Law in 1974
permitting indefinite detention, without

right of appeal, of persons found guilty
of using firearms. In the late 1970s,
both the JLP and the island's leading
newspaper, The Daily Gleaner, over-
stepped the usual boundaries of legiti-
mate opposition in their zeal to unseat
the government. Some officers in the
Jamaica Defense Force planned a coup,
only to be discovered and stopped by
the army's own command in June 1980.
The PNP boycotted the election of 1986
following a dispute with the JLP gov-
ernment over the voters' register, and
since then the House of Representatives
has been, in effect, a single-party as-
sembly. Although none of these epi-
sodes have broken Jamaican democ-
racy, they demonstrate that the system
has its rough edges.
Furthermore there are grounds for
doubting the extent or depth of political
participation actually achieved within
the framework of the island's demo-
cratic institutions. Jamaican politics,
indeed Jamaican society, is both elitist
and authoritarian in its fundamental
values. The parties are not mass organi-
zations in any full sense. They are led
by the educated middle class, funded
by local businessmen, and involve the
masses only as voters, cheerleaders and
recipients of patronage. A strong per-
sonalist tradition the "hero and his
crowd" as it was once referred to -
dominates the political culture, as evinced
by the flamboyant style of all of Ja-
maica's leading politicians. Although
the potential excesses of this tendency
have been kept in check by the other
parts of the democratic system, the
dangers of what West Indians some-
times call "onemanism" remain. Jamai-
can society likes populist and messianic
rhetoric, something which is cultivated
by its long-standing religiosity and tra-
dition of respect for the "preacher"
figure.

4/CARIBBEAN REVIEW

I

Thus the evidence is mixed. The
quality of democracy in Jamaica leaves
much to be desired and, even as it
stands, needs to be constantly protected
from unscrupulous leaders, trigger-
happy gunmen and ambitious soldiers.
By and large, however, Jamaica has
toiled effectively to maintain democ-
racy. The country has powerful forces
favoring democracy, not the least of
which is a people who have become
attached to their own electoral tradition.
What is the explanation? Theories of
democracy range widely and often do
not make clear where definition ends
and theorizing begins. Those theories
that emphasize "regime performance"
- satisfaction of popular demands and
economic well-being do not shed
much light on the Jamaican postinde-
pendence experience, much of which
has revolved around economic crisis
and general dissatisfaction. On stronger
ground are theories that draw attention
to the contribution of crosscutting so-
cial cleavages to democratic stability
by moderating the intensity of politics.
Jamaicans generally possess a number
of politically relevant affiliations (class,
race, generation, party) that pull them
in conflicting directions and reduce the
zero-sum character of political conflict.
The decline of a local plantocracy by
the time of independence also removed
from Jamaica one of the most powerful
antidemocratic forces at work in other
parts of the Third World. Even so it is
hard to be persuaded that socioeco-
nomic factors predetermined the nature
of Jamaica's democracy.
I believe that political factors must
constitute the major factor in explaining
the emergence of a democratic system
in Jamaica. In this context, the crucial
consideration is the 300-year experience
with British colonialism. The colonial
legacy left behind a respect for authori-
tarianism, but also an awareness of the
possibilities of democracy. Further, the
preparation for democratic self-govern-
ment in Jamaica was more elaborate
and sustained than in many other Brit-
ish colonies where independence came
with a rush. Universal suffrage was
established in 1944 and was followed
by a series of constitutional advances
that crept closer and closer to full
self-government until complete inde-
pendence was granted.
This is not to say that Britain left
Jamaica with a perfect set of democratic
institutions I do not accept the
illusion of "Westminster in the sun";

Norman Manley.Photo: J.I.S.
Norman Manley. Photo: J.I.S.

similar inheritances collapsed quickly
enough in other ex-British colonies.
Rather it is to suggest that Britain
socialized a generation of Jamaicans
into broadly democratic values. English-
speaking and colonially educated, the
recipients of scholarships from Jamaica
College to Oxford, Cambridge and Lon-
don, what else could the Jamaican elite
become but would-be parliamentary demo-
crats? At independence, therefore, local
leaders who genuinely believed in democ-
racy took responsibility for its preserva-
tion and continued the process of edu-
cation and dissemination into the next
generation.

It is this elite, incorporating politi-
cians, civil servants, judges, army offi-
cers, journalists, university teachers and
others, which has been mainly responsi-
ble for the maintenance of some degree
of openness and competitiveness. The
political crisis of 1980, when the demo-
cratic system was genuinely threatened
by a highly politicized situation, was its
greatest test. Yet Manley did not rig the
election to stay in power; the JLP
stopped just short of inciting a complete
breakdown of law and order; the Jamai-
can Defense Force caught the conspira-
tors in its midst; and a team of honor-
able public servants presided over voter

CARIBBEAN REVIEW/5

registration. Democracy came close to
collapsing, but it did not. What the
Jamaican experience reveals, above all,
is that the democratic commitment of
political leaders does have a significant
impact on the prospects for stable de-
mocracy. With a few exceptions, Ja-
maica's postindependence leadership has
been sufficiently attached to the demo-
cratic system and has adhered to the
rules of the game even, albeit waver-
ingly, in times of stress and at the
expense of sectional political goals.
This is the factor that has made the
difference in underpinning the coun-
try's formal democratic structures.

A National Identity

The building of a nation in Jamaica,
although less traumatic than in the
ethnically divided new states of Africa
and Asia, has been just as critical to the
country's stability and future prospects.
Notwithstanding the racial and color
divisions of their society, Jamaicans
have in common the fact that they were
all originally immigrants to the land
which they now inhabit. Yet the gulf
between the African culture of the
imported slave population and the Brit-
ish colonial culture of the ruling minor-
ity long precluded the emergence of a
unified Jamaican identity, a process
that one could argue did not even begin
until the 1930s. The attainment of
political independence fostered that proc-
ess, and Jamaica today possesses a
remarkably confident sense of national
identity.
The political leadership must again
take some of the credit. Admittedly it
was aided by the country's basic homo-
geneity and small size. Yet it is impor-
tant that all Jamaica's postindependence
leaders, without exception, have sought
to present their politics in nationalist
terms. They have, for example, sub-
scribed to and sustained the tradition
of Jamaica's official "national heroes."
These canonized figures represent a
racial and class cross-section of Jamai-
can historical society: the colored gentle-
man George William Gordon and the
black Christian deacon Paul Bogle,
heroes of the Morant Bay rebellion of
1865; Marcus Garvey, the voice of
black African consciousness; the nearly
white lower-class moneylender Alexan-
der Bustamante and the brown-skinned
lawyer Norman Manley, founding fa-
thers of the JLP and the PNP. In

practice too all governments since 1962
have endeavored to weld together the
racial segments of Jamaican society.
Sometimes the effort has been primarily
rhetorical, as in the JLP administra-
tion's identification of itself as a "black
power" government in the late 1960s.
Sometimes it has been more meaning-
ful, as in the PNP government's at-
tempts to establish diplomatic ties with
African states and embrace African
cultural forms in the 1970s.
On the whole, the 25 years since
independence have resulted in a consid-
erable step towards full social inclusion
of the black masses into the mainstream
of Jamaican society. During the 1970s,
many black Jamaicans came to feel for
the first time that they were full mem-
bers of a national community, entitled
to be treated as citizens on an equal
basis with others of lighter skin. De-
spite the ensuing economic hardships,
that self-confidence has not been lost.
Even the Rastafarian community, vili-
fied and excluded from normal social
intercourse in the 1960s, has been
legitimized as an accepted part of soci-
ety. Indeed for a while the cultural
characteristics of the movement, if not
all its religious connotations, became a
feature of youthful middle-class rebel-
liousness. Social values have changed,
and the social structure of the country
has been loosened. Contemporary Ja-
maica is far from being a haven of
racial tolerance, but it has moved a long
way towards forging a sense of national
identity that genuinely crosses racial
boundaries.
This consciousness is visible, more-
over, wherever Jamaicans live in
Brixton and Brooklyn as much as in
Kingston and Mandeville. Jamaicans
are proud of their nationality, often
assertively and aggressively so. "JA,"
as the country is popularly known, is
the homeland to which travelers fondly
return and in which many older mi-
grants aspire to live again one day. This
feeling is one of the reasons Jamaicans
living in Britain and the United States
often find it harder than other immi-
grant groups to accept the conventions
of their new environments and why
Jamaicans have long been suspicious,
to the point of disruption, of all at-
tempts to integrate their identity into a
wider West Indian framework. In Ja-
maica, as in other societies, the negative
side of nationalism is an intense paro-
chialism.
The positive side, and very much

part of the phenomenon, is a vivid
cultural nationalism. The popular reg-
gae music of Bob Marley has become
famous throughout the Western world,
but he is only the most widely known
of a large number of Jamaican writers,
artists and musicians. For a new state
only just finding its feet as an independ-
ent entity, Jamaica has made a remark-
able contribution to the arts. The novels
of Roger Mais, the dialect poetry of
Louise Bennett, the sculpture of Edna
Manley, the painting of Karl Parboosingh
all attest to the vigor of modern Ja-
maica's cultural tradition. Add to their
works the reputation of such formal
national organizations as the Jamaica
Folk Singers and the National Dance
Theatre Company, and one can under-
stand that being and feeling Jamaican
generates a vivid creativity in many of
its people. What is more, the best of
Jamaican culture reflects precisely the
nationalist fusion that peculiar and
enticing blend of what Rex Nettleford,
in a felicitous phrase, called "the mel-
ody of Europe, the rhythm of Africa."
Its political significance is all the greater
because it is a popular culture that is
expressed on the streets as much as in
the drawing rooms of the elite.
Compared with other Third World
states that have experienced a modern
history scarred by civil wars, ethnic
riots and communal violence, Jamaica
stands out as a relative success story.
The colonial legacy was not as arbitrary
in shaping the nation as in some other
parts of the world where tribal peoples
were lassoed together by lines drawn
on a map by European governments.
The sea has defined who is and who is
not a Jamaican, thereby adding that
extra sense of "islandness" to the
national identity. The racial divisions
in Jamaican society could have been
exacerbated by different actions and
policies on the part of governments and
the people, and it is noteworthy that,
on the whole, the trend has been in
another, more creative direction.

Flawed Strategies

The pursuit of development has been
the greatest burden for Jamaican gov-
ernments since independence, and in
this area their record has been unim-
pressive. It is not that Jamaica is a
desperately poor country, like Haiti for
example, but rather that the economy's
performance over the last two decades

6/CARIBBEAN REVIEW

has failed to match the ever-expanding
demands of the Jamaican people for
material improvements in their standard
of living. Their aspirations are nurtured
by Jamaica's location within the ambit
of the developed world. Its people are
daily made aware of North American
consumer expectations via media con-
tact and personal observation of tour-
ists. This is the context against which
one must measure the island's histori-
cally high rate of unemployment and
the truly awful living conditions of
West Kingston's chronically poor in-
habitants. The Jamaican economy should
have done better.
By the standards of other developing
countries, Jamaica is not short of natu-
ral resources, which range from sugar,
bananas and other agricultural products
to bauxite and beaches. Further, it is
situated close to the world's largest
market, the United States. With these
endowments, the country should have
been able to find a path towards broadly
consistent economic growth that would,
in turn, have generated the resources
to raise substantially the living stan-
dards of the poor. Certainly every gov-
ernment since 1962 has been publicly
committed to such a goal.
What is striking in looking at the
actual management of the economy
since independence is the variety of
development strategies espoused at dif-
ferent times. Jamaica has been a labora-
tory of economic modeling. The policy
of the 1962-72 JLP government was
geared towards import-substitution in-
dustrialization. It offered foreign capi-
talists a protected market and relied
upon incentives to attract them to set
up industrial enterprises in the island.
Local businessmen were encouraged to
play a subordinate role within what
was, to all intents and purposes, a form
of neocolonial development. The policy
of the PNP government that came to
power in 1972 envisaged a more asser-
tive role for the state in winning greater
independence for Jamaica within the
world economy. Foreign capital was
permitted to operate, but increasingly
on the state's terms which included, on
occasion, joint ownership. Local capital
was equally encouraged but required to
distribute more of its profits to its
workers in the form of higher wages
and improved conditions. This populist
model threatened briefly to develop into
a form of state socialism, which fright-
ened off all forms of capital and brought
the economy virtually to the point of

Sir Alexander Bustamante.

collapse. After 1980 the JLP govern-
ment reverted to the open embrace of
foreign capital but shifted the focus of
development towards the goal of export-
led growth. The apparatus of protection
was dismantled, the role of the state
downgraded, and local business left to
sink or swim in the world market. The
economic story has thus been a journey
from neocolonialism to contemporary
economic liberalism by way of popu-
lism and a brief flirtation with Marxist
socialism.
At each stage, however, the mix of
factors has been flawed in some way.
The neocolonial strategy generated

Photo: J.I.S.

"growth without development" It de-
livered benefits to a narrow section of
Jamaican society but could not find a
satisfactory way of dispersing the gains
among the people as a whole. The
"trickle-down" was insufficient. The
populist strategy put the state in the
driver's seat and temporarily won sub-
stantial new welfare benefits for the
poor and dispossessed; however, it was
allowed to run out of control until it
so alarmed capitalist interests that growth
ceased. When this happened, neither the
state nor the workforce was willing or
able to fill the productive gap.
The liberal strategy has deflated the

CARIBBEAN REVIEW/7

economy and squeezed general living
standards to the point where a sufficient
"adjustment" is deemed to have taken
place to allow for resumed growth, but
it cannot work out who is to lead that
process if foreign capital remains largely
uninterested. The state is not acceptable
for ideological reasons, and local capi-
tal is not able to do so for competitive
market reasons.
In the meantime, ordinary Jamaicans
have had to live through a long and
gloomy period in which they have seen
unemployment remain at a very high
level, prices rise tremendously, the coun-
try's debt escalate, basic infrastructure
visibly deteriorate, and the productive
sector of the economy weaken substan-
tially and dangerously. Some would say
that only the hidden ganja economy has
kept the country solvent. The fact is
that only the rich have been able to stay
ahead of the economy's relative decline,
by leaving the island for Miami or
retreating into protected fortresses in
the hills surrounding Kingston. Guarded
by their dogs and looking out from
behind the bars on their windows, they
at least are partly insulated from the
growing sense of despair about the
economy's future under any conceiv-
able development model that now
dominates the public mind.
Is the despair justified? Or are there
positive lessons to be drawn from the
very diversity of Jamaica's efforts to
generate economic development? The
issue of the Jamaican economy's de-
pendence on external forces over which
it has no control is a live one.
Although it would be an oversimpli-
fication, it would not be wrong to claim
that every development model tried in
Jamaica has been broken on the back
of changes outside of the country,
within the international economy. The
ebb and flow of the bauxite industry,
the price of oil, the state of sugar
markets, the level of activity in the US
economy all of these considerations
have played a major part in the political
economy of postindependence Jamaica,
shaping and limiting the policies that
can realistically be pursued.
Yet it is too severe to claim that such
considerations determine the policies.
Other conclusions also emerge: that the
state cannot afford to opt out of the
pursuit of development; that the local
bourgeoisie in Jamaica, although too
weak to lead the growth process, is
sufficiently strong to damage it; that
foreign capital can no more be dis-

pensed with than relied upon; and that
the working people of the country are
prepared to accept major sacrifices in
their standard of living to bring about
economic recovery.
Ironically, Jamaica has yet to experi-
ment with the one development model
that seems best to fit such conclusions.
Widely adopted in comparable Third
World states, it has been inelegantly
labeled "national developmentalism."
This strategy is characterized by the
deployment of the state to support the
activities of weak national capitalists.
Although the precise mix between state
and private entrepreneurial leadership
can vary, the goal of redefining depend-
ency to favor national class interests at
the expense of foreign interests remains
the same. Policies typically include
selective nationalizations, joint ventures
between the state and private capital,
progressive imposition of constraints
on the inflow of foreign investment,
and the enactment of income and wage
policies to control the flow of rewards
to the work force. The state thus takes
responsibility for the generation of eco-
nomic growth but does not seek to
bring the economy into its total control
or eliminate the need for private capital.
Measured in terms of an expanding
gross national product, it has proved to
be an effective mix in a number of
diverse Third World settings, ranging
from Korea to Kenya.
The question is whether such a model
could work in Jamaica. I see three main
problems. First there is the question of
whether the civil service machine, which
has historically been conservative and
generalist in line with its British ori-
gins, could acquire sufficient edge to
prime the development process.
Second, there is doubt about the
capacity of the Jamaican business sector
to fill the niche in the productive part
of the economy required by such a
strategy.
Third, it is difficult to constrain
levels of popular consumption while
resources are put into investment and
production. These are all formidable
problems; their solutions would require
considerable energy and political skill
as well as an external economic envi-
ronment characterized by expansion
rather than retraction. Nevertheless, analy-
sis of Jamaica's experience with devel-
opment policy since independence sug-
gests that this is the only road left, short
of socialist revolution.

The International Arena

The search for a role in international
politics has also characterized Jamaica's
postindependence period. As in other
newly independent states, Jamaica had
no previous experience in foreign af-
fairs. The country had to create a
foreign policy machine, embracing dip-
lomats, civil servants and intelligence
analysts, and laboriously build up a
body of knowledge about international
affairs. Since none of this is easily done
under conditions of scarce resources,
few new states can make a mark in
international politics in their early years
of independence; Jamaica was no ex-
ception.
Nevertheless Third World states have
to make decisions about the type of
foreign policy they wish to pursue once
the inevitable learning phase has passed.
The literature of international relations
broadly identifies two available models
of behavior, which can be described as
"the acquiescent adaptation" approach
and the "uses of foreign policy" ap-
proach. The former conceives of the
external environment as, at best, provid-
ing a limited range of policy options
and consequent minimum flexibility for
the small developing state as an interna-
tional actor. The latter views foreign
policy as a means to support the achieve-
ment of domestic objectives and regards
the international system as capable of
advantageous manipulation by even the
smallest states. The Jamaican experi-
ence suggests, however, that these two
models pose too simple a choice and
that, in reality, the line between adapta-
tion and activism is considerably more
blurred.
The foreign policy adopted by the
first JLP government in the 1960s was
primarily characterized by acquiescence
in the dominant Western view of the
world, as encapsulated within Busta-
mante's bold declaration that Jamaica
"was with the West." But by the end
of the decade, driven by domestic po-
litical pressure, there emerged a grow-
ing sensitivity to Third World trends
towards nonalignment and associated
arguments about asserting sovereignty
over natural resources. The government
assumed observer status in the Non-
aligned Movement, engaged in a more
active diplomacy at the United Nations
on such issues as apartheid and the
future of South Africa, and was forced
to accept international economic bar-
Continued on page 30

8/CARIBBEAN REVIEW

Latin American Scholarship

From Princeton

Condemned to Repetition
The United States and
Nicaragua
Robert A. Pastor
Here is an insider's account of
U.S. policy making toward Nicar-
agua, written by a major partici-
pant. Robert Pastor was Director
of Latin American Affairs on the
National Security Council from
1977 to 1981, a crucial period in
U.S.-Nicaragua relations. With
scholarly evenhandedness he offers
a new interpretation of the kinds of
choices that U.S. policy makers
faced as they responded to the
Nicaraguan crisis during the Carter
administration, in which
he served, and through the
Reagan years.
Pastor presents a wealth of
original material from his own
experience, classified government
documents, and interviews with
nearly 100 leaders from the United
States, Nicaragua, and throughout
Latin America. What emerges is a
picture of the United States and an
entire region haunted by the spectre
of Cuba and yet "condemned
to repetition."
"Robert Pastor is uniquely
qualified to write a definitive
book of this kind about the
relationship between Nicaragua
and the United States. .what it
has been, is now, and what it
ought to be.
For anyone deeply interested
in this crucial subject, Condemned
to Repetition is an unequaled
source of interesting facts
and ideas."
-Jimmy Carter
Cloth: $24.95 ISBN 0-691-07752-5

Patterns of Development
in Latin America
Poverty, Repression, and
Economic Strategy
John Sheahan
In this major work an economist
with long experience as an advisor
in developing countries explores the
conflict between market forces and
political reform that has led straight
into Latin America's most serious
problems. John Sheahan addresses
three central concerns: the persis-
tence of poverty in Latin American
countries despite rising national
incomes; the connection between
economic troubles and political
repression; and the relationships
in trade and finance between Latin
America and the rest of the world.
Paper: $12.95 ISBN 0-691-02264-X
Cloth: $47.50 ISBN 0-691-07735-5

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AT YOUR BOOKSTORE OR
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Textiles and Capitalism
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An Economic History of
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RichardJ. Salvucci
The obrajes, or native textile man-
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developing capitalism in colonial
Mexico. Drawing on previously
unknown or unexplored archival
sources, Richard Salvucci uses
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simple measurement to analyze the
obraje and its inability to survive
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41 WILLIAM ST. PRINCETON, NJ 08540 (609) 452-4900
Orders: 800-PRS-ISBN (777-4726)

CARIBBEAN REVIEWI9

Race and Economic Power in Jamaica

Toward the Creation of a Black Bourgeoisie
By Carl Stone

G arveyism looked to cre-
ate a transnational defini-
tion of black ethnic bond-
ing that challenged the territorial
nationalism of Jamaica. The op-
posing idea of multiracialism and
of creating a society that denied
ethnic bonding was a deliberate
attempt to weaken the emergence
of black ethnicity as a central
reference for political identity
and political action among Ja-
maica's black majority.
Europeans owned most of the
wealth-producing assets in the
colonial economy. Indigenous
populations were allowed to en-
gage in small-scale peasant farm-
ing on the fringes of large white-
owned plantations, but they were
relegated to providing cheap la-
bor for white settlers in an ex-
panding corporate economy. In-
termediary racial groups such as
East Indians were brought in to
increase the labor supply. As
export staples and diversification
into minerals, tourism and manu-
facturing increased the wealth of
the colonial economy, commerce
and services expanded. This
opened up opportunities for small-scale
capital and smaller entrepreneurial firms
to operate alongside large white-con-
trolled corporations.
White settlers and colonial admini-
strations helped the intermediary ethnic
groups grasp these business opportunities.
In some cases, migration inflows from
a more diverse set of intermediary
Carl Stone chairs the Department of Govern-
ment at the University of the West Indies,
Mona. He is a leading poster and newspaper
columnist and the author of many books
including Power in the Caribbean Basin (ISHI,
1986) and Class, Status and Democracy in Ja-
maica (Praeger, 1986).

Marcus Garvey.
ethnic groups flooded the opportunities
for small-scale capitalism. These mi-
grating ethnic groups either had prior
traditions or experience in commerce
(Chinese, Lebanese, Jews) or had the
advantage of strong extended family
systems that facilitated rapid capital
accumulation.
Racial mixture between white and
black, which created a brown middle
class who inherited property and had
access to education, formed the begin-
nings of a minority, intermediary ethnic
group. Their ranks were expanded by
the addition of other immigrant minori-

10CARIBBEAN REVIEW

ties who established a foothold
in petty commerce, later using
this as a basis for extending
economic power as capitalists.
As the plantation economies
gave way to tourism, mineral
exports, and more diverse serv-
ice and manufacturing activi-
ties, the intermediary ethnic
groups grasped new opportuni-
ties and created a new owner
class, controlling significant cor-
porate economic power along-
side traditional white planters,
who they largely displaced. An
ethnic merchant class emerged
along with new white-controlled
foreign corporate capital in tour-
ism, sugar, petroleum and baux-
ite. They were joined by some
survivors from a largely deci-
mated and disappearing older
white planter class.
The pattern of ethnic eco-
nomic power in Jamaica has
fluctuated since the nineteenth
century. The place of blacks
and that of intermediary ethnic
groups has changed over sev-
eral periods and is likely to
shift again in the future.
Significant changes occurred in the
following periods: (1) between emanci-
pation in 1838 and the great depression
of the 1930s when the economy stag-
nated and the entrenched ethnic divi-
sion of labor was challenged by the
political upheavals of the decade; (2)
between World War II and independence
in 1962 when rapid economic growth
occurred; (3) in the 1970s, characterized
by economic crisis and class and ethnic
conflicts; (4) in the 1980s, characterized
by efforts to reverse and inhibit the
changes that occurred in the 1970s.

The First Hundred Years

In the hundred years between eman-
cipation and 1938, the black ex-slaves
were limited largely to small peasant
farming, unskilled wage work at less
than subsistence wages, and limited
artisan occupations. A few entered pro-
fessions such as teaching, nursing, and
dispensing drugs, as well as nonmanual
occupations, becoming clerks and po-
licemen.
Blacks were discouraged from enter-
ing commerce, which was dominated
by the intermediary ethnic groups.
Whites controlled large-scale plantation
agriculture, the dominant area of eco-
nomic activity. Indians occupied a posi-
tion indistinguishable from the blacks.
At the end of this period (1938), the
overall ethnic balance in the country
was as follows:

Dominant Ethnic Group
Whites 1%
Intermediary Ethnic Groups
Browns 17%
Chinese, Lebanese and Jews 2%
Subordinate Ethnic Groups

Blacks
Indians

78%
2%
Total 100%

Over the period the plantation economy
declined as estates became less profit-
able, earnings from export agriculture
dropped, and many whites sold out
family lands and migrated. As a result,
between emancipation and the 1930s
the white population declined from
some 3% of the population to 1%. The
decline of white-owned family estates
and the overall state of depression in
export agriculture created opportunities
for both blacks and intermediary ethnic
groups to acquire land. The economic
crisis within the plantation sector facili-
tated the emergence of a vibrant black
rural middle class built around medium-
sized holdings; these concentrated on
export crops such as bananas, pimento,
coffee and citrus, and later sugar.
Some of the Jewish and Lebanese
urban merchant interests acquired large
holdings by recovering delinquent loans
extended to planter families. This helped
to consolidate their growing economic
power in the Jamaican class structure.
The economic decline of traditional
family estates weakened the power base
of the dominant white ethnic group and
started the class reformation that was

to be completed in the postwar period
when the center of economic power
finally shifted from the plantation sector
to urban areas.
At the time, educational level was
an accurate index of class. The opportu-
nity for education beyond primary school
was a reliable indicator of ethnic in-
equality. In the late 1930s, 62% of the
whites were educated beyond primary
school. Among the more well-off Jew-
ish and Lebanese ethnic groups, the
level of postprimary educational expo-
sure was 60% and 45% respectively;
for browns and Chinese it was a consid-
erably lower 10 and 12%. Subordinate
ethnic groups had the lowest levels of
postprimary education: 1.5% for blacks
and 2% for Indians. Clearly the interme-
diary ethnic groups were better equipped
than blacks or Indians to grasp new
opportunities emerging from postwar
diversification and expansion of the
Jamaican economy.
Only a small proportion of Chinese
and browns, and only a tiny fraction of
blacks and Indians were middle class
by the end of the 1930s. A small black
rural middle class invested heavily in
educating their children so that they
would move up into respectable profes-
sions. Their attempt to accumulate
through agriculture was frustrated be-
cause a large proportion of what should
properly have been profits for the farm-
ers was appropriated by urban produce
dealers, middlemen, traders, distribu-
tors, government agencies and com-
modity board bureaucracies. In time the
search for greater economic power led
the younger generation of this black
rural middle class to migrate to urban
areas where income from professions
and public service jobs combined with
investments in urban real estate became
the basis on which they entered the new
urban middle class.
Black social protests triggered by a
new political awakening and economic
discontent brought this period to a close
by ushering in political changes that led
to representative government, mass par-
ties, strong trade unions bargaining on
behalf of a working class, and a gradual
drift towards political decolonization
and democratization. Political leaders
emerged from the brown and black
middle classes, both urban and rural,
as power brokers who negotiated with
the white power structure over demands
for change on behalf of the impover-
ished black masses.
Black voters rejected parties and lead-

ers that were visibly linked to the white
planter class, or to the aspiring and
upwardly mobile Jewish, Lebanese and
brown urban merchant and commercial
interests who saw themselves as the
new ruling class. Although the Chinese
lacked the ethnic confidence needed to
enter the political arena, the dominant
and intermediary ethnic groups sensed
the power vacuum developing in the
economy with the retreat of the tradi-
tionally dominant whites and moved
into the political arena to use state
power for enhancing their ambitions to
become part of a new ruling class.
With the majority blacks deeply dis-
trusting the more privileged ethnic
minorities, the black and brown middle
class political leaders assumed a dual
role: bargaining for the blacks while
protecting the interests of the aspiring
and economically powerful intermedi-
ary ethnic groups, whom they saw as
providing the enterprise and entrepre-
neurial dynamism to move the economy
forward. The idea of blacks aspiring
towards economic dominance or play-
ing a key role in the entrepreneurial
leadership was not articulated and had
no place in the new scheme of things.
Blacks were seen as a sort of supporting
cast for the ethnic minority economic
leadership. The blacks would provide
labor and some professional skills, but
the means of production would be
controlled by the dominant intermedi-
ary ethnic minorities. That imbalanced
economic power-sharing formed the foun-
dation of the new democratic Jamaica.
The blacks subscribed to this unstated
understanding by aspiring to move out
of low-status agriculture into high-
status urban professional jobs.
The dual role undertaken by the new
political leaders became the basis for
the multiethnic, multiclass coalitons
around which the Jamaica Labor Party
and the Peoples National Party were
established after the 1930s' political
upheavals.
Garveyism, or black ethnic conscious-
ness, and nationalism, which had
emerged in the latter part of the period
between emancipation and the 1930s,
was pushed aside in favor of multira-
cialism, nonethnic territorial national-
ism, and systematic attempts to disin-
fect the polity of the race issue. Gar-
veyism was suppressed although it
played a key role in the Jamaican
political awakening that occurred as the
prelude to the political protests of the
1930s. Concern with race was seen as

CARIBBEAN REVIEW/i1

subverting the new order of economic
modernization that was promised by the
emergent political leaders.

From WW II to Independence

A new economic order was created in
Jamaica between the end of the second
world war (1945) and independence
(1962). Major changes included the
following: (1) Trade links were shifted
from Britain to the United States. (2)
Bauxite, tourism and urban-based manu-
facturing and services replaced export
agriculture as dominant sectors of the
economy. (3) Large-scale entry of US
foreign capital and foreign corporations
strengthened the new capitalist forma-
tions. (4) Dominant economic power
shifted from the rural-based planter
class to the urban-based intermediary
ethnic groups who reconstituted a new
and powerful capitalist group which
included the whites but eliminated their
ascendancy and dominance. (5) Rapid
economic growth replaced economic
stagnation; but except for tourism and
bauxite areas in the rural parishes, the
growth was confined to the capital city
of Kingston and St. Andrew, and ad-
joining urban St. Catherine. (6) New
economic opportunities emerged as the
public and private sectors expanded
rapidly. Jobs and occupations were cre-
ated, and the working, middle and
entrepreneurial classes in the country's
growth regions expanded rapidly. On
the other hand, agriculture stagnated
and black rural poverty became en-
trenched. (7) This uneven development
stimulated massive rural-to-urban mi-
gration. The black majority's aspira-
tions for a better life that were height-
ened by economic growth were frus-
trated, leading to a huge exodus of rural
migrants to Britain.
How did these changes affect the
ethnic economic division of labor in
Jamaica? Although blacks used ex-
panded educational opportunities to en-
ter the middle class, their new opportuni-
ties were limited to white collar and
professional employment in the public
sector and in such fields as law, medi-
cine, and engineering. This was due to
continued racism which reserved mid-
dle and upper level positions in the
private sector for the upper and interme-
diary ethnic minorities. Blacks did not
see themselves as challenging the domi-
nant and intermediary ethnic groups for
economic ascendancy. They were thank-

ful for limited opportunities to move
into the professional middle class, work-
ing for salaries and thereby escaping
from the frustrations and tribulations
of rural poverty.
The rapid growth of the public sector
facilitated a significant growth of the
black middle class, which expanded
from 1% in the 1930s to 10% by the
1960s. The sheer size of the black
population meant that blacks now be-
came the largest ethnic group within the
middle class, broadly defined to include
middle-income earners. The more afflu-
ent upper middle class, however, was
dominated by nonblack ethnic minori-
ties. Significantly, black protest against
blocked opportunities for social and
economic advancement was limited to
vocal minorities, which included the
Rastafarian movement and the Peoples
Political Party led by a black lawyer,
Millard Johnson.
The early Rasta movement was the
most militant political voice in this
period, advocating black ethnic national-
ism and black liberation. The move-
ment openly challenged white domi-
nance in the society and economy and
explicitly rejected the social ideology
of black inferiority to the minority
ethnic groups by putting forward the
idea of black supremacy.
Millard Johnson's PPP argued the
case against anti-black discrimination
in private sector employment and for
greater respect for blacks in a society
still heavily influenced by anti-black
color prejudices. Although the PPP
attracted widespread interest and fright-
ened the JLP and PNP leadership, the
party earned only 5,000 votes out of
some 575,000 votes cast by the pre-
dominantly black electorate in the inde-
pendence elections won by the Jamaica
Labor Party in 1962. A prominent and
well-known Rastafarian candidate
(brother Sam Brown) ran against a JLP
Lebanese (Mr. Seaga) and a PNP black
lawyer (Mr. Dudley Thompson) in West-
ern Kingston, then the center of urban-
based Rasta cultural and political influ-
ences. Many Rastas refused to vote,
defining elections as corrupt Babylon
politics. The JLP Lebanese candidate
won the election by 52% of the vote,
and the black PNP lawyer received
46%. Sam Brown obtained 78 votes,
less than 1% of the vote.
The black middle class distanced
itself from the Rasta movement, which
became a minority expression of black
lower-class racial protest. Middle-class

blacks often denied their black ethnicity
and lost any trace of a black identity
in the desire to assimilate into the
mainly light-skinned upper middle class.
Mainstream blacks gave their support
to multiethnic political alliances and
parties (the JLP and the PNP) which
tried to suppress black ethnic national-
ism. Indeed, middle-class and PNP/JLP
hostility to the Rasta movement set the
stage for harsh laws against ganja and
for police harassment of the Rastas. A
systematic effort was made to ostracize
the movement and to identify it with
criminality and mental illness.
For the majority of blacks, rapid
economic growth merely heightened
their limited aspirations for a better life
but led to no real fulfillment of those
desires. These frustrated aspirations re-
sulted in a massive outward migration
to Britain and a large-scale exodus from
rural to urban areas, which translated
rural poverty into urban ghettoes and
urban poverty.
Some marginal increases in black
economic power were achieved through
upward mobility into the middle and
upper layers of the public service bu-
reaucracy and the independent pro-
fessions. Even here, however, the light-
skinned ethnic minorities enjoyed most
of the positions of greatest power and
status in the professions and in the
public sector. The nonblack minorities
dominated private and corporate owner-
ship and middle and top-level manage-
rial and technical jobs.
The most important change, how-
ever, was the growth of a new urban
capitalist class dominated by the Jews,
the Lebanese and the whites, and to a
lesser extent by the browns and the
Chinese. Large new corporate enter-
prises were created by new and old
wealth in banking, insurance, manufac-
turing, trading and commerce, export
agriculture, construction, tourism and a
wide variety of service industries. A
modified ethnic economic division of
labor emerged, but for most blacks the
situation remained unchanged.
The intermediary ethnic groups
achieved a significant increase in their
economic power that pushed them up-
wards and out of the intermediary
grouping into becoming part of the
dominant ethnic grouping in the Jamai-
can economy. They were the principal
beneficiaries of the changes in the
Jamaican economy during this second
period. Most blacks were left behind
and the seeds of racial and class resent-

12/CARIBBEAN REVIEW

ment were sewn in the period between
World War II and Independence. This
set the stage for the political and racial
turbulence of the 1970s which opened
up wider opportunities for blacks to
enter the managerial and entrepreneurial
classes on an unprecedented scale.

The 1970s

In the third period, which covered the
decade of the 1970s when the PNP was
in power, the Jamaican economy expe-
rienced continuous negative growth. This
decline in national income and produc-
tion was accompanied by class and
racial militancy and by the rise of leftist
or Marxist articulation of demands for
change within the Peoples National
Party and from the minor Marxist party,
the Workers Party of Jamaica.
Violent crime escalated as the power
contention between the JLP and the
PNP assumed the character of a gang
war. Organized street gangs engaged
in orgies of excessively violent crime
against the middle class and the rich,
who became victims of rapes, robberies
and beatings that seemed designed to
settle scores with the privileged classes
and ethnic groups.
A younger generation of urban based
youth became highly politicized in the
late 1960s due to the fledgling Abeng
and Black Power movements led by
young university intellectuals who
emerged as the first generation of the
black and brown middle class to openly
question the economic hegemony of the
dominant ethnic minorities. This new
wave of radicalism accused the Jamai-
can political leaders and the economi-
cally dominant ethnic groups of con-
spiring to perpetuate the poverty and
powerlessness of the Jamaican masses.
These militant political tendencies
were incorporated into the Peoples Na-
tional Party under the new leadership
of party president Michael Manley.
Their influence and Manley's assump-
tion of intellectual leadership of this
new wave of class militancy shifted the
PNP towards a leftist course and weak-
ened severely the party's links with the
economically dominant ethnic groups,
who saw the PNP as promoting an
enemy cause. Party secretary Dr. D. K.
Duncan was seen as a political threat
to their economic dominance, while
Manley was seen as a captive of new
leftist inclinations and manipulation by
Marxists in his party.

The PNP's multiracial and multieth-
nic alliance was fractured by this devel-
opment, and its traditional minority
ethnic support stampeded toward the
JLP. The PNP became (especially dur-
ing the second half of the decade) the
mouthpiece through which some radical
black tendencies were articulated.

Jamaica's Jews

Minorities and Power in a Black
Society: The Jewish Commu-
nity of Jamaica. Carol S.
Holzberg. Maryland: North-South
Publishing Co., 1987. 259 p.

Carol S. Holzberg provides a de-
tailed, finely grained analysis of the
impact of Jews in Jamaican society,
from the arrival of Sephardic Jews
on the island after Columbus' explo-
rations in the New World to the
development of a Jewish community
and the formation of a national
entrepreneurial elite. Contrary to both
scholarly and lay assertions of an
increasingly assimilated Jewish re-
ligious community, Holzberg pre-
sents ample evidence of their flexi-
bility and use of syncretic social
mechanisms to adapt to the social
and cultural realities of a Jamaica
that is predominantly influenced by
Afro-Caribbean culture.
In doing so, this work con-
fronts pluralist and structuralist explana-
tions of the role of ethnicity in
Jamaica. By treating ethnicity and
culture as independent variables that
intersect with socioeconomic ones,
Holzberg displays the crosscutting
alliances Jamaican Jews maintain
between and within social classes,
as well as within their own ethnic
group. Thus, the member of a promi-
nent Jewish family (like the Ash-
enheims or the Matalons) can be an
active national bourgeois as well as
a leader in the Jewish community,
using the privileges of his status to
assist less well-off Jews. In this
sense, Jewish identity operates across
social classes and does not function
as an epiphenomenon of material
conditions.
Holzberg stresses that the bene-
fits and privileges which Jewish elites
have accrued are symptomatic of

The economically dominant ethnic
minorities retreated in fear. They ex-
ported capital, closed down enterprises,
and migrated in large numbers to Flor-
ida and Canada, in much the same way
as plantation whites had retreated ear-
lier in the century. The motivating
factors were a combination of political

their membership in the national
entrepreneurial elite, and not because
of their ethnic identity. Thus the
Jewish elite are not economically or
politically viable because of their
Jewishness, but due to a constella-
tion of hard work, colonialism, and
racial and economic stratification.
This position is supported by evi-
dence presented on the heterogeneity
within the Jewish community. Not
all Jamaican Jews are wealthy, yet
Jamaican Jews constitute a much
higher percentage of the national
entrepreneurial elite than their actual
representation in the overall popula-
tion would indicate.
Jews only represent .025 per-
cent of the national population, but
the smallness of the community and
its distinctive cultural characteristics
makes individual social mobility more
important and beneficial for the few
within that community than for those
outside of it. In this sense Jamaican
Jews can reproduce both their cul-
ture and influence, despite inter-
marriage and unorthodox religious
practices.
However, two dimensions of
the relations between Jamaican Jews
and the broader society are not suffi-
ciently explored in this study: 1) the
dynamics of power between Jews
and non-Jews outside of the relations
of production and 2) the interface
of Jewish and Afro-Caribbean cul-
ture to assess the impact the two
cultures have upon each other.
Yet, these are not necessarily
flaws as much as a reflection of the
scope of this study, which focuses
on the persistence and viability of a
minority group within the white mi-
nority of Jamaica. In Minorities and
Power in a Black Society, Holzberg
succeeds in examining the Jewish
community "from the inside looking
out, as well as from the outside
looking in."
Michael Hanchard
Princeton University
Princeton, New Jersey

CARIBBEAN REVIEW113

threats, increased black racial militancy,
political challenges to their class domi-
nance, violent crime, intensified class
struggles waged through militant strikes
and trade union action, and deep fears
that the black majority and their politi-
cal leaders no longer accepted their
economic leadership. The dual class
role of party leaders to negotiate for the
poor and protect the privileged, which
was entrenched in the unstated political
pact of the early 1940s, was now
shattered.
This combination of economic and
political crises and threats dislocated
many business enterprises and destroyed
the earlier class confidence of the ethnic
minorities. This dislocation of the es-
tablished and economically dominant
ethnic groups created unanticipated and
unexpected new openings for black
entry into the entrepreneurial class and
facilitated large-scale entry of blacks
into the middle and upper levels of
private sector management.
By the end of the decade, the blacks,
who had been largely excluded from
top jobs in the private sector, emerged
to occupy an estimated 40% to 50% of
top and middle-level technical and mana-
gerial jobs in the private sector along-
side whites, Jews, browns, Chinese and
Lebanese. The bigger corporate enter-
prises (both local and foreign) shifted
their policy towards hiring and promot-
ing blacks into top positions. The rapid-
ity of the change is well illustrated by
the commercial banks, which had only
a handful of blacks in clerical and
nonmanual jobs in the early 1960s. By
the end of the 1970s, 60% of the top
jobs in banks were occupied by blacks.
This rapid mobility by blacks into
private sector management was facili-
tated by several factors. First of all, the
supply of qualified blacks expanded
through the growth of higher educa-
tional opportunities at the University
of the West Indies and the College of
Arts, Science and Technology, espe-
cially in management training and the
applied sciences. This was augmented
by streams of returning Jamaican black
students who had been educated over-
seas but were motivated to return home
by white racism in Canada, the USA
and the UK.
Outward migration by frightened eth-
nic minorities forced some enterprises
to promote blacks into top positions,
and many discovered (contrary to ear-
lier assumptions) that experienced and
educated blacks could handle private

sector management responsibilities. The
widening of these top employment
opportunities in the private sector moti-
vated many gifted, highly trained and
experienced blacks to abandon public
sector careers in favor of more lucrative
private sector employment. In some
cases, the hiring of blacks to fill top
positions was a deliberate strategy to
defuse questions about racism in the
private world of corporate power. Some
multinational corporations used this strat-
egy to reduce their visibility and to
appease strident calls for nationalization
from radicals by increasing the MNCs'
integration into the Jamaican polity.
Black entry into the urban entrepre-
neurial class was also significant but
less successful. Big corporate capital
continued to be monopolized by the
ethnic minorities, but a small number
of large corporate enterprises, employ-
ing hundreds of workers and owned by
blacks, emerged in manufacturing, con-
struction and services. Most of the new
black-owned enterprises were, however,
smaller enterprises mainly in manufac-
turing, construction, business services,
tourism, commerce and agriculture. The
typical new black entrepreneur was a
small businessman hiring 20 to 50
workers.
Large-scale emigration of Chinese,
brown, Lebanese, Jewish and white
businessmen during the 1970s opened
unprecedented opportunities for blacks
to enter the entrepreneurial class in
smaller and medium scale enterprises.
The economic and political crisis caused
by dislocating dominant ethnic groups
created economic space in the business
sector, which came to be occupied by
blacks.
The routes to black acquisition of
enterprises were many. Some bought
out firms that were being sold by
migrating owners. Others saw market
opportunities left open by collapsing
enterprises and went in search of invest-
ment funding. Some top-level managers
and technical staff bought out enter-
prises where they worked but which the
previous owners had decided to close.
Some started new enterprises to meet
needs not filled by importation due to
the shortage of foreign exchange. The
foreign exchange crisis by itself was
inducing and motivating increased import-
substitution, manufacturing activity pio-
neered by several young and enterpris-
ing black entrepreneurs.
Financing was made easier because
of the PNP government's takeover of

the local Barclay's Bank, which was
turned into the state-owned National
Commercial Bank. NCB became an
aggressive and expansionist lender to
small and medium scale businesses
starting up new ventures and continuing
the life of old ventures that would
otherwise have folded. The entry of
many middle-class blacks into manage-
rial jobs in the commercial banks opened
up access to bank loans by black
entrepreneurs.
The 1970s witnessed the most far-
reaching changes in the ethnic eco-
nomic division of labor in Jamaica.
Blacks became well established within
the corporate managerial elite. Black
entrepreneurship was finding a foothold
in many sectors of the economy along-
side the still dominant minority ethnic
groups. But perhaps the most far-
reaching changes occurred at the level
of higgler trading and blackmarketeer-
ing, on the one hand, and illegal produc-
tion and trading in drugs, on the other.
Foreign exchange shortages created
an opening for several thousand women,
mainly from the lower socioeconomic
groups, to establish themselves as hig-
glers in import trading. They traveled
overseas, acquired foreign exchange and
procured scarce goods, luxury goods,
banned goods, or whatever the local
market needed but the established mer-
chants could not supply. They aggres-
sively took over from the established
merchants a considerable market share
of the import trade in clothing, foot-
wear, household articles and some small
strategic areas of imported food.
A small number became wealthy and
bought their way into middle-class liv-
ing; the majority made enough money
to live comfortably and reduce the
impact of the economic downturn on
their families.
Foreign exchange shortages in the
1970s, combined with the liberalization
of ganja use in the USA, motivated a
new breed of entrepreneurs to open up
the illegal drug trade into the USA on
a high scale. Large fortunes were accu-
mulated by many Chinese, brown, and
black entrepreneurs. They abandoned
the restraints of professions and legiti-
mate businesses to make their fortunes
in drugs. A few used drug money to
finance or expand legitimate enterprises,
thereby providing themselves with ac-
cess to investment funds they would
otherwise have been unable to realize
by more conventional and legal chan-
Continued on page 31

14/CARIBBEAN REVIEW

Higglering in Kingston

Entrepreneurs or Traditional Small-Scale Operators?

By Elsie LeFranc

normal or small-scale trading has
a long history in the Caribbean
region. Slaves were able to gener-
ate enough surplus from their small
subsistence grounds to hold reasonably
vibrant weekly markets. Thus the mar-
keting practices and traditions brought
by slaves from West Africa were given
expression and nurtured in what came
to be known as the Sunday markets.
In postemancipation Jamaica, the small
farm sector grew by leaps and bounds,
and with it petty trading in agricultural
produce. By the early 20th century it
was a flourishing phenomenon, and the
growth of this group of traders has
continued more or less unabated. To-
day, small farmers (those working up
to 25 acres of land) account for 90%
of the domestic food crops, and the
petty traders, commonly known as hig-
glers, are responsible for approximately
80% of their distribution. The longevity
of this group, and their stubborn control
of the internal food and vegetable mar-
kets, is particularly remarkable in light
of their constant exposure to official
hostility, harassment or neglect, societal
stigma and ridicule, and/or political
manipulation.
Two questions often arise: What is
the economic role and contribution of
higglers, and given their long history
and relatively exclusive control of the
distribution of domestic food crops,
why have they apparently been unable
to transform themselves into or spawn
a significant trading bourgeoisie? These
questions seem reasonable considering
the trading empires that some of their
counterparts in West Africa and, to a
lesser extent, in Haiti have been able
to build. Furthermore, there has been a
Elsie LeFranc is a senior lecturer in the
Department of Sociology at the University of
the West Indies in Mona, Jamaica.

A. S. Forrest, Resting by the Way,
Jamaica, 1904.
literal mushrooming of petty trading
over the past two decades. Not only has
the number of higglers grown, but the
group is now much more heterogene-
ous. No longer is it largely made up of
sellers of agricultural produce and manu-
factured consumer goods such as cloth-
ing, cigarettes, confectionery, toiletries
and the like, with a sprinkling of coal,
craft, fish, meat and cooked-food ven-
dors. Instead, higglers who import con-
sumer goods for local retail, and street
and curb-side vending by urban-based
higglers now almost seem to eclipse the
older groups. Also, whereas before hig-
glers more or less gravitated toward
well-defined market locations, now they
are widely spread throughout Kingston.
In spite of what has been written by
economists and anthropologists, we are
still very much in the dark about the
relationship between petty trading and
social and economic mobility. There
has been, and continues to be, a great
deal of folk legend and verandah chatter
about sons and daughters who owed
their life's achievements to their strong
higgler mothers; proper and adequate
documentation, however, is all but non-
existent.
The information that follows is based
essentially on interviews conducted in

1984-85 with 866 persons distributed
in 10 market locations in the Kingston
Metropolitan Area. The group was com-
prised of four types of higglers: farmer-
vendor, a person who sells only that
produced on one's own farm; farmer-
higgler, a person who sells one's own
produce as well as that produced on
other farms; country higgler, a person
who only buys and sells and is resident
in the rural areas; town higgler, a
person who only buys and sells, is
resident in the towns, and operates only
within the towns; plus the newer infor-
mal commercial importers (ICIs). The
latter category of traders buys from
neighboring territories such as Panama,
Haiti, Curagao, or the United States for
retail sale in Kingston.

Higgler Specialization

Higglering, at least within the Kingston
Metropolitan Area, has become a fairly
specialized occupation. The image of
the higgler as a woman who sells her
husband's produce and perhaps that of
her neighbors no longer seems gener-
ally correct. It could be argued that
higglering was an adjunct or extension
of the small farm economy. This is
changing, however, as neither country
nor town higglers are involved in farm-
ing activities. Increased specialization
has to a large extent been accompanied
by increasing urbanization of the group.
Among food higglers, the more tradi-
tional groups of farmer-vendors and
farmer-higglers represent a declining
minority, accounting for only 8% and
10% of the group interviewed. At the
same time the town-higgler group (27%)
attracts most of the new recruits into
the system.
Nonetheless, higglers in the markets
are still largely country-based. Recent

CARIBBEAN REVIEW/15

expansion among food higglers in King-
ston most probably finds its greatest
expression on the curb and streetsides,
so that food flows into the area are still
largely controlled by country-based trad-
ers. The sellers of manufactured goods
purchased locally or in foreign coun-
tries are, of course, based in the King-
ston Metropolitan Area.
Compared with full-time small farm-
ing, domestic or other unskilled labor,
and even with clerical and skilled jobs
such as teaching or civil service, hig-
glering represents economic improve-
ment. But this is more a comment on
the poor remuneration of those occupa-
tions than an indication of prosperity
in the petty trading sector; higglering
is still very much a small-scale busi-
ness. Using a crude measurement of
relative economic status or scale of
operation, gross sales revenues, the
majority of higglers did not take in
more than J$1,000 (approximately
US$182) per week. Furthermore, the
economic life of the higgler is relatively
short; approximately 72% spend no
more than 14 years higgiering. The
specialist higgler is more likely to enter
the occupation later in life.
As might be expected, the ICIs domi-
nate the top sales category, while food
higglers are still very much petty trad-
ers. Urbanization seems to mean im-
poverishment rather than growth. More
traditional farmer-vendors and farmer-
higglers appear to be economically bet-
ter off, whereas the specialized higgler,
and certainly the urban-based ones, tend
to be found at the bottom of the
economic hierarchy.
An indication of the small-scale char-
acter of the enterprise is the relative
absence of hired help. Higglering is
labor intensive, and given the relative
lack of official assistance, higglers must
in all probability, depend heavily on a
network of friends, hired help and/or
relatives. Goods must be purchased,
collected, packed, transported and dis-
tributed. Markets and clientele must be
built up, and higglers will at some point
need capital for setting up and running
the business. However, the use of hired
labor is not at all extensive. ICIs are the
biggest users, a few hiring persons to
sell on their behalf in other stalls and
locations, but the average monthly ex-
penditures for hired labor is very mod-
est: J$125 (US$23) at the most. Town
higglers spend the least on hired labor:
J$38 (US$7) per month. It might be
expected, therefore, that the support

activities are largely carried out by
relatives, but their involvement as labor
or suppliers of credit is minimal.
Credit utilization also indicates the
small scale of the operations and the
extent of constraints on possible expan-
sion. Higglering is essentially a "cash
and carry" operation. Only 38% of the
higglers interviewed had taken loans.
Of those for which actual values were
provided, almost all (95%) were very
small: $100 or less. It should be pointed
out, however, that while many higglers

do not borrow money, they may take
goods for sale on credit. Although the
success and longevity of such an ar-
rangement requires trust and coopera-
tion, relatives are among the least im-
portant source. Banks and other formal
&

institutions are of even less conse-
quence. Instead it is friends and the

supplier of the goods who most fre-
quently provide credit.
Occupational histories vary accord-
ing to the type of higgler. For the most
part, higglers have a predominantly
Jamaica, 1904.
do not borrow money, they may take

farminggoods for sale on credit. Although theig-
gsuess and likely to have themselves been ar-

previously engaged in farming and fish-
rng, whie town-based higglers are even
tion, re likely to havs are among the least im-hat

occupation by a circuitous route, via
portant source. Banks annskilled other formalAmong
institutions are of even less conse-ve into
higglquene. Instead g from whit is friend-collar jobs and the
supplier level prof the goods who most fre-
quentrary provide prevailing expectations,
Occupational histories vary accord-
ing to the type of higgler. For the most

part, higglering is not a family enterprise antly
does farming background. Country-based hig-
glers are likely to have themselves been

previously engaged in farming a dependence. fish-
ing, while town-based higglers are even

Reruitment processes have arrived at that
occupation by a circuitous route, via

domestic and ily ties and/or family
s traditions. Inherited businesses ar move into
higglering from white-collar jobs and
lower level professions.
Contrary to prevailing expectations,
higglering is not a family enterprise and
does not exhibit family-based economic
networks and family labor dependence.
Recruitment processes have very little
to do with family ties and/or family
traditions. Inherited businesses are no

longer the norm; neither is there any
kind of family-oriented apprenticeship.
Sons, as opposed to daughters, do give
some assistance in their early years with
collecting, packaging, transporting and
even selling, but they eventually fade
out of the picture. Daughters may be
in competition with their mothers. Of
the higglers interviewed, only 21% iden-
tified any kind of family assistance.
This was so despite a high unemploy-
ment rate among their children. In
short, families did not seem to partici-
pate in any consistent way.

A Petty Occupation

It might be anticipated that three fea-
tures of Jamaican economy and society
would lead to larger scale performance
by petty traders. First, Jamaica has
always been an economy in which
trading was an accepted avenue for
social and economic mobility. All eth-
nic minorities have had significant suc-
cess with this route. Second, inasmuch
as domestic agriculture has been largely
ignored by the estate sector, one might
think that the field was relatively open
to the ambitious trader. Third, a con-
sumer society with long-standing yearn-
ings for imported products should pro-
vide fertile territory for anyone able to
make the goods accessible at reasonable
cost. Yet higglering has retained a low
economic status or pettyness, a phe-
nomenon for which a number of expla-
nations have been advanced.
One argument is that the stigma and
low prestige attached to higglering by
virtually everyone destroys the possi-
bilities for intergenerational accumula-
tion and expansion. Yet low status has
not significantly curtailed the rates of
recruitment. An increasing number of
persons give up occupations of higher
status to become higglers. Thus the
explanation of low status is not conclu-
sive, particularly in view of some evi-
dence that rural-based higglers have
traditionally enjoyed high status within
the rural community.
It has been suggested that the low
status ascribed to higglering and, pre-
sumably, its inability to break out of its
stagnant position, is due to the domina-
tion of this sector by women and the
general stigmatization of higglering as
women's work. Yet in other work
experiences women have done well.
Thus it is difficult to accept that female
dominance has largely contributed to its

16/CARIBBEAN REVIEW

marginalized position. It seems more
likely that low status has to do with the
hostility of traditional economic elites
whose own existence, social status and
political leverage have been derived
from mercantile activities of some sort.
Another explanation is based on the
importance of the female-headed house-
hold in the region. Studies of higglering
have found that one of the more impor-
tant reasons for the entry of women into
higglering has been the uncertainty or
absence of economic contribution by a
male partner. In other words, higglering
has had to substitute for, rather than
supplement the family income. The
scarcity and fragility of wage-labor
employment in Jamaica has been a
frequently cited cause. According to
this explanation, the dual economic role
that higglers are obliged to play has a
debilitating and depressing effect on
their evolutionary potential.
Of greater merit are explanations that
consider the constraints flowing from
having a low-income clientele: clients
with low purchasing power and income
instability, demand for small quantities
(often on credit), and little interest in
product-mix diversification. Yet hig-
glers persist and survive, even while
larger concerns falter and collapse around
them. It is, in fact, their pettyness that
helps ensure survival. Petty traders pro-
vide goods to the low-income sector at
times and at prices that larger establish-
ments are unable and/or unwilling to
deliver.
To be sure, goods purchased from
higglers, especially those at the end of
a long middle-man chain, can often be
more expensive. But this may be traded
off against other conveniences. For
example, food higglers provide trans-
portation, collect goods from remote or
inaccessible places, will buy in small
quantities, and will accept goods of
varying quality. Also, higglers of manu-
factured items help carry these items
into areas that larger establishments are
unwilling to reach. In the Jamaica of
the mid-to-late 1970s, the numbers of
informal commercial importers expanded
rapidly in response to the severe short-
ages induced by the government's at-
tempts to use monetary and fiscal poli-
cies to deflate demand. The scarcity and
very high prices of what was available
in the formal commercial sector meant
that ICIs could sell more cheaply and
still make large profits.
What do higglers do with their earn-
ings? The majority consume rather than

reinvest. Some money is invested in
human capital. The nonwhite Caribbean
population has long held an almost
unshakable belief in education as the
critical means for achieving significant
social and economic mobility, and hig-
glers are no different in this regard. Few
wish their children to enter higglering,
a job they generally feel to be demean-
ing and rough. All actively push their
children towards "nicer" and more
prestigious jobs. A reason frequently
given for continuing to higgle is that it

A. S. Forrest, On the Road to Market,
Jamaica, 1904.

helps to ensure the education of their
children.
Higglers tend to be better educated
than their parents. That the education
did not save them from higglering
suggests that its relationship to social
and economic advancement may not
be clearcut. Higglers' children are also
better educated, in terms of greater
access to secondary education and even
to the higher status grammar schools.
Higglering and farming have almost
disappeared as occupational pursuits
among the children of higglers, but the
proportion engaged in domestic and
unskilled labor is not significantly dif-
ferent from their parents. Some socio-
economic mobility into white-collar and
skilled jobs has occurred, but it is not
commensurate with the apparent im-
provement in educational levels.

A Conservative Group

Higglers are not, as popularly expected,
a dynamic and innovative group but
rather very conservative in their busi-
ness orientation. In general, they are
rarely interested in improving their com-

modity mix, roving in search of cheaper
supplies, or influencing farmers' pro-
duction habits to increase their rate of
profit. They do not appear to roam
much outside of a given radius in
search of supplies. Of the higglers
interviewed, 89% of the country-based
sellers did not buy outside of a 10-mile
radius, and fewer than 5%ventured out-
side the Kingston Metropolitan Area.
Among the ICIs there was a heavy
dependence on one country for pur-
chases (Panama 63% of the time, fol-
lowed by the US at 23%). The large
majority of higglers confined them-
selves to one selling location and to one
type of source. As a group, only 15%
sold in more than one location. Also,
the number of suppliers per higgler was
small, ranging from 2.7 (fish/meat ven-
dors) to 6.5 for ICIs. Few compared
prices; 85% said they never did. Thus
most higglers remain within a fairly
confined area or set of relationships.
There is a general sameness and
inflexibility in the range of items sold;
approximately 65% of those interviewed
sold fewer than five different items. Of
the 35% who sold a wider range, most
did so only because it was necessary
for their economic survival to make
the sale. An explicit profit orientation
appeared to be missing. The business
of trying to corner or capture a market
or to influence prices apparently gives
way to concern with establishing stable
client relationships. Higglering is seen
not so much as a business enterprise
as it is as an immediate source of cash.
With stable security taking precedence
over risk-taking and aggressive profit-
making, what has resulted is a series
of parallel, protected and protective
buyer-seller relationships that are not
in serious competition with each other
and that represent a fairly inefficient
division of labor between suppliers and
the different types of higglers. The
dampening effect of this mode of opera-
tion on capital accumulation is obvious.
To understand this conservatism, it
is necessary to look at the role of
higglering in the wider economy. Hig-
glering has been an important source
of income in a low employment econ-
omy. In a sense, it has always been
expected to perform this role. Ground
provisions were intended to reduce the
demands of slaves on planters; proceeds
from the Sunday markets helped to
finance the manumission of slaves and
the later purchase of land, as well as
Continued on page 35

CARIBBEAN REVIEWI17

The Hassle and the Hustle

A Minibus Ride Through Kingston
By Patricia Anderson

he scene is any major cross-
roads in the city of Kingston,
Jamaica Half-Way-Tree,
Cross Roads, Papine or Parade. These
are intersections of different bus routes,
but they are also the battleground where
minibus workers compete fiercely for
passengers.
Minibus drivers try to edge their
buses to the curb, sometimes jumping
the queue or deliberately blocking other
buses. Conductors fight to wrest pas-
sengers from one another by assuring
that theirs will be the first bus to depart
and that there is ample seating within,
or by seizing any baggage the passen-
gers may have and physically guiding
them into the bus. The conductors are
often assisted by free-lance linesmen
or back-up men, who attach themselves
to particular buses and lobby for pas-
sengers. Depending on their exertions
and success, the linesmen receive a
small and variable payment from the
bus crew.
This is the Kingston Metropolitan
Region's public transportation system,
formally instituted in the beginning of
1984 and known as the minibus system.
Minibus service started as an illegal
offshoot of the transport system in the
mid-1970s, and since then has grown
rapidly. Despite its now official status,
it remains controversial because of sev-
eral structural features defying regula-
tion which increase the physical
risks to all road users and lead to severe
imbalances in service.
The urban minibus service started as
a collection of privately-owned and
often unregistered vehicles which oper-
ated as "pirates" on the official routes
of the Jamaica Omnibus Service (JOS).
Patricia Anderson is a research fellow at the
Institute for Social and Economic Research
at the University of the West Indies, Mona.

This private transport resulted from
individual initiative in response to the
growing inadequacies of the JOS, and
the greater competitiveness of the mini-
bus helped hasten the demise of the big
bus system. The replacement of the JOS
by a privately-run, decentralized system
has partially solved one set of problems
while generating a host of others. Thus
debate still centers around the efficacy
of a decentralized bus system and the
possibility of ever achieving standardi-
zation or equity in service.

More Efficient

Minibuses have been in operation in
Jamaica since the mid-1950s. The ma-
jority are owner-operated. There is both
an organized and unorganized sector of
minibus operations, the latter carried
out by so-called "robots," which are
neither licensed to carry passengers,
insured, nor certified as to fitness. Prior
to 1980, both the legal and illegal
minibuses operated where their services
were in greatest demand and they could
maximize revenue. This put them in
direct competition with the JOS.
In April 1980 the JOS and the
Jamaica Minibus Association (JMBA)
agreed to share the routes. Some were
handed over totally to the minibus
company, some operated jointly, and
the rest were to be operated solely by
the JOS. Most minibus drivers operated
10 to 12 hours per day, and the mini-
buses proved to be more reliable on the
main routes, further undermining the
position of the JOS. By 1982, mini-
buses accounted for 80% of the total
passengers in mass urban transporta-
tion; the JOS accounted for only 19%
of passengers and 12% of total bus
trips. It thus became clear that the two
systems could not coexist and that the

JOS should be phased out7
In early 1982, the government dis-
solved the JOS and implemented a
system of privately-operated franchises
for public transport in the Kingston
Metropolitan Region (KMR). This ac-
tion was consistent with the Seaga
government's broad economic policy
of decreasing the role of the state and
giving greater responsibility for produc-
tive and commercial activities to the
private sector.
While the objectives of the bus sys-
tem transformation were clear-cut, they
were also contradictory. A major objec-
tive was to insure that the system was
competitive and that democratic owner-
ship of the fleet was maintained. The
system was not to require any govern-
ment subsidies, yet it was supposed to
respond to public needs and not dis-
criminate against any category of pas-
sengers by reason of age or handicap.
Its anti-labor spirit was expressed in the
stipulation that the new system should
reduce the possibilities of disruption
by industrial action.
The new system divided the KMR
into ten packages of bus routes. Each
package owner entered into a subfran-
chise agreement with the JOS and paid
an annual fee, which was determined
by the Ministry of Public Utilities and
Transport in relation to the amount of
seating provided by the package holder.
The price per seat was approximately
$113. The seats were then resold to
minibus owners at a higher price plus
charges for package membership and
annual dues. The package holder was
assigned considerable responsibility for
management and monitoring of the
system, being required to see that buses
were road-worthy and insured, that driv-
ers observed the prescribed routes and
designated stops, that the bus crew
issued tickets and did not discriminate

18/CARIBBEAN REVIEW

I

against any passengers, and that the
route was serviced at all times.
Despite the elaborate framework of
regulations, there was a marked absence
of governmental concern with the or-
ganizational structures through which
service was to be supplied or with the
conditions of employment for minibus
workers. It was optimistically assumed
that a highly dispersed, democratic and
competitive ownership structure would
lead to service which was profitable and
provided comprehensive, nondiscrimi-
natory and efficient transport. This ap-
parently was not the case in view of the
persistent complaints which the travel-
ing public has expressed about the
minibus service.

How the System Works

The Ministry of Public Utilities and
Transport allocates routes to package
holders and indicates the minimum
number of seats to be supplied. An
attempt is made to provide each pack-
age holder with a combination of more
and less profitable routes, and the pack-
age holder in turn allows the bus owner
some degree of choice in the selection
of routes.
The allocation of seats to routes was
based on earlier assessments of passen-
ger demand which are probably no
longer accurate in view of the shifts in
residential and commuting patterns since
1979. Furthermore, there appears to be
considerable divergence between the
numbers of seats officially allocated
and the numbers actually supplied. In
mid-1985, for example, it was evident
that three packages were supplying
between 30 and 60% more seats than
had been allocated to their routes. This
"excess supply" supported to some

extent the complaints of minibus work-
ers that their routes were being flooded
with buses to increase the profits of the
package holders. Another problem is
that bus owners independently add ex-
tra seats to increase their capacity and
that robot buses still ply several of the
official routes. The addition of seats is
detrimental to passenger comfort and
safety, some seats being only about
one-and-one-half feet apart.
The persistence of robot buses indi-
cates excess or unsatisfied demand within
the system since they predominate on
routes which do not provide adequate
seating. According to package holders,
robots tend to take up the slack at
nights and on Sundays, when legal
owners have parked their buses. They
assist workers on the late shift at the
Foreshore Road Industrial Estate, and
they are also willing to operate along
the more dangerous sections of routes
which often become impenetrable after
dark because of the high risk of rob-
bery. The typical robot driver is pic-
tured as a man who travels with a
machete under his seat and is willing
to either fight down would-be robbers
or to pay for safe passage. In addition
to the risky routes, robots often serve
the less profitable routes which have
been deserted by their assigned opera-
tors. Although it would appear that the
robot buses serve a useful function,
their presence is sometimes strongly
resented by the legal operators, who
must pay licensing costs, insurance and
subfranchise fees. In one instance a
group of legal drivers slashed the tires
and broke the windows of a robot
vehicle which ventured into Half-Way-
Tree Square in the evening.
Another problem is the tendency for
licensed buses to abandon their as-
signed routes during slack periods and

to "pirate" other routes which offer
more business. This type of route shift-
ing also occurs at night when KMR bus
drivers may decide to do a rural trip.
Minibus workers complain frequently
that the routes are overcrowded. They
would like to see a decrease in the
number of buses, the elimination of
robots and pirates, and a more even
allocation of buses. One working pro-
prietor suggested that the government
should "implement some ruling on the
number of buses per route since the
subfranchise holders just add buses at
will." Others complained that when
they first joined the package, the holder
had promised to limit the number of
buses assigned to their route but that
the agreement was quickly broken.
Passengers find that waiting time
varies considerably. During the peak
periods, waiting time ranges between 5
and 20 minutes, but during off-peak
periods the range is between 5 minutes
and 2 hours. Long waits lead to over-
crowding during the peak periods. As
one passenger bitterly commented,
"They pack you in like commodity."
The alternative is to ride hanging out
of the bus.
Although the government's stated
policy objective of maintaining demo-
cratic ownership of the vehicle fleet
appears to be met, a major problem is
the separation of ownership from manage-
ment. "Absentee ownership" has arisen
because the minibus system is widely
used as a channel of investment for
profits earned in other activities, both
legal and illegal. Thus there is a grow-
ing separation between two classes of
owners: the self-employed owners who
usually operate the smaller buses, and
the nonworking proprietors who are
employed in other sectors and can
purchase larger buses. There is very

CARIBBEAN REVIEW/19

little owner contact with the vehicle.
Operators employed by the absentee
owners are often given responsibility
for the day-to-day operation of the
vehicle.
While the larger buses involve a high
initial investment and repayment cost,
they can obtain higher returns because
of their greater seating capacity and the
fact that many passengers opt for the
newer, more comfortable buses. The
owners of the smaller vehicles operate
more on the margin financially, many
being unable to put aside any money
for licensing, insurance and repairs, or
for their personal needs.
Absentee ownership, which appears
to be increasing, leads to the attenuation
of links between package holders and
owners. This is of concern to those
package holders who are trying to raise
the levels of performance within the
industry. Absentee owners do not attend
meetings of the Jamaica Minibus Asso-
ciation and do not respond to circulars.
It is therefore difficult for the associa-
tion to relay information to workers,
who are the ones serving the public and
dealing with the police. To address this
problem, the JMBA initiated a weekly
15-minute radio program entitled "Mini-
bus Ride" to relay information directly
to workers and discuss problems which
arise in the service.
The relationship between package
holders and bus owners can only be
described as strained. While the pack-
age holders complain of disinterest and
lack of cooperation from bus owners,
the working proprietors express igno-
rance of any benefits accruing from
package membership, some viewing the
relationship as primarily exploitative.
While some package holders appear to
have a strong sense of the social impor-
tance of minibus service and the im-
provements that are needed, there do
not seem to be any structural ar-
rangements by which these concerns
can be translated into effective manage-
ment practices. Package holders de-
scribe the elaborate arrangements for
testing and registering vehicles, but also
admit that their need to increase seat
capacity sometimes means that the regu-
lations are not strictly observed.
While some critics view the role of
package holders as simply that of "mar-
gin-gathering," the real question may
be whether it is possible, and how it
may be possible, for a coordinating
body to regulate the activities of a
workforce over which it has no control.

The situation is particular difficult
when the self-interest of both workers
and owners runs contrary to regulations,
and the package holders themselves
have a vested interest in maintaining
their participation. This is the central
paradox of competition that is yet to
be solved.

Ruffled Riders

The quality of service currently avail-
able to the traveling public encom-
passes the factors of timetables, route
completion, use of designated stops,
ticketing, treatment of special groups

"Where have all the jolly bus gone?"

such as children and senior citizens, and
interaction with the public.
The majority of minibuses operate
without any fixed timetable and instead
base their departures on the availability
of passengers and the departure time
of the previous bus. Although passen-
gers indicate overwhelming support for
the introduction of timetables, workers
attach little importance to them. In the
absence of timetables, an informal un-
derstanding has developed that a bus
will leave the terminus when another
one arrives. If it does not, because crew
members linger in the hope of obtaining
more business, their waiting passengers

express disgruntlement. The conductors
in turn complain that the passengers are
unreasonable and do not allow them
time to assemble a load.
Route shifting and incompletion some-
times occur when a bus crew judges
that the journey will be unprofitable.
When this happens, the few passengers
remaining in the bus are summarily
disembarked, sometimes with a partial
payment of their fare. This practice
creates a particular hardship at night or
when a passenger has a heavy load to
carry.
Because of the intense competition
to secure passengers, minibus drivers
stop at any point to collect potential
passengers. The frequency of this prac-
tice seems to vary with the driver's
assessment of whether police are in the
vicinity and the attendant risk of prose-
cution. While the crew are positively
motivated to make unscheduled stops
to obtain passengers, they are less
enthusiastic about making stops to dis-
embark them. Since people have now
become accustomed to enforcing their
requests for unscheduled exits through
abuse of the bus crew, the practice
continues.
Ticketing exists in theory only; in
practice it is actively resisted by sec-
tions of the traveling public as well as
by most minibus workers. Passengers
are clear about the benefits of having a
ticket, saying it is important for insur-
ance purposes in case of an accident,
and that it would reduce confusion
between passengers and conductors as
to whether they had already paid the
fare. But in practice tickets are seldom
issued. The operation of a ticket system
requires that the fare be paid and the
ticket issued on embarkation. However,
uncertainty as to whether the ride will
be completed whether because of
bus breakdown, route incompletion or
intervention by the police leads to a
reluctance by passengers to pay their
fare until just prior to disembarking.
From the conductor's perspective, the
issuance of tickets implies than an
accounting must be made for the equiva-
lent amount of money. Not only would
this curtail any discretionary expendi-
ture on the part of the bus crew, it
would also increase accounting difficul-
ties when passengers refuse to pay the
full fare, as sometimes happen. Not
surprisingly, therefore, the operation of
a ticket system is not a high priority.
Since the legal inception of the mini-
bus system, there has been reluctance

20/CARIBBEAN REVIEW

on the part of many operators to allow
school children on the buses during
peak periods or to accept the lower fare
paid by senior citizens. The government
has threatened to exercise sanctions
against such operators and has also
encouraged the operation of school
buses. The few that do operate, how-
ever, are inadequate to transport the
numbers of school children on the
roads. The willingness of the minibus
operators to transport school children
varies with the type of bus, the time of
day, and the number of other passengers
available.
The treatment of elderly people on
the minibus is also disturbing. It seems
that only about a quarter of the buses
will accept the reduced fare, while more
than a half demand the full fare. An
alarming proportion refuse to accept
senior citizens on the bus at all. Older
persons are often told to wait for the
bigger buses.
Much of the public dissatisfaction
with minibus service involves the rela-
tionship between the conductor and the
passengers. Dissatisfaction with the
driver is usually related to reckless
driving, whereas complaints about the
conductors refer to their being dirty and
untidy, discourteous or impatient, un-
duly familiar or using indecent lan-
guage. For their part, conductors say
their job is made unpleasant because
of the rude and uncooperative behavior
of many passengers. One conductor
commented: "The minibus system is
like a war system. On leaving home to
go to work, you have to condition your
mind as if you're going to war, because
you will have to deal with passengers
who don't want to pay their fare."
Passengers acknowledge that minibus
service has improved, and for this some
credit may be given to police monitor-
ing. Police have legal responsibility for
checking that minibuses are duly in-
spected, licensed and insured, and that
there are no breaches of the road traffic
law; however, the physical condition
of many vehicles and the behavior of
some crews show that police activity
is not completely effective. From the
perspective of minibus workers, the
police are simply harassing them. To
reduce police incursions on their activ-
ity, minibus drivers engage in recipro-
cal monitoring with citizen band radios,
and drivers may even alter their routes
to avoid the police. Although package
holders are also responsible for moni-
toring, and some employ route inspec-

tors, the resources which are allocated
to this activity appear minimal.
The stated objective of the govern-
ment's transportation policy to "ensure
that the system contains genuine and
permanent competitive elements" seems
to have been met under the conditions
of deregulation which now exist in the
minibus service. However, service has
taken second place to the overriding
objective of making money, with the
pressure to increase revenue most se-
vere among the smaller and more mar-
ginal vehicles. Whereas passengers ex-
perience both the positive and negative
effects of competition, minibus workers
experience mainly the negative conse-

Below: An undesignated stop.

quences as they are subjected to ex-
treme and continuous stress in their
work. Conductors are under pressure
to bring in an expected level of income,
and drivers are under pressure to drive
aggressively to collect passengers. One
working proprietor described the mini-
bus system as a cut-throat system, in
which competing buses block each other
at the terminus to delay departure.

Workers' Perspectives

While there is much public preoc-
cupation with the level and quality of

service, other, less visible factors form
the structural underpinning of the mini-
bus industry. These are the social char-
acteristics of the workers, the con-
ditions under which they are expected
to work, the demands which are made
of them, and their attitudes towards
employment in the industry.
A review of the social-demographic
characteristics of minibus workers re-
veals marked differences in age, educa-
tion, skill level and work experience.
The only consistent factor is sex; mini-
bus work is now dominated by men.
This contrasts with the previous em-
ployment patterns of the JOS, where
large numbers of women worked as
conductors and an increasing number
as drivers. The low representation of
women now is related to the physically
taxing nature of the work, the extremely
long workday and the physical danger.
Drivers and conductors tend to repre-
sent different generations. Conductors
are younger and have a higher level of
education. For them, however, as for
the rest of Jamaica's young population,
exposure to secondary education has
not assured them of absorption into the
labor force. The existing imbalance
between the supply of workers and the
available jobs is the result of higher
birth rates in the sixties and the pro-
longed contraction of the economy. As
a result, rates of unemployment among
young people have been extremely high.
Since the formal sector cannot absorb
the increasing supply of young workers
and is, in fact, steadily expelling older
and more established workers, there has
been a rapid expansion of the informal
sector since the mid-1970s. The virtual
collapse of the building industry and
the severe contraction of manufacturing
have dislodged many workers and led
to their migration to the informal sector
where there is a proliferation of self-
employed service jobs, petty trading
and general "hustling." Minibus work
is one area which has absorbed some
of the younger population.
Popular conceptions of the informal
sector often imply that it is dominated
by the unskilled, being a refuge for
those who are not equipped to find
secure employment elsewhere. How-
ever, studies have generally shown that
in fact it acts as a reservoir for a wide
range of skills, some of which are idle
but others of which are used in small-
scale activity. Consistent with this find-
ing is the relatively high level of skills
Continued on page 36

CARIBBEAN REVIEW/21

Jamaica Well-Told

Tales From the Land of Look Behind
A Multi-Media Review by Richard A. Dwyer

Jamaican Folk Tales and Oral Histo-
ries. Laura Tanna. Kingston: Insti-
tute of Jamaica, 1984 (book), 143
p. 1987 (audiotape), 60 min. 1987
(videotape), 104 min.

he Institute of Jamaica is celebrat-
ing the island's folk heritage
from its remotest accessible past
by mobilizing the latest technology of
the present. In a multi-media package
consisting of a book, audiotape and
videotape, the Institute is making the
fruits of Laura Tanna's 1980 University
of Wisconsin doctoral dissertation avail-
able to a wide audience.
Dr. Tanna's original fieldwork was
done in 1973-74, when she recorded
and transcribed oral narratives in eight
of the island's fourteen parishes. Nearly
fifty of these narratives, along with a
few riddles, rhymes, proverbs and one
Nine-Night song, have found their way
into the book. Providing context for
them are her own brief, anecdotal ac-
counts of the ways the stories were
collected and written down, some his-
torical background to the collected nar-
ratives, and discussions of storytelling
as a performing art. Notes, a 200-item
bibliography, glossary, and an index
round out the volume.
Gathering these stories was far from
easy, and Tanna gives full credit to all
those islanders who gradually took her
into their confidence and into the slums
of West Kingston and remote villages
in the Land of Look Behind. Here is a
glimpse of her own visit with a young
Rastafarian to the Dungle, a garbage
dump on which hundreds live, now
covering all of Hunt's Bay: "We walked
Richard A. Dwyer, Associate Editor of Carib-
bean Review, teaches English at Florida
International University.

down the tracks to a Jewish cemetery,
with gravestones dating back to the
1600s. It, too, was covered in litter,
decaying amid the rubble of broken
stones. Four of the tombs bear the
emblem of the skull and crossbones.
Popular belief has it that Spanish gold
is buried in the tombs, and several of
them have been desecrated by treasure
seekers. We passed the East Indian
1o;r '' 1

shacks, and completed our tour of
Majesty Pen amidst greetings of 'Love'
and 'Peace' and with the fragrance of
ganja wafting across the way. Every-
where, people were warm and friendly,
shaking hands, chatting, drinking beer,
or playing dominos. One of the shacks
had a small bar and jukebox inside.
There, in the midst of pigs grunting at
one's feet in the mud and slime, in the
dirt and dust, people had their own
jukeboxes, tape recorders, and radios,
all blaring out reggae, the voice of the
ghetto."
It is the very availability and popu-

clarity of that new entertainment that
threatens the old and makes Tanna's
project all the more important. The
stories she gathered were in danger of
disappearing with such tellers as seventy-
five-year-old Adina Henry, who lives
with ten of her grandchildren in a
one-room shack at the bottom of a gully
in August Town. There and on a visit
to Miss Adina's childhood home at
Above Rocks in St. Catherine, Tanna
was able to elicit such stories as "Nora
an de Ackee," "Haf a Shad," "Nansi
Steals Backra Sheep" and many others.
These and the other collected narra-
tives are broadly grouped into historical
and imaginative varieties, and the latter
are cut further into cumulative narra-
tives, lying stories, parson stories, big
boy stories, duppy stories, and Euro-
pean fairy tales. But most space is given
to examples of two kinds: trickster
narratives and old-time stories.
Here is a bit of one of the latter
variety in Adina's tale of the "Evil
Stepmada" and how she takes care of
her own: "Come back yah, me daughta.
A will ha-fe gi yu a blessin." An she
go back and de h'ole lady tell er: 'To
every cry to every talk dat yu go to
talk to every cry yu cry darkness
mus cover de eart, an to every laugh
yu laugh, h'everyting in de worl dat
namin wild animals mus come h'out
an trying to get to devour yu, an to every
talk dat yu talk, toads an lizards an
snake an galliwasp an all sort a insect
must drop from yu mout.' An h'as she
go in, er mada said to er, 'Yu come,
yu come.' An as she say: 'Yes, ma,'
de grass was full of every insect in de
world. De mada, an fada an everybody
haf to ganda fe dere house an leave er.
An de very nex moment h'afta dat she
now started to cry and de whole place
was in darkness. An every wild animal
dat possess in de forces she seeing dem.

221CARIBBEAN REVIEW

An she jus running 'hup, down an across.
An er fada come out an start to pray
an tings like dat an gradually de dark-
ness disappear an she an when dey
see er again she was away roun de back
of de house. An de fada go roun an call
er roun an she come in. Well h'afta she
came in back now an were dere, all a
dem sit down. Dere comes de prince
marchin tru de gate, he an his two
footmen, an afta dey come in de prince
wen to de man an tell de man which
ask fe de fada and de fada come out
an afta he came out im say im come
yah fe one of is daughta."
To this printed collection of tales has
been added an hour-long tape recording
of some of the stories transcribed in the
book. The tape features Ranny Wil-
liams and Louise Bennett along with
other performers, and includes introduc-
tions written by Dr. Tanna and narrated
by Olive Lewin, former head of Folk
Music Research at the Jamaica School
of Music. Finally, the Institute of Ja-
maica has collaborated with the Crea-
tive Production and Training Centre to
produce a 104-minute, two-part documen-
tary color videotape demonstrating how
the art of oral narrative performance is
transmitted. The 28-minute first part
explores storytelling, with excerpts from
actual performances and interviews with
traditional artists aged 25 to 85, while
the 76-minute sequel offers a selection
of folktales.
Unlike the original audiotaped ver-
sions, these performances have been
informally staged. While a few per-
formers appear on both the audio and
video tapes, and in even fewer cases
tell the "same" tales, none of the
performances are identical in the two
versions. Although this means that no
transcription is provided for the vide-
otaped variants, it also realistically demon-
strates the fluidity of oral performances.
No two are exactly alike.
Some of the stories, especially in
their full videotaped presentations, are
quite compelling, even for literate, or
television-saturated, audiences. The per-
formers' affectations of Anancy's lisp
and the duppy's nasal whine are often
gripping. And the haunting little songs
woven through the tales incrementally
build suspense.
This is a truly broad-based collabo-
rative effort. The indefatigable Louise
Bennett has written several books and
made recordings, as well as a television
program of her own, dealing with Ja-
maican oral narratives, so her contribu-

Page 22: Louise Bennett, Jamaican poet and actress.
Page 23: Above: Aldina Henry narrating tales (from the dust-jacket)
Below: Additional shots of Aldina Henry relating her stories.

tion to this project is generous. Olive
Lewin has written three books and
many articles about Jamaican song and
story, and her talents have been simi-
larly well-used. The project's acknowl-
edgements are a roster of the Jamaican
cultural elite. We are coming to appre-
ciate the growing authenticity of schol-
arship concerning the African com-
ponents of West Indian folk culture.
Dr. Tanna is well-qualified to make the
connection. She moved with her family

to Kampala, Uganda when she was 14
and later married a Ugandan economist.
She holds a B.A. in comparative litera-
ture from Berkeley, and an M.A. and
Ph.D. in African Languages and Litera-
ture from Madison. She has lived in
Jamaica since 1973 and writes fre-
quently on the island's culture for the
local press. Her ability to communicate
informally both the process and results
of her rigorous research is witnessed in
this multi-media production. R

CARIBBEAN REVIEW/23

Cuba's Inhumanity Toward Cubans

A Review by Jorge I. Dominguez

Romancing the Dictator

A Review by Irving Louis Horowitz

Against All Hope: The Prison Mem-
oirs of Armando Valladares.
Andrew Hurley, trans. New York:
Alfred A. Knopf, 1986. 381 p. $18.95.

his is a story of man's inhuman-
ity to man. It is an account of
the damnable, unjustifiable treat-
ment thousands have received in Cuban
jails during the past quarter century.
Although narrated by Armando Valla-
dares in the first person singular, his
story is also that of many more who
have suffered political imprisonment
and torture at the hands of the Cuban
government. And although that govern-
ment has made a feeble attempt to
justify holding Valladares in prison for
22 years until he was released through
the intervention of French President
Francois Mitterand, in fact, as Valla-
dares himself writes, "there are people
who are shocked and offended by any
man's spending more than 20 years in
prison, reduced to a wheelchair, kept
in inhuman, degrading conditions, held
in complete isolation, and not allowed
to defend himself" (pp. 362-363). And
he is right.
Valladares' book is difficult to read,
in part because the subject is so painful,
and in part because one of the facts of
imprisonment is the tedious repetition
of indignities committed by jailers on
their victims. The senses are, indeed,
dulled after he tells, yet one more time,
of beatings by prison guards. But an
alert reader should not allow the book
to become boring because no one should
ever become accustomed to reading
Jorge I. Domlnguez teaches politics at Har-
vard University. Among his many books are
the edited volumes, Cuba: Internal & Interna-
tional Affairs (Sage) and Economic Issues &
Political Conflict: US-Latin American Rela-
tions (Butterworth).

about the deliberate infliction of pain
by one human being on another as if
that were normal or moral.
Although the book's principal sig-
nificance is its testimony to a personal
experience, it can shed some light on
the patterns of political imprisonment
in Cuba. There are inaccuracies in the
book, especially concerning events out-
side of prison about which Valladares
did not know first hand. In general,
however, despite some differences, much
of Valladares' basic story is corrobo-
rated by the collective witness of many
former Cuban political prisoners, pub-
lished in El presidio politico en Cuba
comunista (Caracas: ICOSOCV, 1982).
About 40% of Valladares' book deals
with the year from his arrest in early
1961 to early, 1962. This is explained
in part by the psychology of imprison-
ment: one may best remember what
first happened harshly; but in part it
corresponds to the nature of the re-
gime's response to the opposition. It
was at its worst at the beginning, when
the government sought to defeat its
enemies by fair and foul means. Then
it began to change, even if the length
of imprisonment or the nature of prison
treatment is not even now acceptable
by international standards. Valladares
himself seems to acknowledge the
change. For example, he quotes an
Interior Ministry official who told him
in 1972 that had his trial not been held
in 1961, but two or three years later,
his maximum sentence would have
been 6 years, not 30.
Although Valladares was not released
until 1983, four-fifths of the book takes
the reader only to 1972. His final
decade in prison receives less discus-
sion in part because there is less to say.
Toward the end, Valladares describes
in some detail the government's efforts
to treat him better so that his physical

condition would not appear so bad upon
his release. In general, prison conditions
improved, though with a lag, as the
Cuban economy recovered in the early
1970s.
The pattern of change is also observ-
able in the declining number of political
prisoners or, as the Cuban government
calls them, counterrevolutionary prison-
ers who have threatened the state's
security. By Fidel Castro's own admis-
sion, there were 20,000 in 1965. By
Comandante Huber Matos' account upon
his release from prison in October 1979,
there were 1,100 left. Although many
who remained in prison were still treated
badly, there were simply fewer of them.
The government, now consolidated, no
longer feared those whose will to resist
in prison had not been broken, but
whose political and military capacity
to do so had been. Cuba's political
prison experience is, regrettably, not
yet of mere historical interest, but there
has been an important change in its
quantitative significance.
Of comparable importance is Valla-
dares' account of the great variability
in human behavior among his jailers.
Continued on page 37

The Closest of Enemies: A Per-
sonal and Diplomatic Account of
US-Cuban Relations Since 1957.
Wayne S. Smith. New York and
London: W. W. Norton & Company,
1987. 308 p. $19.95

foreign service officers share with
working field anthropologists sus-
ceptibility to the same malady:
they can either fall in love with their
area, or just as readily learn to hate it
with equal passion. Wayne S. Smith,
twice assigned to Havana, clearly is in
love with his Cuba. In the photographic
bank, we are shown, among other things,
"Wayne Smith amidst the cannons at
the peak of San Juan Hill," and another
brownie camera special of "Roxanna
Smith at the foot of the memorial to the
American soldier, San Juan Hill." Our
man in Havana relieved his tensions
during the last days of the Batista
regime by going to such "favorite
spots" as the Bodeguita del Medio, one
of Ernest Hemingway's hangouts, and
a Spanish nightclub called El Colmao,
where the music was flamenco, the
politics pro-revolutionary, and the wine

drunk from a goatskin.
Such scenic visions are not asides
but are quite central to Wayne C.
Smith's view of the Cuban landscape.
For his is not, as some reviewers have
mistakenly claimed, a covert voice for
Marxism. More pointedly, his is an
overt voice for romanticism, for a view
of a Cuba historically and currently
wronged by the rather clumsy and
brutish colossus of the North. And
while Smith sadly glosses over Cuban
dictatorship, he clearly acknowledges
the high price in political freedom and
civil liberties paid by the Cuban people
for the right not to go hungry. Given
his position on the left-right diplomatic
pantheon, it behooves us to make direct
reference to his pointed critique of
Castro's Cuba.
"There is little freedom of expres-
sion and no freedom of the press at all.
It is a command society, which still
holds political prisoners, some of them
under deplorable conditions. Further,
while the Revolution has provided the
basic needs of all, it has not fulfilled its
promise of a higher standard of living
for the society as a whole. Cuba was,
after all, an urban middle-class society
with a relatively high standard of living
even before the Revolution....The major-
ity of Cubans are less well off materi-
ally. More food, clothing, consumer
goods and entertainment were available
to them before 1959 than now."
But this is not a monograph on
Cuban evolution or devolution. It is a
work on diplomatic initiatives and frus-
trations since Fidel came to power.
Thus, if this effort is to be viewed
through the lens of the author, it must
look to how the political structure of
the United States and Cuba filters diplo-
matic initiatives. Beyond that, it must
resolve the degree to which the small
nation of Cuba, an admitted client state

of the Soviet Union, can generate an
independent foreign policy. And finally,
it needs to address the issue of causality
in politics, i.e., who was "responsible"
for the failures that have characterized
the diplomatic environment of these
two nations since 1959.

Who Dances?

Because Wayne Smith cares so deeply
for Cuba, he is at considerable pains to
show the Castro revolution to be a
national movement rather than a com-
munist coup. While granting that by
1959, Fidel "was shifting toward a
more radical course, and toward an
association with the Soviet Union,"
Smith asserts that the State Depart-
ment's earlier 1957 assessment had
turned up nothing on the eve of the
Revolution that would predict such a
quick turn to the USSR. The trouble is
that Smith's assertion comes upon Fi-
del's own famous admission of 1961
that he had already been a Marxist in
the Sierra Maestra period of 1956, but
that he decided to withhold such infor-
mation because the Cuban people were
not in a position to evaluate a move-
ment to communism properly. Tad Szulc,
in his own recent and friendly biogra-
phy of Fidel, confirms not only his
ideological commitment to Marxism,
but his functional relationship to com-
munist forces in Cuba.
The reason this causal sequence is
so important is that blame-placing is
central to Wayne Smith. He has a clear
need to define every cause of failure
Irving Louis Horowitz is Hannah Arendt pro-
fessor of sociology and political science at
Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey.
He has written widely on Latin American
affairs, including Cuban Communism, now in
its sixth edition.

24/CARIBBEAN REVIEW

CARIBBEAN REVIEW/125

UPCOMING EVENTS

March 3-5, 1988 XI Encuentro Caribefo:
Unidad y Diversidad en el Caribe. Rio Piedras
and San German, Puerto Rico. Contact: Dr.
Susan Homar, Directora, Secci6n de Literatura
Comparada, Apartado K, Universidad de Puerto
Rico, Rio Piedras, Puerto Rico 00931.

March 17-19, 1988 XIV International
Congress of the Latin American Studies Asso-
ciation (LASA). New Orleans, Louisiana. Con-
tact Charles Bergquist, Center for International
Studies, 2122 Campus Drive, Duke University,
Durham, NC 27706.

March 24-27, 1988 Second National Black
Writers Conference. Theme: Images of Black
Folk in Amerian Literature and in the Litera-
ture of the Other Americas. Contact: Elizabeth
Nunez-Harrell, Chairperson, Humanities Divi-
sion, Medgar Evers College of the City
University of New York, 1150 Carroll Street,
Brooklyn, NY 11225; (718) 735-1801/02.

April 7-9, 1988 Continental, Latin American
and Francophone Women Writers. Wichita State
University. Contact Eunice Myers or Ginette
Adamson, Department of Modern and Classical
Languages, Box 11, Wichita State University,
Wichita, KS 67208.

April 7-9, 1988 Latin American Fiction in
the '80s. Rice University. Contact: Juan Manuel
Marcos, Oklahoma State University, Stillwater,
OK 74078.

April 8-10, 1988 First International Confer-
ence on Women Writers of the English-Speaking
Caribbean. Wellesley College. Contact: Selwyn
R. Cudjoe, Black Studies Department, Wellesley
College, Welleslay, MA 02181; (617) 235-0320.

April 11-15, 1988 Caribbean Educational
Research Association (CARIERA) and Univer-
sity of the West Indies School of Education
Conference. St. Lucia. Contact: E.P. Brandon,
CARIERA, Department of Educational Studies,
University of the West Indies, Mona, Kingston
7, Jamaica.

as US-induced and every effect a Cuban
response. And here his first big error
takes place. For the United States was
not at all deeply concerned about agrar-
ian reform in Cuba or even small
factory expropriation. True, questions
of compensation did (and some still do)
remain. But the capitalist West had
already become practiced in dealing
with such events from its experiences
in India and China and in Czecho-
slovakia and Hungary. It is true that the
United States under John Foster Dulles
did not take kindly to revolutions, even
bourgeois ones, in Latin America. But
even Smith acknowledges that as Cas-
tro came to power the Eisenhower
administration was prepared to give
him the benefit of the doubt. Smith is
scrupulous in his chronology. The trouble
is that he entirely dismisses Fidel's
commitments to Marxism-Leninism. He
sees Fidel as a "wily political fox"
whose "sudden" shift leftward was
made to compel Khrushchev's Russia
to go along with Fidel's Cuba. In other
words, Cuba called the tune and the
Soviet bear did the dancing. This thor-
oughly unsubstantiated claim has be-
come a standard in the explanatory
portfolio of Castrologists.
The problem with the view of a
reluctant Soviet bear being drawn into
Cuban affairs is that the outcome of the
missile crisis contradicts it. The crisis
exposed a weak and dependent Cuba
in the vise-like grip of a big power
settlement negotiated by the United
States and the Soviet Union. Indeed
from 1962 forward, the basic contours
of Cuban military maneuvers have been
dictated by the Kennedy-Khrushchev
accords. The anti-Castro forces have
consistently and bitterly claimed that
this informal nuclear-free zone agree-
ment enshrined Castro as a permanent
fact of life in Cuba; while Fidel and his
entourage were no less embittered by a
settlement that exposed Cuba's preten-
sions to a major hemispheric player,
and made it a permanent economic
basket case beholden to Soviet support.
Dependency became a fact of life, no
less than the continued existence of a
communist Cuba.
The guts of Wayne Smith's book is
his discourse on "The Years of Di-
vorce," "The Carter Opening," and
"Cuba, the United States and Africa."
Here the terrible truth is that Cuba has
become a satellite of the Soviet Union,
more truly locked into its orbit than any
nation in the Caribbean or South Amer-

ica was linked to the United States.
Thus, Smith talks about Cuba's at-
tempts to revive the diplomatic initia-
tives, or turn the embarrassment of
Mariel into a new opening or dialogue
with the United States. He sees a great
opportunity lost in the Cuban suspen-
sion of military shipments to Nicaragua.
One might better view this as a great
fear that in the Reagan administration
there was far less gullibility than there
had been in the Carter years. But these
sorts of arguments about what might
have been are less important than defin-
ing what might yet be. But on this,
Smith is only strident. Indeed, as the
book progresses, so too does Smith's
alienation of affections from the gov-
ernment for which he once worked.
Everything becomes topsy-turvy: Mar-
iel was not a colossal statement of
disaffection and alienation from a tyran-
nical regime, but a consequence of not
talking with Castro about key issues.
The aftermath of the Sandinista Revolu-
tion in Nicaragua resulted from "the
isolation" of the United States. Not a
word about the rising mood of democ-
racy and resistance to tyranny through-
out Latin America, from Costa Rica to
El Salvador to Venezuela, to Brazil and
Argentina in short, the growing
"isolation" of Fidel's Cuba. Indeed,
while he claims that Castro's revolu-
tionary fervor has cooled over the years,
Smith still asserts that in places like El
Salvador and Guatemala "it would be
appropriate for Marxist-Leninist groups
to assist revolutionary organizations."
This is just another way of saying that
the US has no right to support noncom-
munist options in Central America.
Indeed, throughout the book Smith
consistently confuses nationalism and
communism in Cuba. The pleasant fic-
tion that Cuba has mellowed, has be-
come national, is made without regard
to the ever tightening vise of Fidel's
personalist dictatorial style, his reliance
on familial control, his deepening fear
of any economic openings that might
bring about an end to the "grayness"
of the regime which Smith deplores.
Quite the contrary, Smith concludes
his book with illusions worse than those
opening it. Charming vignettes of
Smith's last days in Havana, his discus-
sions with Radl, his daughter's conver-
sations with Fidel (ending with a new
diplomatic initiative: 20,000 American
girls in string bikinis to Santa Maria
beach in exchange for the surrender of
the island of Cuba), attacks on the

261CARIBBEAN REVIEW

United States' action in Grenada. Smith
apparently forgets that it is precisely
because the Bishop government in Gre-
nada "pleaded for talks and signaled
an interest in reaching accommodation
with the US" that his regime was
overthrown not by the United States,
but by a brutal agent of the Soviet
Union who thought nothing of terminat-
ing Maurice Bishop and his entourage.
Again and again, the United States
is chastised, for wrong turns, missed
opportunities, self-imposed isolation. But
a review of United States policies over
the past 30 years does not reveal a
heavy hand. It may not reveal the deft
touch either. But to convert the story
of Cuba into Castro's "harnessing the
force of Cuban nationalism," is to quite
miss the point of Castro's Soviet-
imposed internationalism.

Flawed Nationalism

Without becoming argumentative or even
speculative, one might say that Castro's
tragedy is precisely that he has under-
mined nationalism; he must satisfy Soviet
global considerations simply to keep
the Cuban ship afloat. A "nationalist"
who lacks the power to critique the
Soviet Union even on minute details
(except perhaps in private conversation)
is more like a dwarf who sees himself
a giant by looking through convex
mirrors.
And this, too, is the great failing of
Wayne S. Smith. He is, or was until
1982, a foreign service officer in the
US State Department. He is not a
free-wheeling member of the academic
establishment. This does not mean that
he has no right to be critical, or that
he has no right to speak his piece now
that he is retired and a private citizen.
It does mean that his view of the United
States' national interest was and re-
mains deeply flawed.
If at any given point in the last
decade, perhaps even since the dawn
of the revolution itself, Castro, Che,
Rail, Vilma, et. al had raised their
individual or collective voices in the
hemisphere against the tyrannies of
Soviet tanks in Czechoslovakia, against
the brutal repression of Polish workers
in Gdansk, against the outrageous geno-
cide of Pol Pot and now the Vietnamese
masters in Cambodia, or had taken even
a modestly independent position, like a
neutral stance in Middle East affairs
such as that practiced by Rumania -

had they taken any one of these actions,
then one might share Smith's sense of
missed opportunities. But the Cuban
regime has been more consistently al-
lied to the Soviet Union than even East
Europe. The idea of 30,000 to 40,000
Polish troops in Angola is ludicrous to
even imagine; but for Cuba it is com-
monplace. Fidel cannot even maintain
a decent silence about the Soviet inva-
sion of Afghanistan. And Cuba, while
becoming a land almost without Jews,
with only a small rump of what was a
thriving community, is a center for PLO
terrorist training.
The sort of myopia that characterizes
Smith's world view is what led the
American people to a colossal rejection
of Carterism as an ideology. Carterism
as an ideology asserts that the United
States, precisely because it has so much
power, ought never to exercise that
power. It is a doctrine of the political
bark without the exercise of the politi-
cal (and yes, at times the military) bite.
It might be fair to say that in a pure
game situation, appeals to moral superi-
ority of one side over another are quite
irrelevant; or more concretely, that the
moral claims of the United States are
no greater or no worse than those of the
Soviet Union. But that olympian vision
is granted only to academics by virtue
of their heavenly discourses. It is denied
by force of law and by the law of force
to representatives of national entity. I
happen to think that Smith believes in
the superiority of US moral claims over
those of the USSR. Where he turns
myopic is in the need to hold such
claims in abeyance, as matters of na-
tional interest are played out by a
diplomatic staff.
If I have a disappointment with this
book it is not with Ambassador Smith's
politics. Anyone following press reports
and Op-Ed columns knew what to
expect from this book. Rather it harkens
back to the first paragraph of this
review. It is the problem of falling in
love not with Cuba, but with a Cuba
devoid of Cuban people. While one
does not expect a self-declared member
of the "diplomatic club" to speak
knowledgeably about people excluded
from the club, some more than passing
recognition of the real people of Cuba
would have been in order. One gets the
terrible impression that the only thing
which Smith abjured more than home
policy directives is direct contact with
the people of Cuba.
Continued on page 37

UPCOMING EVENTS

April 14-16, 1988 Gauchos and Nation-
Builders in the Rio de Ia Plata. University of
Wisconsin. Contact: William Katra, Department
of Foreign Languages, University of Wisconsin,
La Crosse, WI 54601.

April 14-16, 1988 Southeastern Council on
Latin American Studies (SECOLAS). Theme:
Transportation and Communication in Latin
America. University of Tennessee, Knoxville.
Contact: Paula Heusinkveld, Department of
Languages, Clemson University, Clemson, SC
29634.

April 28-30, 1988 IX Simposio de Dialec-
tologia del Caribe Hispdnico. Inter American
University of Puerto Rico, San German Cam-
pus. Contact: Dr. Bohdan Saciuk, Dean of
Studies, Call Box 5100, San German, Puerto
Rico 00753; (809) 892-4300.

June 22-25, 1988 Encuentro New Orleans:
Central American Trade, Investment and Tour-
ism. New Orleans, Louisiana. Contact Sam
Stapleton or Anita Pisa, Encuentro, Suite 2926,
World Trade Center, 2 Canal Street, New
Orleans, LA 70130; (504) 529-1601.

June 22-25, 1988 Basque, French and
Hispanic Literatures. San Sebastian, Spain.
Contact: Felix Menchacatorre, Departamento
de Lengua y Literatura, Universidad del Pais
Vasco, Apartado 644, 48080 Bilbao, Spain.

July 4-8, 1988 46th International Congress
of Americanists. Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
Contact: CEDLA, Keizersgracht 395-397, 1016
EK Amsterdam, The Netherlands.

July 24-31, 1988 Congress of the Interna-
tional Institute of Iberoamerican Literature.
Mexico City. Contact: Alfredo A. Roggiano,
Hispanic Languages and Literatures, University
of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA 15260.

October 13-15, 1988 El Espahol en los
Estados UnidoslSpanish in the United States.
Miami, Florida. Contact: Dr. Ana Roca, Confer-
ence Chair, Department of Moder Languages,
Florida International University, University Park,
Miami, FL 33199; (305) 554-2851 or 554-2046.

CARIBBEAN REVIEW/27

Carlos Alfonzo

The Textuality of Painted Surfaces
By Ricardo Pau-Llosa

By addressing the fundamentals
of bidimensional abstraction
and the representation of im-
agery from the unconscious, Carlos
Alfonzo has created paintings that rede-
fine both the nature of visual immediacy
and the semantics of form.
There is a modernist tradition in such
an adventure. The tradition emerged as
Surrealism began to decline in the late
1930s, as witnessed in the works of
Matta, Lam, Tanguy, and their prede-
cessor, Mir6. The aim of modernism
has been to redefine the relationship
between bidimensionality and reference.
As Surrealism turned more and more
toward abstraction, 20th century aes-
thetics opened up. It lead to abstract
expressionism in North America and
oneiric expressionism in Latin America.
It is in this latter current where Matta,
Lam, and many other Latin American
artists have flourished, and it is from
here that Carlos Alfonzo's work ema-
nates.
What separates the two currents is
their approach to the sign, or more
precisely, to the semantic possibilities
of paint (as opposed to these same
possibilities attached to imagery). Ab-
stract expressionism views paint as a
sign of itself, paint takes preeminence
over matter. Such paintings are repre-
sentative, but their referents are them-
selves. They celebrate the power of
representation, exalting itself, by deny-
ing itself, through abstraction.
Oneiric expressionism sought a si-
multaneity of the immediacy of matter
obtained by a denial of representation
and the placing of this immediacy at
the service of another referent not
painting itself but the unconscious. The
result is, in Alfonzo's case particularly,
Ricardo Pau-Llosa, a contributing editor to Art
International, teaches English at Miami Dade
Community College-South

"On hold on the blue line." 1985.

a painted surface charged with a double
focus which coalesces into one unified
though not univocal vision.
It is this duality which makes oneiric
expressionism more faithful to the me-
chanics of seeing and thinking than
those of abstract expressionism. It is
this duality which forms the basis of a
new "textuality" in painting.
Alfonzo's textuality is distinctive in
that imagery-as-presence in the spaces
of his paintings are completely fused
to the space. These images are no less
present in space because they are that
space, and it is this paradox which gives
uniqueness to Alfonzo's vision. Al-
fonzo has taken a Latin American inter-
est in metaphor and metamorphosis as
the generative element of his forms.
Eye, face, leaf, organs, ectoplasmic
forms, insect, root, tongue, and other

images stand just behind the actual
images we see in the paintings. By
"standing behind them", more of these
evoked referents can inform our reading
of the actual image. Alfonzo's images
bring evoked referents into mind as
metaphors do, and as the mind sustains
them together, resemblances and meta-
morphoses are created.
In itself, this is not new. Lam worked
along these lines, but Alfonzo's break-
through lies in integrating these sym-
bols into the fabric of the painted space.
There is no division between presence
and scenario in Alfonzo. Metamorpho-
sis needed to go beyond the mythic
alloys of human and natural elements
that Lam's luminous totems dramatized.
To fuse surface with textuality, Al-
fonzo needed to produce another se-
mantic relation. His inspiration for this

28/CARIBBEAN REVIEW

can be traced to the paintings of another
Latin American giant, Joaquin Torres-
Garcia, who fused radical bidimension-
ality, irreducible signs for everyday
objects, and a voluptuous sense of
texture to produce page-like settings of
images that needed to be "read" intui-
tively, not syntactically. Alfonzo took
Torres-Garcia's fusion of image and
space and Lam's sense of metaphor and
metamorphosis as his foundations.
Alfonzo's achievement, however, goes
beyond that. The fusion of spatial and
semantic concerns is in itself remark-
able, but Alfonzo has turned this fusion
itself into a language that expresses
aspects of the unconscious which had
previously been the domain of art with
a high referential content. The unreality
of distortion or eccentric juxtaposition
which characterizes figurative expres-
sionist (and neo-expressionist), as well
as surrealist art, merely hightens the
iconic side of referentiality.
Icon, in the theories of C. S. Peirce,
distinguishes itself from symbol in that
the latter "means" by virtue of socially
determined values while the icon means
by virtue of its resemblance to the
referent. Symbols include letters and
numbers. Icons are such things as por-
traits and maps. Distortion remains a
faculty of iconic representation. Distor-
tion expands the representation possi-
bilities of the icon the more distant the
icon seems to get from simply mirror-
ing the referent.
The exhaustion of a purely figurative
oneiric art had already led to the inno-
vations of Matta, Lam, and Tanguy in
the 1930s, and that exhaustion was the
product of the limitations of symbolism
in dealing with the unconscious. But
what is the dream if not an oblique
dramatization of the hidden powers and
turmoils of the unconscious, a broken
chain of symbols yearning for the conti-
nuity of the icon. The icons of the
dream, its images and players, are
condemned to mean something other
than what they resemble, or to see their
iconicity undermined by the symbol's
imposing power of substitution. The
tree in the dream is not a "tree" but a
symbol of power, or of male sexuality,
or whatever meaning the unconscious
assigns to it. Assignment is substitu-
tion, is symbolism. Dream disguises
itself with icons, but what binds the
icons is a determined semantic that
turns them into symbols. The task then
is clear: to create paintings continuous
with the unconscious and produce paint-

ings that are icons of the unconscious
and its forces. Abstraction seemed to
be the key to solve the problem.
But abstraction became, in itself,
another symbol, of the action of paint-
ing on the one hand, and of the cryptic
distance of the unconscious on the
other. Abstraction became a symbol of
the inaccessibility of the unconscious.
Luminous fields of turbulent paint or
women turning into horses and jungles
rose as alternate, totemic symbols of
unconscious energies. The problem re-
defined itself, and it now promises to
advance another step in the direction
of a solution by breaking with the

I "Petty Joy," 1984. 1
tendency to think in terms of focus, or
at least in terms of a single focus.
Textuality, presenting itself as the si-
multaneity of diverse aspects of repre-
sentation, emerges as the new possi-
bility.
The true icon of the unconscious is
bound to simultaneity, to visual textu-
ality, and this is radiantly evident in
Alfonzo. In his work is present the
realization that the search for a single
focus is dead and that not an alphabet
but a syntax must serve as icon of the
unconscious. The mere pointing to the
act of painting is a flight from the task,
not its solution. The mere focusing on
metaphor, metamorphosis, or luminous
explosion is also a flight. Univocity is

the enemy of any attempt to get past
symbolism, for although the symbol
presents itself as a sign with plural
significations, it is the icon which is
genuinely plural. The plural symbol is
simply trying to become a transcendent
icon of some kind. Acknowledging this
aspiration of the symbol, Alfonzo seizes
on a grander scheme to penetrate into
the unconscious.
What Alfonzo's textuality lays bare
is the eternal paradoxes of the uncon-
scious which are the paradoxes of life
itself. Change in changelessness, the
Heraclitian river whose elusiveness as-
serts, rather than dissolves, its riverness.
Alfonzo's image-spaces, his "texts,"
both fix and release the identity of
forms. Biomorph becomes a non-
semantic form, turns to "eye," be-
comes oval, turns to "scream," be-
comes the project of a shadow.
The decision of the unconscious is
that awareness be opened decisively.
What dwells in its powers embraces the
symbols and icons that address it. What
dwells in the unconscious imbues its
symbols and icons with a fluidity which
mere sign-making could not have con-
jured. The simultaneous visits the sign
system, possesses it. Simultaneity is not
a product of sign-making; it is some-
thing sign-making finds suddenly in its
blood, finds itself suddenly in the midst
of. Signs are feeble instruments called
to a destiny they had not been imagined
capable of fulfilling. Simultaneity is the
unconscious, or at least its essence.
Causal mysteries blur of necessity the
prioritizing imperative to regulate or
somehow order the relationship be-
tween the unconscious and the con-
scious. As the causal blurs, a web
arises, a web of the simultaneous. And
as a web of the simultaneous it presents
opposites equally in a celebration of
paradox(es). The web demarcates and
brings together, unites and fragments,
is an obstacle and the goal itself,
scenario and image, object and disem-
bodied impression, paint and thought,
flux and stasis, language and flesh.
Alfonzo belongs to a long tradition of
thinkers about temporality and its exis-
tential dimension, from Heraclitus to
Heidegger and Borges. We are time. In
painting that equation presents itself in
the textual conception, of the simultane-
ity of all the aspects which comprise
visual thinking and its expression on
painted surfaces. 0

CARIBBEAN REVIEW/29

"The Trail / El trillo, 1986.

Debt Crisis
Continued from page 3

grow out of the problem rather than
borrow out of the problem, there are
inadequate resource flows to do so
because creditor countries and agencies
have not been able to put together an
approach to satisfy the debtor/creditor
participants. The present mechanisms
all go part way, but the parts have not
been coordinated to achieve the single
objective. And there are missing pieces.
The main mechanism open to debtor
nations is the rescheduling of bilateral
obligations through the Paris Club and
commercial debt directly with com-
mercial banks. There is no access for
rescheduling the multilateral debt of
many poor countries. The short term
nature of IMF repurchases in multilat-
eral debt countries having IMF obliga-
tions, puts them under severe pressure
to keep current in their payments.
The inability of the World Bank and
regional development banks (multilat-
eral development banks) to participate
in debt rescheduling arises from a fear
of reduced credit, which would limit
their own borrowing power and their
ability to fund new programs. Currently
the World Bank offers policy-based
loans for structural adjustment of the
economy, while the IMF has policy
based programs to effect stabilization
of troubled financial systems.
It is understood that these quick-
disbursing debt-based loans are ex-
pected to improve the ability to pay and,
in the case of the IMF, the servicing
of debt is a necessary condition. What
these programs do not address is the
inadequacy of the flows to meet both
economic growth and repayment tar-
gets. There is room, therefore, for a new
and innovative type of policy-based
lending program.
No financing facility so far addresses
a programmed reduction of the debt
service ratio in debtor countries. The
existing facilities target reduction of
public sector deficits and improvements
in the levels of international reserves.
It is time that the basic problem of debt
servicing be addressed directly.
As a parallel program, the Paris Club
could likewise address the rescheduling
of debt by a multiyear program condi-
tioned on a reduction of the debt service
ratio over a given program period. This
could be linked to a counterpart agree-
ment with multilateral development

banks covering the same period and the
same target. The commercial banks,
which hold the preponderance of debt
for many debtor nations, particularly in
Latin America, would fit into this sce-
nario on the same basis. Critical to this
is the expansion of commercial bank
financing which would be structured
into the new multilateral policy-based
facility, either on a co-financing ar-
rangement or on parallel support lend-
ing, as part of the package of resources
required to achieve necessarily agreed-
upon targets.
The structural problem of debtor
nations can only be successfully ad-
justed on a timely basis with resource
flows which permit a program of change
without chaos. These problems are as
much a result of external adjustments
in the international trade and payment
system as they are internal imbalances.
Of particular significance is the reduc-
tion of official development assistance
flows. Likewise, the growing stagnation
of international trade and, specifically,
the fall in commodity prices, limit the
ability to improve resource flows through
export earnings readily and quickly.
In regard to the creditor countries and
agencies, the crisis of confidence can
only be successfully addressed in a
manner that would convince creditors
that good money is not to be thrown
after bad. Any plan need be supported
by effective surveillance and reporting
systems.
What exists now is stalemate and
stagnation against which background
debtors and creditors are taking unilat-
eral action which will further aggravate
the crisis to explosive proportions. The
stagnation of world trade and reduced
levels of export earnings, together with
the net transfers resulting from reduced
credit exposure, are creating a crunch
in the payment system of debtor nations
and an inability to generate sustained
growth. This, in turn, reduces the ability
to sustain payments. Thus a circle of
diminishing returns is created.
The solution is through expansion,
not contraction, through planned medium-
term expansion of resources for eco-
nomic growth and the release of more
disposable resources through resched-
uling arrangements which are consistent
with the objectives of economic growth
and the discharge of debt obligations.
Short-term bailouts by new lending,
without a framework to achieve longer
term targets, are merely a postponement
of the crisis. N

Creative Politics
Continued from page 8

gaining on such matters as trading
arrangements for protected crops like
sugar and bananas. In short, Jamaica
was tentatively asserting itself in the
outside world, but was still constrained
by a need to "behave respectably."
In the 1970s, under Michael Manley's
leadership, Jamaica unquestionably
moved into the full glare of the interna-
tional arena. Its new activism began
with a warm embrace of Commonwealth
Caribbean integration and grew into a
search for contacts with other parts of
the Caribbean and Latin America -
indeed the whole of the Third World.
Jamaica espoused positions on such
faraway issues as the future of Angola,
the role of the Palestine Liberation
Organization, and the struggles of the
Vietnamese. The world was Manley's
stage, and for a while he strode it with
panache and conviction. It cannot be
denied that Jamaica won positive ad-
vantages by its active participation in
such international matters as the law-of-
the-sea negotiations and the talks lead-
ing to the signing of the Lom6 Conven-
tion. The problem was that Manley
ultimately was burned by some of the
excesses of his activist diplomacy. From
Washington's perspective, the close re-
lationship which had developed with
Cuba placed Jamaica's foreign policy
in an East-West context, leading even-
tually to retaliatory action that pro-
foundly damaged Jamaica's economy.
After embracing the cause of "anti-
imperialism" at the rhetorical level,
Jamaica found itself with no practical
means to fight it, either politically or
economically.
The reaction against the militancy of
this phase led the country to retreat into
the protective arms of the US. Since
1980, Seaga had gone out of his way
to court the US and was rewarded with
increased aid, an easing of trade barri-
ers, political support in dealing with the
International Monetary Fund, and warm
praise from President Reagan. Seaga
worked hard to obtain these favors. He
was one of the originators of the Carib-
bean Basin Initiative; he vigorously
criticized the revolutionary government
in Grenada; he has sought to persuade
his CARICOM colleagues to extend the
organization to include other pro-US
states in the region such as the Domini-
can Republic and Haiti. In short, he has

30/CARIBBEAN REVIEW

been aptly described as "America's
man in the Caribbean." Using the
terminology of the aforementioned mod-
els of foreign policy, Jamaica under
Seaga's leadership has been active in its
acquiescence and adaptation to US he-
gemony in the Caribbean.
Is there another option? Is it possible
for a country like Jamaica to construct
a foreign policy in which the mix is
reversed in which activism is adapted
to geopolitical reality? There are, clearly,
limits beyond which a Caribbean state
cannot go without incurring the dis-
pleasure of the United States. Cuba,
Nicaragua and the Soviet Union are out
of bounds except for the most perfunc-
tory of economic dealings.
Yet that is not to say that a more
assertive "Third Worldist" approach
is inherently unviable. The lesson of
postindependent Jamaica implies that
there are ways of making the interna-
tional system work to domestic advan-
tage. But the task must be undertaken
with a blend of vigor and caution,
boldness and realpolitik, which no Ja-
maican government has yet quite
achieved. Seaga's vision of the interna-
tional stage is unnecessarily limited to
the American lake in which he sits;
Manley's vision was too expansive and
insufficiently aware of the constraints
imposed by the island's location. Ja-
maica cannot avoid operating in the
active presence of an aggressive super-
power, but it does not have to be a
client state.
Indeed the lesson is a general one.
What I see emerging from this analysis
of postindependence Jamaica is the
existence of options within limits. There
is a path between the determinism of
structural forces and the voluntarism of
free choice, and it is the state which
must find that path. Jamaica has built
a broadly democratic political system,
but that was not inevitable. It has
developed a strong sense of national-
ism, but that was not predetermined. It
has struggled to find a workable strat-
egy of development and has not yet
exhausted all the possibilities. And it
has groped for a role in world affairs,
finding that different stances are possi-
ble even within relatively narrow geo-
political limits. It is the choice of
options that makes the politics of every
Third World state different, and it is the
peculiarly creative way that Jamaica has
used its opportunities since independ-
ence that makes its politics worthy of
analysis. N

Race & Economics
Continued from page 14

nels. The lucrative ganja trade helped
to finance a significant entry of blacks
into businesses as some laundered drug
money by buying farms and agricultural
land, hotels, supermarkets, service sta-
tions, and high-priced real estate.
By the end of the decade, therefore,
blacks had established unprecedented
access to money, a visible presence
within the private sector, a wide range
of new small and medium scale black-
owned enterprises, and a few large
black companies owned and controlled
by the more successful. The browns,
Chinese and Lebanese no longer domi-
nated the ownership of the medium
scale and smaller scale manufacturing
and commercial enterprises in the Ja-
maican economy.
The big corporate sector enterprises
in insurance, banking, distribution, manu-
facturing, hotels and services remained
under the ownership of the economi-
cally dominant minority of Jews, whites,
Lebanese and Browns. These larger
enterprises made handsome profits in
the 1970s, and their owners were not
sufficiently intimidated by political and
class threats to retreat. Instead, there
appears to have been a consolidation
and expansion of corporate ownership,
as the owners of the more successful
enterprises expanded and bought out
smaller firms and enterprises abandoned
by migrating families. This was espe-
cially the case in the areas of big
finance, distribution and services, where
high margins of profits were used to
diversify and expand into other enter-
prises.
It had been mainly the smaller enter-
prises owned by the ethnic minorities
that were dislocated in the 1970s. Large
numbers of Chinese, browns and Leba-
nese had migrated and closed or sold
businesses over the period. The more
established Jews and whites were only
marginally affected by these develop-
ments. Instead of leaving the country,
big business families spearheaded the
political attacks on the PNP and did
everything to get Mr. Seaga's JLP
elected in 1980.
Much of what they identified as class
threats was little more than an excess
of rhetoric, but their fear was that it
inflamed the black masses and put them
under class and racial pressures. Funda-
mentally, however, the PNP in the

1970s under Michael Manley broke the
1940s unstated pact under which party
leaders had the dual roles of protecting
the privileged and negotiating and engi-
neering benefits for the poor.
The PNP's rhetoric was too populist
for the economically powerful ethnic
minorities, and although Manley pro-
tected and assisted some of his friends
(Grace Kennedy, Alkali, ICD and the
Matalons, etc.) in the big corporate
sector in the 1970s, the overall climate
in the political system gave the appear-
ance of threatening to undermine their
economic and political leadership. Real-
ity and appearance are, however, often
quite different, as in this case.

The 1980s

In contrast to the 1970s, when there
was an unbroken pattern of negative
economic growth in Jamaica, the dec-
ade of the 1980s has witnessed two
periods of steady growth (1980-83 and
1985-87). These were interrupted by a
period of negative growth (1983-85)
induced by IMF stabilization designed
to reduce economic imbalances caused
by the drastic decline in bauxite earn-
ings. In both the growth periods and the
recessionary negative growth years, black
businesses and black accumulation of
capital have come under severe pres-
sures. Overall, some ground has been
lost, but most of the 1970s' expansion
in black ownership has not been re-
versed.
The return to a pro-business political
atmosphere that accompanied the 1980
change of government to the JLP stimu-
lated a return flow of some migrants
who had left during the 1970s. Where
premises had been leased or rented to
new black owners, this return flow of
ethnic minorities displaced some blacks.
The market share of commerce that was
aggressively taken over by the black
higgler women was reduced as big
borrowing by the government and mas-
sive inflows of aid money removed the
severe foreign exchange shortages that
had facilitated the growth of the higgler
trade. The big established merchants
were restored to power. Instead of
competing with those merchants, some
higglers now joined forces with them,
operating as their wholesale suppliers
in such areas as garments. Many hig-
glers have, however, been able to stay
in business by underselling the mer-
chants sand targeting their sales to

CARIBBEAN REVIEW/31

low-income buyers.
Dependence on US loans forced the
government to mount the most large-
scale and systematic anti-ganja cam-
paign ever attempted in Jamaica, as
dissatisfied US interests threatened to
cut off aid if no effective anti-ganja
measures were developed. The new
government initiated a program of legal
and tax harassment of suspected or
known ganja dealers. Some were charged
with multi-million dollar tax claims.
Others were imprisoned on real or
manufactured drug or criminal charges.
The intensive anti-drug surveillance in-
creased the losses incurred by the drug
operators and cut the export outflow of
ganja to the US. As a result, this source
of illicit capital accumulation, accessi-
ble to some blacks, was reduced.
The new economic policies of the
JLP government tried to promote an
open economy strategy that emphasized
exports over domestic production and
opened the economy to a larger inflow
of imports. Both the import deregula-
tion policies and the more accessible
supply of foreign exchange threatened
many local manufacturers and farmers
with competition from imports. Manu-
facturing and farming ventures that
were viable and lucrative under the
conditions prevailing in the 1970s ceased
to be viable. Some of these enterprises
had to go out of business due to
competition from imports. Several busi-
nesses established by smaller black
entrepreneurs in the 1970s folded as a
consequence.
This reversal was further aggravated
in the post-1983 period when high
interest rates (exceeding 30%) were
used to cool down and stabilize the
economy. The high cost of money and
massive increases in business debt, added
to increased competition from imports,
drove a number of black-owned busi-
ness enterprises into ruin and bank-
ruptcy.
Blacks were obviously not the only
interests adversely affected, but because
many had recently come into business,
had borrowed heavily to make the
move, and were operating in very vul-
nerable sectors, the effect was greater
on black businessmen as a whole than
on enterprise owners among ethnic
groups. A significant number of blacks
who borrowed heavily at low interest
rates to run businesses that were viable
under the conditions of the 1970s expe-
rienced bank foreclosures and bank-
ruptcy in the 1980s. On the other hand,

many of the big corporations, owned
by ethnic minorities, profited from the
devaluations of the dollar carried out
during the 1983-85 period.
Some have accused the government
of deliberately attempting to undermine
the growth of black private enterprise
in Jamaica. There is no evidence for
this contention, except perhaps in one
case where race and party politics com-
bined to encourage the JLP government
to undermine one of the country's
largest black corporate enterprises.
The overall trend is one in which
policies adverse to recently established
smaller manufacturing enterprises have
served (by largely unanticipated conse-
quences) to weaken many small busi-
nesses. No Jamaican government has
ever developed economic policies with
any purposive intention to promote
black business. When in the 1970s
black business expanded, it was a result
of the unintended consequences of poli-
cies, politics and the overall economic
climate. When in the 1980s the effect
was reversed, hurting many recently
established small black-owned busi-
nesses, the effect was similarly gener-
ated by unintended consequences of
other policies.
On the other hand, the JLP govern-
ment's emphasis on private sector growth
and privatization has encouraged a fur-
ther expansion of black business in
areas such as export manufacturing,
horticulture and nontraditional export
agriculture. The larger flow of credit,
foreign exchange and investment money
has encouraged the emergence of many
small enterprises owned by blacks. More
than 60% of new export enterprises
sponsored by the JNP are small busi-
nesses, and at least half of them are
owned by blacks, some of whom are
venturing into business for the first
time.
Two developments in the 1980s con-
vinced critics of the Seaga-led JLP
government that its policies were
undermining black interests in Jamaica.
These included the heavy emphasis and
expenditure on foreign consultants, which
was seen as discrimination against local
black professionals, and the over 30,000
layoffs and employment cutbacks in the
public sector, which shrunk and dried
up a large part of the job market that
traditionally provided jobs and income
for the black lower middle class. That
policy, combined with the tight restric-
tions on public sector wages and sala-
ries and the high cost of living increases

caused by big devaluations during the
1983-85 period, convinced some middle-
class blacks that the government was
systematically weakening their economic
opportunities. Again, it seems that poli-
cies adverse to lower middle-class pub-
lic sector workers (teachers, nurses,
civil servants, etc.) created great hard-
ships in areas dominated by blacks, but
there was clearly no racial intent. The
fact that the prime minister is a member
of an ethnic minority seems, in the eyes
of some, to make him more ideologi-
cally attuned to the needs of the minori-
ties than the needs of the black major-
ity. But objectively, it seems to me that
this has no real basis and is more
perception than reality.

The Contemporary Situation

During the 1970s and 1980s there has
been a consolidation and increased con-
centration of ownership by the eco-
nomically dominant ethnic minorities.
Among the larger enterprises in the
economy, these ethnic minorities own
and control companies whose total sales
exceed that of the big foreign corpora-
tions in Jamaica.
Among the 30 largest privately owned,
nonfinancial corporate firms in Jamaica,
19 are owned mainly or exclusively by
these ethnic minorities and 11, mainly
or exclusively by foreign interests. In
terms of sales in US dollars for 1986,
the locally-owned corporate entities repre-
sent some 64% of total sales and the
foreign enterprises 36% of total sales
generated by these 30 companies. The
largest among the locally-owned, pri-
vate sector companies selling a mini-
mum of US$9 million, or J$50 million,
in 1986 are as follows:

1986 Sales, Millions, US$
Grace Kennedy 200
Desnoes & Geddes 103
Jamaica Banana Producers 82
Industrial Commercial Dev. 68
Jamaica Flour Mill 45
T. Geddes Grant 39
J. Wray & Nephew 35
Pan Jamaica Investments 31
Lascelles Demercado 27
National Continental Corp. 18
CMP & Wisynco 13
Gleaner 12
West Indies Glass 10
Alkali 9
Source: South Magazine,
April 1987, p. 91-92.

32/CARIBBEAN REVIEW

These big companies and the other
major locally-owned financial, manu-
facturing, distribution and service com-
panies are controlled mainly by the
following 23 prominent and strategic
ethnic minority family interests: Ashen-
heim, Matalon, Henriques, Hart, Issa
Clarke, Kennedy, Facey, Mahfood, Wil-
liams, Lalor, Ewart, Stewart, Hen-
drickson, Panton, Thwaites, Chen,
Young, Hadeed, DaCosta, Desnoes, Ged-
des, Delisser, Rousseau.
Only three black businessmen or
business families in legitimate endeav-
ors have established large corporate
enterprises. These include Ellworth Wil-
liams and Brothers (merchant banking,
food processing and construction); Rich-
ard Morgan (manufacturing); and Denis
Morgan (hotels, car rentals, real estate).
The Williams manufacturing enterprise
was put into receivership, and the mer-
chant bank closed after the Free Zone
food processing business was refused
entry into the Jamaica market and cash
flow problems developed.
There is evidence that suggests that
two of the big corporations owned by
ethnic minorities played a key role in
orchestrating pressures on the company
to facilitate a takeover. The owners,
who support the PNP, have accused the
JLP government of acting to facilitate
those interests.
The Broadway company owned by
Richard Morgan has deep financial prob-
lems and might end up in receivership
for large overdue loans owed to NCB.
Of the three big black-owned enter-
prises, only the Denis Morgan interest
seems likely to survive and to grow into
a major black corporate enterprise.
An examination of gross profits gen-
erated in the Jamaica economy in 1982
gives a clear picture of the concentra-
tion of economic power in the hands
of ethnic minorities. Black ownership
concentrates in agriculture and manu-
facturing, where some 26% of the
overall flow of gross profits were earned.
The major share of the 26% in fact
accrues to the big companies owned
by ethnic minorities.
The bulk of the gross profits flowing
through the Jamaican economy in 1982
was generated in distribution, finance
and real estate. These together represent
65% of total gross profits in legitimate
private business in the Jamaican econ-
omy. The greater proportion of that
65% was generated in big enterprises
controlled by the predominant ethnic
minorities.

% Share of Gross Profits (1982)
Sectors % Share of Profits
Agriculture 13%
Bauxite 8%
Manufacturing 13%
Construction 4%
Distribution 37%
Finance 6%
Real Estate 22%
Source: National Income & Product
1982 (Statin)

The corporate power of the ethnic
minorities extends to their strategic
location in sectors that determine whether
smaller enterprises survive. They con-
trol ownership of the financial institu-
tions and dominate the boards of direc-
tors. They therefore determine which
interests get big loans and how enter-
prises are treated when they run into
financial problems. They also control
the big distribution firms that determine
which goods reach the mass market
through their distribution networks. They
therefore operate as the gate-keepers of
the private sector, who control exit and
entry and exercise enormous private
power over the fate of smaller business
enterprises owned by blacks. Black
business interests are therefore in-
timidated by their awesome power and
seek to court their favor. Access to drug
money through the ganja trade has been
the illegitimate alternative channel which
has facilitated blacks getting access to
big financing. While much of the drug
money is banked overseas and dissi-
pated in excessive consumption, in a
few important cases (which I am obvi-
ously unable to cite for legal reasons),
successful black businessmen have used
drug money to finance legitimate enter-
prises and thereby have bypassed the
stranglehold exercised over big corpo-
rate financing by the ethnic minorities.
Some commentators have raised the
issue of whether these powerful ethnic
minority interests discriminate against
black entry into the business sector on
purely racial grounds. Their exclusive-
ness and defensive use of their corpo-
rate power to protect their class interests
could be so interpreted. But such a view
strikes me as misinformed.
My evidence of their social behavior
suggests that while they have daily and
intimate business contacts with blacks,
there is a tendency to operate socially
within their narrow ethnic groups. Close
social contact with blacks is therefore
taboo among the older generation of
these ethnic minorities. The younger

generation, however, is breaking out of
this narrow world and is developing
social ties with blacks.
There is no evidence that the racial
groupings operate as tightly-knit ethnic
formations that avoid close linkages
(business or social) with other non-
black, ethnic groups. On the contrary,
marriage patterns, intimate social rela-
tionships and friendship ties tend to
increasingly cut across ethnic lines to
a point where it makes sense to regard
them as now constituting a single social
agglomoration with networks of alli-
ances and family and social ties that
knit together and integrate the powerful
and ethnically varied family interests.
They have a strong sense of common
interest and rally to each other's defense
when under political attack. Intragroup
disagreements are usually arbitrated by
informal leaders, as occurred in the
public dispute between Senator Hugh
Hart and hotelier Butch Stewart. And
they try to avoid a public display of
intragroup contentions. In that sense the
browns, whites, Jews, Lebanese, and
Chinese are evolving into a single,
unified ethnic minority of powerful
families controlling the country's cor-
porate sector. A few blacks will be
admitted to the inner circle over time
as the economy expands, because their
small size does not allow them to
monopolize potential opportunities for
corporate growth and expansion. Such
likely cooptation of blacks into the
ruling class is likely to be on terms that
will preserve intact the dominant power
position of the ethnic minorities.
The ethnic minorities have not had
to practice racism because they have
not really been challenged by any sus-
tained effort by blacks to break into
corporate power. What the ethnic mi-
norities do is simply to use their corpo-
rate power to protect their interests by
keeping out challengers, supporting each
other in cartel-like fashion, tieing up
and monopolizing intra-enterprise busi-
ness transactions to the exclusion of
outsiders, and using their financial power
to perpetuate their class hegemony.
In exercising that power they are
building up networks of black support
by promoting and utilizing black mana-
gerial talent and developing client rela-
tionships with small black businessmen
who are grateful for the help they
receive. Claims about racial attacks
amount to little more than isolated
incidents of racial abuse of individuals
or sporadic political appeals to black

CARIBBEAN REVIEW/33

political identity that pose no real threat
to most of the more confident ethnic
minority families, who know that they
enjoy real power in the society and can
mobilize pressure against interests that
choose to challenge them.
Their strategy is to accuse all persons
who raise the race issue as being racists
and as undermining Jamaican multi-
racial nationalism. But there can be no
challenge to their class hegemony un-
less the issue of minority ethnic control
is put on the political agenda. To date,
race has not been an item that has
attracted political interest or support
from the mainstream political parties
or political tendencies in the country
since the earlier Garvey period.
A more important question is whether
the ruling group can be dislodged to
make way for black control or a greater
black presence in the corporate sector
of the economy. Given the "entrenched"
character of ethnic control of the corpo-
rate private sector, it is unlikely that
their economic ascendancy and power
will decline in the near future. That fact,
however, will not prevent black entry
into the big corporate sector. Such black
entry-would have the effect of diversi-
fying the ethnic elements controlling
the corporate economy and changing
the present ethnic division of labor that

Jamaican Folk Tales and
Oral Histories, a multi-
media package authored by
Laura Tanna, produced by
the Institute of Jamaica Pub-
lications, and reviewed in
this issue (p. 22), is now
available from Caribbean
Books, P.O. Box C, Park-
ersburg, Iowa 50665. Tel.
1-800-255-2255, ext. 6300.
The book is available at
US$20.00 plus $1.75 post-
age and handling; the audio
tape, at $9.95 plus $1.00;
the video tape, at $275.00
plus $4.95.
The complete package,
including all three media, is
available at $295.00 plus
$4.95 postage and handling.

limits black economic power to the
occupation of managerial authority un-
der other ownership.
Significant black entry (beyond to-
kenism) into ownership in the corporate
sector could be facilitated by four major
factors: (1) black ethnic nationalism
challenging the economic dominance
of the ethnic minorities; (2) mobiliza-
tion of external black financing in
Canada, the UK and the US to establish
a black venture capital market for the
long-term financing of new black enter-
prises; (3) policies which encourage
drug dealers to accept legal amnesty in
exchange for channeling their overseas
hard currency into legitimate local
business enterprises and providing a
new stream of black business financing;
(4) sustained rapid growth of the econ-
omy which would force the small ethnic
minority to open its inner circle to
trained, experienced and enterprising
black entrepreneurs. If all four factors
were set in motion, reinforcing each
other, the impact would be to signifi-
cantly blacken the complexion of the
dominant corporate-owning families in
Jamaica in one generation.
The black population as an ethnic
majority has the power to act on and
change the first or the most political of
these four factors. It is a necessary and
crucial ingredient if the country is to
achieve a significant ethnic majority
presence in Jamaica's privately owned
corporate sector. Several factors, how-
ever, militate against this issue becom-
ing a political demand articulated by
large numbers of blacks across the
society's various class divisions.
Unlike the ethnic minorities, blacks
reveal very weak ethnic bonding or
solidarity. Part of the problem is that
the social, cultural and historical forces
making for strong ethnic bonding are
largely absent among Jamaican blacks.
Apart from a common racial coloration
and physical features, the blacks in
Jamaica uniquely share very few attrib-
utes and characteristics that set them
apart from other ethnic groups, unlike
the case with majority ethnic groups in
many Asian and African countries where
ethnic bonding is very strong. They
have no common and distinctive lan-
guage, religion, or core cultural institu-
tions and ethnic leadership to set them
apart from other ethnic groups. They
are sharply divided by income, class
and education.
Many have overcome the negative
stereotypes about black inferiority gen-

erated in the country's colonial period
and still operating at some some levels
in contemporary Jamaica. But the typi-
cal response of the Jamaican blacks to
their inherited position of social inferi-
ority is to fight against the system
militantly as tough, rugged, individuals
articulating total confidence, as exhib-
ited by higglers, gunmen, ghetto mili-
tants, black intellectuals, professionals,
entrepreneurs and others. These strug-
gles for personal mobility, accumulation
and power become individualistic and
personal triumphs where they succeed
but provide no basis for enhancing and
moving forward the collective situation
of other blacks in the system. This
rugged and aggressive individualism of
confident blacks is often used against
the ethnic group by those in ascendant
positions of power, as the aggressive
and individualistic black can be induced
to block and destroy efforts by other
blacks to survive and progress.
The single and fundamental problem
facing black Jamaicans at the political,
economic and social levels is the fact
of weak ethnic bonding. It is reinforced
by the suppression of black ethnic
identities and nationalism in favor of
multiracial territorial nationalism among
the country's mainstream political move-
ments, sharp intra-black class divisions,
the absence of shared ethnic institu-
tions, and tendencies to seek individual
progress without any collective concern
for the ethnic group. These realities
make it most unlikely that the issue of
race will be put on the political agenda
in the near future unless these factors
change. Such a change is crucial for
pressuring the economically dominant
ethnic minorities to accept the validity
of seeking to blacken the coloration of
private corporate ownership in the coun-
try as a legitimate and worthwhile
national objective.
The other major issue is that the
powerful corporate controlling ethnic
minorities are too numerically small as
a class to provide the range and depth
of economic leadership and private
sector dynamism needed to move our
economy forward to fuller employment,
greater production and better living
standards for the black masses. To
expand the country's still narrow pro-
ductive and economic base, the inner
circle of the corporate ruling class must
he widened. Given the ethnic balance
in the country, this can only happen
by promoting large-scale black entry
into the corporate sector. 0

34/CARIBBEAN REVIEW

Higglers
Continued from page 17

subsidize wages in the early posteman-
cipation period; and more recently, off-
farm income, including that from hig-
glering, has been found to be an impor-
tant source of working capital for the
peasant farmer. Higglering has substi-
tuted for and supplemented wages in
the male-denuded family, and during
the recession of the 1970s and 1980s
provided a critical net for the fallout
from the wage and salaried sectors. It
is therefore not difficult to appreciate
the inhibiting effects of free entry on

accumulation. The system is loose and
fluid, and entry free but not necessarily
easy in that it receives little assistance,
guidance or protection from formal
organizations nor from the family. The
flood of new sellers will obviously
exacerbate the problem inasmuch as it
introduces additional pressure on an
already atomized situation. In what is
essentially a dependent economy, hig-
glering has helped to maintain the status
quo by continuing to subsidize the
wage sector and acting as a cushion for
the unemployed.
The chief function of higglering,
from the perspective of the higgler, has
become the achievement of independ-

ence, or separation, from the prevailing
production system rather than auton-
omy or a stake within the system. In
this context, the target nature of higgler-
ing can be more readily understood.
Like migration it is a form of escape,
a safety valve, and efforts are made to
use the proceeds to improve educational
levels, not for use in the dominant
productive system and its appendages,
but in the peripheral service sectors
such as teaching and administration.
To the extent that new higglers do not
operate within a system of surplus
transfer and extraction, it will be inter-
esting to see whether the inherited
conservative attitudes persist. E

CAHBBCAN

"VEviW AWARD
We are pleased to accept nomina-
tions for the ninth annual Ca-
ribbean Review award, an an-
nual presentation to honor an
individual who has contributed
to the advancement of Caribbean
intellectual life.
The award recognizes individ-
ual effort irrespective of field,
ideology, national origin or place
of residence. The award commit-

tee consists of Lambros Comitas
(chairman), Columbia University;
Angel Calderdn Cruz, Universidad
de Puerto Rico; Locksley
Edmondson, Cornell University;
Lisandro Perez, Florida Inter-
national University; and Andrds
Serbin, Universidad Central de
Venezuela.
Nominations are to be sent to
the Editor, Caribbean Review,
Florida International University,
Miami, Florida 33199. Nomina-
tions must be received by March

15, 1987. The Ninth Annual
Award will be announced at the
XIIIth International Meeting of
the Caribbean Studies Associa-
tion to be held May 1988. In
addition to a plaque, the recip-
ient receives an honorarium of
$250.
Previous recipients have been
Aime Cisaire, CLR. James, Gor-
don K. Lewis, W. Arthur Lewis,
Sidney W Mintz, Arturo Morales
Carridn, Philip M. Sherlock and
M.G. Smith.

I I
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CARIBBEAN REVIEW/35

Minibus
Continued from page 21

found among minibus workers.
For those who can endure the rigors
of minibus work, it provides a means
of survival. Most workers are out on
the road for 16 hours a day and work
at least six days a week. The average
total length of breaks for a full day's
work is little more than an hour. There
is apparently no shift system. Total
weekly earnings average about $150 for
conductors and $270 for drivers. Al-
though some workers receive a fixed
wage, the earnings of a significant
number are tied to the revenue of the
bus. The latter method protects the
profit level of the bus owners while
acting as an incentive for workers to
act competitively and aggressively. Few
workers receive any kind of paid leave,
and most try to avoid getting sick
because they may find themselves with-
out a job when they return.
The small size of the operation and
the lack of any complex hierarchical
structure leads to personalized rela-
tionships between employers and work-
ers. Where these relationships become
antagonistic, they are quickly termi-
nated. For those who remain, the rela-
tionship seems fairly cordial, with ele-
ments of paternalism.
Workers generally assess minibus
jobs unfavorably. Because of the in-
formal and unprotected nature of the
industry, with its varying and sub-
standard practices, jobs are regarded as
a "hustle." The industry has a high
turnover rate because workers enter the
industry mainly to subsist. Future aspi-
rations of workers are either to become
owners of minibuses or to cut ties with
the industry altogether and seek more
stable self-employment elsewhere.
While acknowledging that public re-
lations is a necessary skill in the indus-
try, workers feel that much of the onus
for poor relationships with the public
should be placed on the shoulders of
the passengers themselves, who are
characterized as rude and uncoopera-
tive, snobbish and prejudiced. For conduc-
tors, knowing how to deal with the
public involves varying their behavior
according to the passenger, since they
must be nice to some but rough with
others who are unruly or who refuse to
pay their fares. Dealing with the public
therefore implies a clear element of
passenger control. Conductors are also

often involved in soliciting patronage,
particularly at stops where linesmen do
not operate. One conductor said that
he has to "toast and nice-up the passen-
gers" while another stated that he
"must have plenty argument [persuasion]
and must can chat like a D.J. [disc-
jockey]."
This is similar to the responses of the
linesmen, who say that they must know
the areas and routes, but most impor-
tant, they must know how to approach
people. One linesman said that he
"needed lyrics to capture the passen-
gers from other buses," while another
replied: "I need to have enough argu-
ment to give passengers to get them
on the bus, so that I can load the bus.
I have to nice-up the people, because
the more sweet words you use, the
more passengers you get." Persuasion
sometimes involves duplicity as admit-
ted by a linesman who explained that
he had to do "nuff head work," for
example telling passengers that there
were five empty seats when in fact there
was only one. This technique, he ex-
plained, was learned through the proc-
ess of constant competition ("Man bet-
ter than man").
Physical danger is a major problem
on several routes. Passengers may be
thieves or pickpockets, or become vio-
lent when approached for their fare.
Sometimes persons living along certain
sections of the route descend on the
crew to rob them or demand protection
money. In the latter case, the conductor
must usually pay to insure safe passage,
thus compounding his problem of achiev-
ing a satisfactory intake.
For linesmen danger can occur from
pickpockets and "bad boys." Further,
the competitive nature of their work
often brings them into violent conflict
with other linesmen. In some cases a
group of linesmen may control a par-
ticular locality, such as a section of the
downtown Parade area, where they both
limit the entry of other linesmen and
provide a degree of protection to passen-
gers in the area. For most minibus
workers, the ability to physically defend
themselves is critical; machetes, rachet-
knives or pieces of lead pipe are tools
of the trade.
Despite the problems. which workers
identify, they are grateful to be em-
ployed. Many even enjoy the driving
and public interaction. For most, how-
ever, without the minibus industry they
probably would not have a job.
It is encouraging to note that since

mid-1985 there have been increased
efforts by the government and the
police to monitor the system more
closely, reducing the frequency of acci-
dents and violations of the road code.
Package holders have begun to intro-
duce training programs for workers, and
discussions have started about the es-
tablishment of a joint council of pack-
age holders. Much of the stimulus for
these improvements must be traced to
the continuing public outcry about the
abuses of the minibus system, and the
attention given to these problems by the
media. The people of Kingston won't
let their public transport system remain
one of the city's biggest hustles. E

rNUEVA

SSOCIE H

NOVIEMBRE/DICIEMBRE 1987 NO 92
Director: Alberto Koschuetzke
Jefe de Redacci6n: Daniel Gonzalez V.

COYUNTURA: Julio Godio: Argentina:
opci6n por la justicia social; Jose Luis
Le6n: Mdxico: paradoja del precipicio;
Apolinar D(az-Callejas: Colombia: la dia-
lectica de las realidades; Gonzalo Ortiz
Crespo: Ecuador: semillas de inconstitu-
cionalidad; Miguel Bonasso: Premio No-
bel: una oportunidad para la paz.
ANALISIS: Jorge Tapia Vald6s: Pax cas-
trense. LLa relegitimaci6n de la violencia
political ; Jos6 Aric6: Asedio al socialis-
mo argentino. Un intent de recreaci6n;
Marie-Chantal Barre: Un consenso diff-
cil. Estados Unidos y America Central;
Carlos Marfa Carcova: Obediencia debi-
da. Modelo para armar.
FORO LATINOAMERIGANO: Ideolo-
gia democracia partidos (11).
POSICIONES: Coordinaci6n Socialista
Latinoamericana (CSL): Am6rica Latina:
una, socialist y democratic; Consejo de
la International Socialista: Apoyo a Es-
quipulas II; COPPPAL: Solidaridad con
Haiti.
TEMA CENTRAL: CULTURAL & SO-
CIEDAD: N6stor Garcia Canclini: Cultu-
ra y political. Nuevos scenarios para
Amdrica Latina; Eduardo Galeano: La
pasi6n de decir; Pedro Susz K.: De la eu-
foria a la perplejidad. Dos dccadas del ci-
ne latinoamericano; Orlando Rodrfguez:
tPor qud un teatro para el cambio so-
cial?; Horacio Riquelme: Desarraigo e
identidad psicocultural. La experiencia
de latinoamericanos en Europa.
SUSCRIPCIONES ANNUAL BIENAL
(incluido (6 nms.) (12 njms.)
flete a6reo)
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Resto del Mundo US$ 30 US$ 50
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PAGOS: Cheque en d6lares a nombre de
NUEVA SOCIEDAD. Direcci6n: Aparta-
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rencias bancarias para cancelar suscrip-
ciones.

36/CARIBBEAN REVIEW

Cuba
Continued from page 24

Although Valladares tends to present
each case as if it were unique, there are
in fact many people who did not behave
brutally, who did not torture, and who
helped and protected him, and presum-
ably others, from sadistic behavior
(examples on pp. 124, 143, 214-217,
258, 309, 324, 332, 368).
A further observation is that there
were organizational differences among
those in charge of prisons. It made a
good deal of difference who prevailed.
For example, the lack of adequate food
at times was not the result of Interior
Ministry policy but of theft by some
of the guards, who diverted food for
their own use (p. 252). Similarly, health
care improved at a time when it became
the direct responsibility of the Public
Health Ministry, as compared to the
Interior Ministry (p. 307) and, in gen-
eral, whenever civilian doctors had some

say in how a prisoner should be treated.
Moreover, the Interior Ministry's poli-
cies seemed to have become less unac-
ceptable under Sergio del Valle's tenure
than under Ramiro Vald6s.
Finally, there is the troubling subject
of "rehabilitation." In most prison sys-
tems, rehabilitation provides an op-
portunity for prisoners to shorten the
duration of their sentences, to receive
better prison treatment, and to acquire
attitudes and skills enabling them to
function effectively in society upon
their release. So too has been the case
in Cuba, but with two twists. Resocializa-
tion to "function effectively" in con-
temporary Cuba often required that the
prisoners adopt the political beliefs of
the jailers. Unlike the case of common
criminals, rehabilitation of political pris-
oners was a demand by the prison
system that prisoners surrender the be-
liefs for which they were willing to
sacrifice their lives and careers. It is the
moral equivalent of unconditional sur-
render in war.

More seriously, Valladares and oth-
ers have reported what appeared to be
the deliberate intensification of brutality
to induce political prisoners to accept
this rehabilitation process. Because the
pain became so bad, many did surrender
their political beliefs for the sake of
better treatment, and eventually to get
out of prison. Therefore, apparently,
more humane treatment through reha-
bilitation became directly linked to both
physical and psychological torture: the
deliberate infliction of pain to change
a person's beliefs and behavior. Even
when the physical pain stopped, there
were still the moral scars for having
obtained safety at the cost of dignity.
That so many thousands of prisoners
rejected rehabilitation, at enormous per-
sonal cost, is a tribute to each of them
individually, to the bond of solidarity
that they developed in adversity, and
to the human spirit that can flourish
even when it seems that the sun will
never rise again. N

Dictator
Continued from page 27

I should like to end this review with
the words of a fine, young Cuban poet,
Reinaldo Arenas, writing in the Necesi-
dad de libertad. This man, who escaped
Cuba in the 1980 Mariel exodus, had
far less access to the Castro family elite
than Wayne Smith. Yet he reveals far
more understanding than Mr. Smith of
what that regime has done in the
deformation of a democratic culture and
in the destruction of the very Cuban
nationalism Smith celebrates. It is not
Wayne Smith's right to speak that is at
issue, but the right of those left behind
in Cuba. These people should be our
primary concern.
"To be a leftist in a democratic
country is nowadays an income-generat-
ing attitude; because aside from being
fashionable, it trades with the hope of
a great majority, always anxious for
change. It is pathetic that the eternal
and justifiable desire for mobility brings
us to the sinister trap of the totalitarian
state, more perfect today than ever:
communist totalitarianism. The artist
who, in search for a better world,
defends this totalitarianism, because of
dullness, because of congenital malig-
nity, because of material motivations,

is close to digging his own grave, aside
from betraying humankind. In a country
where political fanfare carries the domi-
nant voice, the best an artist can do is
get out and quickly, before it is too late;
before the act of leaving becomes a
severely punishable crime in the eyes
of the State....In Cuba tradition pain-
fully attests to the fact that literary
production is to a great degree an
activity of exile. In this century as well
as in the last. This is because the things
of the spirit are agreeable to loud
speakers, strident speeches and unap-
pealing slogans. By misfortune, for a
Cuban, 'homeland and freedom' as we
see stamped on the national currency
are not synonomous. Exile seems to be
the arduous, humiliating and sad price
that almost all Cuban artists must pay
to do their work."
Ambassador Smith's leaving Cuba
was also a sad event. But not quite in
the same way as Arenas' departure.
Never mind the farewell parties, never
mind the small talk with Fidel and
Rail, never mind even the question of
the rights of a diplomat in framing a
national posture. Ultimately, it is the
absence of any Cuban national interest,
as something apart from Castro's image
of that interest, that enfeebles this deeply
flawed, if well-intentioned, effort at a
reckoning. E

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CARIBBEAN REVIEW/37

First Impressions

Critics Look at the New Literature

Compiled by Forrest D. Colburn

A New Naipaul?

The Enigma of Arrival. V. S. Naipaul.
New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1987. 354 p.

The title of V. S. Naipaul's new novel
is quoted initially from Giorgio de
Chirico's painting of two diminutive
figures abandoned in some ancient sea-
port. Naipaul himself is no stranger to
unsettling arrivals. Given the obvious
correspondences between Naipaul's ca-
reer and specific episodes in this
"novel," he must be aware that it will
be taken as autobiographical. The order
of disclosure is artistically arranged for
effect, but the chronological sequence
fits Naipaul's departure from Trinidad
in 1950, his years at Oxford, the appear-
ance of unnamed novels and travel
books, the deaths of family members,
and travel to various parts of the world.
The structure of the novel itself
accounts for moments of discovery,
which lead to plot turns and the resolu-
tion of the basic conflict. In a first part,
the writer comments on the division of
his soul between being a man and being
a writer, removed from experience. Part
two accounts for the beginnings of that
dichotomy and of the dreams of insig-
nificance and death that plague him into
mid-career. Something of a synthesis
emerges during the process of writing
a history of Trinidad. In 1950, as his
plane departed, he had been surprised
to observe meaningful patterns in the
landscape of Trinidad. Similarly, his
historical overview supplies late-gath-
ered global connections which identify
his newly-understood connections with
the larger world.
"The Ceremony of Farewell" of the
final section refers to the Hindu ritual
attendant upon his sister's death in
Trinidad. When the writer returns for
this ceremony, he realizes that the
people he left behind had constructed
worlds for themselves just as he had
Forrest D. Colburn teaches politics at
Princeton University.

done as a writer. Death brings them
together to remember and honor.
Although this novel reveals the social
criticism and commentary on human
frailties to be expected in a Naipaul
story, it has none of the condescension
with which he is often identified.
Through his protagonist Naipaul dem-
onstrates appreciation for the ceremo-
nies of his communal origins and for
the dignity of ordinary people, whether
in England or Trinidad. It remains to
be seen whether this marks a new
direction in Naipaul's career.
Robert D. Hamner
Hardin-Simmons University, Abilene

Political Ornithology

Bird of Life, Bird of Death. Jonathan
Evan Maslow. New York: Simon & Schus-
ter, 1986.

Jonathan Maslow calls his book "a
naturalist's journey through a land of
political turmoil." The book is an
account of a trip "into the Central
American Cordillera of Guatemala to
see the rare and endangered Resplen-
dent Quetzal" and to investigate "its
impending extinction."
Throughout the journey the reader is
aware of the presence of the military
dictatorship. From the naturalist's view,
the counterpoint to the Resplendent
Quetzal (bird of life and symbol of
liberty to Guatemala) is the vulture or
Zopilote, the bird of death, gaining
dominion in this impoverished land due
to the carrion of poverty and repression.
The Resplendent Quetzal was so sacred
to the ancient Maya that to kill one was
a capital crime. Today the bird of life
is facing extinction as the Central Ameri-
can cloud forests are vanishing.
Maslow's story is a "kind of essay in
political ornithology a field that
does not quite exist, at least yet."
The search for the Quetzal is not

nearly as interesting nor as successful
as the insights into the people and their
lot in life. There are wonderful observa-
tions: "like water itself, the tortilla is
all tastes combined, and no taste at all.
It is history, and outside history....You
taste in them the Indian peasant's tena-
cious loyalty to his roots, his isolated
and ethereal temperament, as he scratches
the thin, poor laterite soil of his milpa
...to eat the tortilla is to accept the wafer
of sacrament for the isthmus of Middle
America."
He juxtaposes the fundamental hos-
tility between the Spanish immigrant
and tropical nature "man good,
jungle bad" with the New World
Spanish Conquest and its resultant cul-
ture shock. This is the land of the Maya,
the Nobel Laureate Miguel Angel As-
turias, Fray Bartolom6 de Las Casas,
as well as the Quetzal all dead or
dying, and the land of the military and
lower classes and the zopilote all
surviving.
Gilbert B. Snyder
Miami, Florida

Poor Bodies, Poor Spirits

Religion and Political Conflict in Latin
America. Daniel H. Levine, ed. Chapel
Hill: The U. of North Carolina Press,
1986. 266 p.

The essays in this book are held to-
gether by a number of common themes
and assumptions. One is a focus on the
concept of poverty, utilizing primarily
class and sociological definitions, though
the theological concept of "the poor in
spirit" is also recognized. Much analy-
sis focuses on the significance of the
grass-roots Christian communities (or
CEBs) and how they provide an institu-
tionalized link for the poor. Another
common theme is the common rejection
of the traditional assumptions of relig-
ious and political studies.

38/CARIBBEAN REVIEW

The authors profess appreciation for
the content of religious beliefs and their
contributions to development, a dialec-
tical perspective to the links between
religion and politics, and a belief in the
strong relationships between popular
expression and institutions. They accept
neither Marxist nor traditional social
scientific viewpoints that diminish the
importance of religion to either the
poor or to the broader political sphere.
They firmly believe that the culture,
theology, and organization of popular
religion play crucial roles in the various
political settings of Latin America.
In one of the more interesting stud-
ies, Michael Dodson emphasizes that
the so-called "religious renewal" in
Nicaragua has been stimulated not only
by events in the international church,
but also by the participation in the
struggle to overthrow the Somoza dicta-
torship. A chapter by Thomas Bruneau
provides the empirical data (based on
survey research) substantiating the commit-
ment of the Brazilian church to encour-
aging the CEBs. Brian Smith, in a
detailed exploration of church-state con-
flicts under the Pinochet regime in
Chile, provides useful scenarios for the
resolution of intrachurch debates over
the relative weights of religious as
opposed to social objectives. This book
is important to understanding the dynam-
ics of church involvement in Latin
American politics today.
Dale Story
University of Texas, Arlington

Ideology of Migration

Caribbean Migrants: Environment and
Human Survival on St. Kitts and Nevis.
Bonham Richardson. Knoxville: U. of
Tennessee Press, 1983.

In late 1986, President Reagan signed
the Immigration Reform Act designed-
to control the flow into the US of
immigrants, most of whom come from
the Caribbean basin. If he and the
members of the US Congress had read
this book, they probably would not
have bothered with the legislation. Not
that Caribbean Migrants offers new
insights. Rather it reconfirms in a par-
ticular context (St. Kitts and Nevis) and
with a slightly different approach (cul-
tural ecology) the conclusions of all
studies of Caribbean migration: that the
international flows of people looking

for work are deeply rooted in history,
in contemporary political economy, and
even in Caribbean island culture in
short, in forces quite beyond the control
of governments. Laws may temporarily
defer migration and even deflect it from
one destination to another, but they
cannot stop it.
Some writers have asserted that the
prime mover of migration from the
Caribbean is the ideology of migration,
the expectation that everyone, or at least
all nonelite males, will migrate abroad.
Richardson demonstrates how this cul-
tural expectation is based in the islands'
concrete history and contemporary con-
ditions. He describes the devastating
ecological effects initiated by the first
landings of Europeans and greatly ad-
vanced by the sugarcane slave planta-
tions that destroyed any possibilities of
island subsistence. Although Richardson
does not advance his ecological argu-
ments with sophisticated quantitative
calculations, he is convincing. A good
portion of St. Kitts' and Nevis' popula-
tion migrate to survive.
Richardson's contribution is his link-
ing of individual migration behavior to
the background of historical and struc-
tural conditions impelling that migra-
tion. He describes how the evolution
of political and economic forces changed
the principal migrant destinations suc-
cessively from Trinidad and Guyana to
the Dominican Republic and Cuba, to
Great Britain, to the United States, and
to St. Thomas and St. Croix. Individual
migrant histories and anecdotes consid-
erably liven his story and provide depth
and pathos.
Alex Stepick
Florida International University

Story's Story

Industry, the State and Public Policy
in Mexico. Dale Story. Austin: U. of
Texas Press, 1986. 275 p.

Story's book provides a welcome coun-
terbalance to the recent overemphasis
on the state and foreign capital in
studies of the political economy of
Latin America. He upgrades private
industrialists from their status as pliant
wards of the state and junior partners
of MNCs to their proper place as
significant contributors to industriali-
zation and powerful political actors.
Marshalling a massive array of data

on private-sector production, investment,
organization and political activity, he
carefully interprets and disaggregates
time-series data on the economic per-
formance of private firms, the state and
MNCs; chronicles the activities of ma-
jor business associations; reports the
results of his attitude survey of 109
Mexican business leaders (and com-
pares them to their Venezuelan counter-
parts); and devotes a chapter to the
politics of Mexico's decision not to join
GATT.
The book helps us move beyond
simpler interpretations, showing that
industrialists are not as constrained or
weak as theories of authoritarianism
and dependency would have us believe.
Unfortunately it stops short of develop-
ing an alternative framework. This and
other shortcomings should not obscure
the fact that Story has filled a major
gap in the study of Mexican political
economy.
Ben Schneider
University of California, Berkeley

Beefprints

Hoofprints on the Forest. Douglas R.
Shane. Philadelphia: Institute for the
Study of Human Issues, 1986. 159 p.

The destruction of Latin America's
tropical forests is such an important
issue that one wishes this book had
been better written. Still, it presents a
quantity of useful information and a
convincing argument that greater atten-
tion is needed to what is clearly a
growing problem.
Hoofprints on the Forest reflects a
broad concern for environmental impact
at both a regional and global level. It
presents some staggering statistics: 14.8
million acres of Latin American tropical
forest are felled annually for agriculture
and cattle ranching activities; an esti-
mated 37% of Latin America's total
tropical forests have been destroyed,
while 2/3rds of Central America's tropi-
cal forests are gone, presumably, for-
ever.
The author makes a convincing case
for the essential ecological function
served by tropical forests, while point-
ing out the economic incentives that
have led to the replacement of tropical
forests by cattle ranches. The book is
not definitive, but it is certainly thought-
provoking. Having read the book, you

CARIBBEAN REVIEW/39

may find yourself wondering just how
many square meters of Latin America's
tropical forest will have been demol-
ished in the production of your next
corned beef sandwich.
Ellen Calmus
Princeton, New Jersey

Resilient Self-Delusion

Pan American Visions: Woodrow
Wilson in the Western Hemisphere,
1913-1921. Mark T. Gilderhus. Tucson:
U. of Arizona Press, 1986. 194 p.

Of all the myths and self-delusions of
US attitudes toward Latin America,
perhaps two of the most powerful are
the recurrent themes of commonality
of interests and a special, custodial role
for the United States toward its less-
fortunate, unruly neighbors to the south.
This volume examines in great detail
the development of Woodrow Wilson's
policy of Pan Americanism.
Conceived in response to the Republi-
can, Rooseveltian decade of interven-
tionist and pro-business dollar diplo-
macy, the Wilsonian view presumed a
distrust of major US business interests
abroad. Yet curiously it persisted in the
belief that American investment and
trade dominance in Latin America con-
stituted essentially worthy goals com-
patible, if not virtually synonymous,
with Latin American prosperity. The
most compelling lessons to be learned
from a reading of this work are the
resiliency of US self-delusion in Latin
America and the dangers posed by
crusading Democrats out to prove their
"realism" and superiority to individual
business interests in the defense of
spheres of American influence.
Principal among the book's defects
is the conceptual framework. Pan Ameri-
canist expressions are taken at some-
thing approaching face value despite the
fact that the author undercuts them
repeatedly. Ultimately one is left uncer-
tain as to whether the author intends to
undermine the credibility of Pan Ameri-
canist pronouncements, virtually to the
point of mockery in several instances,
or continues to consider such a policy
"visionary" if somewhat utopian. Had
the author attempted to analyze ideo-
logical self-delusion as a coherent but
contradictory social process, we would
perhaps have a deeper understanding
of phenomena hardly limited to Wilson.

Gilderhus' portrayal of Wilson's Pan
Americanism presents a troubling view
of US-Latin American relations, as much
with reference to the present and future
as to the Wilsonian era.
Lowell Gudmundson
University of Oklahoma, Norman

Raptures and Recuperaciones

La ruta de Sarduy. Roberto GonzAlez
Echevarria. Hanover: Ediciones El Norte,
1987. 274 p.

Roberto Gonzalez Echevarria attempts
the Herculean task of analyzing the
literary production of the contemporary
Cuban novelist, Severo Sarduy. The
analysis accepts the difficulty of read-
ing Sarduy's highly experimental nov-
els and proposes to focus on the socio-
ideological background of the works.
The result is a study with many insight-
ful observations.
Gonzalez' analysis takes the reader
from the prehistorical era in Cuba to
the pre-Conquest, as well as the Indian,
black, oriental, and modern Cuban peri-
ods, not to mention the ever-present
Caribbean santeria. The study's overall
effect is to return the reader to Sarduy's
basic and special metaphoric themes.
Sarduy's literary universe is shown to
consist of a combination of "raptures"
and "recuperaciones" that take place
at different historical times and textual
spaces.
Rafael Ocasio
University of South Alabama, Mobile

Caribbean Concepts

Venezuela y las Relaciones Internacion-
ales en la Cuenca del Caribe. AndrBs
Serbin, ed. Caracas: ILDES & AVECA,
1987. 282 p.

At least three main conceptions of the
Caribbean currently contend for accep-
tance: a strategic-economic orientation
adopted by the Reagan administration
in the United States; an ethnohistorical
approach which emphasizes differences
in perception, rooted in distinctive ex-
periences of the region's racial groups;
and an inclusive Third World view,
which stresses the socioeconomic diver-
gencies between countries of the North
and the South.

The contributors to this volume join
in critiques of the first perspective,
while explicitly attempting to fill the
perceived gap between the hemisphere's
Hispanic and Anglophone worlds.
A first part examines the roles of the
principal Caribbean Basin actors and
the relationships between them, whereas
the second focuses upon Venezuela's
regional policy, expressed in terms of
overlapping Andean, Amazonian and
Caribbean concerns. Taken together,
these contributions potentially create
new channels of communication be-
tween Anglophone and Hispanic Carib-
bean scholars. They effectively explore
the ambiguities inherent in the policy
processes of "middle powers" such as
Mexico, Venezuela and more tenta-
tively Colombia, each seeking to as-
sume an independent posture, primarily
for domestic political reasons, while
attempting to attain an elusive modus
vivendi with the United States. Perhaps
the most attractive feature of this work
is the interpenetration and systematic
analysis of the major actors' partly
conflicting, yet partially complementary,
interests, and the efforts of the editor
to interpret Venezuelan self-concepts
as well as Anglophone Caribbean per-
ceptions of Venezuela.
The apparent errors are more those
of commission than omission. Thus,
discussion of Puerto Rico's possible
role as a "US Trojan horse" in regional
institutions such as CARICOM is em-
bedded in unnecessarily detailed analy-
sis of the associated state's political
economy. Similarly, an extensive as-
sessment of Brazil's gains from the
Law of the Sea Treaty seems somewhat
beside the point. More typically, the
authors carefully consider such impor-
tant issues as the multiple divergencies
between members of the Contadora
Group and Cuba's future role within the
region, closing with the clash of Anglo-
phone Caribbean "objective neoparticu-
larism" and Venezuelan "co-subjective
universalism": jargon, to be sure, but
suggestive concepts in application, nev-
ertheless.
Dennis J. Gayle
Florida International University

Benign Neglect

Frangipani House. Beryl Gilroy. Exeter,
N.H.: Heinemann Educational Books,
1986. 111 p.

40/CARIBBEAN REVIEW

The themes of this prize-winning novel
have a significance that goes well be-
yond its setting in Guyana. Mama King,
without the help of a spouse, endured
the burden of raising twelve children
and several grandchildren, all of whom
desert her for greener pastures overseas.
Frail and infirm in her old age, her
daughters from distant New York se-
cure a coveted place for her in a
privately operated home for the aged
- Frangipani House. Unable to adjust
to the prison-like conditions, Mama
King escapes from the house and joins
the ranks of beggars, among whom she
receives the companionship and love
denied her in Frangipani House.
Her freedom was short-lived. As she
lay on the verge of death from a vicious
mugging, her offspring converge around
her hospital bed to reclaim her and in
the process display a clash of values: a
conflict between their desire for the
opportunities of emigration and their
mother's need for familiar surroundings.
Though adorned by a joyful ending, the
story remains a strong rebuke of the
typical treatment meted out to the aged,
who are forced to rely on institutional
care an issue of universal concern.
L. P. Fletcher
University of Waterloo, Ontario

Plantations and Crime

Crime in Trinidad: Conflict and Con-
trol in a Plantation Society, 1838-
1900. David Vincent Trotman. Knoxville:
U. of Tennessee Press, 1986. 345 p.

Plantation society theory has typically
been advocated as an intellectual tool
for understanding, and in that sense
demystifying, the hegemony of the
planter archnemesis. This is the objec-
tive of David Trotman in Crime in
Trinidad. He quickly advises the reader
that "...the nature and demands of the
plantation system had a profound effect
on the range, pattern, and characteristics
of criminal activity in nineteenth-
century Trinidad." He returns to this
and related points but never makes it
clear how the plantation system ac-
counted for crime.
Nonetheless the book is otherwise
informative and well-documented. The
author examines a wide range of police,
court, and other records, local newspa-
pers, and an interesting mixture of
nineteenth century books and articles,

notably the pejorative writings of the
all-purpose colonial civil servant and
social observer, L. M. Fraser. He also
pays attention to current social science
and literary sources. He argues convinc-
ingly that crime cannot be measured
simply in terms of offenses against
person or property, but must also be
seen in relation to the severe stigmatiza-
tion of Afro-Trinidadian culture and the
consequent negative stereotyping of the
urban underclasses.
For true believers in the plantation
as the final explanation for Caribbean
society, the book undoubtedly confirms
their faith. For others it is a useful study
that adds historical depth to an under-
standing of Caribbean "crime," how-
ever defined.
Frank E. Manning
U. of Western Ontario, London

Why Migrate?

The Caribbean in Europe. Aspects of
the West Indian Experience in Britain,
France and The Netherlands. Colin
Brock, ed. London: Frank Cass and Co.,
1986. 243 p.

This excellent collection of essays fo-
cuses on the contemporary West Indian
experience in Europe and is timely
given the growing restrictions placed
on immigration, refugee resettlement
and guest worker programs throughout
Western Europe.
Elizabeth Thomas-Hope's superb analy-
sis of the Caribbean Diaspora is particu-
larly interesting for her challenge to
traditional notions positing a direct rela-
tionship between population growth,
adverse economic conditions and emi-
gration. She points to an inverse rela-
tionship between population density and
emigration. Caribbean economic growth
in the 1950s, which should have sig-
naled a reduction in migration, in fact
had the reverse effect, since "op-
portunities for capital accumulation...
encouraged migration by providing fi-
nances for the journey." The massive
and almost continual flow of labor from
the Caribbean must be explained in the
context of the wider global transfer of
human resources from the Third World
to the industrialized North, according
to Thomas-Hope.
Articles focus on West Indian settle-
ment in Britain, the development of
British immigration policies along color

lines, and the social geography of ex-
clusion, as West Indians are increas-
ingly segregated in decaying inner-
cities and marginalized from suburban
employment opportunities. There are
also essays examining the Caribbean's
contribution to music, literature and
sport.
The book opens up promising new
avenues for comparative work on the
differential experiences of West Indians
in France, Holland and England.
Nancy Robinson
Bryn Mawr College, Pennsylvania

Unflattering Analysis

Latin American Political Economy:
Financial Crisis and Political Change.
Jonathan Hartlyn and Samuel A. Morley,
eds. Boulder: Westview Press, 1986.
386 p.

By mid-decade, Latin America had rid
itself of most of its uniformed presi-
dents. And it stopped growing for the
first time since 1945. Generals have
come and gone, individually or in
packs, but the addition of sustained
stagnation distinguishes the recent con-
juncture. Hartlyn and Samuel analyze
this conjuncture with particular atten-
tion to the nature and origins of the
economic crisis.
The geographic distribution of arti-
cles is fairly standard: an article for
each of the large or topical countries
(Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Peru, Mexico,
Colombia, Cuba and Nicaragua, all but
one written by social scientists from the
country analyzed), preceded by four
overview articles and followed by brief
commentaries. The myriad policy blun-
ders of recent decades are subjected to
the unflattering glare of post-hoc and
post-crisis analysis. What emerges over-
all is a tale of decreasing degrees of
freedom (both policy-induced and exter-
nally-imposed) as each country careens
along until it slams into the wall of
balance-of-payments disequilibrium. Coun-
try by country the interpretations of
why this happened are complete and
convincing.
The country studies and especially
the editors' introductory chapters should
be very useful to students of recent
economic and political developments
in Latin America. Other articles offer
specialists a more sophisticated and
theoretical approach to the current cri-

CARIBBEAN REVIEW/41

sis. Hence, the volume, or parts thereof,
should be of interest to both practition-
ers and initiates.
Ben Schneider
University of California, Berkeley

Small and Vulnerable

Vulnerability: Small States in the
Global Society. Report of a Common-
wealth Consultative Group. Common-
wealth Secretariat. 1985. 126 p.

This short but thorough report tells you
more than you ever need to know about
small Commonwealth states. It was
commissioned after the Turkish inva-
sion of Cyprus and the American-led
invasion of Grenada had alerted Com-
monwealth leaders to the vulnerability
of many of its members. It was pub-
lished before the military coup in Fiji
reinforced the view that small states
(indeed all Third World states, regard-
less of size) are inherently vulnerable
to external or internal aggression.
The report considers ways to enhance
internal security and sensibly suggests
the use of citizen volunteer forces and
attempts to have neutrality status recog-
nized by neighboring and larger coun-
tries. It also explores the economic
vulnerability of most of these states,
stressing the need for a vigorous, in-
digenous private sector to play the
leading role in the economy, and argues
the need for greater regional coopera-
tion. Unfortunately, the report doesn't
tell Commonwealth leaders how to deal
with military officers who feel that the
time has come for them to direct the
affairs of state.
Roy Patman
The University of Sydney, Australia

Smith on Smiths' Smith

To Shoot Hard Labor: The Life and
Times of Samuel Smith, an Antiguan
Workingman, 1877-1982. Keithlyn B.
Smith and Fernando C. Smith. Ontario:
Edan's Publishers, 1986. 173 p.

A nearly 106-year life that spanned
most of the last quarter of the 19th and
more than the first three quarters of the
20th centuries in the Leeward Islands
would likely be interesting. Especially
so if lived by an individual sensitive to

and concerned for social and community-
oriented issues. Samuel Smith was the
great-great grandson of a West African
slave woman who was among those
emancipated in Antigua in 1834. His
grandsons tape recorded, organized, and
presented what was said. The result is
an action-packed, pain-filled, sad, joy-
ful, depressing, optimistic, thoroughly
entertaining, educational, and almost
poetic volume.
Degradation, abuse, optimism and
hope for humanity are portrayed as
unadorned experience. In this oral auto-
biography, no filter of carefully "cor-
rect" language or screen of social
theory is necessary for communication.
Reflection in the vernacular on a raw,
bone-weary, always hungry, necessarily
self-educated and self-medicated, and
virtually always abused and overworked
life carries the communication.
This extraordinary book is an impor-
tant part, and an outstanding example,
of the growing tradition of specific,
personal, ecologically grounded recrea-
tion of the history of those people
whom Eric Wolf has called "the people
without history." For Antigua, this
book will probably become a model of
how to create history. Others in the
excolonial world should also take heed.
Larry J. Smith (Unrelated)
University of Wisconsin-Green Bay

What Debate?

Honduras Confronts Its Future: Con-
tending Perspectives on Critical Is-
sues. Mark B. Rosenberg and Philip L.
Shepherd, eds. Boulder: Lynne Rienner
Publishers, 1986. 286 p.

Honduras: Portrait of a Captive Na-
tion. Nancy Peckenham and Annie
Street, eds. New York: Praeger, 1985.
350 p.

These are two very different collections
of essays on Honduras. The Rosenberg
and Shepherd book, emanating from a
1984 conference, has a uniformity of
theme if not message. The Peckenham
and Street collection is more eclectic,
gathering material from the early 20th
century to the present, and from oral
histories to a speech by Ronald Reagan.
The latter volume also has a more
obvious point of view.
Most of the essays in Rosenberg and
Shepherd are by Hondurans, but few

of them have many insights, perhaps
because, as Shepherd suggests in his
perceptive final essay, Hondurans are
reluctant to delve too deeply below the
surface of things in their country. There
are a few clashes of opinion, but they
seem strangely muted.
Peckenham and Street, who are jour-
nalists rather than academics, attempt a
chronological approach, starting with
an account of the Spanish conquest and
covering the growth of banana empires,
before focusing on the book's chief
preoccupation: the US role in Hondu-
ras, especially in the '80s. Their thesis
appears to be that the US, first economi-
cally and then militarily, has come to
dominate the country. Although the
material is of uneven value, the editors
have drawn together a number of writ-
ings from sources that would not read-
ily be available to the reader.
Thomas P. Anderson
Eastern Connecticut St. U., Willimantic

Rumupmanship

Rum Yesterday and Today. Hugh
Barty-King and Anton Massel. London:
Heinenmann, 1983. 264 p.

Area studies specialists are devoted not
just to the intellectual conquest of a
certain body of gossip but to the dra-
matic emulation of specific styles of
life. This latter aspect is harder for the
"convert to the field" than it is, e.g.,
for someone who earns his wages study-
ing the lifestyles of his grandparents.
In Caribbean studies in the US, this
means that although the area studies
newcomer may learn several of the
area's languages, he'll never quite lose
his accent nor will he be able to
strategically toggle-at-will between Eng-
lish spoken American-direct or that
spoken with a slightly-debonair faintly-
affected British clip. Nor will anyone
ever believe that the newcomer wears
a guayavera for any other reason than
to hide the curves that scholarship has
added to his belly and spine.
Fortunately, however, with the publi-
cation of Rum-Yesterday and Today,
newcomers no longer need fear being
at a disadvantage in those social situ-
ations in which rumupmanship is prac-
ticed. Having read this book, they
should know almost as much about
Cockspur as they do about Manishevitz.
The book thus will be of help to anyone

42/CARIBBEAN REVIEW

in need of intellectual support to defend
his or her drinking habits while at
attendance at parties of Caribbean-wise
fellows.
Once known as Kill-Devil because
of its hell-fire ability to get one tipsy,
rum today has become a fashionable
drink (not only among area specialists
but among normal folk as well) that
demands the same kind of knowledge
that wine requires to appreciate its true
subtlety and variety.
Like the sugar cane from which it is
made, rum is a major product of the
Caribbean. Early rum was unscientifi-
cally produced, a drink relegated to
sailors and slaves. But rum drinking
was soon to become more sophisticated.
Europeans took to the new drinks en-
thusiastically. Austrian composer
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, as well as
French composer Hector Berlioz are
reported to have favored hot rum punch,
soon to be known by the name, 'grog'.
Rum is distilled from molasses or
from the juice squeezed from fresh
cane, in either a pot or continuous still.
Molasses distilled rum, known as black-
strap or industrial rum, is the most
common; rum produced from pressed
cane juice, however, is considered to
be quite special though not as available
outside the countries where it is made.
Worked by knowledgeable craftsmen,
pot stills allow more exact refraction
and flavoring but are less economical
than modern continuous stills. Like
whiskey, most bottled rums are blended
versions of both processes.
Rums fall on a continuum from
white, though light and medium, to
heavy rum. White rum is nearly flavor-
less; heavy rums contain additives to
produce a sweet and fruity flavor. Mod-
ern tastes prefer lighter rums that are
drier yet still able to demonstrate char-
acter. White rums are good for mixed
drinks. Special aged rums demand a
special public pose and should be fon-
dled and sipped like a cognac, rather
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than mixed and swallowed in gulps.
Each country has its specialties and
prized brands. Puerto Rico is the largest
producer of rum. Bacardi, which has
plants in many countries, produces most
of its rum on the island. Bacardi Light
is by far the most popular rum in the
world indeed, the most popular
distilled spirit in the world! but not
on the island where Don Q is preferred.
Jamaica has long been known as the
place for heavier rums. Germany, which
still favors such fruity spirits, imports
much of its intake from Jamaica. Apple-
ton is the island's best-known brand.
Both kinds of stills are used in Barba-
dos to produce good quality medium
light rum. Mount Gay is the oldest
brand name in the business. The water
to make Mount Gay comes from a
special well in St. Lucy that has func-
tioned since the 17th century. Cock-
spur, however, is the local favorite.
Trinidad, using continuous stills, is
renowned for its consistency. Royal
Oak Twelve is excellent. In Guyana,
rum is fruit-cured to give it a spicy taste
to meet local demand.
Rum in Haiti is double-pot distilled
much in the same way as cognac. Their
famous brand, Rhum Barbancourt, puts
forth a wide variety, including several
excellent agricultural rums for sipping
as well as 15 different flavored rum
liqueurs. Martinique and Guadeloupe
share the French experience in making
brandy and they, too, are famed for
their rums. The most popular brand in
Martinique is La Mauny, a rum distilled
from cane juice. One can also find
fruitier and stronger rums such as St.
James. Rhum Clement is another pro-
ducer of fine agricultural rums. Guade-
loupe's favorite is Grosse Montagne.
Venezuela, thought to have the high-
est rum consumption per capital of any
country, produces smooth golden rums.
Pampero is the most popular brand.
Colombia's Ron Viejo de Caldas is
noteworthy.
The USVI and BVI, the smaller
islands of the West Indies (Antigua, St.
Lucia, Grenada, Dominica), the Nether-
lands Antilles, the Bahamas, even Bra-
zil and Argentina, all produce rum.
Since most rum brands are not exported
however, research on special rums will
require more than a reading of Rum -
Yesterday and Today and will necessi-
tate active participant observation some-
where out in the field.
Barry B. Levine
Florida International University

That Was the Way It Wasn't

Guyana: Fraudulent Revolution. Lon-
don: The Latin American Bureau, 1984.

The Wild Coast: An Account of Poli-
tics in Guyana. Reynold Burrowes. Cam-
bridge: Schenkman, 1984.

These two books offer a dramatic con-
trast in approach to the voluminous
literature on the modern political his-
tory of Guyana. Neither one breaks new
ground nor is exempt from criticism.
But Latin American Bureau's 100-page
dissection of Guyana's political and
economic troubles is the more carefully
assembled and well-reasoned. Primary
attention is given to the personalist and
authoritarian rule of Forbes Burnham
whose "cooperative socialism" was
shown convincingly to have been "lit-
tle more than a political device to
maintain itself in power by a party that
was neither cooperative nor socialist."
The Burrowes book, a rambling un-
focused academic thesis, offered a naive
solution to the problem of Burnham's
corrupt tyranny: a constitutionally fixed
term of office. But this is only one of
a number of odd, usually ill-considered
and weakly-reasoned arguments. Bur-
rowes took too much at face value and
rarely exercised any scholarly responsi-
bility to weigh evidence and dispute or
confirm the accounts and judgments of
others. When he did present data, their
disarray leaves one with the impression
that he tossed up whatever he had at
hand. Though reading through it all is
occasionally rewarding, the book's arbi-
trary selection and perfunctory treat-
ment of topics causes the reader to
wonder all too frequently why he is
even making the effort.
Edward Dew
Fairfield University, Connecticut

SERVICIO DE TRADUC-
CIONES "VICTORY"
Traducciones de alto nivel profe-
sional, inclusive comerciales, publici-
tarias, cientrficas, legales y tecni-
cas. Ingles, espahol, frances, ita-
liano, portuguds. Prometemos cum-
plir con susfechas de entrega.
Pedro J. Romahach
22 Salamanca Ave. Apt. 304
Coral Gables, Fl. 33134
Tfno: (305) 443-1379

CARIBBEAN REVIEW/43

Recent Books

On the Region and Its Peoples

Compiled by Marian Goslinga

ANTHROPOLOGY AND SOCIOLOGY

Afro-Caribbean Folk Medicine: The Repro-
duction and Practice of Healing. Michel S.
Laguerre. Bergin & Garvey, 1987. 256p.
$29.95.

Arid Land Use Strategies and Risk Man-
agement in the Andes: A Regional Anthro-
pological Perspective. David L. Browman,
ed. Westview Press, 1986. 300p. $29.50.

The Barbadian Male: Sexual Attitudes and
Practice. Graham Dann. Macmillan Carib-
bean, 1987. 224p. 4.95.

The Black Saturnalia: Conflict and Its Rit-
ual Expression on British West Indian
Slave Plantations. Robert Dirks. U. Presses
of Florida, 1987. $18.00.

The Caribbean Exodus. Barry B. Levine,
ed. Praeger, 1987. 293p. $32.00.

The Church and Revolution in Nicaragua.
Laura Nuzzi O'Shaughnessy, Luis H. Serra.
Ohio U. Press, 1986. 118p. $11.00

Coca and Cocaine: Effects on People and
Policy in Latin America. Deborah Pacini,
Christine Franquemont, eds. Cambridge: Cul-
tural Survival, 1986. 169p. $8.00.

Colombia Before Columbus: The People,
Culture, and Ceramic Art of Prehispanic
Colombia. Armand J. Labbe. Rizzoli, 1986.
207p. $19.95.

Dos filmes de Mariel: el 6xodo cubano de
1980. Jorge Ulla, Lawrence Ott, Minuca Vil-
laverde. Madrid: Editorial Playor, 1986. 160p.
$7.95.

East Indians in a West Indian Town: San
Fernando, Trinidad, 1930-1970. Colin G.
Clarke. Allen & Unwin, 1986. 192p. 27.50.

Marian Goslinga is the Latin American and
Caribbean Librarian at Florida International
University. The artwork reproduces paintings of
Caribbean scenes by A. S. Forrest.

From Insurrection to Revolution in Mex-
ico: Social Bases of Agrarian Violence,
1750-1940. John Tutino. Princeton U. Press,
1987. 352p. $35.00.

El guarani conquistado y reducido: en-
sayos de etnohistoria. Bartomeu Melii.
Asunci6n, Paraguay: Centro de Estudios An-
tropol6gicos, Universidad Cat6lica, 1986. 298p.

The Jewish Presence in Latin America.
Judith Laikin Elkin, Gilbert W. Merkx, eds.
Allen & Unwin, 1987. 256p. $23.95; $12.95.

Latin America. Eduardo P. Archetti, Paul
Cammack, Bryan Roberts, eds. Monthly Re-
view Press, 1987. 320p. $26.00; $11.00.

"Let All of Them Take Heed": Mexican
Americans and the Campaign for Educa-
tional Equality, 1910-1981. Guadalupe San
Miguel. U. of Texas Press, 1987. 304p.
$25.00.

Liberation Theology: Essential Facts About
the Revolutionary Religious Movement in
Latin America-and Beyond. Phillip Berry-
man. Pantheon, 1987. $16.95; $6.95.

Mexicano Resistance in the Southwest:
"The Sacred Right of Self-Preservation."
Robert J. Rosenblaum. U. of Texas Press,
1986. 253p. $9.95.

Moral Imperium: Afro-Caribbeans and the
Transformation of British Rule, 1776-1838.
Ronald Kent Richardson. Greenwood Press,
1986. $35.00.

La peinture haitienne: Haitian Arts. Jos6e
Nadal-Gardere, G6rard Bloncourt. Port-au-
Prince: Editions Nathan, 1986. 292F.

The Periphery of the Southeastern Classic
Maya Realm. Gary W. Pahl, ed. Los Angeles:
Latin American Center, U. of California, 1986.
296p. $48.50.

Politics and Parentela in Paraiba: A Case
Study of Family-Based Oligarchy in Bra-
zil's Old Republic. Linda Lewin. Princeton
U. Press, 1987. 392p. $40.00.

La question creole: essai de sociologie
sur la Guyane frangaise. Marie-Jos6 Jolivet.
Paris: Orstom, 1986. 502p.

Religious Repression in Cuba. Juan M.
Clark. Coral Gables, Fla.: Institute of Inter-
American Studies, U. of Miami, 1986. 115p.
$8.95.

Society and Health in Guyana: The Sociol-
ogy of Health Care in a Developing Nation.
Marcel Fredericks, et al. Carolina Academic
Press, 1986. 173p. $22.75.

The Way of the Dead Indians: Guajiro
Myths and Symbols. Michel Perrin; Michael
Fineberg, trans. U. of Texas Press, 1987.
229p. $30.00; $12.95.

Writing Home: Immigrants in Brazil and
the United States, 1890-1891. Witold Kula,
Nina Assorodobraj-Kula. Boulder: European
Quarterly, 1986. 576p. $50.00.

BIOGRAPHY

Adolfo L6pez Mateos: vida y obra. Cle-
mente Diaz de la Vega. M6xico: Terra Nova,
1986. 275p.

Aproximaci6n a Alfonso L6pez: testimo-
nios para una biografia. Anibal Noguera
Mendoza, ed. Bogota: Banco de la Rep0blica,
1986. 2 vols. $75.00.

Biografia de una emoci6n popular: el Dr.
Grau. Miguel HernAndez-Bauza. Miami: Edi-
clones Universal, 1986. 440p. $12.00.

44/CARIBBEAN REVIEW

Breve historic de grandes hombres. Luis
Benitez. Asunci6n, Paraguay: GrAf. Comu-
neros, 1986. 390p.

Burnham: Reviews and Reminiscences.
Forbes B. Burnham. Georgetown, Guyana:
Department of Culture, 1986. 140p.

Confesiones de un contra: historic de
"Mois6s" en Nicaragua. Elisabeth Reimann.
Buenos Aires: Legasa, 1986. 158p.

Dom Pedro: The Struggle for Liberty in
Brazil and Portugal, 1798-1834. Neill
Macaulay. Duke U. Press, 1986. 368p. $37.50.

Duarte: My Story. Jos6 Napole6n Duarte;
Diana Page, ed. Putnam, 1986. 288p. $18.95.

Fidel: A Biography of Fidel Castro. Peter
G. Bourne. Dodd, Mead, 1986. 352p. $19.95.

Jos6 Marti: Revolutionary Democrat. Chris-
topher Abel, Nissa Torrents, eds. Duke U.
Press, 1986. 238p. $29.95.

Kinship, Business, and Politics: The
Martinez del Rio Family in Mexico, 1824-
1867. David Wayne Walker. U. of Texas
Press, 1987. 288p. $27.50.

Liberation Theology from Below: The Life
and Thought of Manuel Quintin Lame.
Gonzalo Castillo-Cirdenas. Orbis Books, 1987.
208p.

Paz Estenssoro. Augusto Guzmin. La Paz,
Bolivia: Los Amigos del Libro, 1986. 282p.

Per6n and Argentina: The Enigmas. Fobert
D. Crassweller. Norton, 1986. $22.95.

Saba Silhouettes: Life Stories from a Carib-
bean Island. Julia G. Crane. Vantage Press,
1986. $20.00.

Stroessner: de Boguer6n a Villa Montes,
1932-1935. Miguel Angel Duarte Barrios.
Asunci6n, Paraguay: Escuela Thcnica Sale-
siana, 1986. 227p.

DESCRIPTION AND TRAVEL

Coups and Cocaine: Two Journeys in
South America. Anthony Daniels. Wood-
stock: Overlook Press, 1987. 230p. $17.95.

Cuba Official Guide. Andrew Gerald Gravette.
Macmillan Caribbean, 1987. 288p. 19.95.

Curagao Close-Up. Bernadette Heiligers-
Halabi. Macmillan Caribbean, 1986.63p. 3.50.

Eadward Muybridge in Guatemala, 1875:
The Photographer as Social Recorder. E.
Bradford Burns. U. of California Press, 1986.
144p. $35.00.

Ecuador and the Galapagos Islands: A
Travel Survival Kit. Rob Rachowiecki.
Emeryville: Lonely Planet Publications, 1986.
239p. $7.95.

A Guide to the Yucatan Peninsula. Chicki
Mallan. Chico: Moon Publications, 1987. 250p.
$9.95.

Headhunters and Hummingbirds: An Ex-
pedition into Ecuador. Robert McCracken
Peck. New York: Walker, 1987. 128p. $14.95.

The Magnificent Peninsula: The Only Ab-
solutely Essential Guide to Mexico's Baja
California. Jack Williams. Sausalito: H.J.Wil-
liams, 1986. 256p. $14.95.

ECONOMICS

La aristocracia del dinero en Venezuela
actual, 1945-1985. Federico Brito Figueroa.
Barquisimeto, Venezuela: Fondo Editorial
Buria, 1986.

Caye Caulker: Economic Success in a
Belizean Fishing Village. Anne Sutherland.
Westview Press, 1986. 170p. $17.95.

Comercio y contrabanda en Cartagena de
Indias. Jos6 Ignacio de Pombo. Bogota:
Procultura, 1986. 125p. $5.00.

Dual Legacies in the Contemporary Carib-
bean: Continuing Aspects of British and
French Dominion. Paul Sutton, ed. London:
Cass, 1986. 280p. 20.00.

Economic Development in the Caribbean.
Kempe Ronald Hope. Praeger, 1986. 230p.
$39.00.

Economic History of Puerto Rico: Institu-
tional Change and Capitalist Development.
James L. Dietz. Princeton U. Press, 1987.
608p. $65.00; $20.00.

Ecuador: petr6leo y crisis econ6mica. Al-
berto Acosta Espinosa, et al. Quito: Institute
Latinoamericano de Investigaciones Socia-
les, ILDIS, 1986. 237p.

Endeudamiento externo y crisis mundial:
antecedentes sobre el caso brasilefio. Pa-
blo Rieznik. Buenos Aires: Consejo Lati-
noamericano de Ciencias Sociales, CLACSO,
1986. 123p.

Histoire de la Soci6t6 Guyanaise: les
ann6es cruciales, 1848-1946. Serge Nan-
Lan Fouck. Paris: Editions Caribbennes, 1986.

Indigenous People and Tropical Forests:
Models of Land Use and Management from
Latin America. Jason W. Clay. Cambridge:
Cultural Survival, 1987. 150p. $7.00.

Kilowatts and Crisis: A Study of Develop-
ment and Social Change in Panama. Alaka
Wall. Westview Press, 1986. 250p. $26.50.

Latin America at the Crossroads: Debt,
Development, and the Future. Howard J.
Wiarda. Westview Press, 1986. 125p. $19.95.

Latin America, the Caribbean, and the
OECD: A Dialogue on Economic Reality
and Policy Options. Angus Maddison. Paris:
Organisation for Economic Cooperation and
Development, 1986. 165p. $22.00.

Management Education in Developing Coun-
tries: The Brazilian Experience. Dole A.
Anderson. Westview Press, 1987. 205p.
$23.50.

Las mayores empresas brasilefias, ale-
manas y norteamericanas en el Paraguay.
Ricardo Rodriguez Silvero. Asunci6n: El Lec-
tor, 1986. 208p.

Miners and Mining in the Americas. Tho-
mas Greaves, William Culver, eds. London:
Manchester U. Press, 1986. 358p. $54.00.

Monetarism and Liberalization: The Chil-
ean Experiment. Sebastian Edwards, Alejan-
dra Cox Edwards. Cambridge: Ballinger, 1987.
240p. $26.95.

Natural Resources and Economic Devel-
opment in Central America. H. Jeffrey Le-
onard. Transaction Books, 1987. 315p. $29.95.

Neoconservative Economics in the South-
ern Cone of Latin America, 1973-1983.
Joseph R. Ramos. Johns Hopkins U. Press,
1986. 240p. $25.00.

Political econ6mica da Nova Republica.
Ricardo Carneiro, ed. Rio de Janeiro: Paz e
Terra, 1986. 275p.

CARIBBEAN REVIEW/45

The Political Economy of Nicaragua. Rose
J. Spaulding. Allen and Unwin, 1986. 256p.
$23.95; $12.95.

La question du tourlsme a la Martinique.
Henri Aim6-Pastel. Fort-de-France: Editions
D6sormeaux, 1986. 418p. 150F.

Regional Impacts of U.S.-Mexican Rela-
tions. Ina Rosenthal-Urey, ed. San Diego:
Center for U.S.-Mexican Studies, U. of Cali-
fornia, 1986. 172p. $11.00.

The Sandinista Revolution: National Ub-
eration and Social Transformation in Cen-
tral America. Carlos Maria Vilas; Judy Butler,
trans. Monthly Review Press, 1986. 317p.
$27.50.

The Theory of Inertial Inflation: The Foun-
dation of Successful Economic Reforms
in Argentina and Brazil. Luiz Carlos Bresser
Pereira, Yoshiaki Nakano. Boulder: L. Rien-
ner, 1987. 225p. $30.00.

Toward Renewed Economic Growth in Latin
America. Bela Balassa, et al. Washington:
Institute for International Economics, 1986.
205p. $15.00.

U.S. Labor and Latin America: A History
of Workers' Response to Intervention. Philip
Sheldon Foner. Bergin & Garvey, 1987. 320p.
$36.95.

HISTORY AND ARCHAEOLOGY

Ambivalent Conquests: Maya and Span-
iard in Yucatan, 1517-1570. Inga Clendin-
nen. Cambridge University Press, 1987. 256p.
$39.50.

Atlas of Ancient America. Michael Coe,
Dean Snow, Elizabeth Benson. Facts on File,
1986. 240p. $35.00.

Colonial Encounters: Europe and the Na-
tive Caribbean, 1492-1797. Peter Hulme.
Methuen, 1986. 350p. $39.95.

La Frontera: The United States Border with
Mexico. Alan Weisman. Harcourt Brace Jov-
anovich, 1986. 200p. $29.95.

La gran mentira: 4 de septiembre 1933 y
sus importantes consecuencias. Ricardo
Adam y Silva. 2d ed. Santo Domingo: Editora
Cornpio, 1986. 315p. $14.95. [About Cuba]

Id6las fllos6ficas e political em Minas
Gerals no s6culo XIX. Jos6 Carlos Rod-
rigues. Rio de Janeiro: Itatitaia, 1986. 180p.

Letters from Mexico. Hernan Cortes; An-
thony Pagden, ed. and trans. Yale U. Press,
1986. 640p. $45.00; $14.95.

Lines to the Moutain Gods: Nazca and the
Mysteries of Peru. Evan Hadingham. Ran-
dom House, 1987. $22.50.

Los mayas de la gruta de Loltun, Yucatan,
a trav6s de sus materials arqueol6gicos.
Ernesto Gonzalez Lic6n. M6xico: Instituto
Nacional de Antropologia e Historia, INAH,
1986. 148p.

The Mexican Republic: The First Decade,
1823-1832. Stanley C. Green. U. of Pitts-
burgh Press, 1987. 320p. $29.95.

The Petroglyphs in the Guianas and the
Adjacent Areas of Brazil and Venezuela.
C. N. Dubelaar. Los Angeles: Institute of
Archaeology, U. of California, 1986. 327p.
$30.00.

Scenes from the History of the Portuguese
in Guyana. Mary Noel Menezes. London:
Menezes, 1986. 175p. $18.00.

Six Galleons for the King of Spain: Impe-
rial Defense in the Early Seventeenth Cen-
tury. Carla Rahn Phillips. Johns Hopkins U.
Press, 1987. 323p. $37.50.

-- - ---P-
Unitarios y federales en la historic argen-
tina. Ram6n Torres Molina. Buenos Aires:
Contrapunto, 1986. 134p.

LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE

Anblisis de la obra literaria de Tristan
Solarte. Victor Fermndez Canizalez. PanamA:
Ediciones Libreria Cultural Panamefia, 1986.

Anthology of Contemporary Latin Ameri-
can Literature, 1960-1984. Barry J. Luby,
Wayne H. Finke, eds. Faireigh Dickinson U.
Press, 1986. 320p. $38.50.

Caracteristicas nacionales de la literature
cubana. Mercy Ares, et al. Miami: Patronato
Ram6n Guiteras Intercultural Center, 1986.
92p. $6.95.

The Colonial Legacy in Caribbean Litera-
ture. Amon Saba Saakana. London: Karnak
House, 1987: 3.95.

Contemporary Chicana Poetry: A Critical
Approach to an Emerging Literature. Marta
Ester Sanchez. U. of California Press, 1986.
389p. $10.95.

. Los cuentos negros de Lydia Cabrera: un
studio morfol6gico. Mariela Gutierrez. Mi-
ami: Ediciones Universal, 1986. $12.00.

DramaContemporary: Latin America.
George William Woodyard, Marion Peter Holt,
eds. Garrar, Straus & Giroux, 1987. $22.95;
$9.95. [Plays]

Gabriel Garcia Mhrquez: New Readings.
Bernard McQuirk, Richard Andrew Cardwell,
eds. Cambridge U. Press, 1987. 280p. $39.50.

Gustavo Pales Matos: obras. Alfredo Matilla
Rivas, ed. U. of Puerto Rico Press, 1986.
512p. $15.00.

El habla de la ciudad de Bogota: materi-
ales para su studio. Hilda Otalara de
Fernandez, Alonso Gonzalez G., eds. BogotA:
Institute Caro y Cuervo, 1986. 696p. $12.00.

Les ibos de I'Am6lie: destin6e d'une car-
gaison de traite clandestine a la Martin-
ique, 1822-1838. Frangoise Thesee. Paris:
Editions Caraibeennes, 1986. 135p. 78F.

Jean Rhys: The West Indian Novels. Ther-
esa F. O'Connor. New York U. Press, 1986.
$35.00.

Mario Vargas LLosa. Raymond Leslie Wil-
liams. Ungar, 1986. 230p. $15.95.

Mujeres poetas de Hispanoam6rica:
movimiento, surgencia e insurgencia.
Ramiro Lagos. Bogota: Ediciones Tercer
Mundo, 1986. 339p. $15.00.

Protagonistas de la literature hispanoameri-
cana del siglo XX. Emmanuel Carballo.
Coordinaci6n de Difusi6n Cultural, Direcci6n
de Literature, U. At6noma de M6xico, 1986.
206p. [Interviews]

Race and Color in Brazilian Literature.
David Brookshaw. Scarecrow Press, 1986.
356p. $32.50.

Sangre bajo las banderas: de Rusia vino
el martillo y la hoz de mi garganta. Enrique
Piedra. Miami: Ediciones Universal, 1986.
101p. $9.95. [Poems by a Cuban exile.]

A State of Independence. Caryl Phillips.
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1986. 158p. $13.95.
[Novel about St. Kitts]

46/CARIBBEAN REVIEW

Wilson Harris and the Modern Tradition:
A New Architecture of the World. Sandra
E. Drake. Greenwood Press, 1986. 229p.
$29.95. [A study of the Guyanese author.]

Years of Fighting Exile: Collected Poems,
1955-1985. Milton Vishnu Williams. Leeds,
Eng.: Peepal Tree Press, 1986. 85p. $7.50.

POLITICS AND GOVERNMENT

Agonia y muerte de la Revoluci6n Mexi-
cana: el triunfo del sistema. Alejandro del
Palacio Diaz. M6xico: Claves Latinoamerica-
nas, 1986. 183p. 2500 pesos.

America Latina hacia el 2000: opciones y
estrategias. Gonzalo Martner, ed. Caracas:
Editorial Nueva Sociedad, 1986. 271p.

Avenir des Guyanes. Guy Numa. Paris:
Editions Caribeennes, 1986. 180p. 76F.

Calamity in the Caribbean: Puerto Rico
and the Bomb. Louise L. Cripps. Schenk-
man, 1987. 185p. $16.95; $9.95 paper.

The Central American Impasse. Giuseppe
Di Palma, Laurence Whitehead, eds. St.
Martin's Press, 1986. 272p. $32.50.

Comparing New Democracies: Transition
and Consolidation in Mediterranean Europe
and the Southern Cone. Enrique A. Baloyra,
ed. Westview Press, 1987. 300p. $32.50.

Confronting Revolution: Security Through
Diplomacy in Central America. Morris Blach-
man, William LeoGrande, Kenneth E. Sharpe.
Pantheon Books, 1986. 438p. $12.95.

Contadora and the Diplomacy of Peace in
Central America. Bruce Michael Bagley, ed.
Westview Press, 1987. 2 vols. $61.00.

David and Goliath: The U.S. War Against
Nicaragua. William Robinson, Kent Nors-
worthy. Monthly Review Press, 1987. 320p.
$26.00; $10.00.

Dominant Powers and Subordinate States:
The United States in Latin America and the
Soviet Union in Eastern Europe. Jan F.
Triska, ed. Duke U. Press, 1986. 515p. $57.50;
$16.95.

Elections and Democratization In Latin
America, 1980-1985. Paul W. Drake, Eduar-
do Silva, eds. San Diego: Center for Iberian
and Latin American Studies, U. of California,
1986. 353p. $17.00.

Elementos de Andlisis: de una teoria de
seguridad para la democracia venezolana.
Antonio Varela. Caracas: Ediciones de la
Presidencia de la Republica, 1986. 157p.

The Iberian-Latin American Connection:
Implications for U.S. Foreign Policy. How-
ard J. Wiarda, ed. Westview Press, 1986.
495p. $25.00.

Jose Marti and the Cuban Revolution Re-
traced. Edward Gonzalez, ed. Los Angeles:
Latin American Center, U. of California, 1986.
93p.

Latin America and the Comintern, 1919-
1943. Manuel Caballero. Cambridge U. Press,
1987. 224p. $39.50.

The Mexican Left, the Popular Movements,
and the Politics of Austerity. Barry Carr,
ed. San Diego: Center for U.S.-Mexican Stud-
ies, U. of California, 1986. $9.00.

Mexico: Paradoxes of Stability and Change.
Daniel C. Levy, Gabriel Sz6kely. 2d ed., rev.
and updated. Westview Press, 1987. 332p.
$31.00; $13.95.

Political Change and Public Opinion in
Grenada, 1979-1984. Patrick Emmanuel et
als. Cave Hill, Barbados: Institute of Social
and Economic Research, U. of the West
Indies, 1986. 173p. $17.50.

Reagan Versus the Sandinistas: The Un-
declared War on Nicaragua. Thomas W.
Walker, ed. Westview Press, 1987. 275p.
$30.00; $14.95.

Redemocratization in Bolivia. Jerry R. Lad-
man, Juan A. Morales, eds. Tempe: Center
for Latin American Studies, Arizona State U.,
1986. 150p. $30.00.

Revolution in El Salvador: Origins and
Evolution. Tommie Sue Montgomery. 2d
ed., rev. and updated. Westview Press, 1987.
270p. $32.50; $14.95.

Revolutionary Organizations in Latin Amer-
ica. Michael Radu, Vladimir Tismaneanu.
Westview Press, 1987. 260p. $34.50.

Revolutionary Social Democracy: The Chil-
ean Socialist Party. Benny Pollack, HernAn
Rosencranz. St. Martin's Press, 1986. 244p.
$29.95.

Statecraft, Domestic Politics, and Foreign
Policy Making: The El Chamizal Dispute.
Alan C. Lamborn, Stephen P. Mumme.
Westview Press, 1987. 150p. $18.00.

Transition from Authoritarian Rule: Latin
America. Guillermo O'Donnell, Philippe C.
Schmitter, Laurence Whitehead, eds. Johns
Hopkins U. Press, 1986. 272p. $10.95.

Where is Nicaragua? Peter Davis. Simon
and Schuster, 1987. $17.95.

REFERENCE

Bibliographic Guide to Gabriel Garcia
Mdrquez, 1979-1985. Margaret Estella Fau,
Nelly Sfeir de Gonzalez. Greenwood Press,
1986. 198p. $35.00.

Biographical Dictionary of Councilors of
the Indies, 1717-1808. Mark A. Burkholder.
Greenwood Press, 1986. 229p. $35.00.

Dicionario biogrifico: judaizantes e ju-
deus no Brasil, 1500-1808. Egon Wolff,
Frieda Wolff. Rio de Janeiro, 1986. 222p.

Escritores de la dlispora cubana, manual
biobibliogrdfico: Cuban Exile Writers, A
Biobibliographical Handbook. Daniel C. Ma-
ratos, Mamesba D. Hill, eds. Scarecrow Press,
1986. 407p. $35.00.

Latin American Literary Authors: An An-
notated Guide to Bibliographies. David S.
Zubatsky. Scarecrow Press, 1987. $32.50.

Latinos in the United States: A Historical
Bibliography. Albert M. Camarillo, ed. Santa
Barbara, Calif.: ABC-Clio, 1986. 350p. $32.50.

La mujer en Chile: bibliografia comentada.
Ana Maria Arteaga, Eliana Largo. Santiago:
Centro de Estudios de la Mujer, 1986. 284p.

El negro en la literature hispanoameri-
cana: bibliografia y hemerografia. Andre
Bansart. Caracas: Editorial de la U. Sim6n
Bolivar, 1986. 113p.

Paraguay: cinco atios de bibliografia, 1980-
1984. Margarita Kallsen. Asunci6n: Cromos,
1986. 145p.

CARIBBEAN REVIEW/47

Southeast Florida's Comprehensive Public University

Florida International University (FIU) is the fourth largest
university in the State University System (SUS) of Florida. FIU
is a multi-campus institution in the Miami metropolitan area,
with an enrollment currently exceeding 16,500 students in 153
undergraduate and graduate programs, more than 600 full-time
faculty and an annual budget of $100 million. FIU is embarking
on an era of institutional development appropriate for the major
public university in the state's largest metropolitan area.
FIU offers a variety of academic programs and courses at the
bachelor's, master's and doctorate degree levels. Degree level
programs are offered in the College of Arts and Sciences, College
of Business Administration, College of Education, College of
Engineering and Applied Sciences, School of Hospitality
Management, School of Nursing, and School of Public Affairs
and Services. Graduate study at the doctoral level is available in
Computer Science, Education, Psychology, and Public
Administration.
FIU-located in one of the nation's fastest growing
metropolitan areas and centers for international trade, finance
and cultural exchange-emphasizes broad interdisciplinary educa-
tion for strengthening understanding of world issues and prepar-
ing students for membership in our modern interrelated world.
The Latin American and Caribbean Center, one of twelve US
Department of Education National Resource Centers, coor-
dinates teaching and research on the region, administers an
academic certificate program, and supports research. Contact:
Latin American and Caribbean Center, (305) 554-2894.
There are also special international programs at the graduate
level. The Graduate Program in International Studies is a
multidisciplinary curriculum leading to the Master of Arts
degree. Contact: Director, Graduate Program in International
Studies, (305) 554-2555.
A program in International Economic Development is offered

as part of the Master of Arts in Economics. Contact: Chairper-
son, Department of Economics, (305) 554-2316.
A Master of International Business provides basic manage-
ment tools and familiarity with the international environment.
Contact: Director, Master of International Business, (305)
940-5870.
The Certificate in International Bank Management provides
training in international banking policy, practice, and techni-
ques. Contact: Business Counseling Office, (305) 554-2781.
All students may use the facilities of the English Language
Institute, which conducts a writing laboratory for individualized
instruction in all types of writing, provides diagnostic testing of
oral and written English language proficiency, and operates the
Intensive English Program. This consists of a four-month
course, offered three times a year, providing instruction in
reading, conversation, grammar, composition, TOEFL prepara-
tion and business English, using the most advanced teaching
methods and modern laboratory equipment. Contact: Director,
English Language Institute, (305) 554-2493.
Florida International University's faculty members are
renowned for their commitment to teaching, research and ser-
vice from an international perspective. Individual and group
research projects run the gamut of possible topics and
geographic regions. Faculty exchanges take FIU researchers
abroad and bring leading international scholars to the campus.
The University is also the base for several international
organizations such as the Institute of Economic and Social
Research of the Caribbean Basin (IESCARIBE). This group of
Caribbean Basin economists and research institutes develop
cooperative projects of mutual interest. Supported by FIU's
Department of Economics and Latin American and Caribbean
Center, the group conducts seminars and publishes resulting
materials.

Florida International University

1965 TM

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We've got a love affair
going with a fleet of Tall
Ships, and we're looking
for an intimate group of
congenial guys and gals
to share our decks. We're
not the Love Boat, but
we'll take on anybody
when it comes to sailing

and fun in the exotic Ca-
ribbean. There's running'
with the wind to great ports
o' call for those with itchy
feet and a love of adven-
ture. Cruises to the loveliest
places in paradise start
from $625. We'd love to
send you our brochure.

affi
". X ,"

Windiamme, 0
P.O. Box 120, Dept. 3427
Miami Beach, FL 33119-0120
TOLL FREE (800) 327-2600
in FL (800) 432-3364

*Windjamme
1amrefoofOuis
P.O. Box 120, Dept. 3427
Miami Beach, FL 33119-0120
TOLL FREE (800) 327-2600
in FL (800) 432-3364

I want to share the love affair. Tell me how.
NAME
ADDRESS
CITY/STATE/ZIP

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What better way to fly to and from the Netherlands because that is the way of our Dutch and Antillean
Antilles than on its own airline, ALM! From the moment heritage.
you step aboard and enter the bright, pleasant and
freshly appointed cabin of your Super 80 jet, you feel the Other airlines will fly you to the Caribbean, but not the
difference... the difference in our multi-lingual cabin way we do.
attendants who speak your language, assist you and The Super 80 is one of the most advanced commercial
care for you ... the difference in the comfortable jets in the sky, incorporating the most sophisticated
seating with plenty of leg room .. and ah, the advancements in performance and passenger comfort.
difference in the food. ALM prides itself on good service, The roomiest, most comfortable coach class seats
from the ticket agents at the counter, to the in-flight available. Even wider in First Class. ALM is the leader in
personnel, to the ground crews and baggage handlers. Caribbean air service. Fly with ALM. You'll see and feel
The courtesies and friendliness remain unchanged, the delightful difference.

9a0=1

ANTILLEAN AIRLINES C
THE AIRLINE OF THE DUTCH CARIBBEAN J e

2elightfu[ difference YOUR TRAVEL AGENT KNOWS

1 ~ --- ~ --- -- --C---~---------~-- - ~L-IC -IIII~I

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	Front Cover
	Table of Contents
	Foreword
	Main
	Back Matter
	Back Cover

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