Caribbean Review

|CAPBBEAN
IE WINTER 1987 No.3
S1( m VOL. XV FIVE DOLLARS

CULTIVATING A CARIBBEAN SENSIBILITY 6 DOMINICAN SWAN SONG
SCOLOMBIA'S RACIAL BLENDER jSPANGLISH AS EQUIPMENT FOR LIVING
03 i MEXICO'S FRIDA KAHLO i FAREWELL TO AMAZONIA?

S501V 445

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going with a fleet of Tall
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for an intimate group of
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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
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UJindjammtn O

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

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-.-y "

SWind Jommer
'o13arefb 'Ouim
PO. 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

Marley, an icon of the people, see p. 4

K I

A preference for whiteness, see p. 18

Only rubbing will make us free, see p. 20

CAI?BBEAN

F719"w^

In this issue

3
Crossing Swords
The US and A New Haiti
By Robert Maguire

4
Cultivating A
Caribbean Sensibility
Media, Education and Culture
By Rex Nettleford

9
Music and Politics in Jamaica
By Jay S. Kaufman

10
Running Out of Options
in Jamaica
Seaga and Manley Compared
By Carl Stone

13
A Contest that Became
A Referendum
By Bernard D. Headley

14
A Democratic Shoot-Out
in the D.R.
An Analysis of the 1986 Elections
By Jonathan Hartlyn

17
Caribbean Swan Song
Joaquin Balaguer
By Peter R. Greiff

Cover
Crop Time, 1955, by Jamaican
artist Albert Huie (Oil on canvas)

18
Claro, Trigueflo, Moreno
Testing for Race in Cartagena
By Mauricio Soladn, Eduardo Vdlez
and Cynthia Smith

20
Spic Chic
Spanglish as Equipment for Living
By Gustavo P6rez Firmat

22
The Biography of an Artist
Mexico's Frida Kahlo
Reviewed by Jan Michael Hanvik

26
Farewell to Amazonia?
How to Invest in its Future
A Review Essay by William T Vickers

37
Interlingual Poetry
By Gustavo P6rez Firmat

40
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

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
Approximately 300 pp.

1986
$17.95

PROBLEMS OF DEVELOPMENT IN
BEAUTIFUL COUNTRIES: Perspectives on the
Caribbean. Ransford W. Palmer, Howard
University, 1984, 91 pp. + xvii
ISBN: 0-913897-02-7. $12.50
"This is a concise book that manages, through
thorough analysis, to achieve what the author
has set out to do.... Professor Palmer not only
achieved his goal but has provided us with
what is, to date, the most definitive work on the
economic problems of the Caribbean and the
relevant policy issues. THIRD WORLD
QUARTERLY.

BIG REVOLUTION, SMALL COUNTRY: The
Rise and Fall of the Grenada Revolution. Jay R.
Mandle, Temple University, 1985, 107 pp. + xi,
index ISBN: 0-913897-03-5.

"[A] tightly argued little book ... with facts and
theory to dismantle the assertions of PRG
[People's Revolutionary Government] success
and liberation from dependency." JOURNAL
OF INTERAMERICAN STUDIES AND WORLD
AFFAIRS.
Add $1.50 for the first book and $0.50 for each additional
book for postage and handling. Orders from individuals
must be prepaid. Make checks or money order (U.S. dol-
lars) payable to:

A" THE NORTH-SOUTH PUBLISHING CO.
P.O Box 610
| Lanham, Maryland 20706

Winter 1987
EDITrroR AND PUBLISHER
Barry B. Levine
MANAGING EDITOR
June S. Belkin
ASSOCIATE EDITORS
Richard A. Dwyer
Elizabeth Lowe
William T. Vickers
AsSIrANTr EDITOR
Joann Biondi
AmR AND FILM EDITOR
Ricardo Pau-Llosa
BOOK REVIEW EDITOR
Forrest D. Colburn

Henry S. Gill
Eneid Routtd G6mez
Peter R. Greiff

Vol. XV. No. 3

Five Dollars

ASSOCIATE PUBLISHERBuSINESS
Jill E. Rapperport
ASSOCIATE PUBLISHER/EDITORIAL
Rosario A. Levine
BIBLIOGRAPHER
Marian Goslinga
CARTOGRAPHER
Linda M. Marston
GRAPHIC DESIGNERS
Angel A. Marti
Marla E. Marti
Alex SuArez
CIRCULATION MANAGER
Marisela Borondo

CONTRIBUTsNG EDITORS

Aaron L. Segal
Andr6s Serbin
Olga J. Wagenheim

BOARD OF EDITORS
Reinaldo Arenas James A. Mau
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GermAn Carrera Damas Daniel Oduber
Yves Daudet Robert A. Pastor
Edouard Glissant Selwyn Ryan
Harmannus Hoetink Carl Stone
Gordon K. Lewis Edelberto Torres Rivas
Vaughan A. Lewis Jos6 Villamil
Leslie Manigat Gregory B. Wolfe
Caribbean Review, a quarterly joumal dedicated to the Caribbean, Latin America,
and their emigrant groups, is published by Caribbean Review, Inc., a corporation
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2/CARIBBEAN REVIEW

SCAI?BBEAN

M VIE W

Founded in Puerto Rico in 1969

Crossing Swords

The US and A New Haiti

By Robert Maguire

On the morning of Jean-Claude
and Michele's departure, many
Haitians moved about with
tree branches in their hands, using them
as brooms to symbolically sweep out
the evil spirits that had inhabited their
country for so many years. Such out-
ward signs of liberation are hopefully
the beginning of change in Haiti.
Given the breadth and depth of Haiti's
poverty and its concomitant needs, walk-
ing tall, speaking out and cleansing
communities of the evil of the tonton
macoutes, though necessary prerequisites
of broader change, will not in them-
selves directly satisfy the hard and fast
economic needs of the country.
The result of years of exploitation
was a polarization of the country; re-
sources were concentrated in the hands
of a few, mostly city dwellers while the
countryside was progressively impover-
ished. The call coming from rural Haiti
in the aftermath of February 7th is for
two changes. First, the country must
be depolarized. The imbalance of re-
source expenditure should be reversed
so that public funds are invested geo-
graphically in direct proportion to where
the population resides. Second, the whole-
sale extraction of wealth from the coun-
tryside should end, with the dismantling
of the "squeeze and suck" system.
"Squeeze and suck," or pesi-sousi,
is a term borrowed from the Haitian
popsicle which comes in a plastic tube
and is eaten by squeezing at the bottom
of the tube while sucking at the top.
The following story illustrates how
pesd-souse debilitated the Haitian spirit
during the Duvalier years.
In the Haitian rural legal code, it
states that before a tree is cut down, the
owner of that tree must pay a tax of
five cents. The tax is to support a state
forest service with tree nurseries through-
out the country. Upon paying the tax,
the small farmer is supposed to receive
four or five seedlings, to be planted in
place of the single tree cut down.

The tax was paid to a public official,
the forest officer. But according to
pesd-souse the forest officer would
demand payment of anywhere from
$1.00 to $5.00 for permission to cut
down a tree. The extorted money did
not go toward supporting nurseries, but
rather went into the pocket of the agent,
often a macoute. The local forest agent,
in turn, was required to forward certain
sums of money along a chain of com-
mand to other macoutes, which moti-
vated the local official to extort the
most he could get Taxes not only for
tree cutting, but for all sorts of other
services, were set as much as 100 times
the legal fee, reaching up to five percent
of a peasant's annual income.
Demacoutization has to occur on two
levels. The first, the literal dechou-
kaj (uprooting) of those who wore the
blue denim of the macoutes has been
done. No longer do blue uniformed
militia overtly terrorize Haitian citizens.
But there are scores of Haitians, both
former tonton macoutes and those in-
doctrinated to macoutism by living under
it for so long, who have a ma-
coute mentality. Hence, a second de-
choukaj, the casting out of that mental-
ity, is underway. It will be a long,
tedious process of education and re-
orientation, but for Haiti to achieve its
democratic potential, this second cast-
ing out must be as definitive as the first.
Most Haitians with whom I spoke
urged United States support in helping
to: 1. Depolarize the country by build-
ing up the rural infrastructure, particu-
larly roads, ports, drinking water, small
scale irrigation and energy systems.
2. Dismantle the public, parastatal and
private monopolies that bled the Haitian
people. 3. Reconstruct the infrastructure
of regional port towns, destroyed by the
Duvaliers.
The figurative demacoutization of the
country can be furthered with financial
assistance to support Haitian democratic
processes, particularly by helping to

insure that honest, clear and complete
information is available to the Haitian
people.
Very specific things can now be
done, for example: Supporting Radio
Soleil, the Catholic radio station that
plays a crucial role in civic education.
* Backing the national literacy program
launched last year by the Haitian Catho-
lic bishops. Assisting local programs
of legal aid and the protection of
citizens' rights. Urging that ma-
coutes and criminals of the old regime
be brought to trial swiftly. Pressuring
for the return of resources stolen by the
dictatorship. Helping to ensure that
macoutes who fled Haiti not pose a
threat to Haitian stability in the future.
* Expanding development education
programs that work with the rural poor.
* Aiding community-based programs
that enable producers to improve and
protect the environment, to have access
to credit at fair rates, and to store,
transform and market their crops. This
will facilitate control beyond the farm
gate and result in value added in the
hands of poor producers.
Haiti is not just Port-au-Prince. We
should not be distracted by the attempts
of urban leaders to protect the status-
quo to the detriment of the evolution
of democratic processes in rural areas.
"Port-au-Prince," I was warned, "a
toujours mangi les revolutions" ("Port-
au-Prince has always eaten the revolu-
tions"). Responsive and responsible sup-
port from the United States to the
Haitian people, during what is being
called Haiti's second liberation, will
enable the Haitian people to become
healthier neighbors.
Robert Maguire is the
representative for Haiti
of the Inter-American
Foundation in Wash-
ington. He has worked
on Haitian development
problems for nearly a
decade. These ideas
are his own.

CARIBBEAN REVIEW/3

Cultivating A Caribbean Sensibility

Media, Education and Culture
By Rex Nettleford

Central to postcolonial reality is
how Caribbean countries are
to attain ideal form and pur-
pose. Immediately, the dilemma of shap-
ing the political order comes to mind.
Power having been transferred from
Great Britain, the question is how is
that power to be distributed, where is
it to be located, and who should admin-
ister it. Distribution, locus, and power
brokering are not, as concerns, merely
internal to the region or to its individual
constituent nations. The external dimen-
sions of the problematique of indepen-
dent existence loom large in Super-
power bids to control this or that sphere
of influence in a hegemonic rivalry that
carries with it opposing worldviews of
man and his relation to the environment.
Cultural penetration and intellectual
domination have, however, become cur-
rent buzzwords in any critique of the
new dispensation of a Caribbean which
is still struggling to decolonize itself
from three centuries of transplantation,
exploitation and psychic disrepair. De-
spite this, there has been positive achieve-
ment in terms of some self-definition
through creolization, that awesome pro-
cess of shaping, delineating, articulating
self and society out of the contradictions
and complexities of criss-cross encoun-
ters between differing civilizations un-
equally matched on foreign soil.
Much of this has been achieved by
cultural resistance filtered through the
sense and sensibility of the majority of
transplanted souls who had to come to
terms with their new environment; who
dominated the production process by

Rex Nettleford is director of extra-mural studies
and head of the Trade Union Education
Institute at the University of the West Indies
in Mona, Jamaica. He is the founder and
artistic director of the National Dance Theatre
Company of Jamaica. He is author of Carib-
bean Cultural Identity: The Case of Jamaica.

the centrality of their labor to that
process, and actually shaped the cul-
tural profile, albeit of the "lower orders,"
by the sheer superiority of numbers as
much as by the ingenuity forged from
having to survive.
As with people anywhere, it was the
exercise of intellect and imagination
which marked off the real parameters
of combat and decided who governed
and who ruled. If the British imperial
power governed for those 300-odd years
under colonialism, it was the ordinary
people who ruled. Their devices were
regarded as subculturall." But that
subculture seeping from underground,
or as Edward Kamau Brathwaite would
say, seeping from under the sea (subma-
rine), influenced, coerced, teased the
ethos into something definably "Car-
ibbean." The languages, religious expres-
sions, kinship patterns, artistic expres-
sions even the indigenous modes of
production, distribution and exchange
- as well as the native organization
of action groups with recognized lead-
ers, all had their own intrinsic logic
often forcing the Establishment to either
resist or appropriate them. What is
certain is that their autonomy and legiti-
macy were never fully conceded and
they were to become rallying points for
politicians pleading self-government
before Independence only to be abandon-
ed by some once power was won.
Caribbean identity carries, then, the
internal imperative of making Carib-
bean cultural realities, rooted in the
exercise of the creative imagination and
intellect by the "people from below,"
central to the ethos of the post-colonial
Caribbean.
It is against the background of this
challenge that the media, education and
the fact of culture become variables
shaping the modern Caribbean not only
in terms of its own internal identity and

self-articulation but also of its relation-
ship to the outside world.
With respect to the latter, the contend-
ing ideological "scaffoldings" that prop
up the Western liberal democratic tradi-
tion of Europe and the US on the one
hand, and the Marxist/Socialist commit-
ment of the USSR and the Iron Curtain
countries on the other, serve to com-
plicate the efforts of the region to find
itself on its own terms.
Moreover, voluntary membership in
the Third World and/or non-Aligned
groupings does not solve the problem

4/CARIBBEAN REVIEW

The National Dance Theatre Company of Jamaica

of geopolitical identity since confusion
reigns as to what constitute the First
and Second worlds. Moreover, how can
one rely on putative members of the
Third World when oil-producing Third
Worlders, poor bauxite countries vic-
tims of the old international economic
order, parts of Latin America which
culturally identify more with Europe
than with the developing world, may
at any time wish to pursue their own
interests independent of membership in
a club of the underdeveloped. Others,
designated as a Fourth World, would

regard the countries of the Caribbean,
with the exception of Haiti, as relatively
prosperous.
Talk about some third path to develop-
ment, other than the traditional market-
forces capitalist one or the conventional
centrally-planned economy, is regarded
as an impossible dream. The very at-
tempt to find any such path in terms
of the cultural realities of the region (to
use the language of the trade) is frus-
trated by persistent efforts to retain a
world order in which some remain
subordinates of others.

The media, education and culture are
devices or weapons, cleverly manipu-
lated or aggressively brandished, to
both intimidate and woo a region like
the Caribbean into submission. The
Commonwealth Caribbean has become
a big section of the "basin" as part of
Washington's initiative to spur eco-
nomic growth through exports with
Jamaica as "showpiece." Jamaica read-
ily accepted the challenge with the
Jamaican prime minister reported by
Newsweek [2 May 1983] as saying that
the heavy dose of American television
fare on the Jamaican Broadcasting Cor-
poration "helps to keep his nation
stable." There was no challenge to the
accuracy of the report. The media spoke
and the world believed.

THE MEDIA

The role of the media indeed takes on
a particularly ominous character. The
region's knowledge of English the
international language of commerce and
cross-cultural discourse is a potential
source of strength, for obvious reasons.
It is also a most ready cause of the
region's vulnerability under the bom-
bardment by its most powerful neigh-
bor, the United States. Newspapers,
books, radio and television originating
in the US are easily accessible to both
the schooled and unschooled.
Some predict a progressive "American-
ization" of the region in things of the
most fundamental importance to the life
and being of its inhabitants. For exam-
ple, in deciding to go "color" the entire
region adopted the American NTSC
format over the European PAL one.
The Jamaicans resorted to public con-
troversy over the choice but succumbed
to the "inevitable." The destiny of the
region was tied up with that of the US.

CAmIBBEAN REVIEWI5

Language, access to spare parts, tech-
nological compatibility with the great-
est market for Jamaican and Caribbean
cultural fare, etc., etc., were cited to
justify the choice.
Geographical proximity to the United
States and the availability of rapid
travel by air facilitate what is now
perceived to be calculated cultural pen-
etration of the region by the world's
most powerful nation. American influ-
ence dates back to the '30s and before;
but then it had to contend with a hardy
British culture transferred to John Bull's
oldest outpost of Empire conditioned
for three centuries via Anglican ortho-
doxies, grammar schools, law courts,
cricket and "patriots" returning from
the London School of Economics,
Oxford, Cambridge and assorted Scot-
tish universities. With the departure of
British colonialism and the advent of
socialist Cuba, the penetration has seem-
ingly intensified and the traditional
resistance has been emasculated by
geopolitics. The media (both print and
electronic) are cashiered into service,
sometimes unwittingly, to support this
penetration.
The prevalence of satellite dishes
(some estimated 7,000 in Jamaica alone)
confirms the ease of access and the
threat of conscious conditioning of im-
portant segments of the population away
from a Caribbean sensibility. Not even
the Jamaican government's decision to
tax the dishes heavily will deter the
dish owners. Interestingly enough one
public advocate of the tax (a junior
minister) had recommended the tax on
the basis that the revenue could be used
to produce and transmit local television
programs to counteract the influence of
those picked up on the dish. This was
not even mentioned in the enactment
of the measure: the government was
more concerned with balancing the
budget as a matter of priority rather
than protecting identity interests. A
subsequent statement by the Jamaican
prime minister [19 March 1986] di-
vulged that the count on satellite dishes
was only 2,000 and not the original
7,000 cited. He informed the nation
that the revenue from the tax would
indeed be used to finance programs to
be aired on Channel 2, a public service
channel dedicated to culture and the
arts. Meanwhile Ted Turner's CNN
(upbeat and admittedly informative) is
ubiquitous. It has even influenced some
local productions in style if not content.

The "Dallasization" of consciousness
is effective as soap operas transmit to
Caribbean people images of material
opulence not likely to be in the grasp
of most.
Many express deep concern about the
programming patterns and the ownership/
control structures of television in the
region. They maintain that if foreign
ownership threatens to alienate the Ca-
ribbean from itself, government owner-
ship threatens to imprison an entire
people within the platitudes and self-
serving propaganda of small groups of
protagonists of this or that ideological
persuasion. A vicious circle, sigh the
cynics; a case for radical change, cry
the activists!
In the Bahamas (Grand Bahama)
there is 100% foreign domination of
television. There is no local television.
In Antigua/Barbuda the ABS-Television
is government-owned. There is 60%
American programming and 40% local,
most of which are government informa-
tion programs. There is also privately
owned cable television but this offers
100% American programming 24 hours
a day with 12 channels for viewing. It
is pertinent to note that 80% of the local
viewing population are connected to
cable. In Trinidad, TTT has 20% local
programming, 24 hours a day. The rest
is foreign. In Dominica, cable television
reaches 5,000 people 88 hours per week

with 100% foreign programming. The
Dominican government insisted on one
hour a day on all eight channels but
lack of staff (and funds) prevent current
use. Guyana in its (questionable) wisdom
has no television. But television sets
and satellite dishes receiving channels
from the US abound.
Jamaica has a government-owned sta-
tion (JBC) which is technically up for
divestment and the intention is to encour-
age local material for use by the station.
But the foreign input outweighs the
local though real efforts are made to
increase. the latter. Government control
is heavily felt in the JBC and has been
the subject of public controversy since
the late '60s through the '70s and now
in the '80s. The announcement of a
media policy recently attracted attacks
from the print media accusing the gov-
ernment of state ownership (despite its
market-forces philosophy) and monop-
oly control (by not extending television
licences into private hands). The pa-
radox is that the broadsides have come
from the Daily Gleaner, itself long
viewed as a private monopoly.
The other dailies in Barbados (the
Barbados Advocate and the Nation) and
Trinidad and Tobago (the Trinidad Ex-
press and the Guardian) along with
Jamaica's Gleaner and Star are all
privately owned escaping the dullness
of "palace releases" but guaranteeing

6/CARIBBEAN REVIEW

power to the well-off and to sections
of an articulate intelligentsia.
The radio in an oral tradition of
information transmission, is very acces-
sible thanks to the advent of the transis-
tor. It may well be the one media
serving the mass of the population best,
and possibly one of the greatest hopes
for Caribbean identity. One in three
persons is said to own a radio receiver.
Ownership of radio stations is shared
between governments and private per-
sons though there is government monop-
oly in some countries. Radio Jamaica
is co-operatively owned.
Government interference is real: the
BBC model of old has undergone seri-
ous sea-change in its journey across the
Atlantic. The interference is not always
in the interest of Caribbean identity in
a world of conflicting ideas. Again, the
East-West dissensus is likely to prompt
the sort of programming that lauds
Washington over Moscow or makes
claims for Castro over Reagan, depend-
ing on who is in power. Equally bad is
interest in glorifying a particular leader
or leaders to the exclusion of others at
home. But there are correctives of not
insignificant proportions.
The disc jockeys, as if in defiance,
play the music "of the people" which
is abhorred by the well-to-do; and the
call-in shows ("Public Eye"and "Hot-

line" in Jamaica, "Catapult" in Bar-
bados) provide the wider populace with
a voice. The politicians in Jamaica have
cottoned on to the game: they also call
in, monopolizing long periods of time
explaining their policies all in the name
of democratic dialogue. The Jamaican
prime minister is now available for
answers to questions of moment in a
special weekly program aired from his
office. It is an attempt to hear the
people out. It can do nothing but good
for Jamaican life and for Caribbean
political identity.
The region is, nevertheless, in danger
in its use of the media to deprive itself
of that most necessary means of self-
perception, i.e. releasing itself from the
stasis of a cosy bipolarization into a
more dynamic state of existence hope-
fully to be perceived in terms of con-
tinuing social interaction and an organic
interpenetration between the myriad
points of reference available to human
intelligence and activity. Greater use
of dialectical thinking is needed.

EDUCATION

The region has a major responsibility
to facilitate the formation of its citizens
through a learning process that will
guarantee intellectual plasticity, flexibil-

ity and adaptability which are the cause,
occasion and result of creative thinking
and action. There is need for education
perceived in terms of (a) the condition
of an all-inclusive learning process embrac-
ing all the elements involved on the
road to cognition and providing the
learner with life skills for coping with
a range of contradictions, and (b) the
condition of a world defined by cul-
tural, racial, political and social diver-
sity. An integrated universe of knowl-
edge is being invoked in preparing
individuals to develop a kaleidoscopic
view of the world while they retain a
full grasp of the nature, function and
potential of the individual elements,
each of which possesses a separate
existence but together form differing
patterns with every new shift in the
position of the parameters within which
they dynamically co-exist. In this, there
is no place for the abolition of the social
sciences which train the mind for dia-
lectical thinking; though through their
penchant to critique, question, and doubt,
they can be a humbug to political
leaders who want to get on with the
job, without challenges from eggheads.
The region must however, address
education rather than simply training,
despite the pressure on respective com-
munities to meet manpower needs per-
ceived as so many statistical units in

CARIBBEAN REVIEW/7

the throughput from the educational
system. Here the role of the university
as part of an articulated system of
educational preparation is relevant. The
discussion is here threatened by the
conspicuous absence of any such articu-
lated educational policy in the region.
To emphasize one level of education at
the expense of another or to pit vocational/
technical against humanist/intellectual
kinds of training is to set up false
opposition and to rob the region's
inhabitants of the texture they need and
are capable of handling. All levels and
all types of education are now relevant
to the development of the region. Empha-
sis cannot be on primary/secondary at
the expense of tertiary. Otherwise the
region will continue to prepare its
people for migration elsewhere.
The universities and other tertiary-
level institutions cannot, on the other
hand, be regarded as ivory towers for
an elite few, chosen to hold the more
"radical and irresponsible elements of
the populace in check" as some ex-
pected of an earlier University of the
West Indies [Attributed to Sir James
Irvine, Chairman of the Committee
which recommended the establishment
of University College of the West
Indies, later UWI, and quoted by Kath-
leen Drayton in "UWI at the Cross-
roads" in Caribbean Contact August
1981].
Enlightened intellectual despotism is
no less obscene than the political exces-
ses that produce Mongoose gangs and
tonton macoutes. Access to the upper
reaches of knowledge, especially in the
creation of new and appropriate knowl-
edge for the region's perceived needs,
must be available to a wide cross-
section of the population. Otherwise the
loyalty, commitment and will to sustain
application for the good of the region
will not be forthcoming from the very
people in whose education the region
invests so much. It is a pity that the
endowment of institutions of research
and learning was not seen as integral
to the CBI which will be helpful only
if the validating factors of a sound
knowledge-base for producing what is
to be exported as well as adequate
management skills are in place.
Education is a social cost. It has been
the only means of social mobility for
most in the region and continues to be
seen as the light at the end of the tunnel
for the marginalized majority. In very
practical terms it is a necessity for

development strategies that hope to
bring to the mass of the population
nutrition, clean potable water, access
to good primary health care, jobs and
inexpensive housing.
The restructuring of the University
of the West Indies in October 1984 was
a fantastic exercise in bureaucratic engi-
neering. In effect, it gave to campus

territories (Jamaica, Barbados and Tri-
nidad) greater autonomy over the fund-
ing of the university operating in those
territories. Institutional arrangements gave
to the system a plethora of councils,
grants committees, academic commit-
tees in addition to cross campus facul-
ties, research institutes and outreach
programs. The delivery of university
services to non-campus countries was
central to the continuing involvement
of most of those territories in the UWI
system. The Office of the University
Services was established with Cave Hill
to serve the Organization of Eastern
Caribbean States' countries with Mona
to look after Belize, Bahamas, British
Virgin Islands, Turks and Caicos.

With new institutional mechanisms
in place, an organic restructuring must
now take place to better achieve what
the enlightened among its founding
fathers felt the UWI was about the
inculcating of values rooted in the
experience and realities of the Carib-
bean, guaranteeing to the region new
Caribbean men and women fully e-

quipped (skills-wise and philosophi-
cally orientation) to contribute to the
improvement of the social order in a
creative and lasting way. Closely re-
lated to this must be a commitment to
intellectual daring, independence of mind
and a will to action. The continuing
regional nature of the institution is a
sine qua non for achieving any of this.
There is, in fine, the need for curri-
cula at all levels of the educational
system to invest training with the agile
use of the mind so that carpenters and
mechanics know why as well as how
to work their planes and spanners. And
even if some should miss the oppor-
tunity of such rounded instruction, con-
Continued on page 28

8/CARIBBEAN REVIEW

Music and Politics in Jamaica

By Jay S. Kaufman

J amaican folk-music may be di-
wided between work music and
social music. Work music in-
cludes 'sugar-boiling', 'boat-loading' and
others which arose in Jamaica following
African traditions. Social music in-
cludes 'tea-meeting', 'anancy', and 'polit-
ical' varieties. Many of these folk forms
have been disappearing as they become
less relevant to the daily lives of Ja-
maican people. Those forms which con-
tinue to thrive, however, include Rasta-
farian music, children's songs, and polit-
ical songs. Jamaican popular music
continues an African tradition of polit-
ical and social commentary, especially
since the population no longer has
occasion to use music for many of its
former purposes, such as sugar-boiling.
Although many of the more pious
Rastamen reject Reggae because it is
performed for profit and uses European
(electric) instruments, the connection
between the two is no less substantial,
musically and thematically. With the
exception of Jimmy Cliff, a Muslim, all
major Jamaican Reggae musicians con-
sider themselves to be or identify heavily
with Rastafarians.
The creole comprador class in Ja-
maica developed an animosity toward
their African roots. Rastafarian-oriented
popular music, however, rekindled both
race-pride and Pan-Africanism among
the Black bourgeoisie in the late 1960s
with the development of modem Reggae
from earlier popular styles such as Ska
and Rock-Steady. As the music became
more carefully produced and recorded,
it became more accessible to the elite,
and this transformation carried with it
the implication that the Rastas them-
selves were also less far-out and had
become more refined.
Rastafarian participation in the estab-
lished political system has traditionally
been very limited, not only because of
discrimination against the brethren by
the government, but also because of a
belief on the part of the Rastas that
Babylonian 'politricks' were designed
to deceive and oppress them.

By the late 1960s, the Rastafarians
had become sufficiently numerous to
warrant attention from the leaders of the
two major political parties. In 1966,
Michael Manley, who had recently taken
leadership of his father's PNP, invited
Emperor Haile Selassie to Jamaica for
a state visit. The JLP, which was then
in power, agreed to the idea, consider-
ing the Rastafarians to be somewhat of
a nuisance, and assumed that Selassie
would deny his divinity and put an end
to the movement. To the contrary,
however, every denial by the Emperor
simply impressed audiences as acts of
humility and the religion flourished.
The significance of this event in the
broader scope was that it brought the
Rastafarians and their music into public
view to a greater extent than before. In
that same year The Maytals released the
first Reggae song, "Do The Reggae."
As the popularity and importance of
Reggae increased, musicians began to
consider themselves as part of the
political process, and to take advantage
of their influence over all sections of
the society. Indeed, by the early 1970s
everybody was listening to Reggae, and
by the 1976 election, competition for
the backing of Reggae stars by the two
parties became vicious.
"Reggae was used heavily on both
sides," explained disc jockey Don Top-
ping after the re-election of Michael
Manley and the PNP in December of
1976. "The politicians are very aware
of the power of the messages of these
songs; the person who controls music
in Jamaica to a certain extent controls
a huge mass of popular opinion."
As musicians began to feel their
influence, a sense of responsibility
emerged in many of their statements.
"We try in our music to unite the
people that everybody live together.
No more songs about girls..." pro-
claimed Big Youth. Yet many of the
expectations which existed at the time
of the 1976 election remained unful-
filled in the years that followed, and a
disillusionment with political involve-

ment reemerged. "The politicians should
be brought to trial!" said Prince Buster,
regarding Jamaican violence. To Mi-
chael Manley, Max Romeo wrote his
song "No, Joshua, No"
They think they have been used
I want you to know, Joshua
Rasta is watching and blaming you
Since you are my friend, Joshua
I want you to forward and start anew.
A number of the more critical post-
1976 Reggae numbers were banned by
the government, but banning was noth-
ing new, beginning as early as 1964,
when "Carry Go Bring Home" was
banned for criticizing the JLP leader
Alexander Bustamante. The PNP lost
power in 1980 despite efforts to silence
its most persistent critics, and Jamaican
musicians, though disillusioned with
the possibility of progress through the
established political process, continued
to play an active role in the years that
followed.
The fact that the Rastafarians, while
comprising no more than ten percent
of the Jamaican population, were able
to have such a dramatic impact on
political and cultural life speaks strongly
for the power of music in that society.
While music was at first the only way
in which Rastafarians could enter the
political process, it later dominated the
political arena to such an extent that
elections were almost won or lost by
the popularity of their campaign songs.
In the last decade Jamaican musi-
cians have increasingly turned their
attention outward, addressing political
issues on an international scale. The
world-wide acceptance of Reggae, as
well as the politicization of other Carib-
bean music (e.g., Salsa, Merengue and
especially Calypso), provides evidence
that the power of music to influence
political and social change is not lim-
ited to Jamaican society, but is some-
thing more fundamental and universal.
Jay S. Kaufman, an accomplished musician,
is a Watson Traveling Fellow studying the
relationship between popular music and poli-
tics in the Caribbean.

CARIBBEAN REVIEW19

Running Out Of Options in Jamaica

Seaga and Manley Compared
By Carl Stone

hen, in March 1982, US
president Ronald Reagan out-
lined his Caribbean Basin
Initiative, he hailed Jamaica under the
leadership of Prime Minister Edward
Seaga as a model for the rest of the
Caribbean. Both leaders, by happy coin-
cidence, came to power within weeks
of each other and established a close
relationship based on strong anti-Cuban
foreign policies, faith in the free enter-
prise system, a rejection of socialist
models of development and a vision of
the role the US should play in the
Caribbean to bolster democratic capital-
ist countries and isolate revolutionary
regimes and movements.
The Reagan administration poured
some $500 million of foreign aid into
this tiny country between 1981 and
1984 making Jamaica second only to
Israel in terms of quantum per capital
US foreign aid received over that period.
In addition, the Reagan administration
with the help of David Rockefeller and
a group of US business leaders helped
to promote Jamaica as an attractive
prospect for US investors. Federal laws
were waived to permit the US General
Services Administration to stockpile
Jamaican bauxite and special tariff breaks
were extended to Jamaica by the US
administration to promote Jamaican ex-
ports to the US.
Prior to Prime Minister Seaga's elec-
tion to office in October 1980, Jamaica
had eight years of socialist policies and
a Third World oriented foreign policy
under former prime minister Michael
Manley. Manley's close ties with Cuba's

Carl Stone chairs the Department of Govern-
ment at the University of the West Indies,
Mona. He is a leading pollster and newspaper
columnist and author of many books including
Power in the Caribbean Basin (ISHI, 1986)
arid Class, State and Democracy in Jamaica
(Praeger, 1986).

Prime Minister Seaga and President
Reagan. (Photo: J. B. Diederich)

Fidel Castro and his anti-imperialist
posturing alienated Washington and set
the stage for US hopes for the success
of a conservative successor. Four and
a half years after Prime Minister Seaga
replaced his socialist predecessor, Ja-
maica's economy remains in as deep a
crisis as was the case under Manley
leadership; the new ideological path and
massive US economic backing have
failed to move this small island econ-
omy any closer to recovery.

POLITICS & ECONOMICS

Manley's radical foreign policy and
radical rhetoric was combined with
rather moderate domestic economic and
social policies. The latter involved little
more than a Keynesian emphasis on
expansionist fiscal policies, and an im-
pulse to regulate the local private sector

10/CARIBBEAN REVIEW

and establish an economy that balanced
expanding public sector ownership with
private sector initiatives. Because the
administration's leftist rhetoric intimi-
dated the local private sector, a large
scale flight of capital and business
closures followed and set the stage for
rapid growth of public sector owner-
ship. Public spending as a share of GDP
grew from 22% in 1972 to 42% by
1980. A number of welfarist income
distribution policies were developed at
the same time as the country's private
sector was both declining and shrink-
ing. These included massive price sub-
sidies, price control of basic consumer
goods and rent control. Additionally, a
large number of state funded social
projects were developed to ease the
economic pressures on the poor.
The economic environment was sub-
jected to intense levels of politicization
which gave the impression that politics
and political objectives took precedence
over economic considerations. The pri-
vate sector had become convinced that
as long as the Manley administration
felt satisfied that its policies were popu-
lar, little weight was given to other
considerations. The result was a major
crisis of confidence between the gov-
ernment and the private sector.
The most far reaching policy of the
Manley administration was the imposi-
tion of a production levy on the multina-
tional bauxite companies. The intention
was to unilaterally increase the coun-
try's take from its main foreign ex-
change earner to compensate for the
steep increases in imported oil and
other import prices triggered by OPEC
in the 1970s. The levy earned for the
economy some US $150 million per
annum between 1974 and 1983. The
political impact was to give the Manley
administration an exaggerated sense of
confidence of how far mere political

will could defeat adverse international
economic interests. Instead of being
used for purposes related to national
development and investment as were
the stated intentions, the levy earnings
were frittered away on massive and
unproductive public spending and rap-
idly expanding recurrent expenditure.
The short run effect of the levy also
gave the Manley administration a false
confidence that it had the resources to
manage the economy despite weak pri-
vate sector support, open antagonism
from sectors of the local bourgeoisie
and hostility from foreign companies
and investors.
The levy only temporarily eased the
foreign exchange crisis as increased
demand for foreign exchange swelled
by high levels of public spending and
a large 16-18% budget deficit (over
GDP), combined with declines in tradi-
tional sources of hard currency earnings
(tourism, sugar, bananas, etc.) and fur-
ther increases in the cost of oil and
other imports. The impact of the levy
was reversed between 1974 and 1976.
Starting with big private bank bor-
rowing and continuing with large IMF
loans, the Manley administration reacted
by establishing a trend towards debt
capital dependence. The result was the
replacement of welfarist policies by
restrictive IMF stabilization measures.
As the foreign exchange crisis got
deeper, capital flight and illegal cur-
rency exports increased despite repres-
sive policy measures designed to regu-
late currency transactions. Severe short-
ages of food and consumer goods fol-
lowed while purchasing power, con-
sumer demand and production declined
as unemployment and the cost of living
increased. These developments destroyed
the base of Manley's popular support
and set the stage for Prime Minister
Seaga's election in October 1980.

CHANGING DIRECTION

The Seaga administration immediately
set about changing the direction of
Jamaica's foreign and domestic pol-
icies. Jamaica emerged as a US surro-
gate in the Caribbean promoting and
supporting President Reagan's foreign
policy. Within the region Jamaica spear-
headed strong political attacks against
the leftist regime in Grenada. With John
Compton in St. Lucia, Eugenia Charles
in Dominica and the late Tom Adams
in Barbados, Prime Minister Seaga

emerged as the leader of a strong
anti-leftist and pro-US alliance bent on
insulating the region from Marxist influ-
ences. Diplomatic ties with Cuba were
severed quite unceremoniously. When
the Bishop regime collapsed in Grenada
in 1983 due to violent internal factional
struggles, Prime Minister Seaga played
a key role in organizing Caribbean
support for the US invasion and in
organizing the restoration of parliamen-
tary democracy in what had become a
one party state. Jamaica's image in the
Third World underwent rather sudden
change from being identified with anti-

Former Prime Mininster Manley
(Photo: Jean Bernard Diederich)

imperialism and nonalignment to being
cast in the role of a surrogate of a
conservative and anti-Third World US
president.
In place of the domestic policy empha-
sis on state ownership established by
the Manley administration, Prime Min-
ister Seaga installed foreign investment
as the major lever for economic growth,
hoping for the foreign investor to bring
new technology, open up non-tradi-
tional markets to increase foreign ex-
change and ease the balance of pay-
ments crisis by substantial inflows of
capital. The Seaga administration also
committed itself to a policy of divesting
state owned enterprises.
Whereas the Manley administration
emphasized self-reliance as the top pri-
ority in economic policy thinking, the
Seaga administration shifted the empha-
sis towards exports and high tech-
nology. The new government fully en-

dorsed the World Bank-IMF structural
adjustment policies which seek to com-
bine trade liberalization to promote
export competitiveness with drastic
stabilization measures. The latter in-
clude slashing the high budget deficit,
extensive currency devaluations, wage
restraint, reliance on free market mech-
anisms for resource allocation, and tight
monetary policies combined with the
contraction of domestic demand to
reduce the balance of payments crisis
by cutting imports. By dismantling
import substitution and protected mar-
kets and by making the currency cheaper
and labor costs highly competitive, it
hoped to stimulate exports.
Borrowing from the IMF continued
on a larger scale than in the Manley
years. Other complementary aid sources
multiplied rapidly due to the strong
connection with Washington. Over the
1978 to 1980 period total non-IMF
international agency loans was US $188
million under Manley while in 1982
alone the Seaga administration attracted
US $232 million in aid and a much
larger US $600 million over a com-
parable 1981-83 period.
Complementing this emphasis on for-
eign capital and generous international
agency support was a large presence of
foreign experts and consultants in virtu-
ally every area of the economy. Under
Manley, local university academics, se-
lected civil servants and trusted party
advisors provided most of advice relied
on to guide economic policy. Under the
Seaga administration foreign consultants
took over this role.
The style of political administration
also changed. Continuous political mobi-
lization under Manley gave way to a
technocratic, managerial style under
Seaga. Whereas Manley operated as a
conceptualizer, communicator, teacher
and policy salesman and at a distance
from. policy details, Seaga got im-
mersed in administrative details in a
rather imperious presidential style that
centralized decision making in his hands.
Manley's constant consciousness rais-
ing rhetoric contrasted with Seaga's low
profile bureaucratic style.
The Jamaican private sector openly
welcomed the pro-business policy and
ideology of the Seaga regime and had
great expectations as to what was possi-
ble under this renewed climate of confi-
dence. Private sector optimism replaced
the negativism of the Manley years. In
contrast to the Manley period in which
conflicts with the IMF became major

CARIBBEAN REVIEW/l1

Table One
(A) Rate of Growth of GDP at Constant Prices
Manley Period
1973 1974 1975 1976 1977 1978 1979 1980
0.4 -3.9 -0.5 -6.2 -2.5 0.5 -1.5 -5.8
Seaga Period
1981 1982 1983 1984
3.2 0.04 1.8 0.5
GDP at Constant Prices ($Jmillion)
1973 1976 1980 1983 1984
$2,240 $2,011 $1,828 $1,922 $2,018
(B)Per Capita Consumption Level Private Consumption (in $J 1974)
1974 1977 1978 1980 1981 1982 1983
732 682 616 565 533 532 536
(C) Unemployment Unemployment as a % of the Labor Force
1973 1976 1980 1983
21.4 20.5 27.9 25.9
(D) Inflation % Change in all Items Price Index
1978 1979 1980 1981 1982 1983 1984
49% 20% 29% 6% 6% 17% 31%
Source: Economic and Social Survey (1973-1983) Monthly Statistical Review (Oct-Dec 1984)
Table Two Indicators of Income, Investment and Production
(A) Fixed Investment as % of GDP
Total Investment Public Sector Private Sector
1970 31.6 6.0 25.6
1974 22.2 6.0 16.2
1976 16.8 12.8 4.0
1978 13.4 9.8 3.6
1980 14.6 8.1 6.4
1982 20.3 11.4 8.9
1983 21.9 12.8 9.1
(B)Gross Profits as % of GDP
1973 1976 1980 1983
27% 25% 32% 26%
(C) Share of Labor Income Accruing to Top 20%
1972 1974 1976 1978 1980 1981
53% 57% 58% 58% 67% 75%
(D) Production Levels as % of 1973 Production by Sectors
1980 1983
Export Agriculture 72% 72%
Mining (Bauxite & Alumina) 89% 65%
Manufacturing 70% 76%
Domestic Agriculture 115% 113%
Sources: National Income & Product (1970-83), Economic and Social Survey (1970-83), Compton Bourne
"Economic Recession and Labor Income Inequality: A Jamaican Case Study"
Table Three Indicators of Trade, Debt and Budget Deficit
(A) Trade Imports and Exports as % of GDP
Exports Imports Deficit
1978 42% 41% 0%
1979 49% 50% 1%
1980 51% 53% 2%
1981 48% 58% 10%
1982 40% 52% 12%
(B) Foreign Public Debt in $US millions
1977 1978 1979 1980 1981 1982 1983
1,016 2,293 2,831 3,181 3,981 4,905 5,247
(C) Overall Budget Deficit as % of GDP
1970 1975 1980 1981 1983 1984
5% 11% 18% 14% 15% 8%
Source: Economic and Social Survey (1974-83)

Table Four Comparative Per Capita Incomes of Selected Countries as % of US Per
Capita Income (1957-81)
1957 1965 1972 1981
Singapore 6% 14% 23% 41%
Hong Kong 11% 12% 18% 40%
Barbados 8% 10% 15% 27%
Costa Rica 14% 12% 11% 11%
Dom. Republic 9% 7% 9% 10%
Guyana 9% 8% 7% 6%
Jamaica 12% 14% 14% 9%
Puerto Rico 22% 32% 37% 26%
Source: Wobrld Bank Tables (1965, 1973, 1981), U.N. National Income Statistics (1958)

political issues, the Seaga administration
accepted the overall objectives and me-
thods of the IMF, although disagree-
ments arose over details.
In the Manley period external shocks
on the economy consisted largely of
imported inflation, the rapid increase
in oil price and declining hard currency
earnings which all led to a continuous
balance of payments problem. In the
Seaga years since 1980, the balance of
payments problem has continued with
even greater severity due to the decline
of the bauxite-alumina industry, the
country's main hard currency earner, a
rapid increase in imports due to trade
liberalization and a decline in earnings
from traditional agricultural exports.
Both regimes tried to buy time by
large scale external borrowing. The
cumulative effect was to build up mas-
sive debt payments that by 1987 were
consuming some 40% of export earn-
ings. The Seaga administration resorted
to more severe austerity measures than
those implemented by Manley. After
two years of optimism and hope that
the country might be on the path to
economic recovery under Prime Min-
ister Seaga, the severity of the austerity
measures adopted and the gloom in-
duced by the decline in the bauxite
industry and the closure of two major
plants (Reynolds and Alcoa) led to
feelings of hopelessness and loss of
confidence in the government's policy.

STRUCTURAL PROBLEMS

A comparison of the policy results of
the two regimes suggests that it is
misleading to interpret the fortunes of
the Jamaican economy mainly in terms
of the impact of political ideology. The
notion that socialist excesses in the
1970s were the root causes of the
problems that could be corrected by a
shift to free enterprise capitalism was
mistaken. Underlying both attempts were
common structural problems that are
obviously independent of ideology and
require long term solutions. Equally
misleading are the views that Manley's
policies failed because they were not
socialist enough or that Seaga's policies
were doomed because of their neocolo-
nialist or dependent capitalist approach.
Before I attempt to identify the underly-
ing structural problems, it is first neces-
sary to compare the policy performance
of the two contrasting regimes.
Continued on page 29

12/CARIBBEAN REVIEW

A Contest that Became A Referendum

By Bernard D. Headley

n July 29th 1986, political elec-
tions were held in Jamaica.
Jamaicans were asked to
choose from among 400 candidates to
represent them at the local or parish
level. The principal contestants were
drawn from the two mainstream polit-
ical parties which have dominated Ja-
maican political life since the late 1940s:
the ruling Jamaica Labor Party (JLP),
whose titular head is the prime minister,
Edward Seaga; and the People's Na-
tional Party (PNP), led by former prime
minister Michael Manley. Two of the
more recently formed parties also en-
tered candidates: the Workers Party of
Jamaica (WPJ), a Marxist-Leninist group
led by University of the West Indies
Political Scientist Trevor Monroe, and
the right-wing Jamaica American Party
(JAP), which advocates that Jamaica
become the 51st American state.
When the final results were in, of the
roughly 500,000 ballots cast in a voter
turnout of approximately 60%, the PNP
received some 58% of the vote to the
JLP's 41%. Together, the WPJ, the JAP
and an unrecorded number of Indepen-
dents received less than 1% of the total
vote.
Local elections in Jamaica typically
do not deal with national issues such
as taxes, cost of living, unemployment,
foreign affairs, but only with local
matters relating to things like trash
collection, street cleaning and sanita-
tion. Contending political parties usu-
ally do not invest huge amounts of
campaign funds or energy in them,
because the results have typically fa-
vored whichever of the two principal
parties happens to be ruling at the
national level.
In the local elections of 1986, this
pattern was not only altered but dramat-
ically turned around. There was a mas-
sive upsurge in voter interest; the two
major political parties went all out in
their efforts to win votes, spending two
to three million (Jamaican) dollars in
Madison Avenue-style media blitzes.
Campaign rhetoric was heated and had
little to do with local matters, dealing
instead with national issues.

Reversing national tradition, the gov-
erning party was soundly defeated. This
is only the second time in recent Ja-
maican history that such a political
phenomenon has occurred. Why should
the 1986 local elections exhibit such a
radical departure from previous con-
tests? Why did the JLP, which had
trounced the PNP in the 1980 national
elections, lose so badly after a vigorous
campaign? The answers to what trans-
formed an insignificant local election
into a major national event can be
traced to the beginnings of the JLP era
under Prime Minister Seaga.
When Seaga and the JLP came to
power on 30 October 1980, expectations
were riding high. The new government
promised "change without chaos, deliv-
erance, human rights and justice." Where
the PNP had flirted with socialism and
with the Cubans, Seaga unabashedly
turned to Uncle Sam and committed the
economic destiny of the country to the
"magic" of the marketplace. The Reagan
administration responded enthusiastically,
making Jamaica the key to its national
security plans for the Caribbean Basin.
Jamaica was to be the showpiece of
capitalism in the Caribbean.
In January 1981, Seaga became the
first head of government to visit the
Reagan White House. Reagan and Seaga
hit it off at once and at the end of their
meeting Reagan promised that Seaga
could "count on American support for
his objectives to expand his country's
private sector." Seaga proposed that
Reagan formulate a sort of Marshall
Plan for the Caribbean. That idea became
the Caribbean Basin Initiative (CBI).
Jamaica became pivotal to the success
of this effort to encourage the Carib-
bean and Central America to "earn
their way to self-sustaining growth."
Within two short years of the Seaga
administration, Jamaica had become the
fifth largest per capital recipient of US
assistance. Jamaica, in Seaga's and the
JLP's vision, was to become a Carib-
bean Singapore, a society whose eco-
nomy would be built on export-oriented
industrialization. This represented a sharp
turn away from the import substitution

policy of the PNP. Under Manley, that
strategy had succeeded in building up
a diversified industrial base, but by the
late 1970s its limitations had become
obvious. Lacking a large enough con-
sumer market the country was unable
to sustain consistent industrial growth,
and protection against foreign competi-
tion. Businesses, according to one ob-
server, became "sluggish and ineffi-
cient, forcing consumers...to subsidize
them through higher prices."
Seaga and the JLP hoped to emulate
the free-market "success stories" of
Singapore, Taiwan, South Korea and
Hong Kong by mounting an aggressive
strategy of export-oriented industrializa-
tion. Disregarded were differences that
had fashioned the East Asian societies.
The "disciplined" labor force Seaga
had expected to serve as the base for a
Singapore model was never there to
start with.
It did not take long for Seaga's
"structural adjustment program" to dis-
locate the Jamaican economy. Dere-
gulation of the economy allowed price
gouging. Prices of staples soared. The
policy of liberalized imports had an
adverse effect on the country's trade
balance. Repeated devaluations of the
Jamaican dollar bred further hardship,
and increased the cost of doing business
for local manufacturers. By 1982, do-
mestic food production was 30% below
1978 levels.
The JLP initially pitched the 1986
local elections as nothing more than the
usual run-of-the-mill local contest. But
Manley and his supporters quickly raised
the stakes. The elections were turned
into a referendum on the JLP leadership
and its management of the country and
the JLP lost heavily.
Washington has all of a sudden
begun to cultivate a cautious interest
in what they hope is a rehabilitated
PNP. Manley is now finding doors at
the State Department once again open
to him.

Bernard D. Headley chairs the Department
of Criminal Justice at Northeastern Illinois
University.

CARIBBEAN REVIEW/13

A Democratic Shoot-Out in the D.R.

An Analysis of the 1986 Elections

By Jonathan Hartlyn

he elections held in the Domi-
nican Republic on May 16,
1978 were only the country's
eighth free or even moderately free
presidential elections in its history. When
Joaqufn Balaguer assumed the pres-
idency on August 16, 1986, it was the
first time in the country's history that
a succession based on such elections
occurred in three consecutive periods.
A number of factors suggested these
would be tranquil elections. The two
major presidential candidates, Joaquin
Balaguer, 78, of the Social Christian
Reformist Party (PRSC), and Jacobo
Majluta, 51, of the incumbent Dem-
ocratic Revolutionary Party (PRD) and
of a new party whose creation he
promoted, La Estructura (The Struc-
ture), shared a strong commitment to
the existing socioeconomic order. Even
the third major candidate, the quasi-
marxist nationalist Juan Bosch, 76, of
the Dominican Liberation Party (PLD),
considerably moderated his stance on
many issues during the campaign. There
was only limited social mobilization or
political violence, no active guerrilla
movement and a low-profile military
presence.
Yet, the election process was com-
plex and incident-prone. For many Do-
minicans, the stakes were high. Given
the country's strong president, the large
role of the state in the economy, eco-
nomic recession, high unemployment,
the absence of competitive bidding for
state transactions and the non-existence
of civil service legislation, winning was
of considerable import to party mem-

Jonathan Hartlyn teaches political science at
Vanderbilt University. During 1985-86, he
researched the politics of democratization in
the Dominican Republic. He is co-editor of
Latin American Political Economy (Westview,
1986) and author of a forthcoming book on
the politics of coalition rule in Colombia.

bers or sympathizers seeking contracts,
spoils or jobs. All of this was magnified
by a personalistic politics of intrigue
and distrust, by weak and manipulable
institutions, and by unstable alliances
which generated an atmosphere of con-
tinual political crisis and a potential for
serious violence.
On the one hand, the crisis-ridden
electoral process illustrates the continu-
ing fragility of the political regime and
the low legitimacy of state institutions
and basic political processes. Only the
ability of party leaders and ad-hoc
organizations to negotiate pacts or agree-
ments at critical moments helped dissi-
pate tensions. Yet, from a more limited
perspective, the elections may be viewed
as successful, for they were carried out
without any sustained fear of state
coercion or military intervention and
the results were respected, in these
ways advancing democratic institution-
alization, albeit modestly.
The narrow victory of Joaquin Bala-
guer in 1986 represented an astounding
political comeback for the aging, nearly
sightless caudillo of the PRSC. A mere
eight years earlier, in 1978, the electoral
victory of a vigorous, united PRD over
then three-term president Balaguer (1966-
78) led to a democratic transition after
considerable international and domestic
pressure thwarted military efforts to
keep Balaguer in power. Balaguer's
defeat then was viewed as a rejection
of political repression, corruption and
cronyism as the country's economic
boom years faded.
But eight years in power changed the
PRD. The governments of Silvestre
Antonio Guzman (1978-82) and of Sal-
vador Jorge Blanco (1982-86) generally
respected civil liberties and human rights,
though the brutal repression of the
"IMF riots" in 1984 and other inci-
dents have not left the PRD with an

unblemished record. Furthermore, polit-
ical power turned many PRD leaders
from social-democratic opposition acti-
vists into calculating and in some cases
questionably wealthy machine politi-
cians. The party became bitterly fac-
tionalized and was incapable of im-
plementing reforms for its middle and
popular sector constituencies. PRD rule,
particularly the Jorge Blanco years,
coincided with the need for politically
unpopular and socially regressive yet
overdue IMF monitored economic adjust-
ments, a result of low world prices for
sugar and other exports, high oil prices,
spiraling debt service payments and
past policy errors. Under these circum-
stances, it is understandable why voters
turned away from the PRD toward
Balaguer and to a lesser extent, toward
Bosch.

THE PRD

Electoral politics shaped the calcula-
tions of leading politicians early in
Jorge Blanco's government, often with
nefarious consequences for the coun-
try's economic and social well-being.
The most intense intra-party competi-
tion for the presidential nomination
occurred within the governing PRD.
The leading contenders were Jacobo
Majluta, president of the Senate and
Josd Francisco Pefia G6mez, mayor of
Santo Domingo, who was ambiguously
backed by President Jorge Blanco.
The more conservative Majluta had
unsuccessfully sought the PRD pres-
idential nomination for both the 1978
and 1982 elections. In 1978, he settled
instead for the vice-presidency under
Antonio Guzmdn, serving as president
for 42 days in 1982 in the period
between Guzmdn's suicide and Jorge
Blanco's inauguration. During most of

141CARIBBEAN REVIEW

Jorge Blanco's term, Majluta led an
obstructionist opposition from Congress
analogous to what Jorge Blanco himself
had done to President Guzmdn in the
1978-82 period. Majluta also fomented
the creation of a new legally-recognized
party, La Estructura, to promote his
candidacy for the 1986 elections. The
implicit threat was that he would run
in the 1986 elections even without the
PRD nomination, threatening to divide
the party.
Over most of Jorge Blanco's term,
Majluta stymied tax legislation forcing
the administration to impose fiscal mea-
sures administratively, stopped innu-
merable international loans and blocked
constitutional reforms, often in alliance
with the PRSC and the PLD, while
charging that Jorge Blanco's govern-
ment was one of the worst the country
had experienced. Particularly bitter for
the administration and for Pefia G6mez,
was the Majluta-led congressional re-
fusal in 1984 to approve a US$150
million Inter-American Development
Bank loan for the Madrigal dam and
waterworks intended to improve the
seriously deficient water supply to Santo
Domingo. According to political observ-
ers, Majluta stopped the loan primarily
because he feared commissions stem-
ming from it would be used to block
his political ambitions.
Pefia G6mez became Majluta's lead-
ing contender for the PRD presidential
nomination. Peila G6mez was the char-
ismatic PRD leader who had primarily
concerned himself with developing the

party's ideological and organizational
base, until he accepted in a last minute
decision to run for the critical post of
mayor of Santo Domingo in 1982.
However, with his absence from the
party leadership, party factionalism, espe-
cially the division between Jorge Blanco
and Majluta, intensified. Finally, in
June 1984, Pefia G6mez formed his
own Bloque Institucional (Institutional
Bloc) faction as a result of a perception
that the party was losing coherence and
popularity even as his own influence
within it was declining sharply. The
catalyst was the Congressional defeat
of the Madrigal loan for the Santo
Domingo water system. Encouraged as
well by his close friend, former Vene-
zuelan president Carlos Andr6s P6rez
from the Socialist International, Peifa
G6mez launched his own bid for the
PRD presidential nomination, in part
to prevent a reelection bid by Jorge
Blanco.
President Jorge Blanco was playing
a reelection game without even for-
mally presenting his candidacy. The
dynamics of politics in a regime with
a large state apparatus, few institutional
democratic traditions and a strong con-
stitution that has no provision prohi-
biting reelection has led contemporary
Dominican presidents to be tempted by
reelection. Just as significantly, even
those who may not originally have been
seeking a new term often project the
image that they are, or do not disavow
reelection efforts of their close col-
laborators, in an attempt to keep their

Former President Juan Bosch
(Photo: Jean Bernard Diederich)

political followers and their own effi-
cacy as a new election approaches.
Jorge Blanco was no exception to this
pattern, even though the PRD has a
strongly anti-reelection tradition and
despite the fact that he personally pre-
sented a constitutional amendment to
Congress prohibiting reelection (which
never prospered particularly because of
Majluta's opposition). The president's
faction, the Tendencia Jorgeblanquista,
ambiguously supported Pefia G6mez's
candidacy in an effort to block Majluta,
while carefully retaining its own iden-
tity. At a minimum, Jorge Blanco thus
remains positioned to seek the pres-
idency again in 1990.
The complex party nomination pro-
cess was to serve as an exemplar of
internal party democracy. Instead, it
submerged the PRD in its worst crisis
since Bosch divided the party by his
departure in 1973. On November 24,
1985 each of the PRD local-level com-
mittees met separately for individual
members to vote for their presidential
nominee, Majluta or Pefa G6mez. How-
ever, tensions ran high between party
members whose future livelihood hinged
on their candidate gaining the nomina-
tion. Allegations of fraud intensified as
it became clear the vote count would
be close. The result was a shoot-out the
next day between followers of the two
candidates and a disruption of the ballot
counting at the Dominican Concorde
Hotel.
Although it is likely that Pefia won
a narrow victory, in the critical weeks

CARIBBEAN REVIEW/15

after the voting fiasco he came across
as indecisive, alleging victory but pro-
moting in rapid succession a series of
solutions to the impasse. By his calm
demeanor, Majluta won in the eyes of
public opinion. Efforts at intermedia-
tion by media and church leaders failed.
The Church, presciently concerned about
the precedent this set for the upcoming
general elections, and in a rare move,
the US Ambassador, publicly criticized
the PRD, whose troubles were para-
lyzing the country.
An intra-party pact imposed by Pres-
ident Jorge Blanco on January 27 re-
solved the nomination struggle and at
least postponed a new PRD division.
By means of the president's Pacto La
Union, Majluta became the PRD pres-
idential nominee and Pefia G6mez was

offered the vice-presidency, which he
refused. In the following weeks, re-
versing past experiences of internal
party democracy, the three leaders de-
cided congressional and local-level can-
didacies, with the Jorge Blanco and
Pefia G6mez tendencies receiving greater
shares than Majluta's faction. Yet, dis-
satisfaction by PRD members with the
selection process was indicated by the
fact that dissident PRD lists were reg-
istered in 12 of the 30 provinces,
requiring the Central Electoral Board
(JCE) to determine which lists were
valid. Pefla G6mez decided only hours
before inscriptions closed on March
31st that he would not accept the PRD
nomination for the key Senate seat from

Santo Domingo. Catching Majluta by
surprise, the president's wife, Asela
Mera de Jorge, was registered instead.
Majluta, who owed his nomination
ultimately to Jorge Blanco's pact, still
wished to avoid over-identification with
the unpopular administration that he
had been criticizing so harshly. His
campaign downplayed his party affilia-
tion focusing on "Jacobo", while PRD
candidates carried out their own prose-
lytizing activities.

THE PRSC & PLD

Balaguer's nomination as the presidential
candidate of the PRSC was never in
doubt, though relations among PRSC
leaders jockeying for position under

him were not much warmer than among
PRD leaders. In spite of his defeats in
1978 and 1982, Balaguer continued
expertly to beat back internal chal-
lengers by strengthening and then un-
dercutting close collaborators. He main-
tained a captive electorate from his past
twelve years in the presidency, particu-
larly in some rural areas, which was
not large enough by itself for electoral
victory. For PRSC leaders, the 1986
elections were viewed as crucial be-
cause they were almost certainly Bala-
guer's last due to his age and physical
condition. There was concern, promoted
by Balaguer himself, that if the PRD
were to win a third term it could gain
a hegemonic position in the political

regime, becoming an equivalent to the
PRI in Mexico as the PRSC would
fragment in a post-Balaguer period.
In contrast to his lackluster 1982
campaign, Balaguer now acted as if he
sought to win. He supported the merg-
ing of his Partido Reformista with the
existing minor Christian Democratic
parties in the country, opening the way
for the integration of the newly-named
Partido Reformista Social Cristiano
(PRSC) into the Christian Democratic
International in October 1985. As with
the link between the PRD and the
Socialist International, this association
brought the PRSC international visibil-
ity, financial and technical assistance
and the promise, as yet largely unreal-
ized, of an ideological basis for the
party.
Balaguer carefully renewed his ties
with conservative figures who previ-
ously had broken with him to form their
own small parties, such as Augusto
Lora and Luis JuliAn P6rez. Balaguer
even successfully wooed General Wessin
y Wessin, who had once tried to over-
throw him, after negotiations between
the retired general's Partido Quisqueyano
Dem6crata and the PRD failed (the
PQD vote almost equalled Balaguer's
margin of victory over Majluta). Side-
stepping intra-party antagonisms, Bala-
guer strategically promoted Rafael
Corporin de los Santos, a popular
extra-party figure who had once worked
with the PRD, as the PRSC mayoral
candidate for Santo Domingo, a tradi-
tional PRD bastion. Balaguer sought to
invigorate the party structure by person-
ally attending PRSC municipal con-
ventions through which local party activ-
ists chose mayoral candidates. Yet, final
selection of congressional candidacies
was chaotic, with last-minute name
changes.
Given concerns about Balaguer's age
and eyesight, the normally inconse-
quential choice of a vice-president
became crucial. Waiting until the last
possible moment allowed by law, Bala-
guer judiciously chose a political un-
known, Carlos Morales Troncoso. Mo-
rales was the vigorous 45 year old
manager and part owner of Central
Romana, the sprawling sugar and tour-
ist complex purchased by a consortium
led by the Cuban-American Fanjul broth-
ers from Gulf & Western early in 1985.
Morales strengthened the ticket primar-
ily because he reassured the domestic
and foreign business communities and
Continued on page 33

161CARIBBEAN REVIEW

Caricatures of Majluta, Balaguer and Bosch that decorated the walls of the Neon
Discoteque in the Hotel Santo Domingo. Reproduced from Ultima Hora.

Caribbean Swan Song

Joaquin Balaguer
By Peter R. Greiff

W hen Joaquin Balaguer, 79-
years old and blind, was
sworn in as president on
August 16, it was the fifth time in 26
years he had taken the oath of office.
One of the hemisphere's shrewdest and
most enigmatic politicians, Balaguer's
return to power was remarkable even
by the colorful and sometimes bizarre
standards of Dominican politics. In
many respects, Balaguer is a typical
caudillo, or strongman, whose political
following is based not on ideology but
on the strength of his personality. Yet
this academic, frail, self-described poet
was hardly seen during his election
campaign, and even after so many years
as president, remains a stranger to many
Dominicans.
Most of Balaguer's mystique and
the core of his political support can
be traced to his political origins as a
prot6g6 of the brutal dictator Rafael
Leonidas Trujillo, who ruled the coun-
try with an iron fist for 31 years.
Balaguer first became president in 1960,
when Trujillo named him to succeed
his brother, H6ctor Trujillo, as puppet
president. At the time, not much was
expected of Balaguer, a scholarly bureau-
crat and devout Catholic with little
apparent political ambition. Trujillo, or
el Jefe, as he is still commonly called,
would often publicly humiliate his hand-
picked presidents including his bro-
ther to remind them, and any one
else who was watching, that he held
absolute power.
When Trujillo was assassinated in
1961, Balaguer played a delicate bal-
ancing act to hold on to his office,
careful not to interfere with the highest
priority of the Trujillo clan and the
military: the rounding up and killing
of Trujillo's assassins. With the backing
of the US embassy, he eventually ex-
pelled most of the surviving Trujillos

President Balaguer
(Photo: Jean Bernard Diederich)

and kept the military at bay for a year,
long enough to hold elections.
The 1962 vote brought leftist pro-
fessor Juan Bosch to power for an
ill-fated seven-month experiment with
democracy. After he was ousted in a
military coup, three years of political
chaos followed, culminating in the 1965
landing of US Marines to stave off a
civil war. When elections were finally
held again in 1966, Balaguer won by a
large majority, mainly because voters
hoped he would restore the order of the
Trujillo days. He stayed on for 12 years,
and only with heavy US pressure on his
military supporters, left office after an

electoral defeat in 1978. This May, he
was re-elected with about 40 percent
of the vote in a hotly contested election.
As president at the time of Trujillo's
death, Balaguer represents a bridge
between the dictatorship and democ-
racy. He is said to keep a portrait of
Trujillo in his study, and though he has
criticized the excesses of the dictator-
ship, he has never personally denounced
his former mentor. To the largely super-
stitious Dominican peasantry, who freely
mix politics, religion and witchcraft,
and with whom Trujillo was very popu-
lar, Balaguer is Trujillo's anointed suc-
cessor, and carries on his legacy. In
fact, to vote for any one else would' be
an act of disloyalty against the vengeful
el Jefe. In the words of one Dominican
diplomat, "If you believe in ghosts, you
vote for Balaguer."
Balaguer's main political vehicle has
been the Reformist Party, which he
founded in the 1960s. It has never
developed an ideology other than loy-
alty to Balaguer, and is not known for
its democratic roots. In fact, Reformists
will sometimes argue in private that
what the country needs is a good,
heavy-handed dictatorship; the only
reason there isn't already one there, is
that it would be an embarrassment to
the United States.
Indeed, Balaguer's style of governing
shows the same astute understanding
of the Dominicans' love of drama and
mystery that kept Trujillo in power for
31 years. Like Trujillo, he is secretive
and has a penchant for arcane political
machinations and surprise announce-
ments to keep rivals and opponents off
guard. Paradoxically, his use of tactics
Continued on page 35
Peter R. Grieff spent two months in the
Domincan Republic during 1986 working with
the presidential campaign of Jacobo Majluta
of the Dominican Revolutionary Party.

CARIBBEAN REVIEW/17

Claro, Trigueflo, Moreno

Testing for Race in Cartagena
By Mauricio SolaOn, Eduardo V61ez and Cynthia Smith

In recent years, race has become a
major focus of nationalist ideo-
logies throughout much of the Car-
ibbean though not in the Spanish-
speaking areas. There, political battle
lines have been more typically defined
in terms of social class and party
banners. This is not because racial
discrimination has ever been absent
from these societies; instead there has
always been a curious coexistence both
of clear racial preferences and deliber-
ate accommodation between individuals
defined as racially different.
In the Hispanic Caribbean, wherever
a significantly large minority of whites
met large proportions of blacks (in
some cases actual majorities) and Amer-
indians, a white-dominated class pyra-
mid crystallized with blacks subor-
dinated to whites. Slavery was the
historical origin of this domination.
'Indian' became a sociocultural or ethnic
definition to designate individuals with
special cultural patterns (language, dress,
etc.); whereas 'negro' was a racial term
referring to physical appearance.
Extensive miscegenation became a
norm, recognized since early colonial
days with the usage of a complex
terminology that sought a precise defini-
tion of both origin and possible mix-
tures. Three terms survive to this day:
mulato (a mixture of white and black
genes), zambo (black and Amerindian
descent), and mestizo (white and Amer-
indian).
The Caribbean port city of Cartagena,
Mauricio SolaOn teaches sociology at the
Center for Latin American and Caribbean
Studies of the University of Illinois, Champaign-
Urbana. His most recent book is Politics of
Compromise: Coalition Government in Co-
lombia. Eduardo V6lez is associate director
of Institute SER de Investigaci6n in Bogota,
Colombia. Cynthia Smith studies sociology
at the University of Illinois.

Colombia, illustrates the clashes and
mingling of these three racial types.
Cartagena was once a major port of
entry for black slaves into Colombia.
It is a city of abolengo (lineage or
strong tradition) that in the last two
centuries experienced periods of eco-
nomic expansion and decline, followed
more recently by urbanization and the
beginnings of industrialization.

TWO PATTERNS

Two racial patterns coexist today in
Cartagena: discrimination and integra-
tion. The polar extremes of the class
structure are racially segmented; there
are virtually no negros (in the Spanish
sense) at the elite level and there are
practically no whites at the lower class
level. Yet a degree of integration is
provided for by full acceptance of non
whites at all levels of the class pyramid.
Discrimination is reinforced by an
inverse relationship between blackness
and social class, a deliberate exclusion
of some outsiders from elite or 'society'
circles on racial grounds, infrequent
marriage between blancos and
negros and a general ideological pref-
erence for lightness over darkness.
This type of racial system is not a
miscegenated racial melting pot without
distinctions. Nor is it a system charac-
terized by pluralistic arrangements in
which relatively self-segregated and or-
ganized racial and ethnic communities
achieve an equilibrium and share socio-
political power. Rather, what is funda-
mental in this kind of circumstance is
the highly ambiguous position of miscege-
nated individuals and the fluid bound-
aries which categorize them.
This results in an eclectic, miscege-
nated-scattered, stratification pyramid

where substantial numbers of individu-
als regardless of class level can
simply deny the existence of discrimi-
nation. The acceptance of miscegenated
individuals allows for a belief that
'money whitens' and that race is not a
decisive factor in the system.
The 'problem of race' remains more
or less a latent issue. But of particular
interest is a widely held tenet of a
'bleaching process' a perception that
miscegenation whitens rather than dark-
ens the population, that family success
can be achieved through it, and that it
will result in a largely homogeneous
predominantly 'white' or 'fair' society.
Many reasons explain this relatively
mild racial system, typical of Spanish
America. Among them are: The role
of the Catholic Church with its cultural
imperialism defining all human beings
(slaves included) as members of one
society under its tutelage. The exis-
tence of a paternalistic Spanish Crown,
which allocated rights even to slaves,
who could legally seek manumission.
* The existence of a patriarchally-
oriented, precapitalistic economy that
had little competition and large propor-
tions of slaves outside the plantation
economy. A scarcity of Europeans in
the colonies and a high male-female
ratio of the colonizers resulting in
upward mobility of non-whites and
frequent relations between European
males and indigenous and slave fe-
males. The Moorish conquest of
Spain that proceeded the American
colonization and which consisted of
dominance by a darker-skinned group.
Moorish women became idealized in
Hispanic culture as possessing sensual
beauty and mystique (the term moreno,
derived from Moor, continues to be
used to define white brunette individu-
als and a wide variety of miscegenated

18/CARIBBEAN REVIEW

individuals as well as blacks; linguistic-
ally the morena remains a romantic
symbol).

THE LANGUAGE OF RACE

In Cartagena, as elsewhere in the Spanish-
speaking Caribbean, a complex termi-
nology developed to make race am-
biguous. Its nonpolarity and fluidity has
contributed to the submergence of the
racial issue. This system has allowed
for the peculiar coexistence of discrimina-
tion with racial integration.
From a statistically-designed strat-
ified quota sample, we interviewed 120

adults in Cartagena and showed them
22 photographs, asking them to identify
the race of each. The respondents were
chosen from four social classes: upper,
middle, working and lower. The indi-
viduals photographed represented a vari-
ety of racial types and patterns of dress.
Many societies recognize the existence
of an intermediate racial group between
whites and blacks, but we found an
extraordinary multiplicity of terms used
to define our subjects. For the 22
pictures there were 128 different designa-
tions, an average of 17 per picture.
The racial nomenclature from colo-
nial days has remained although some
terms were dropped and new ones
crystallized. For example a person could
be not only white (blanco) but blanco
aindiado (white with some Indian char-
acteristics); not only negro but negro
fileno (black with a straight nose).
Terms that have no connotation of
racial descent were frequently employed.
Individuals were not simply blanco,
negro, mestizo, mulato and zambo; they
are also claros (light) or trigueios (a
term derived from trigo, wheat). Some
persons were trigueio claro (light
trigueio), others blanco claro (light
white).
Many responses typified mere phys-
ical characteristics (rather than racial
origin) such as rubio (blond), acane-
lado (cinnamon like), cobrizo (copper
like). Or a person could be blanco no
del todo (white, but not completely so)
or blanco quemado (burned white). A
tendency to use racially neutral terms
to designate miscegenated individuals
was manifested in less frequent use of
the term mulato, as opposed to descrip-
tive terms lacking a historical genetic
meaning, such as moreno and claro.
The nomenclature is hybrid, composed
of terms with a connotation of racial
ancestry (mulato), racially neutral terms
(claro), and those with a physical descrip-
tion 'negro por el pelo' (black by
virtue of hair texture).
Terms were assigned in an unreliable
fashion: an individual could be desig-
nated as negro by one respondent, mu-
lato by another, triguefo by another
and claro by still another. The avail-
ability of a multiplicity of terms raised
the probability of 'error,' leading to
ambiguity or dissent in racial designa-
tions. The most frequently employed
term per picture ranged from 24 to 71
percent; no picture received over 50
percent racial definition. The idio-
syncratic aspect of the terminology was

revealed by the fact that 60 percent of
the responses were given only twice at
most.
The terminology reflected a contradic-
tory ideology that, although discrimina-
tory, fully accepts non-whites. It per-
mited the neutralization and suppression
of racist definitions in pertinent rela-
tions. For instance while otherwise
discriminating against 'outsiders' -
one could still classify one's uncle,
cousin or brother not as negro or mu-
lato, but as trigueio or moreno claro.
A blanco social definition could thereby
be given to miscegenated individuals
who would be treated as if they were
white, though personally one knew that
they were not. The terminology would
thus reduce the number of individuals
found at the discriminated-against pole
and serve to lighten (or 'bleach,' as
expressed locally) the population, fos-
tering a type of 'passing.'

RACIAL EUPHEMISMS

Our respondents were asked for their
racial self-classification. Only among
the lighter upper class did a majority
consider themselves blanco; no
blancos were found in the lower class
and no negros in the upper class. As
one descends the social class pyramid,
the darker segments were found. Yet
only a minority defined itself as negro.
The nomenclature allowed a 'termi-
nological miscegenation.' If one so
chose one could place oneself outside
the racial poles. Indeed, the darker
segments opted to define themselves
predominantly as moreno, an ambiguous
term that denotes both blackness and
lightness. When upper class respond-
ents employed the term, they used it in
the latter sense rather than as a euphe-
mism for black.
As one ascends the stratification pyra-
mid, where the better educated are
increasingly found, the number of per-
sons who identified themselves as black
dramatically decreases. All social class
groups preferred terms that lightened
them and showed a remarkable lack of
identity with blackness. Not only did
only a small minority call itself negro,
terms denoting Negro ancestry were
infrequently used only 12 respond-
ents considered themselves mulato and
none used the term zambo. Thus we
found that the history of domination in
Cartegena has remained, as before, asso-
ciated with a preference for whiteness.

CARIBBEAN REVIEW/19

Spic Chic

Spanglish as Equipment for Living
By Gustavo P6rez Firmat

A couple of years ago a Newyo-
rican musical group called 'Los
Amigos and the Bad Street
Boys' had a hit record entitled, in
Spanish, Bailando pegaito. As you can
perhaps tell from the title, the bad street
boys did a pretty bad thing they took
that old Irving Berlin standard, Cheek
to Cheek, translated and revised some
of the lyrics, and set it to a salsa
rhythm. The result was a transculturated,
ghettoized version of Cheek to Cheek
in which a Puerto Rican kid from the
barrio tries to get a sophisticated anglo
girl to dance. The new lyrics include
such memorable lines as: It feels like
heaven dancing with you tonight; take
off your shoes I know they're getting
tight; or: Tighter and tighter as we can
get; your hips are moving like a speed-
ing jet. You will perhaps not be sur-
prised when I tell you that the record
cover featured a photograph of the
backside of several young women in
tight shorts who are of course standing
'cheek to cheek.'
In spite of this (or maybe because of
it), I have always had a special place
in my heart for this tongue-in-cheek
Irving Berlin, since I think it offers an
excellent example of how a minority
group can deal creatively with the
majority culture, of how the barrio can
come to terms with Broadway without
being assimilated by it. As many of you
will recall, the first words of Cheek to
Cheek are: "Heaven, I'm in heaven."
The Newyorican version brings heaven
down to earth, to the bad streets of the
city. By fusing Berlin and the barrio,
the song transculturates North-Ameri-
can pop culture, making it more reflec-
Gustavo P6rez Firmat teaches Spanish-
American literature at Duke University. He is
the author of several books of criticism and
of a forthcoming collection of poetry, Carolina
Cuban.

tive of the ethnic diversity of this
country. In fact, the musical miscegena-
tion of the song constitutes its very
subject, for what the bad street boys
have done, in effect, is to make two
cultures, two continents, dance cheek
to cheek. One could say that this odd
coupling is 'thematized' in the song,
which deals precisely with odd cou-
plings, with putting together things that
do not jive. This might be salsa, but it
is self-reflexive salsa, meta-salsa, a
salsa for all seasonings. Not salsa
consciente, as in Ruben Blades, but
salsa autoconsciente, as in Ruben Dario.

SPIC & HICK

I dwell on this song because even
though I am not Puerto Rican nor have
I ever lived in New York, I find the
song has for me a certain biographical
significance. I am myself a somewhat
odd coupling of North and South, of
Carolina and Caribbean, spic and hick
in equal parts. Thus, in its blending of
Spanish-American and North-American
rhythms, the revised Berlin is for me
something of a critical and creative
model, and it will provide the starting
point as well as the terminus for
these remarks'on the Hispanic literature
of the United States. I should make
clear, however, that I will be talking
less about Hispanic than about Cuban-
American literature; and I'll be talking
most of all about my own work, such
as I would like it to be.
Let me begin with an obvious but
crucial fact. The Hispanic literature of
this country is marginal twice over. It
is marginal, first, with respect to North-
American literature, of which in
spite of recent efforts by Julio Iglesias
- it is not really a part; and it is
marginal again with respect to Spanish-

American literature, to whose canon it
does not belong either. What separates
it from North-American literature is, in
some cases, language, but above all
cultural embedding the distance that
divides Broadway from the barrio; what
separates it from Spanish-American lit-
erature is also, at times, language, but
more importantly, geography. The fact
is that most people don't know quite
what to do with spic lit.
At the yearly Modem Language Asso-
ciation meetings, for example, the ses-
sions on US Hispanic literature are
sponsored by both the English and the
Foreign Language groups; and in one
issue of Hispania, the journal of the
Association of American Teachers of
Spanish and Portuguese, there is an
article on Rudolfo Anaya's Bless Me,
Ultima, a novel written in English and
thus one that a teacher of Spanish or
Portuguese would normally have no
occasion to teach. But as these exam-
ples suggest, one principal reason for
this institutional indecision is that the
literature of US Hispanics possesses a
translinguistic identity.
It is a commonplace of literary histo-
riography that geographical and na-
tional boundaries are less meaningful
than linguistic ones. Thus it is said that
all Spanish-language literature is funda-
mentally one, regardless of whether a
particular author hails from Santiago
de Chile, Santiago de Cuba, or Santiago
de Compostela. But the literature of
US Hispanics shows that language is
not always a pertinent criterion of
coherence, for here we have a literature
that is culturally singular and linguisti-
cally plural some of it is in Spanish,
some of it is in English, and some of
it is in different combinations of the
two. My point, then is that spic lit
occupies the space between two lan-
guages, two cultures, two continents.

20/CARIBBEAN REVIEW

This means that the latino writer lives
on the edge, as it were, in that interstice
or fault line that divides one cultural
mass from another.
Now a fault line is not necessarily a
good place to be, and in fact the
temptation to step over the edge, to
cross over into one or another side is
very strong. On either side of the fault
line, there awaits a sort of stability. One
temptation is to escape from the ghetto
into the suburbs, to abandon Spanish
and traffic entirely in English.
The other option is to wall oneself
up in a linguistic, cultural and psy-
chological ghetto, and by so doing
forsake English altogether. This has
been the tack taken by many Cuban-
American writers, who are still writing
today as if they had just left Old
Havana, even though many of them
haven't set their sights on the Malec6n
in over twenty years.
For me, both of these alternatives are
existentially and artistically wrong,
though I do recognize their indiscreet
charm. If Cuban-American literature
has a contribution to make, it will do
so neither from the suburbs nor from

the ghetto. The distinctive voice of
Cuban-American literature has to be a
voice on the edge, the voice of someone
who linguistically and culturally -
occupies, colonizes and even dances
upon that space between.
Let me illustrate what I mean by
quoting from the introduction to an
anthology of poetry by US Hispanics:
"Juan Ram6n Jim6nez used to say that
he didn't learn English because for
every word learned, he would forget
three in Spanish. In a certain sense,
what threatens and at the same time
fertilizes the Latin American poet living
in the United States is precisely that
fear of losing the roots represented by
the mother tongue. But contrary to
what Juan Ram6n said, contemporary
poets learn English, communicate in
English, marry foreigners, using both
languages in their daily life. Thus the
state of emotional termoil in which they
find themselves. They feel threatened
... they lead a double life, in which the
foreign is joined to the memory of
what the poet tries desperately to keep
intact." ("Breve Antologia de Poetas
Latinoamericanos en Estados Unidos,"

Norte, Vol. 11, 1970. Translation ours.)

RESIDENCE BEFORE ESSENCE

The author of these lines is Josd Kozer,
a Cuban-American poet whose own
work bears out that this vexed emo-
tional state can be the occasion of some
exceptional poetry. For myself, how-
ever, I find the idea of a double life
personally and artistically disturbing. It
is nothing new, of course, for a writer
to be at odds with his medio ambiente;
the history of Spanish-American litera-
ture, at least from Dario on, is the
history of such discordances. But I do
think that when this opposition includes
language, the antagonism changes com-
plexion. It is one thing to live at odds
with society's values, another to live at
odds with its language.
When the language of life is English
and the language of literature is Span-
ish, the result is a frightening dissocia-
tion between one's literary and non-
literary selves. To marry an American,
to watch American TV and read Ameri-
can newspapers, to listen to English
every day, and still to write poetry in
Spanish is, to me, nothing short of
crazy. Residence precedes essence. Juan
Ram6n never learned English because
he thought he was just passing through.
But the Cuban-American writer who
came to this country as a child or young
adult and who has written almost all if
not all of his work here, is not just
passing through; whether he likes it or
not, he is, as in Gershwin's song, here
to stay. So it is not a question of leading
a double life, but of compacting one's
doubleness into one life, of exploring
and exploiting that space between, of
walking the fault lines.
In linguistic terms, what I am advo-
cating is the practice of what some
would regard as a barbarous, substan-
dard mixture of Spanish and English.
A colleague with whom I was talking
about this not long ago suggested that
my argument boiled down to a defense
of the 'Cierra la window que me estoy
friziando' school of Spanish usage. To
some extent, to a great extent, she's
right.
The space between is the space of
barbarism, both in the linguistic and
cultural senses of the term. The fault
in the fault line is, at the very least,
grammatical. Let's not forget that the
barbarian, originally, was someone who
Continued on page 36

CARIBBEAN REVIEW/21

J.A.P. Records, Box 771, Grand Central Station, N.Y., N.Y. 10077

The Biography of an Artist

Mexico's Frida Kahlo
Reviewed by Jan Michael Hanvik

Friday: A Biography of Frida Kahlo.
Hayden Herrera. New York: Harper &
Row Publishers, 1983. 507 pp. $21.95

he infamous myths and tradi-

tions of machismo suggest that
the obsession with male domi-"
nance is stronger in Latin America than
in the rest of the world. One conse-
quence is that women do not rise to
prominence in public life, even less
frequently in Latin America than else-
where. Therefore it was intriguing to
note in a tourist guide to Mexico City
some years ago a museum named after
a woman, Frida Kahlo. Adding interest
were her Germanic name, the fact of
her marriage to the giant of world
muralism, Diego Rivera, and a refer-
ence to her violent "anti-Americanism."
These indicators suggested a potentially
volatile combination of forces. What
would her works be like? Certainly no
polite still lifes or landscapes would be
among them.
The house-museum, where she and
Diego Rivera and such guests as the
exiled Leon Trotsky occasionally lived,
itself gave some clues. Twelve-foot
papier-mach6 skeletons greeted visitors
at the entrance. A small replica of a
pre-Columbian pyramid and other heavy
pre-Hispanic sculpture occupied prom-
inent positions. Narrow walkways mean-
dered under gloomy trees inside blank
close walls. In an obviously affectionate
spirit, tiny bright clay pots spelled out
"Frida" and "Diego" high on the
kitchen wall. In overall layout and
appearance, rooms and furnishings were
open, sparse, simple and utterly without
pretension.
Jan Michael Hanvik is a dancer, choreog-
rapher and Latin Americanist who has taught
and performed in Mexico with the Ballet
Folklorico.

Self-Portrait with Cropped Hair. 1940. Oil on canvas. The Museum of Modern Art, N. Y.

In the room where she died after a
lifetime of illness in 1954, dolls, minia-
tures of furniture and toys, messy half-
used paints, and an' unfinished portrait
on an easel suggested Kahlo is only
away momentarily. In the only Kahlo

painting then on exhibit, she is giving
horrifically bloody birth to herself under
the evil-looking smokestacks of Detroit.
All the passions of the life force once
careened through this house.
Hayden Herrera's excellent biography,

22/CARIBBEAN REVIEW

Friday pushes the door to Kahlo's public/
private heaven/hell further ajar. Though
exceedingly thorough as art history,
biography, and social commentary, it
leaves the impression that efforts to
capture all of Kahlo's complexity in a
mere 500 pages are futile. Every ar-
tistic, psychological or other category
into which Kahlo can be slipped, is one
from which she slips out just as easily.
In Lucy Lippard's evaluation of New
York University's 1983 exhibit of
Kahlo's work, this insoluble division
is explained. "In her more grandiose
paintings, she presented herself as a

like so many major women artists, she
juxtaposed the European/Indian heri-
tages, saw herself as loved/unloved,
courageous/terrified, dying/healing, pagan/
Christian, her body poised between sun
and moon, the barren volcanic rock of
the Pedregal and the lush leaves, vines,
flowers and fruits of rebirth."

LABYRINTH OF SOLITUDE

To emphasize her mexicanidad, she
publicly stated that she and the revolu-
tion were born in the same year, 1910,

I The Suicide of Dorothy Hale. 1938. Oil on panel. Phoenix Art Museum. I

microcosmic duality which might have though she was actually born in 1907.
represented Mexico itself. She saw her- Frida, as an ambitious and educated
self literally on the borderline be- female member of the middle class,
tween nature and culture, between the was fated for unresolved duality. Given
ancient earth of pre-Columbian Ameri- her sex, her family, her time and place
can and 'Gringolandia' a distaste- of birth, she could not harmonize the
fully technological USA. A synthesizer, possibilities provided by her society.

Thoroughly educated in the classical
yet free-thinking post-positivist, post-
revolutionary spirit of the day, Mexican
society, nonetheless, did not value edu-
cated women.
Kahlo was doomed to a kind of
perpetual adolescence. The opposing
states of solitude and communion are
equally in evidence at all phases of
Friday Kahlo's life, which ended at age
47. Constantly the center of the party,
she forever despaired in her loneliness.
Maniacally devoted to her easel at
times, she would leave it for months
as she indulged in romance, shopping
and extended periods of ennui. Her
deliberately asking the notoriously anti-
Semitic Henry Ford "Are you Jewish?"
at a large dinner party is but one
example of both mature courage and
political conviction as well as of child-
ish prankishness and impudence.
Though she was Diego Rivera's wife,
she fulfilled the equally important roles
of his daughter and mother. Given who
she was by nature, and what society
would allow her to be, she was doomed
to frustration, both personal and artistic.

THE MASK

Her solace appears to have been in the
creation of an overbrimming sense of a
somewhat forced alegria. Just before
her right leg was amputated, following
a streetcar accident, she "dressed in an
elegant Tehuana dress as if it were for
a party" and asked her friends, "What
tragedy? They are going to cut off my
pata. So what?" The accident and
amputation caused her in her painting
to "chart her state of mind ... in terms
of things done to her body: her face is
always a mask; her body is often naked
and wounded, like her feelings ... Even-
tually the role of heroic sufferer became
an integral part of Frida: the mask
became the face."
Although bourgeois, she dressed in
the traditional costume of the notoriously
independent women of the isthmus of
Tehauntepec. The long skirts covered
her somewhat misshapen legs and her
limp declared her solidarity with la
raza. Herrera continues, "the costume
was a primitive mask, releasing
[women] from the strictures of bour-
geois mords."
This is a crucial aspect of mexica-
nidad, according to more than one
Mexican analyst. Samuel Ramos's Pro-
file of Man and Culture in Mexico

CARIBBEAN REVIEW/23

The Little Deer. 1946. Photograph Copyrighted 1986 Sotheby's, Inc.

(1934) claims that along with the Mexi-
can inferiority complex "goes the almost
universal implication that Latin Ameri-
cans are either deliberately deceiving
themselves or are setting out to deceive
others as to their true nature. 'The
mask' is a vital prop which [is justi-
fied] as a way of preserving inner
freedom and individuality." For good
or ill, it is a part of Mexico's colonial
heritage, when, according to Rodolfo
Usigli, "Mexicans learned to lie for
self-preservation."
When the facade broke down and the
mask repeatedly fell off, what did not
change was Kahlo's involvement with
nature. As a small child, Herrera re-
ports, she walked with her father in
parks, taking home pebbles, insects and
plants "to look up in books, dissect,
and to peer at under a microscope."
Her friend, Lola Alvarez Bravo, ex-
plained that in a sense Kahlo died in a
streetcar accident and afterwards under-
went a rebirth.
Realizing she could not have chil-
dren, she painted her-menageries into
her compositions so that they often
seemed a substitute for children. She
painted flowers and fruit so that they
looked alive, projecting upon them the
full force of her obsession with fertility.

In My Nurse and I (1937), she painted
her adult head on an infant's body,
nursing from the massive breasts of an
impassive Indian woman. In this paint-
ing, Herrera observes, "The engorged
leaf and the 'Virgin's milk' (milky or
sperm-like rain), the praying mantis and
the metamorphosing caterpillar/butterfly
that are camouflaged against the stems
and leaves of plants, all express Frida's
faith in the interconnectedness of every
aspect of the natural world and in her
own participation in that world." In
The Little Deer (1946) she makes the
full transition, painting herself with the
body of a young stag, her human head
crowned with antlers.

ART AND POLITICS

As a volatile and unusual artist, she
needed to make art exceed the bound-
aries prescribed by her place and time
- while at the same time knowing and
respecting those boundaries so as to be
able to work within the circle of her
peers.
In Jean Franco's The Modern Culture
of Latin America: Society and the Artist
(1970), she states that the predominant
characteristic of Latin American art is

its social consciousness, i.e., the artist
as guide, teacher and conscience of his
society. Already Kahlo is the exception,
since she produced work primarily re-
flective of her psyche.
Kahlo, however, achieved harmony
in the post-World War II cultural-
nationalist movement. Like many of her
contemporaries, she allied herself with
the government to receive grants and
which prevented her from working in
isolation. She used backgrounds of Mex-
ican fruit and flowers, she painted all
classes and races, she jibed at the
bourgeoisie, and after dabbling with
Surrealism, recognized that Europe could
still offer technique but not values.
While other artists abandoned art for
politics, Kahlo seems merely to have
ignored the subject in her work. While
other artists were leftists because of
French influence, out of a passion for
social justice, or a rather opportunistic
sense that the leftists would eventually
win, Kahlo seems to have been leftist
because Rivera was and because it was
glamorous to harbor Trotsky.
The cooperative effort required of
muralism held small attraction for her;
she would not abandon her affair with
the canvas. The social realism of the
time also failed to entice her. Though

24/CARIBBEAN REVIEW

she broke with upper class conventions
such as painting "aristocratic features
or soft, reclining nudes," she did not
follow the lead of other painters and
their broad depictions of coarse rural
features. She made no effort to show
the social usefulness of her work.

PAINTED POEMS

One of Kahlo's most salient traits,
typical of her time, is the combination
of a rather primitive art form with a
very strong interest in the subconscious.
Soon, she discovered that the creation
of art from the point of view of the
rejection of European values proved too
narrow a vein to be exploited for long,
and a more positive, personal approach
needed to be found. Her paintings could
easily be termed 'painted poems' in the
same sense that they, like the post-
Modernist poetry of Mexico, Chile,
Argentina, Uruguay and Colombia, all
reflected 'inner spiritual conflicts.'
Kahlo claimed to "detest Surrealism.
To me, it seems to be a decadent
manifestation of Bourgeois art." While
Andrd Breton sought in psychology a
means to eliminate contradiction, Kahlo
seems to have honed her skills at
developing and expressing contradic-
tion. The shock value of Surrealism and
its starting point in an abstract idyll of
freedom did not appeal to her.
Kahlo's poignancy springs from the
fact that she was born at a time when
traditional Mexican religiosity had been
broken down by the philosophies and
necessities of the revolution, dictating
the creation of a new spirit or source
of spirituality; that her ill and reclusive
parents, combined with her own ill-
nesses, deepened her solitude; that the
ambiguous shifting of roles between
herself and Diego Rivera precluded the
establishment of a safe harbor for her-
self with him; that she had to pay twice
for her freedom and creativity, once as
an artist in conflict with her times and
once as a woman in conflict between
her needs and her society's traditions.
Kahlo quit trying to "make conces-
sions to regionalism or local color" but
freed herself from dogmatism to paint
the reality of her interior and middle-
class landscape. She opened the door
to post-revolutionary artistic freedom,
not bound to express the pre-ordained
dictates or commitments of the revolu-
tion, as were the muralist generation.

She represented responsibility to herself
rather than to society. She respected the
goals of the masses but refused to
pretend to join them as was the desire
of others. And while others expressed
the need to reform society, she resisted
such pressure to express her belief in
the honest emotions of the individual
grappling with a psychological reality
just as critical as the external one.
Herrera does not give us much in-
sight into Kahlo's art training. She was
until the time of her accident enrolled
in a program leading to a medical
degree. Was she then schooled or self-
taught? Apart from paging through art
books the Renaissance held a partic-
ular fascination for her during her
recuperation, was she aware of art
history, of Mexico's place in that his-
tory, of contemporary techniques or
philosophies? To what extent was her
philosophy shaped by her proximity to
Rivera's work, and to what extent did
she react against him?
Also missing is knowledge of the
extent to which Kahlo was or was not
an art snob. Though she was a com-
munist, painted murals on the external
walls of the local pulqueria, taught
students with no distinction as to class
or education, she hobnobbed with and
sold her paintings to Nelson Rock-
efeller, Henry Ford, Paulette Goddard,
Dolores del Rio, Marcel Duchamp,
Aaron Copland, to lords and ladies. The
whole issue of Kahlo's elitism or
proletarianism is open to question. It
seems her philosophy diverged greatly
from her quotidian reality.
Such questions, as always, dominate
consideration of Kahlo's work. She was
Mexican. She was international. She
was a Modernist, or an Arielist, or a
Surrealist, or a Fantastic Realist. She
was as devotedly monogamous emotion-
ally as she was polygamous sexually
and romantically. She was a materialist
and a communist, lesbian and hetero-
sexual, an intellectual and a primitive,
sophisticated and crude. Her story is the
story of an obsessed individual hell-
bent on destruction, it is the story of
Mexico, it is the story of modem
Western art and intellectual movements.
Hers is a story of conflict: European-
versus Indian influences, romance ver-
sus discipline, government support ver-
sus reliance on wealthy individual
buyers. But unflinchingly, and this was
the linchpin of her existence, she was
a painter.

UPCOMING EVENTS

February 23-27, 1987 Conference on The
lewi.h Presence in Latin America. University
of Florida, Gainesville, Fl. Contact Judith
Laikin Elkin, LAJSA, 2104 Georgetown Blvd.,
Ann Arbor, Ml. 48105; (313) 996-2880.

February 26-28, 1987 Conference on Negri-
tude, Ethnicity and Afro Cultures in the
America. Florida International University, Miami,
FL. Contact Michelle M. Lamarre, Conference
on Negritude, Ethnicity and Afro Cultures in
the Americas, Department of Sociology and
Anthropology, Florida International University,
Miami, FL. 33199; (305) 554-2247.

March 25, 1987 Third Annual Conference
on Latin American Studies. Theme: The
Mhlitary-Civilian Colrontation in Latin Amer-
ica: Myth or Realiv? Contact S.A. Arcilesi,
P.R. Benson, Jr. or W. L. Harris, The Citadel,
Political Science Department, Charleston, S.C.
29409-0275.

April 27-30, 1987 European-Caribbean Con-
tacts' 87, Annex VI to the Third Lome
Convention. Martinique. Theme: The Develop-
ment of the Caribbean Region through Regional
Cooperation. Contact Commissariat General des
Contacts Europe-Caraibes, B.P. 478, 97205
Fort-de-France Cedex, Martinique, French West
Indies.

May 27-29, 1987 XIl International Congress
of the Caribbean Studies Association. Belize
City, Belize. Theme: The Challenge of Change:
Leadership in the Caribbean. Contact: Claudia
Mitcell-Kernan, Program Chair, Center for
Afro-American Studies, University of Cali-
fornia, Los Angeles, CA. 90024.

June 3-6, 1987 V International Symposium
on Indigenous Literature of Latin America.Comell
University, Ithaca, N.Y. Contact: Richard Luxton,
LAILA/ALILA Symposia Chairman, P.O. Box
163553, Sacramento, CA. 95816.

July 14-16, 1987 Eleventh Annual Cofherence,
Society for Caribbean Studies. Hoddesdon,
Hertfordshire, United Kingdom. Contact David
Lowenthal, 56 Crown St., Harrow-on-the-Hill,
Middlesex, U.K.

CARIBBEAN REVIEW125

Farewell to Amazonia?

How to Invest in Its Future
A Review Essay by William T. Vickers

Dreams of Amazonia. Roger D. Stone.
New York: Elisabeth Sifton Books-
Viking, 1985. 193 p. $17.95.

Change in the Amazon Basin, Volume
I: Man's Impact On Forest and
Rivers. John Hemming, ed. Manchester:
Manchester University Press, 1985. 222
p. $38.50.

Change in the Amazon Basin, Volume
II: The Frontier After a Decade of
Colonisation. John Hemming, ed.
Manchester: Manchester University
Press, 1985. 295 p. $38.50.

Sicuanga Runa: The Other Side Of
Development in Amazonian Ecuador.
Norman E. Whitten, Jr. Urbana and
Chicago: University of Illinois Press,
1985. 315 p. $24.95.

A mazonia comprises the earth's
greatest river system and its
largest tropical forest ecosy-
stem. Along with Antarctica it remains
one of the relatively unknown geogra-
phic and scientific frontiers that still
challenge man's imagination. However,
Amazonia's status as a frontier is endan-
gered, for the eight nations that girdle
the Amazon Basin have come of age.
Their demographic growth, rising eco-
nomic needs and technological capac-
ities, and increasing geopolitical aware-
ness all combine to force the issue of
Amazonian development.
Amazonia, the great lacuna of the
South American continent, represents
to many an opportunity for personal,
corporate, or national aggrandizement.
William T. Vickers teaches anthropology at
Florida International University. His book, Adap-
tive Responses of Native Amazonians (co-
edited with Raymond B. Hames) was pub-
lished by Academic Press.

As such the region has little intrinsic
worth in its "undeveloped" state. Its
real value lies in its potential for exploita-
tion. Failure to develop Amazonian
lands is seen as an invitation to foreign-
ers to seize the resources that have been
ignored. Hence it has been on every
nation's list of things to do in the 20th
century.
In the 1960s Peruvian president Fer-
nando Belaiinde Terry announced plans
for the Marginal Highway of the Jungle,
which was to link the Spanish-speaking
nations from Venezuela to Bolivia. This
attempt, seen as a defense against Brazil's
expansionist tendencies, galvanized a
Brazilian reaction that became the Trans-
amazon Highway network. The Brazi-
lian slogan became, "Integrar para nao
entregar" ("Integrate rather than sur-
render").
In the 1970s most of the Amazonian
nations embarked on competitive pro-
grams of road construction, coloniza-
tion, and general economic develop-
ment in their frontier regions. In addi-
tion to geopolitical concerns, Amazonian
settlement was seen as a mechanism for
ameliorating internal political pressures,
particularly those relating to the issues
of social and economic injustice and
agrarian reform. Wouldn't things be
better for everyone if significant num-
bers of the overcrowded and oppressed
peasantries of the Brazilian northeast
and Andean highlands could be trans-
ported to the Amazon? It was an idea
that many could support, each for their
own selfish reasons. So the critical issue
of land reform was deflected into
schemes for planned colonization in
areas where less competition and con-
flict were anticipated.
This simplistic approach overlooked
important details. Primary was the fact
that Amazonian lands were not the
empty and fertile expanses that the

city-based planners envisioned. The jun-
gles were inhabited, albeit sparsely, by
indigenous peoples and the descendents
of old-line pioneers who had filtered
into the region over centuries. These
were the true Amazonians who had
been long ignored by the centers of
political power. They would continue
to be ignored in the new plans that
were drawn up in Brasilia, Lima, BogotA,
La Paz, and Quito. The approach to
Amazonian development would be bu-
reaucratic and high tech. One had to
have a degree in public administration,
engineering, economics, or agronomy
to know anything. Needless to say, the
long-term inhabitants of Amazonia were
eminently unqualified.

MASSIVE PLANS

So massive plans were drawn, enor-
mous bureaucracies empowered, and
the international race for "develop-
ment" was on. At first it was all new
and exhilarating. In Brazil, for example,
glossy magazines such as Manchete and
Veja issued special editions to educate
the public about Amazonia and the
government's programs to subdue it.
T-shirts emblazoned with the Trans-
amazonica logo became a hot item.
Much was happening, or seemed to be
happening. Long-neglected Amazonia
was at last getting more than its fair
share of attention.
Scholars and other observers who
felt an affinity for Amazonia were also
active. Some were driven by the desire
to understand the region as a natural
environment, indeed, as perhaps the
most complex biotic system on earth.
Others focused more on the human
component, the exotic and immensely
interesting lifeways of the native peo-
ples, and the trials and tribulations of

261CARIBBEAN REVIEW

The Cuyabeno River, Ecuador (Photo: William T. Vickers)

the poor pioneer folk who were increas-
ingly in evidence. Most of these same
observers decried what they perceived
as the development-induced destruction
of both the natural and human environ-
ments, and shared a sense of over-
whelming loss as they viewed the mas-
sive transformations of the past two
decades.
Assessing what has been wrought in
Amazonia has been the task of the
authors and contributors to the four
books that are considered here. They
include scholarly types, government offi-
cials, and other interested observers.
Their collective view is unsettling. Ama-
zonia always had its share of mysteries,
but the complexities of its development
have proven to be far greater than
anyone imagined. The region has not
been a tractable case, nor has it been
amenable to technocratic quick fixes or
social engineering. Most of the utopian
colonization projects have floundered,
while a few struggle on. Much environ-
mental and human damage has been
done, but not all of Amazonia has been
destroyed. We may yet learn from the
mistakes of the unrestrained devel-
opmentalism of the recent past.
Roger D. Stone's Dreams of Ama-
zonia is not the work of an academic,
but rather that of an intelligent and
sophisticated observer who witnessed
many of the significant events of the
70s and early 80s. His book is unbur-
dened with disciplinary jargon and is
easily the best written of the four works
considered here.
Dreams of Amazonia begins with a
history of the region. Stone describes
the initial exploratory thrusts of the

Spanish, Portuguese, and Dutch, but
gives particular emphasis to the work
of 18th and 19th century naturalists.
He outlines the political and entrepre-
neurial processes leading up to the great
rubber boom of the early 20th century
and the subsequent bust and decline of
the Amazonian economy.
He traces the growing awareness of
political leaders for a need to occupy
Brazil's "empty spaces," from Vargas's
1940 "March to the West" speech and
Kubitschek's Bel6m-Brasilia Highway
to Castello Branco's 1965 "Operation
Amazonia" and M6dici's 1970 "Plan
of National Integration." Stone details
how by 1974 the emphasis for Amazo-
nian development had shifted from small
farmer colonization to the promotion
of large-scale corporate efforts such as
the King Ranch and Volkswagen cattle
enterprises, Daniel K. Ludwig's mas-
sive Jari Project, and various other
mining and hydroelectric programs.
Finally, Dreams of Amazonia consid-
ers the research of present-day zoolo-
gists, botanists, limnologists and agron-
omists, and discusses the implications
of their research for future Amazonian
development. He clearly views such
individuals the modem heroes of Ama-
zonia. He shows how their work, cou-
pled with the disappointing performance
of the development and colonization
projects of the 1970s, has begun to
influence Brazilian public opinion and
even government planning vis-a-vis the
region. Stone argues for ecologically-
sound planning. He presents evidence
to support the idea that the conservation
of biotic resources promises both scien-
tific and economic benefits.

The two volumes, Change in the
Amazon Basin, are the result of a 1982
symposium held in Manchester, En-
gland. Volume I, Man's Impact on
Forests and Rivers, focuses on Brazil-
ian development policies and recent
environmental legislation, the effects
of deforestation, basin hydrology, botan-
ical resources, and the modem rele-
vance of indigenous adaptive strategies.
Volume I is an important contribution
in that it documents the recent changes
in official attitudes towards Amazonian
development and proposes alternative
approaches to the poorly conceived
programs of the 1970s.
Volume II, The Frontier After a
Decade of Colonisation, is replete with
analyses. Studies reveal the demogra-
phic and socioeconomic aspects of migra-
tion, provide telling sociological por-
traits of the plethora of Brazilian develop-
ment agencies and their tendency to
work at cross purposes, give insights
into such questions as the evolution of
social elites in the frontier, offer inno-
vative approaches to colonization in
Bolivia, examine the subculture of
Brazil's garimpeiro miners, and assess
indigenous land requirements. Addi-
tional chapters deal with colonization
and frontier issues in Ecuador and
Brazil, indigenous political organiza-
tion, and seasonality as a potential
factor in economic activities. The editor,
John Hemming, limits himself to only
a few comments in his editorial role,
but is to be congratulated for organizing
this massive collection sure to become
a standard reference work of the region.
Norman Whitten's Sicuanga Runa
takes place in eastern Ecuador and the
people studied are lowland Quichua
Indians. Sicuanga Runa presents a de-
tailed view of a specific native setting
and how its members attempt to cope
with foreign ideologies and structures
that outsiders seek to impose on them.
Whitten's theme is that the jungle
Quichua are not simply passive victims
of pro-nationalist and developmentalist
forces, but rather are active participants
in a dynamic process of inter-ethnic
contact and change. He documents the
ways in which the natives strive to
defend their lands and cultural identity,
while at the same time accommodating
themselves to many of the new ele-
ments of national power and culture.
Overall, Sicuanga Runa is a highly
conceptual book and blends aspects of
art, myth and religion into its social,
Continued on page 38

CARIBBEAN REVIEW/27

Sensibility
Continued from page 8

tinuing education in adult life should
seek to instill this, drawing on the
life-long experience of men of action
to help them order, distill and shape
that experience into basic principles
that can be plowed back into everyday
activities. A commitment to this makes
policies for certain kinds of educational
delivery systems easy. None of this is
irrelevant to Caribbean identity and the
world of ideas.

CULTURE

What is more, none of this makes sense
without the employment of genuine
creativity. This is universally applicable
to every human act of intelligence but
finds its most cogent manifestation in
the phenomena collectively referred to
as "culture." It is no accident that in
the Caribbean the struggle for the intel-
lectual and cultural control of the region
comes in the forms of not only the
ideologies of the two Superpowers but
in the assertive media evangelism which
has been exported from American bor-
ders with the proselytizing zeal of
apostles like Billy Graham, Oral Ro-
berts and Jimmy Swaggart. Religion is
a cultural index of the greatest impor-
tance to Caribbean civilization.
In fact, the whole range of cultural
factors (central to the region's identity)
now challenges development theorists
and practitioners to serious encounter
with such realities, often misnomered
"imponderables."
Caribbean identity is indeed now
most readily acknowledged in the ar-
tistic manifestations of culture. But this
is too often attended by an exoticist
perception which does little or no jus-
tice to the ontological and philosophical
underpinnings of calypso and reggae.
These contemporary musical forms, like
their predecessors (the traditional and
ancestral songs), are mnemonic devices
for storing the worldviews of people
yearning for a place in the sun, nowa-
days so lavishly marketed to North
American visitors.
Rastafarian philosophy creatively prof-
fers a philosophy of brotherhood, libera-
tion, human dignity, and self-respect,
indigenously crafted out of Caribbean
realities, rather than, copied from the

archives of the French Revolution or
the theses of Karl Marx. And in using
the Old Testament as a source of energy
for its redemptive ethic, the movement
transcends the mere replacement of
Christ by Haile Selassie I by creating a
value-system that in praxis leads to
self-discipline, self-reliance and the aboli-
tion of self-contempt and self-doubt,
frequent afflictions of a Caribbean legacy
of human exploitation and colonialism.
Are such things proper ingredients
of Caribbean identity? The answer is
not easy to find. Bob Marley is an icon
of the people. Another generation wor-
shipped Louise Bennett. The Mighty
Sparrow has been honored. But while
papiamentu finds full legitimacy in
neighboring Curagao, the creole lan-
guages of Jamaica, St. Lucia and Domi-
nica are still regarded as illegitimate
and backward.
Religious expressions are proper if
they have the seal of the orthodoxy of
the world's "great religions." But the
syncretized indigenous forms are largely
anthropological specimens for scholars
though fiercely adhered to by the
common folk. The nuclear family is
socially recognized despite the uni-
versal presence of single-parent, ma-
triarchal or extended family patterns.
Jamaica did abolish bastardy by the
Status of Children's Act of 1976, and
some other territories of the region
show positive interest in this move.
European classical ballet still holds
a fascination for many even in its most
inexpert and embarrassing execution
by the natives, though the National
Dance Theatre Company of Jamaica
and Beryl McBurnie and her Little
Carib Theatre of Trinidad are touted as
models of indigenous creativity. The
intuitive (untrained) school of Jamaican
painting is the subject of almost weekly
controversy since the Euro-trained
manifestations of painting and sculpture
are still held in awe. So are the Euro-
pean classical composers of a genre of
music, regarded as "serious."
It is, however, true that the Marleys,
Sparrows, Jimmy Cliffs and Peter Toshes
of the Caribbean world can no longer
be ignored. Yet, the denigration of
things African continue despite the clear
advances made in consciousness. Adver-
tisements on television still tend to use
a certain type of Caribbean person to
depict perfection in the marketing of a
product. That person is frequently and
phenotypically far removed from the

coast of Guinea. Racial bliss will, of
course, come only when the last ves-
tigial traces of discrimination of this
type (however subtly concealed) is re-
moved from Caribbean personal inter-
relations.
Politicians still tend to work for the
people rather than with them, encour-
aged, admittedly, by the Messianic im-
pulse which invests leaders with the
power of the Redeemer. "Deliverance
is near" was the slogan of the Jamaica
Labour party under Edward Seaga in
1980. But political messianism is
common to all countries of the region.
Michael Manley (Jamaica), Maurice
Bishop, Eric Gairy (Grenada), Eustace
Bird (Antigua), Ebenezer Joshua (St.
Vincent), John Compton (St. Lucia) and
Robert Bradshaw (St. Kitts) have all
been living expressions of the religious
impulse.
The cultural inventions of the people
from below are what invest the society
with cultural meaning and purpose; yet
they continue to exist on the margin or
as a subculture. It is in the recognition,
mobilization and involvement of the
creative potential of the mass of the
Caribbean population by leaders (polit-
ical and otherwise) towards the articula-
tion, delineation, consolidation and fur-
ther development of Caribbean identity
in the world of ideas that the region has
any future worth contemplating.
The media, education and culture
provide between them three powerful
operational frameworks through which
much of this can be done. The common
point of reference for all three are the
creativity of the people of the region.
From the majority of the population has
emerged over three centuries a capacity
to shape life-styles, attitudes, world-
views, designs for social living appro-
priate to needs. This capacity is what,
in great part, has given shape to any-
thing approaching a Caribbean identity.
In the world of ideas the Caribbean
must continue to strive to take its own
side. Can it really do that?
It certainly is a challenge for media
workers, educators and the people them-
selves who will be composing their own
music, painting their own landscapes,
worshipping their own gods, shaping
their own ontologies and cosmologies,
determining their own destinies and
electing their leaders to help in the great
task of self-determination. CARICOM
has a great deal to preside over other
than the movement of goods.

28/CARIBBEAN REVIEW

Options
Continued from page 12

Table 1 highlights the comparative
policy performance of the Manley and
Seaga administrations in terms of eco-
nomic growth, per capital consumption
trends, unemployment and inflation. In
the Manley years GDP declined consis-
tently and continuously between 1973
and 1980, with the two election years
(1976 and 1980) being the worst years
of negative growth. Prime Minister
Seaga managed to reverse this negative
growth trend but the rate of growth has
been rather modest. Indeed, these modest
levels of increase in GDP have left the
economy at a production level that is
considerably below that of the early
1970s. Jamaica's GDP at the end of
1984 was still 10% lower than it was
11 years earlier in 1973 despite positive
growth since Prime Minister Seaga was
elected in 1980.
The modest growth contrasts sharply
with the massive increases in external
aid and loans and suggests that the
growth levels were induced more by the
level of aid and borrowing than by
forces internal to the economy. The
modest impact itself also raises ques-
tions about the effects of this very large
increase in external aid and debt capital
in the absence of basic changes to the
structure of the economy.
This is further confirmed by the data
on per capital consumption levels. Con-
sumption levels fell steadily in the
Manley years but have stabilized rather
than improved appreciably in the Seaga
period. The marginal improvement here
places overall per capital consumption
level still below where it was in 1979
when compared to 1983. As is the case
with production it remains below the
levels of the early 1970s. Here the gap
between current and past levels is even
greater as per capital consumption levels
at the end of 1983 were 27% below
what they were in 1974.
Despite the great expectations aroused
by Prime Minister Seaga's election vic-
tory in 1980 and his strong backing
from Washington and international aid
agencies, the quality of life for the
majority of Jamaicans has witnessed
no improvements. On the contrary,
cutbacks in public sector employment,
reductions in health and educational
expenditure, massive increases in the
cost of public utilities and the scaling
down of local government services as

a means of reducing the budget deficit
have all reduced living standards below
what they were in 1980. The major
positive change in terms of consump-
tion levels has been the abundance of
consumer goods available and the elim-
ination of shortages but prices have
moved far beyond the reach of the
poorer classes while the rich have gotten
richer and the middle sectors have
experienced a substantial reduction in
living standards.
Unemployment increased rapidly
during the second term of the Manley
administration (1976-80) but it declined
only marginally between 1980 and 1983.
The open unemployment rate remains
very high and points to a continuing
social problem that reflects an underde-
veloped and underutilized productive
capacity which neither Manley's socia-
lism nor Seaga's free enterprise capital-
ism has been able to address. The more
restrictive spending policies of the Seaga
administration and the large inflow of
legal and illegal consumer goods which
entered the economy between 1980 and
1982 stabilized prices by the sheer
impact of increased supplies and re-
strained purchasing power.

COMPARATIVE ACHIEVEMENTS

Table 2 outlines the achievements of
the Manley and Seaga administrations
with respect to investment, income, and
production levels for the main sectors
of the economy. It is apparent that
overall investment levels have improved
under Prime Minister Seaga after the
dramatic decline in the second half of
the 1970s under Manley. However, the
investment increases are considerably
less than was expected given the level
of private sector confidence that fol-
lowed the election of Seaga in 1980,
the promotion of the economy by blue
chip US business leaders, the massive
investment promotion program under-
taken by the government and the cli-
mate of business optimism that existed
over the 1980-82 period.
Total investment levels remain con-
siderably below what they were in the
period before Manley came to power
(1970). Private sector investment level
remains rather modest, while reflecting
a marginal increase over the Manley
years. The public sector has had to
expand its investment level to fill the
vacuum. In spite of the pro-private
sector ideology of Prime Minister

Seaga's government, public sector invest-
ment levels remained high up to 1983
and exceeded that of the private sector,
thereby confirming the sluggish re-
sponse of the latter to the policy over-
tures of a government that has aggres-
sively promoted the idea of private
sector led growth.
The levels of gross profits generated
in the economy have not been signif-
icantly affected by the changes in the
ideological direction of economic policy.
However, as the economy has come
under rigid IMF controls since 1977,
income distribution has become more
concentrated in the hands of upper
middle and upper income earners. Under
both regimes labor income has concen-
trated within the top 20% of income
earners over the 1978 to 1981 period.
Production levels in key sectors show
the failure of the Jamaican economy to
return to the output levels of the early
1970s. Mining has been heavily hit by
declining international demand for alu-
minum and a reduced competitiveness
of US based aluminum smelters. In the
case of manufacturing and traditional
export agriculture the problem relates
to supply rather than demand. Some
positive trends have, however, emerged
in tourism, domestic agriculture and
non-traditional agricultural exports.
Preliminary estimates indicate that
31 export agricultural crops showed an
increase of 37% over 1983 levels.
These include mainly winter vegetables
and ethnic food crops. Domestic agri-
culture is estimated to have grown by
23% in 1984 which would put its
output level of 39% above the 1973
levels or 21% above the output level
of 1980 when Seaga came to power.
Tourism arrivals recorded impressive
growth before the roadblocks and street
protests against the gas price increase
in January 1985 generated an adverse
overseas image leading to cancellations
of bookings. Neither of these growth
areas of additional hard currency earn-
ings are likely to come close to filling
the gap left by the declining bauxite
and aluminum industry which tradition-
ally supplies 70% to 80% of the eco-
nomy's net foreign exchange cash in-
flows. The effort to promote manufac-
turing has been a total failure leaving
the entire burden of earning more hard
currency on agriculture and tourism. In
these circumstances, the country's bal-
ance of payments situation is likely to
remain problematic for a long time to
come and extensive borrowing will

CARIBBEAN REVIEW/29

continue in spite of an already exces-
sive level of debt payments.
Table 3 projects the main trends in
imports and exports and public debt as
well as the budget deficit. In the period
between the Manley and Seaga admin-
istrations the gap between imports and
exports deteriorated. High levels of
borrowing added to trade liberalization
policies induced a rise in imports not
matched by a corresponding increase
in exports. This big borrowing created
a facade of economic buoyancy which
reflected itself in increased buying and
selling rather than in increased produc-
tion. The merchants and the higgler
traders thrived while the manufacturers
and producer's suffered. Commerce ex-
panded while manufacturing contracted.
The budget deficit was reduced only
marginally up to 1983 but IMF pressure
forced a program of accelerated budget
cuts and increased revenue raising that
dramatically reduced the budget deficit
in 1984. In the process some 8,000
public sector jobs were cut from the
budget leading to widespread and unpop-
ular layoffs of workers. It is testimony
to the tough and resolute leadership of
Prime Minister Seaga that he was pre-
pared to adopt these harsh measures
which Manley did not have the stomach
for in the 1970s. These layoffs com-
bined with tight monetary policies, a
drastic devaluation of the Jamaican
dollar from a value 56 cents (US) to
18 cents (US) over the 1983 to 1985
period, and bold increases in taxes all
increased Prime Minister Seaga's unpop-
ularity. He has been resolute and single
minded in ignoring popular pressures
and doing what has to be done to adjust
the economy in keeping with the bal-
ance of payments, earnings and budget
deficit crises. Among elected leaders
dependent on votes for reelection Prime
Minister Seaga stands out alongside
Mrs. Thatcher of Great Britain as a
leader strong enough to implement highly
unpopular policies.
The size of the external debt con-
tinues to rise ominously in an economy
in which hard currency earnings have
been declining rather than increasing
thereby indicating a reduced capacity
to repay debts. The creditworthiness of
the Seaga administration has been based
mainly on strong US support and the
willingness of Prime Minister Seaga to
carry out severe adjustment and auster-
ity measures to satisfy demands of
creditors and lending agencies.
Beyond these political factors the

economy in objective terms has ex-
ceeded its borrowing capacity but con-
tinues to get generous inflows of loans,
credit and international aid because of
political considerations. The debt pay-
ments now exceed 50% of the actual
cash inflow of hard currency. The
economy will have to double its present
level of hard currency earnings to cope
with an increasing debt burden and
provide an adequate cash flow to fi-
nance imports when the level of exter-
nal borrowing begins to decline.

ALUMINUM'S DECLINE

What has been unfortunate is that nei-
ther the government, the technocrats,
the bauxite companies nor the IMF
anticipated the sudden decline in world
demand for aluminum. The govern-
ment's austerity measures came conse-
quently rather late and after producers
and consumers had been fed on the
unbounded optimism of Prime Minister
Seaga. His sudden reversal into harsh
austerity measures, therefore, occasioned
a serious problem of political credibility
and confidence in his policies.
As ,Table 4 suggests Jamaica has
fared much worse than other small open
economies without substantial petro-
leum resources. Like Puerto Rico, Ja-
maica's income level has fallen con-
siderably between the '70s and the '80s.
This is in contrast to countries such as
Barbados, Hong Kong and Singapore
where income levels have grown appre-
ciably over the same period despite
external economic pressures.
The fortunes and prospects of small
open economies are heavily dependent
on increasing export earnings or hard
currency earnings from services such
as tourism. Barbados, Singapore and
Hong Kong found ways of increasing
export earnings and have raised their
per capital hard currency earnings to a
high threshold level. Barbados's per
capital foreign exchange earnings were
2.7 times Jamaica's earnings in 1979.
Jamaica's per capital foreign exchange
earnings were barely above that of the
smaller Eastern Caribbean territories
and about one-sixth of a tourist eco-
nomy like the Bahamas.
To merely plead that Jamaica has
been a victim of external shocks under
both Manley and Seaga is to beg the
question of why the economy has been
so slow in adapting to adverse world
conditions, especially since the country

is endowed with a wide range of
resources and has been blessed with
generous doses of loans and aid since
the 1970s. The economic crisis in Ja-
maica was evident from 1973 and 13
years later the economy has barely
begun to cope with, adverse world
circumstances. To understand the under-
lying problems one has to look beyond
ideology and beyond the specific po-
licies of Manley and Seaga and identify
the obstacles to economic development
in this small island economy.

OBSTACLES TO DEVELOPMENT

A range of underlying factors have
contributed to the gaps between eco-
nomic performance and policy goals
and targets in Jamaica under both the
Manley and Seaga administrations. Fore-
most among these factors has been the
high level of external borrowing and
the generous inflows of aid. Faced with
balance of payments problems caused
by a gap between the level of hard
currency earnings and the demand for
imports, the Jamaican economy would
have more quickly adjusted itself and
reallocated its productive resources to
cope in the absence of such massive
infusions of loans and aid.
The elected political leaders would
have had no choice but to impose
austerity measures and stick to them
regardless of the short term political
costs. The private sector would have
been forced to shift productive capacity
towards areas of production that gener-
ated high local value added and foreign
exchange earnings and to abandon screw
driver industries that consumed foreign
exchange. Economic activity would have
more quickly relocated towards areas
of genuine comparative advantage that
offered prospects for export earnings.
Lifestyle and consumption patterns that
consume large quantities of foreign
exchange would have had to be ad-
justed to the country's hard currency
earning level. What the massive bor-
rowing and generous aid inflows did
was to postpone the hard decisions,
delay the adjustment process and permit
a climate in which producers and con-
sumers believed that "business as usual"
could continue except for short crises.
Elected leaders in turn sought to avoid
harsh adjustment policies, to implement
them long after they became necessary,
and to abandon them as soon as there
was some temporary sign of an easing

301CARIBEAN REVIEW

of the crisis. The massive levels of
external aid and borrowing destroyed
the country's capacity and will to carry
out effective economic crisis manage-
ment.
The problem was especially evident
in the country's manufacturing sector
which was built around import substi-
tution screw driver industries that de-
manded large doses of foreign exchange
but earned little. Generous governments
continued to borrow undervalued hard
currency due to artificially high rates
of exchange and to make this available
to non-viable screw driver industries to
merely keep them alive. The meaning
of the foreign exchange crisis was that
many such industries could not be
afforded by the economy and a manu-
facturing capacity had to be relocated
towards agroindustry and other areas
utilizing more local raw materials with
a higher local value added. It took the
impending collapse of the bauxite indus-
try in 1983 to force the Seaga govern-
ment to adopt monetary and foreign
exchange policies which will permit
only the viable manufacturing enter-
prises to survive. Out of this will
emerge manufacturing enterprises with
a capability to earn hard currency but
the process of adjustment has been
slow. Even as these policies were being
implemented in 1985, mistaken and
disillusioned manufacturers were blam-
ing their woes on the Seaga policies
while being quite oblivious of the under-
lying structural problem.
Both the Seaga and Manley admi-
nistrations have in different ways inti-
midated and cramped private sector
initiative. In the Manley period radical
anti-capitalist rhetoric and fears aroused
by the anti-imperialist foreign policy
and close ties with Cuba increased the
perception of political risk on the part
of both local and foreign capital. Those
fears did not entirely evaporate with the
change of government in 1980 as the
two party character of Jamaican policies
and the prospects of a return to power
by the PNP in the 1980s perpetuated a
sense of political risk. This factor was
aggravated by polls which documented
the rapid decline of the popularity of
the Seaga administration.
Both local and foreign capitalists
have been very disillusioned by the
gaps between the pro-private sector
rhetoric of Seaga and the actual policies
and approaches to decision making and
economic management. Cumbrous pro-
cedures for obtaining licenses and other

approvals to conduct business, time
wasting red tape and complicated bu-
reaucratic procedures, punitive rates of
taxation, slow unreliable and complicated
customs procedures, constant shifts and
changes in government policies and
priorities, a lack of consultation be-
tween the Seaga government and the
private sector and an excessive appetite
for arbitrary and cumbrous regulation
of private sector activity have all led
to great doubts and skepticism about
the government's commitment to a pri-
vate sector led economy.
The management of access to foreign
exchange has been a major problem.
Enterprises which earn foreign exchange
or otherwise bring in hard currency into
the economy do not have a prior claim
on its use and have to bid like users for
the scarce funds available to the Central
Bank. Under the Manley administration
foreign exchange access was rationed
by regulating import licenses. Under the
trade liberalizing regime of Prime Min-
ister Seaga, competitive bidding for
foreign exchange by various auction
systems have replaced state regulation
and control over the allocation. Both
systems offer less than adequate incen-
tives for enterprises able to earn foreign
exchange to maximize investment effort.
In a small open economy that is faced
with a foreign exchange problem enter-
prises earning foreign exchange must
be accorded priority access to credit,
foreign exchange and other facilities.
The system of open bidding established
under the Seaga administration repu-
diated this while the priorities govern-
ing allocation of foreign exchange under
the more regulated system of the Manley
regime did not give preference to for-
eign exchange earners by allowing them
access to what hard currency they earned.
A powerful incentive to encourage
an expansion of export oriented produc-
tion is the liberalizing of foreign ex-
change access permitting firms prior
access to the foreign exchange they
earn. To make such a system workable,
the foreign exchange needs of the state
and that of domestic producers would
have to be allocated on a priority basis
from sectors which earn more than their
needs, thereby permitting the remainder
of the foreign exchange to be utilized
by the enterprises which earn it.
Throughout the period of the coun-
try's economic crisis, Jamaica's private
sector has failed to measure up to goals
set by successive governments as re-
gards new investment and employment

creation. Four factors have contributed
to impairing the capacity of the Ja-
maican private sector to contribute more
to national development.

PRIVATE SECTOR FAILURES

First of all the private sector has no
national commitment. More than 80%
of Jamaican businessmen are holders
of US Green Cards which entitles them
to residence in the US. Increasingly
since the political tensions of the 1970s
some actually live in the US and
commute back and forth between Ja-
maica and the US mainland. As a
consequence, most members of the Ja-
maican private sector have a high pro-
pensity to export income and profits as
a hedge against political or other uncer-
tainty. This is especially so in periods
of crisis when what the economy needs
is business confidence leading a high
retention of profits and a high rate of
reinvestment of profits.
Secondly, the Jamaican economy has
only recently evolved out of a colonial
type monocrop sugar economy in which
the easiest way toward accumulation
of wealth was to be found in merchan-
dising or buying and selling rather than
in production. The onset of the eco-
nomic crisis of the 1970s triggered a
return to traditional modes of risk avoid-
ance by the Jamaican private sector by
ignoring opportunities to invest in pro-
duction and concentrating on high profit
turnover areas of business such as
commerce and real estate. My research
has shown that in 1982, 60% of the
gross profits turned over in the Ja-
maican economy were concentrated in
commerce and real estate. While these
investments created lucrative incomes
for private sector interests, they repre-
sented a less than optimal allocation of
the national investable surplus in terms
of either employment creation or re-
source utilization.
Thirdly, the Jamaican private sector
maintains a high dependency on debt
capital borrowed from banks as against
equity capital. Very few enterprises are
registered on the local stock exchange
as public companies utilizing equity
financing. Even the larger enterprises
that seek some equity funding do so
on a limited scale. In the majority of
family owned private companies, only
token sums of equity investment are
retained to satisfy legal requirements.
Both working capital and investment

CARIBBEAN REVIEW W31

capital needs are secured by bank bor-
rowing. The reasons are identifiable.
The Jamaican entrepreneur is too risk
averse to invest his own funds in his
own enterprises. The investment risks
are passed on to the banks. There is a
reluctance to seek outside equity financ-
ing out of a desire to maintain tight
control over the enterprise by family
interests. Even the public companies
restrict public share subscription so as
to maintain control by small cliques of
wealthy family interests.
The effects of this method of busi-
ness financing are quite severe. It per-
mits enterprise profits to be siphoned
into luxury living and maintains a low
propensity to reinvest income accruing
from business activity. It restricts own-
ership to a small class of family inter-
ests with influential networks of contact
with the bankers and retards the poten-
tial to unearth the enormous entrepre-
neurial talents within the majority of
the population by its allocation of cap-
ital to privileged classes and its limita-
tions on equity ownership. This system
of business financing slows down the
rate of growth of enterprises with po-
tential to expand and diversify and
increase employment because of re-
stricted access to the available potential
pool of eager equity investors.
All of this reinforces the fourth prob-
lem area which relates to the high
propensity of the Jamaican private sector
to consume business profits in expen-
sive lifestyles based on high consump-
tion of luxury imports. In the 1980s,
hundreds of millions of dollars were
frittered away on importing motor cars
while opportunities for investment in
production were ignored. The result of
this syndrome is an acute dependence
on foreign savings which compounds
the country's indebtedness and financial
problems. Instead of foreign savings
being used to complement domestic
savings, high consumption patterns
among the business elite lead to a
reliance of foreign savings to replace
deficient levels of local savings.
Clearly, the Jamaican private sector
has been more part of the problem than
part of the solution during this period
of national economic crisis. Real progress
towards economic recovery requires
more than just appropriate government
economic policies but demands thor-
ough modernization and rebuilding of
the Jamaican private sector.
The attempt by the Manley administra-
tion to discover an alternate engine of

growth in a dynamic state sector was
itself subject to major obstacles. There
is no adequate technical and financial
assistance available internationally to
support large scale efforts at developing
state managed public enterprises. This
is in contrast to the generous technical
and financial assistance available from
international capitalist sources for pro-
moting private sector development. The
underdevelopment of international so-
cialism as an economic force limits the
level and degree of socialist economic
initiative possible in small countries
like Jamaica with limited managerial,
technical and financial resources. With-
out substantial technological transfers,
technical assistance, equity investments,
and balance of payments supports from
socialist sources and prospects for increas-
ing export earnings from socialist mar-
kets, foreign exchange or trade depen-
dent small open economies such as
Jamaica are not likely to find any
option to a capitalist path.

RUNNING OUT OF OPTIONS

To maximize the capitalist path to devel-
opment in a small trade dependent
economy with a weak private sector,
large inflows of foreign capital and
technology are obviously necessary.
Prime Minister Seaga understands this
very well to a degree that the more
nationalist former Prime Minister Manley
did not. The Seaga administration tried
to open up the Jamaican economy to
US investors through a high profile
investment promotion program. High
interest rates in the US, the instability
of the Jamaican dollar, uncertainty over
access to funds to repatriate profits,
added to the paucity of investment
opportunities likely to interest big US
corporations reduced the impact of this
policy initiative.
Between 1981 and 1984 a total of
311 such investment projects were
brought into production. Some 12,000
jobs have been created in an economy
with close to 300,000 unemployed.
Most of the projects were financed by
local capital indicating that no sub-
stantial inflow of equity capital has
occurred. Most investors are Jamaican
and US small businessmen with a major-
ity Jamaican presence. Conspicuously
absent are large Jamaican companies
controlled by the closed clique of wealthy
families or big US corporations. Total
investment for these 311 projects

amounted only to US$182 million be-
cause of the proliferation of small
enterprises. This investment initiative
is a very positive one that promises to
open up opportunities for some enter-
prising small business interests (both
local and foreign) but its total impact
is not likely to fill the investment,
employment and hard currency earning
gaps in the Jamaican economy.
Political risk compounded by risks
due to social violence and added to the
high consuming, low investing charac-
teristics of the Jamaican private sector
have not provided a climate in which
either the socialist mixed economy po-
licies of the Manley administration nor
the free enterprise approach of Prime
Minister Seaga have found fertile soil
for economic recovery in Jamaica. Nor
has there been either the capital, tech-
nical capacity or management capabil-
ity necessary to render the state as a
viable engine of growth and develop-
ment. In the face of these realities
Jamaica is fast running out of options
as changes of government have failed
to improve the prospects for economic
recovery.
Part of the problem is rooted in the
divergence between the political and
economic time tables. Populist politics
based on patronage and clientelism has
demanded that elected leaders show
short term material gains in living
standards or welfare and social benefits
to secure and maintain popularity. The
time frame required to restructure the
Jamaican economy to improve its hard
currency earning capacity, its resource
utilization (of both labor and capital)
and its resource allocation as well as
to streamline and modernize its private
sector requires at least a decade of
consistent stable economic policies
geared towards those objectives. In
addition, harsh austerity measures while
this restructuring is occurring are unavoid-
able. But elected governments get no
more than two terms in office and
usually spend the first term settling
down to merely understanding the mag-
nitude of the policy problems. By the
time that settling down process is com-
pleted it is time to prepare for elections.
Policy performances in the second terms
are usually constrained and limited by
the build up of opposition party strength
buoyed by cumulative social and eco-
nomic discontent and government lead-
ers desperate for a third term divert
energies towards policies at the expense
of economic crisis management.

321CARIBBEAN REVIEW

D. R.
Continued from page 16

the US government that Balaguer had
a trustworthy running mate and poten-
tial successor.
Some businessmen linked to Bala-
guer hoped his victory would result in
tightened public expenditures, lower
taxes and even "privatization" of some
of the inefficient deficit-plagued state
enterprises. Others associated with the
two major candidates simply intended
to feed from the state trough. It is a
measure of the disrepute of politicians
and of the perception that the country
sought conservative management prac-
tices to deal with a state apparatus gone
awry, that Majluta also chose a busi-
nessman, NicolAs Vargas, a retired San-
tiago executive, to share the ticket with
him.
In the PLD, the choice of Juan Bosch
as the presidential candidate was also a
foregone conclusion. Unlike the ideo-
logically heterogeneous, clientelistic struc-
tures of the PRD and the PRSC, the
PLD has been an organizationally rigid
structure under the iron grip of Bosch,
who maintains a certain caudillo aura
like Balaguer. Bosch had been the
successful PRD presidential candidate
in the 1962 elections, though he was
overthrown in 1963 after only seven
months in office. He became disillu-
sioned with liberal democracy and bit-
terly anti-US following the 1965 US
intervention that blocked the effort to
bring him back to power and his defeat
to Balaguer in the 1966 elections. Bosch
founded the PLD in 1973 when he left
the PRD with a cadre of young intel-
lectuals to form a small, disciplined
party that would promote his thesis of
"dictatorship with popular support."
Bosch's rejection of elections as a
means of attaining power gradually
changed as the PLD vote jumped from
1.1% in 1978 to 9.8% in 1982. In 1986,
Bosch claimed electoral victory was
attainable. As in earlier campaigns, only
publicity focused on the party or on the
figure of Bosch was permitted and only
positions previously cleared by him
could be enunciated characterized
by a blend of anti-US and quasi-marxist
nationalism and populism. As the elec-
tions approached, Bosch moderated his
positions regarding relations with the
US, the role of foreign investment, debt
payments and association with the IMF.
PLD publicity centered on the promise

of honest, efficient administration and
PLD campaign activities were marked
by tight organization and discipline.
As in earlier PLD campaigns, Bosch
was unforgiving of his former party;
he bitterly attacked Majluta in personal
terms, thus indirectly but purposefully
boosting Balaguer's candidacy.
The socialist left was splintered and
in disarray. In 1982, the two non-PLD
left coalitions had received 33,731 votes.
These coalitions, however, gradually
fell apart. In 1986, only the Communist
Party went to elections, engaging in
sterile polemics with the PLD and
ultimately receiving only 4,756 votes.
Other socialist movements called for
abstention or endorsed the PLD as the
most viable "progressive" alternative.

THE CAMPAIGN

The 1986 campaign was characterized
by a lack of serious discussion of
issues. Balaguer and Majluta were con-
servative machine-oriented pragmatists
and Bosch was seeking to expand his
electorate by moving toward the center.
For Nicolis de Jesus L6pez Rodriguez,
the Archbishop of Santo Domingo, it
was the country's poorest electoral pro-
cess since 1962. The campaigns of
Balaguer and Majluta were flashy and
expensive, though they were also char-
acterized by considerable infighting and
disorganization. They swapped charges
of repression and corruption while their
extensive television propaganda com-
bined upbeat messages occasionally tar-
geted to specific groups and "nega-
tive" advertisements. The PLD cam-
paign was much more tightly organized,
though it lacked the financing and the
rural outreach of the two major can-
didates.
The electoral process was marred by
continuing allegations of fraud that
were poorly managed by the Central
Electoral Board (JCE) responsible for
holding the elections. Part of the prob-
lem was the JCE's ambiguous status.
The organization is intended to direct,
regulate and also be the final court of
appeals regarding all electoral matters,
yet its autonomy from the other branches
of government is limited. Its three
directors (judges) are normally elected
by the Senate, though only for a four
year period, opening the way for a
politicization of the JCE. Furthermore,
the JCE is dependent upon the pres-
idency for prompt disbursement of funds

and shares responsibility with it for the
management of the offices that provide
the personal identification cards re-
quired to receive the electoral carnets
citizens must present in order to vote.
The three judges eventually appointed
to the JCE to oversee the 1986 elections
were viewed as "representing" the
interests of Majluta, Jorge Blanco and
Balaguer, respectively. Under intense
political cross-pressure, the JCE was
increasingly paralyzed. It delayed acting
on charges of potential fraud by the
different candidates regarding issues
such as the extension of the period to
register to vote, the accuracy of the
electoral registry, the quality of the ink
intended to prevent multiple voting, the
nature of party alliances and the form
and manner of use of the new single
ballot. The new boleta unica was in-
tended to reduce vote-buying facilitated
in the past by the use of separate party
ballots. Yet, the version implemented
by the JCE did not permit ticket split-
ting to the detriment of minor parties
and the major parties feared uneducated
voters would spoil their ballots.
The constant talk of fraud was prepar-
ing public opinion to reject the validity
of a narrow electoral defeat. Many
feared that premature "victory" an-
nouncements by the candidates and
celebrations by their followers immedi-
ately after election day would lead to
bloodshed and an electoral fiasco. Inci-
dents of violence were viewed as tragic
but relatively minor until two weeks
before the elections when a caravan of
cars led by Majluta met one led by a
PRSC candidate and gunfire was ex-
changed, resulting in several deaths and
burned-out vehicles. President Jorge
Blanco was finally galvanized into action.
He cancelled a planned trip to Costa
Rica and invited international observers
to the elections. He visited each of the
candidates to negotiate a "gentleman's
agreement" regarding non-violence and
respect for the electoral results to be
announced by the JCE (Bosch did not
sign the pact, but submitted a letter).
Responding to a suggestion by Bala-
guer, the president appointed a Com-
mission of Electoral Advisers (Comisidn
de Asesores Electorales, CAE) presided
over by Archbishop L6pez Rodriguez
as support for the JCE and a guarantee
of the fairness of the electoral process.
As a result, election day was relatively
uneventful. The CAE had taken a number
of measures prior to the elections to
seek to ensure that they would be

CARIBBEAN REVIEW/33

honestly carried out and the ballots
fairly counted, building upon the JCE's
efforts. And from election day until
after the post-electoral crisis had receded,
radio and television stations were forced
to link up to the state broadcasting
company.

CRISIS AND RESOLUTION

In the tense days following the elec-
tions, the role of the CAE turned out
to be pivotal. As the preliminary vote
count in favor of Balaguer gradually
widened two days after the elections,
and with only 8% of the ballot boxes
(mesas electorales) yet to be counted,
Majluta accused the JCE president and
one other judge of bias. Whether it was
complicity, cowardice or other factors,
the two judges immediately stepped
aside for their substitutes with the
knowledge that the new JCE president
in particular would be abjectly identi-
fied with Majluta. When this new pres-
ident was challenged by the PRSC and
the PLD, he refused to step aside in a
legally questionable maneuver. He
immediately prolonged a temporary halt
in the vote count and there were indica-
tions that the new JCE would attempt
to lengthen the vote count process and
possibly tamper with it. Following Maj-
luta's instructions, the PRD observer at
the JCE became especially obstruction-
ist, provoking bitter confrontations with
the commission.
The country's low level of institution-
alization was never more apparent. The
ad-hoc CAE became the neutral stabi-
lizing force that the JCE should have
been, first declaring that the votes had
been counted honestly and then chal-
lenging the dubious actions of the new
JCE. The CAE's call for the electoral
results to be respected was supported
by business, professional and labor
organizations who all published profuse
ads in the print media.
The actions of these associations
were partially analogous to those car-
ried out during the more serious regime
crisis of 1978 when elements of the
military stopped the vote count as it
went against the incumbent Balaguer.
And in a mirror image of PRD mobi-
lization of US and Socialist Interna-
tional support to defend its 1978 vic-
tory, the PRSC in 1986 also mobilized
Christian Democratic leaders from
around the world to send telegrams
defending Balaguer's electoral victory.

The crisis receded as a political agree-
ment was reached between Majluta and
Balaguer four days later. Ultimately,
Jorge Blanco imposed a solution he
preferred, by which the original mem-
bers of the JCE who had earlier stepped
aside again took their place.
Although Jorge Blanco's democratic
credentials were not in question as
Balaguer's had been in earlier periods,
he played a complex game during this
period. By the steps he took, particu-
larly formation of the CAE, he indi-
cated his commitment to honest, free
elections. Such elections would strength-
en his image as a statesman and his
future political possibilities. At the same
time, his wife's senatorial victory in the
National District was threatened unless
the 7.4% vote of Majluta's La Estruc-
tura was added to the PRD's disap-
pointing 32.6%; otherwise, the PRSC,
with 34.9% would emerge victorious.
However, La Estructura had not offi-
cially registered her candidacy by the
March 31 deadline, though it had claimed
to have sent a letter to the JCE register-
ing its support subsequently. In a letter
he sent to Majluta during the post-
electoral crisis, the president wrote that
the legal challenge of the JCE was a
"bad step", but also expressed the
"necessity" that the LE votes be added
to those of the PRD.
The question of alliances between
parties at the national and local level
was a legal morass exacerbated by the
JCE's earlier vacillating behavior. It
became a politically charged issue due
to the narrow vote margins. However,
in contrast to the Balaguer-influenced
JCE of 1978 which twisted electoral
results in order to give Balaguer's party
a majority in the Senate, the current
JCE generally respected the electoral
results. On July 12, Balaguer was offi-
cially declared president-elect, and Asela
Mera de Jorge was not allotted the
Senate seat for Santo Domingo. The
PRD mayoral candidate, however, was
declared the winner because La Estruc-
tura had registered its support for him
at the appropriate time. The final results
gave the PRSC broad control of the
Senate (PRSC, 21; PRD, 7; and PLD,
2) but a few seats shy of a majority in
the Chamber of Deputies (PRSC, 60;
PRD, 52; and PLD, 16).
A comparison of the 1982 and 1986
electoral results show that the PRSC
victory was based on a marginal in-
crease in its percent of the vote, a
doubling of the PLD vote and a precip-

itous decline in the PRD vote. The
decline in the PRD vote undoubtedly
represented a confluence of factors.
Broad sectors of the population blamed
the governing party for the country's
economic decline and harsh stabiliza-
tion program, party factionalism was
now represented by the separate La
Estructura party, in some regions unpop-
ular candidates were imposed by faction
leaders and Majluta's campaign got off
to a late start due to the troubled
nomination process. Furthermore, the
PRD could no longer use the issues of
repression and especially corruption
against Balaguer as effectively as it had
in earlier campaigns. The PRSC made
at best modest organizational advances,
though it did make some inroads into
traditional PRD centers such as Santo
Domingo and successfully managed ques-
tions about Balaguer's age, health and
eyesight It was also aided by the PLD
campaign. The PLD, in turn, nearly
doubled its vote in percentage terms,
expanding in economically hard-hit urban
centers and eastern sugar-growing re-
gions that were strongly PRD in past
elections.
Given the already bitter divisions
within the PRD, the electoral setback
by such a narrow margin set off a flurry
of mutual recriminations. For Pefia
G6mez, a more balanced strategy toward
the left to stem the growth of the PLD
could have provided the victory, to
which Majluta responded that his defeat
was due to "treasonous behavior" by
presumed PRD supporters.
The elections reflected the fragility
of the political regime, yet strengthened
it by their successful realization. They
also marked a turning point in the
evolution of the country's parties and
party system. The PRSC now confronts
the challenge of generational succession
in a more advantageous position from
the presidency, as Balaguer plays out
what almost certainly will be his last
term in office. The PLD also faces the
challenge of how to manage leadership
succession from their caudillo without
party fragmentation, though Bosch could
conceivably be a presidential candidate
in 1990. Within the PRD, the three
tendencies could possibly reunite in the
opposition, though it is more likely that
in time one or more of them will be
forced out or will break away, possibly
to form new coalitions with other par-
ties. All three faction leaders retain
presidential aspirations, as do other
ambitious PRD figures. Reflecting ideo-

341CARIBBEAN REVIEW

logical affinity and political pragmatism,
Majluta is negotiating participation by
his faction in Balaguer's new govern-
ment. Pefia G6mez and Bosch spoke to
each other for the first time in 13 years
just before the elections and have held
several conversations subsequently. This
could set the groundwork for Pefia
G6mez to eventually head a new coali-
tion, incorporating the more social-
democratic part of the PLD in a post-
Bosch period. And Jorge Blanco, with
his administrative experience, financial
resources and current presence within
the PRD structure will continue to play
a prominent role in national politics. A
complex period of party readjustment
has begun.
At the same time, Balaguer has an
opportunity to strengthen democratic
processes in the country. He appears to

wish that his last term be an "historic"
one. It is another indicator of the
country's low level of institutionaliza-
tion that so much can depend upon the
health and intentions of one individual.
Although hard-line conservative policies
are likely, a return of earlier repressive
practices is not. The country is not now
polarized as it was following the 1965
civil war and US intervention and major
party leaders across the spectrum have
now had experience both as government
and as opposition.
Yet, Balaguer's term will be conflic-
tive. Conflicts will stem not only from
Congressional opposition and as a result
of the political readjustment in process,
but also because of intractable eco-
nomic problems. Balaguer will be unable
to satisfy fully pent-up popular eco-
nomic frustrations, though the country's

economic prospects are less glum than
in past years due to Jorge Blanco's
economic stabilization policies and lower
world oil prices. Job creation, export
diversification and attention to deficit-
plagued state enterprises will be immedi-
ate priorities. Extreme versions of "pri-
vatization", however, are unlikely to
find strong support from an old master
at using state resources for political
advantage.
Ultimately, for these elections to be
considered an important step toward
solidly establishing open, peaceful polit-
ical processes in the country, dem-
ocratic "rules of the game" and insti-
tutions will need to be more fully
accepted within leadership circles, and
broader political incorporation, economic
well being and social equity will have
to occur.

Swan Song
Continued from page 17

normally seen only in closed political
systems in an open democratic system
has been part of the key to his success.
Two recent examples come to mind.
In late July, just two weeks before he
was to be inaugurated, Balaguer's daily
five o'clock afternoon walks through a
nearby park ceased, with no explana-
tion. His staff, queried by newspapers,
did not know or would not disclose his
whereabouts. Within a few days, Santo
Domingo was rife with rumors: he had
suffered a stroke, was terminally ill, or
had died in a Houston hospital. One
newspaper even ran an artist's depiction
of Balaguer, lying prostrate in a hos-
pital bed, leg in traction. As the state
of suspension grew, politicians started
jockeying for position to fill the antici-
pated power vacuum.
But, lo and behold, before the coun-
try had descended into total chaos, Dr.
Michael De Bakey of Houston issued
a public statement to the effect that he
had recently completed a routine check-
up of Balaguer, whom he found to be
in fine shape for a man of his age,
except for his glaucoma. After an eye
check at Mass General, Balaguer re-
turned with a new bill of health, stronger
than ever. Not only that, his mysterious
absence had enabled him to test the
political loyalties of his courtiers; a few
were said to have lost appointments
because of clumsy maneuvering during

his absence.
Another typical Balaguer move is his
choice of a chief-of-staff: a 26 year-old
political novice, Glory Consuelo Torres
Mejia, better known as "Minu". A
Dominican who until this spring was
studying in Costa Rica, Minu met
Balaguer at a party rally when she took
off his trademark top hat and donned
it herself. Balaguer, the story goes, was
touched by her mirth and simplicity,
and remembered her. When time came
to put together an executive staff, he
put her in charge of all administrative
matters, including appointments. Word
around Santo Domingo is that as a
result, jobs are being doled out on the
basis of merit and not political connec-
tions, as Minu simply doesn't know
who's who in Dominican politics, and
owes loyalty only to Balaguer. The
Dominican political elite, not surpris-
ingly, is baffled by and resentful of
Minu's special standing with President
Balaguer.
Both maneuvers are classic Trujillo:
he used to regularly feign mortal ill-
ness, disappear from sight for a few
days, and through informants watch
closely the scheming his absence un-
leashed. When he would suddenly reap-
pear, those who had plotted against him
were normally stripped of their posi-
tions, sometimes publicly humiliated,
and banned from government and busi-
ness. And Trujillo frequently played
new favorites against his inner circle
of advisors and sycophants, a role
Balaguer once occupied and which he

has now bestowed upon Minu.
Balaguer has also been associated
with some of the rougher tactics of
Latin dictatorships. During the 12 years
he governed from 1966 to 1978, there
were a number of disappearances and
assassinations by right wing para-
military death squads, supporting Bala-
guer's government, but over which he
claimed to have no control. The opposi-
tion was so intimidated by the so-called
"uncontrollables" that it boycotted elec-
tions in 1970 and 1974.
In one important way, however, Ba-
laguer differs from most caudillos, and
from most modem Dominican politi-
cians: he has never personally been
accused of corruption or been consid-
ered to be corrupt. Instead, his record
of good management can be seen through-
out the Dominican Republic in the form
of low-cost housing, roads and other
public works built during his 12 years
in office.
As he donned the presidential sash
in August, Balaguer's popular image
was that of a benevolent, wise, national
grandfather (he is actually a bachelor),
called back by his people to restore
order and prosperity. Even his main
rival in the May election, Jacobo Maj-
luta, has called him the country's most
distinguished living politician. Many
even find his aloof, almost reclusive
manner reassuring. For many Domini-
cans, Balaguer's political comeback re-
presents a return to simpler, and for
some, better days.

CARIBBEAN REVIEW/35

SPIC CHIC
Continued from page 21

spoke a language that the Greeks found
unintelligible. At the root of the concept
of barbarism are linguistic acts of ef-
frontery like 'Cierra la window que
me estoy friziando,' a sentence that if
you scan it is actually a perfect hendeca-
syllable, the very backbone of Spanish
poetry. Having been raised on the good
streets of what the natives call la
saguesera, I am myself a barbarist, and
proud of it. For me, Spanglish is not a
Miami vice but a Little Havana virtue.
Because Miami is both la capital del
sol and la capital del solecismo, a
barbaric mixture of Spanish and Eng-
lish is the linguistic modality that most
authentically expresses me. To deny
myself barbarism is to deny who I am.
I have little sympathy, therefore, for all
of those arbiters of linguistic propriety
who disdain nilingues like myself. The
real nilinguismo, the one sure way of
having no language, is to refrain from
barbarism, to speak a civil tongue, to
let the language of Greece squelch the
language of grease. I'm also not too
keen on being what some linguists call
a 'balanced bilingual,' for I am less a
balanced bilingual than an imbalanced
interlingual.
The one concession I would make
to purism, however, is that I see a
crucial difference between the victim
of barbarism and its instigator. Like
most of you, I do not like the sort of
evil hodgepodge that results from the
mindless agglutination of two languages.
But I admire immensely writers, musi-
cians, artists, and just plain people
who, by shrewdly seasoning the mix,
can turn a foul-smelling hodgepodge
into a mouth-watering ajiaco. This is
why I like the Newyorican Cheek to
Cheek so much; it's shot through with
barbarisms, but barbarisms handled ir-
reverently, sassily, with Miami spice
or New York salsa.
Not long ago I was at a Cuban-
Jewish wedding in Miami where the
entertainment was being provided by
Willie Chirino, a popular local singer.
If you've been to a Jewish wedding,
you know that at some point the band
has to play Hava Nagilah. No Jewish
wedding is complete without Hava Na-
gilah. Well, on this particular night
Chirino played all sorts of salsa music
but no Hava Nagilah but at one point,
late into the evening, he said something

like: "No se preocupen, que ayer nos
pasamos la tarde ensayando Hava Na-
gilah en guaguanc6." Thereupon fol-
lowed a rendition of Hava Nagilah-
or perhaps I should say, Havana-gilah,
for Chirino did indeed play this tradi-
tional Jewish song in a guaguanc6
rhythm, and this prompted a horah with
salsa steps, if you can imagine it.
That night was one of the high points
of my life (and it wasn't even my
wedding), for Chirino's Cuban-Jewish
chutzpah brought home, as they say,
that one does not have to submit
somberly to the vexations of bicultural-
ism or bilingualism or exile. There is
no need to feel 'threatened' by English,
as Kozer puts it, for the impingement
of two languages on one life is not a
threat but an opportunity. It is not
necessarily a bad thing for the mother
tongue to become the other tongue; it
is not necessarily wrong to cut the
umbilical word. The thing, to misquote
a famous English poet, is to make
parade of pain, to turn the fault line into
a conga line. But in order to do this
one cannot avoid barbarisms; indeed,
one has to court them.

It simply comes down to being what
one is: not an American writer, and not
a Spanish-American writer either, but
only a Latin from Manhattan or a Spic
from Chapel Hill and the word 'spic'
itself, as you know, is probably a
reference to our barbaric mangling of
the English tongue.

THE EDGE EFFECT

Biologists have a concept that I find
useful in this connection. When dis-
cussing those areas where two different
environments meet shorelines, the
borders between mountain and plain,
between forest and desert they talk
about something called the 'edge effect.'
Apparently these border areas are remark-
able for their particularly rich and com-
plex ecosystems, a proliferation of flora
and fauna that is attributed to the
meshing of the ecological resources of
two different environments. I believe
that the latino writer, caught as he or
she is between languages and cultures,
can profit from a similar edge effect
The ground between languages can be

The

40c 1gn OF THE

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ZGM FMA 94

ZGM-FM 94, the Caribbean Superstation, seeks a
qualified professional to manage On-Air news and
human interest programming and staff.
The qualified applicant should have at least three
years experience in radio and TV broadcasting pro-
gramming and news Formal training in studio man-
agement, production techniques, or broadcast journal-
ism will be an asset
Responsibilities include:
Formulation and presentation of human inter-
est programs
Preparation and presentation of world and
regional news
Preparation and presentation of promotional
and commercial announcements

,

FM Stereo
230,000 WATTS

If you meet these qualifications and are looking for a
rewarding career with the Eastern Caribbean's best
source of news and entertainment, send your c v. in
strictest confidence to-
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West Indies

36/CARIBBEAN REVIEW

a fertile one, if one will only take the
time to cultivate it, to mix it up. Some
of us may have lost our place, but we
have gained an edge. Now the trick is
to live and write on the edge.
As I mentioned earlier, Cheek to
Cheek begins by transporting us to

heaven: Heaven, I'm in heaven. For
me, as for the Bad Street Boys, heaven
is hick and spic bailando pegaito. If
you can't have it in Havana, make it
in Miami. Whatever contribution Cuban-
American literature has to make to the
cultural life of this country, it will come

Interlingual Poetry

Gustavo P6rez Firmat

Turning the Times Tables

I am the sum total of my language.
Charles Sanders Pierce

&,Y si soy mis de uno, Pierce?
,Y si soy dos,
o tres,
0-como dirfa David-
un million?
L.En qu6 moment, en qu6 participio del
mundo
se convierte tu suma en mi resta, Pierce?

I am what is left
after the subtraction of my languages.
I am the division that resists
the multiplication of my languages.
I am the number that won't square,
the figure you can't figure,
the remainder of my languages.

One into two
won't go.
You into tO
won't go.
Yo into you
won't go.
I into yo
won't go.
Nothing into nada
won't go.

Split the difference.
Split the atom.
Split.
I still won't go.
Some people
just
don't add
up.

from the friction and the heat generated
by close dancing. Only rubbing will
make us free, only rubbing will make
us singular rather than marginal, but it
will be a singularity based on the ac-
ceptance, and even the celebration, of
our linguistic and cultural doubleness.

Bilingual Blues
Soy un ajiaco de contradicciones.
I have mixed feelings about everything.
Name your tema, I'll hedge;
name your cerca, I'll straddle it
like a cubano.

I have mixed feelings about everything.
Soy un ajiaco de contradicciones.
Vexed, hexed, completed,
hyphenated, oxygenated, illegally
alienated,
psycho soy, cantando voy:
You say tomato,
I say tu madre;
You say potato,
I say Pototo.
Let's call the hole
un hueco, the thing
a cosa, and if the cosa goes into the
hueco,
consider yourself in casa,
consider yourself part of the family.
Soy un ajiaco de contradicciones,
un potaje de paradojas:
a little square from Rubik's Cuba
que nadie nunca acoplari.
(Cha-cha-chA.)

Who speaks for the Caribbean?

Please send a subscription for the period [ ] My check for $__ is enclosed.
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CARIBBEAN REVIEW/37

AMAZONIA
Continued from page 27

economic and political analysis.
The true theme that pervades and
links these four volumes is how a
unique and valuable geographical and
cultural region has been violated by
poorly planned and implemented pro-
grams that were driven by external
political and economic forces. These
"development" programs, and even
their personnel, have been external to
the region. They have frequently ignored
the very real ecological differences be-
tween various portions of Amazonia,
and they have not benefitted from the
knowledge of the local inhabitants, whe-
ther Indian or non-Indian. The folly of
such methods is increasingly recog-
nized, even by many in positions of
official responsibility.
Hopefully, these books will con-
tribute to the debate on alternative
approaches to Amazonian development.
This debate should include the consid-
eration of indigenous agro-forestry as
an appropriate land management system
versus cattle ranching or monoculture,
and the development of water transport
versus unlimited highway construction.
An investment in the future can be
made by supporting efforts to conserve
a truly unique array of floral and faunal
resources that offer multiple economic
and scientific benefits. It is also time
to invest in the human resources of
Amazonia. This can be done by recog-
nizing that the long-time residents of
Amazonia really do possess unique
knowledge and expertise. They should
be provided with opportunities for formal
education and be allowed to participate
in the decision-making processes of the
region and nation. It is imperative that
their legitimate land claims be recog-
nized and protected. Within a few
decades much of Amazonia will cer-
tainly be "developed." The question
facing us now is whether the process
can be bent to a more intelligent and
democratic end.
ANYWHERE N THE
CARIBBEAN
FOR
RESEARCH OR RELAXATION
R & R TRAVEL
(305) 253-6577
13721 SW 152 ST., MIAMI, FL.
IN THE COUNTRY WALK PLAZA

CAr BBAN

iEW AWARD

We are pleased to accept nominations
for the eighth annual Caribbean Review
award, an annual presentation to honor
an individual who has contributed to
the advancement of Caribbean intellec-
tual life.
The award recognizes individual effort
irrespective of field, ideology, national
origin or place of residence.
The award committee consists of
Lambros Comitas (chairman), Columbia
University; Angel Calder6n Cruz, Uni-
versidad de Puerto Rico; Locksley Ed-
mondson, Cornell University; Lisandro
Pirez, Florida International University;

and Andrds Serbin, Universidad Cen-
tral de Venezuela.
Nominations are to be sent to the
Editor, Caribbean Review, Florida
International University, Miami, Flo-
rida 33199. Nominations must be re-
ceived by March 15, 1987.
The Eighth Annual Award will be
announced at the XIIth International
Meeting of the Caribbean Studies Associa-
tion to be held May 27-29, 1987, in
Belize City, Belize. In addition to a
plaque, the recipient receives an honora-
rium of $250, donated by the Inter-
national Affairs Center of Florida Interna-
tional University.
Previous recipients have been Aimi
C6saire, CJLR. James, Gordon K. Lewis,
Sidney W. Mintz, Arturo Morales
Carridn, Philip M. Sherlock, M.G. Smith.

38/CARIBBEAN REVIEW

RECENT TRANSACTION BOOKS

9 The Latin American Series s

THE SELLING OF FIDEL CASTRO
THE MEDIA AND THE CUBAN REVOLUTION
William Ratliff et al.
ISBN: 0-88738-104-9 (cloth) July 1986 193 pp. $19.95
ISBN: 0-88738-649-0 (paper) $12.95
RACE, CLASS, AND POLITICAL SYMBOLS
RASTAFARI AND REGGAE IN JAMAICAN POLITICS
Anita M. Waters
ISBN: 0-88738-024-7 (cloth) 1985 356 pp. $29.95
PERIPHERAL CAPITALISM AND UNDERDEVELOPMENT IN
ANTIGUA
Paget Henry
ISBN: 0-87855-490-4 (cloth) 1985 220 pp. $34.95
PERUVIAN CONTEXTS OF CHANGE
William W. Stein, editor
ISBN: 0-88738-013-1 (cloth) 1984 400 pp. $29.95
DOMINATION AND POWER IN GUYANA
A STUDY OF THE POLICE IN A THIRD WORLD CONTEXT
George K. Danns
ISBN: 0-87855-418-1 (cloth) 1982 193 pp. $29.95
ROMULO BETANCOURT AND THE TRANSFORMATION OF
VENEZUELA
Robert J. Alexander
ISBN: 0-87855-450-5 (cloth) 1982 737 pp. $19.95
THE STRUCTURE OF BRAZILIAN DEVELOPMENT
Neuma Aguiar, editor
ISBN: 0-87855-138-7 (cloth) 1979 258 pp. $19.95
Order from your bookstore or prepaid from:
Transaction Books Dept. LAS4* Rutgers University New Brunswick, NJ 08903

ALLEN &UNWIN

r

THE DOMINICAN
REPUBLIC
Politics and Development in an
Unsovereign State
Jan Knippers Black
Drawing on her 20 year involvement
with Dominican history, Black ad-
dresses the political tension generated
by the contradictory demands of the
country's impoverished population
and representatives of U.S. political,
military and economic interests. This
timely volume is already establishing
itself as the essential textbook in the
study of Latin American and Carib-
bean affairs.
HB $22.95 0-04-497000-5
PB $11.95 0-04-497001-3
160pp. 1986
THE FALKLANDS/
MALVINAS WAR:
A Model for North-South
Crisis Prevention
Virginia Gamba
Gamba views the Falklands/Malvinas
War as a tragic, but logical, conse-
quence of contemporary North-South
communications problems. With this
war as an example, she highlights the
necessity for improved North-South
communications and outlines crisis
prevention techniques.
HB $29.95 0-04-497003-X
PB $14.95 0-04-497026-9
298pp. 1986
EAST INDIANS IN A
WEST INDIAN TOWN
San Fernando, Trinidad, 1930-70
Colin Clarke
Clarke blends geographical,
sociological, and anthropological ap-
proaches to the study of social and
cultural pluralism in a town south of
Trinidad.
HB $34.95 0-04-309106-7
192pp. 1986
WELFARE POLITICS IN
MEXICO
Papering Over The Cracks
Peter M. Ward
"Ward has written a fascinating
political-economic study of the provi-
sion of housing, public services, and
health care in Mexico City . the
balance of history, policy and disag-
gregated statistical information is
superb .... A valuable addition to
the literature." Choice
HB $24.95 0-04-361058-7
176pp. 1986

I
8 Winchester Place, Winchester, MA 01890
Toll Free (800) 547-8889 In MA and Canada (617) 729-0830

THE POLITICAL
ECONOMY OF
REVOLUTIONARY
NICARAGUA
Rose Spalding, Editor
The authors of these essays examine
the goals, internal debates, external in-
fluences, and shifting policy decisions
that have effected the efforts of the
Sandinista government. The essays
clarify the dynamics between soaring
food prices and falling real wages, and
explain the complex relationship be-
tween the private sector economy and
the state. The essays also document
the Reagan administration's extensive
policies toward the Sandinista
government.
HB $23.95 0-04-497014-5
PB $12.95 0-04-497015-3
256pp. November 1986
Thematic Studies in Latin America

FIRMS, FARMS AND THE
STATE IN COLOMBIA
A Study of Rural, Urban and
Regional Dimensions of Change
Burt Helmsing
This explanatory work attempts to
give focus and direction to the mud-
dled theories associated with regional
development. Using Colombia as a
basis of study, Helmsing discusses
theories of rural and urban change,
general and spatial conceptions of
rural organization, and the formation
of an agro-industrial complex to
reshape the rural economy.
HB $37.95 0-04-497003-X
298pp. 1986

forthcoming
WOMEN ON THE
U.S./MEXICAN BORDER
Responses to Change
Vicki L. Ruiz and
Susan Tiano, Editors
HB $28.95 0-04-497038-2
PB $13.95 0-04-497039-0
256pp. January 1987
Thematic Studies in Latin America

POPULATION GROWTH
IN LATIN AMERICA AND
U.S. NATIONAL SECURITY
John Saunders, Editor
If current growth rates of Latin
American populations remain un-
changed, by the year 2001 Northern
Americans will be outnumbered by
approximately 2 to 1 in the Western
Hemisphere. These essays analyze the
demographic dimensions of Latin
America's rapid population growth,
and then consider the consequences
these dimensions may have for U.S.
security.
HB $24.95 0-04-497002-1
224pp. 1986

NICARAGUA:
REVOLUTION AND
DEMOCRACY
Jose Luis Corragio
Coraggio argues that, unlike most
Third World Revolutions, the San-
dinista Revolution was democratic and
used a unique combination of armed
force to reach power, and democratic
measures to build a new society. He
then questions the meaning of
"democracy" in a Third World socie-
ty, and uses the Sandinista Revolution
to illustrate his point: namely, that
socialism and democracy are not con-
tradictory, but are part of the same
process.
PB $11.95 0-04-497019-6
160pp. 1986

m

First Impressions

Critics Look at the New Literature

Compiled by Forrest D. Colburn

BIG STUFF

Small Countries, Large Issues -
Studies in U.S.-Latin American Asym-
metries. Mark Falcoff. American Enter-
prise Institute Studies in Foreign Policy,
1984. 126 p.

There are five essays in this lucid
volume, each dealing with one Latin
American country and its relations with
the United States. They are Cuba,
Uruguay, El Salvador, Nicaragua and
Chile. The unifying theme is the inter-
play between the influence exerted on
these countries by the United States as
distinct from the part played by indig-
enous social-political and cultural forces.
Mark Falcoff is among the small
number of specialists on Latin America
who do not subscribe to the so-called
dependency theory and the associated
belief that the U.S. (or the West) and
capitalism are responsible for the eco-
nomic and political difficulties of Latin
American (and other Third World) coun-
tries. Even more unorthodox is his view
that "The United States, uniquely among
nations, expects its foreign policies to
be an extension of its national values"
- an observation of special relevance
when many American policies in Cen-
tral America have been subject to crit-
icism precisely in the light of such
national-moral values, and when many
of the critics are unwilling to grant any
geopolitical justification to U.S. policy.
Falcoff's essays, however well
grounded in history and scholarly in
approach, will not convince those who
are committed to casting the United
States in the traditional imperialist role.
While the debate over American influ-
ence in Latin America is likely to
remain contentious and emotional, Fal-
coff's dispassionate analysis should make
it easier to assess the limits of American

Forrest D. Colburn teaches politics at
Princeton University.

responsibility both for the domestic
problems of the countries concerned
and for the growing affinity of their
Marxist-Leninist movements (or gov-
ernments) to the Soviet/Cuban axis.
Paul Hollander
University of Massachusetts
Amherst, Massachusetts

WEARY TRAVELER

The Old Gringo. Carlos Fuentes. Carlos
Fuentes and Margaret Sayers Peden,
trans. Farrar Straus Giroux, 1985. Harper
& Row, 1986. $5.95.

Fuentes' tenth work to be translated
into English (and beautifully translated
it is too) has its roots in his abiding
passion for the Mexican revolution and
a teenage reading of the American
writer and journalist Ambrose Bierce.
In 1914 Bierce, then an old and grizzled
gringo, disappeared in Mexico. The
ambiguities surrounding Bierce's end
fascinated Fuentes. Did he fight with
Villa and then desert him for the
perfumed old senator Carranza? Was
he recaptured by the revolutionaries and
shot as a deserter? Was he shot by Villa
for giving him a round of drunken
abuse? Was he the victim of treacher-
ous Mexicans? Did he die, uncharacter-
istically, fighting for the revolution (the
same man who defined revolution as
"an abrupt change in the form of
mismanagement")? Or, did he die natu-
rally, through a combination of old age
and travel weariness?
Fuentes imagines a fate to satisfy the
most sardonic: he dies needlessly and
unheroically, as we all tend to. But in
the eyes of a young gringa, Bierce takes
on the mantle of a wise old man. When
dead, she lets him assume the identity
of her father and buries him in a hero's
grave. As in so much of Fuentes'
fiction, a villain becomes a hero and
reality is mixed with myth.

The book represents another chapter
of Fuentes' fascination with the betrayal
of the Mexican revolution and the
ubiquitous presence of the United States
in Latin America. The book gives us
another chance to learn to live with
Mexico, and not to try and "save it for
democracy and progress."
Roy Pateman
University of Sydney
Sydney, Australia

INVITATION TO A PARTY

Bondmen & Rebels: A Study of Master-
Slave Relations in Antigua. David Barry
Gaspar. The Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1985. 338 p. $35 00.

As the members of Antigua's planto-
cracy prepared for their annual celebra-
tion of the coronation of George II in
October 1736, their slaves were in-
volved in plans of their own. The slaves
of Antigua had planned an islandwide
revolt to begin on the evening of
October llth. They intended to blow
up the celebration site as the coronation
ball was being held, simultaneously
invade the capital town of St. John's
with different armed groups, and then
spread the revolt throughout the rest of
Antigua, where whites were badly out-
numbered. When the coronation ball
was postponed for three weeks, the
slaves' plot was discovered, hearings
were conducted, and many slaves -
the majority of them artisans and field
supervisors put to death.
Gaspar's fine book focuses on this
aborted insurrection in its full social
and economic contexts. He discusses
the implications the Antigua incident
had for other Caribbean islands. A
major contribution is the comparative
inter-island model Gaspar develops to
help explain why, in order to achieve
freedom, an islandwide insurrection was
the only practical way for Antigua's

40/CARIBBEAN REVIEW

slaves. Antigua's small size and (by
1700) deforested hills afforded no local
maroon refuge or sanctuary. The highly
organized attempt at total takeover on
Antigua (facilitated by secretly trans-
mitting messages and plans among the
slaves on the contiguous estates that
covered the island) was thus encour-
aged by Antiguan geography.
Bonham C. Richardson
Virginia Polytechnic Institute
Blacksburg, Virginia

BRINGING MISERY ALONG?

The Plight of Haitian Refugees. Jake
C. Miller. Praeger, 1984. 222 p.

It is difficult for social scientists to
write about contemporary Haiti without
lapsing into indignant tirades about the
cruelty and greed of the rulers and the
incredible plight of the masses.
Perhaps it is inevitable that condi-
tions in Haiti and among Haitian mi-
grants force us to abandon detached
scholarly analysis in favor of ringing
indictments, but I keep hoping for a
more nuanced description. I keep won-
dering, for example, how do Haitians
find the money to finance travel to the
United States, where do the apparently
abundant supply of craft for the long
sea journey come from, how did the
financial system among Haitians become
so developed that it allows emigrants
to send remittances to the most remote
comers of their country.
We have limited information about
the inner workings of Haitian society
and the concrete processes through which
outmigration occurs. Miller's intentions
are commendable and his compassion
for the Haitian poor shines in every
page; as social science, however, his
book leaves much to be desired.
The book takes us from an overview
of conditions leading to migration from
Haiti to a description of alternative
destination countries including the
Dominican Republic, Cuba, Jamaica,
and the Bahamas to an account of
the journey to the United States and the
ensuing unfavorable reception.
The treatment by U.S. immigration
authorities of the Haitian boat arrivals
is described in detail and deplored, as
are the dismal employment, housing,
and health conditions confronted by the
refugees in South Florida, as well as the
violent attacks against them by black

Americans and other native groups. It
seems that, wherever they turn, these
hapless citizens of the poorest country
in the hemisphere are confronted by
catastrophe. It is, without doubt, a
moving story. Still, books such as this
one point to the need for better first-
hand research so that descriptions of
these migrants' plight can be trans-
formed into scientific understanding of
its causes and, hence, of the most
effective means to alleviate it.
Alejandro Portes
Johns Hopkins University
Baltimore, Maryland

RAISING CANE

Sugar and Slavery in Puerto Rico:
The Plantation Economy of Ponce,
1800-1850. Francisco A. Scarano. Univ.
of Wisconsin Press, 1984. 242 p. $21.50.

Scarano provides a convincing analysis
of a sugar plantation system which
hitherto has received insufficient atten-
tion either in its own right or within the
context of the larger Caribbean sugar
plantation economy under slavery.
Sugar slavery came late to Puerto
Rico. Decades after the Haitian Revolu-
tion took St. Domingue out of the world
sugar economy, and contemporaneous
with the demise of sugar slavery in
Britain's West Indian colonies, a pro-
ductive sugar plantation system devel-
oped in Puerto Rico. Sugar's ascend-
ancy relative to other agricultural enter-
prises was never of a scale to warrant
classifying Puerto Rico as a plantation
society. Nevertheless, the crop domi-
nated in localities such as Ponce,
Guayama and Mayaguez. By the mid-
nineteenth century, the volume of the
island's sugar exports was second in the
Caribbean only to Cuba, whose levels
of efficiency Puerto Rico surpassed.
The book documents the transforma-
tion of land-holding and labor patterns
in the southern municipality of Ponce,
where sugar estates worked by slaves
replaced the small-holding peasantry to
become the dominant sector of the
region. Although sugar slavery trans-
formed Ponce, its impact throughout the
island was less extensive. Notwith-
standing sugar's dominance in certain
localities, Puerto Rico continued to
support "a flourishing nonplantation
sector associated with tobacco and coffee,
and in some areas of the country the

peasantry was still as strong as ever."
The impact of sugar slavery in Puerto
Rico thus differed dramatically from
elsewhere in the West Indies.
The oppressive conditions of slave
life and labor on Ponce estates, how-
ever, followed a pattern common to the
Caribbean, although, unfortunately, the
author could find no extant plantation
accounts and his treatment of the world
of the slaves is correspondingly scanty.
Further, with Puerto Rico's transforma-
tion to export production, the island
became subordinated to an international
economy on much the same terms as its
Caribbean neighbors, the legacy of which
they continue to share.
Roderick A. McDonald
Rider College
Lawrenceville, New Jersey

LEARNING ABOUT POLITICS

I...Rigoberta Menchu: An Indian
Woman in Guatemala. Edited and intro-
duced by Elisabeth Burgos-Debray.
London: Verson Editions, 1984

Rigoberta Menchu is a young Quich6
Mayan Indian woman born in a north-
western province of Guatemala. Her
improbable life takes her from being a
migrant laborer to being a "representative
of the 31 January Popular Front" in
Europe. Elisabeth Burgos-Debray, a Ven-
ezuelan anthropologist, stopped her
long enough to write up her auto-
biography.
The ethnographic interest of the book
lies in Rigoberta's comments on preg-
nancy and child-rearing, sex roles; and
the nahual or protective spirit. Much
scholarship on religious syncretism, the
fusing of half-understood symbols and
the emotional-intellectual need for expres-
sion, is summed up in her comments
on her own grappling with Catholicism:
"the prayers weren't even in Spanish.
Although it's something we say and
express with all our faith, we don't
always understand what it means...it
was just a channel for our self-
expression."
Catholicism was only the first belief
system that Rigoberta used as a channel
of self-expression. The second, one of
political resistance, was drawn out of
her political experience.
Her political transformation began
with the organizing abilities she learned
in the apolitical Catholic Action and

CARIBBEAN REVIEWI41

her father's unsuccessful struggles to
hold onto his land. Her father's activ-
ism led to his jailing and his participa-
tion in the formation of the Comitd-de
Unidad Campesina (CUC).
Rigoberta followed her father into the
ranks of CUC organizers. She traveled
in both the highlands and the south
coast teaching, exhorting, listening, learn-
ing Spanish and organizing networks
that taught workers to defend them-
selves with available tools: tunnels,
machetes, stones, chile and salt, and
molotov cocktails.
But if Rigoberta represents the will
to resist by Guatemalan Indians she also
symbolizes the intensity of the repres-
sion. Her family was shattered by the
reprisals of the government. Her father
died in the January 1980 blaze in the
Spanish Embassy that killed 39 people.
In 1979, her brother was tortured for
16 days, put on public display and shot.
In April 1980 her mother was tortured
and left to slowly die from her wounds.
After all this Rigoberta continues to
organize and move clandestinely in and
out of Guatemala as a spokesperson for
the guerrilla groups (with whom she
had not been associated until after the
Lucas Garcia period). But the repres-
sion worked. Public demonstrations were
no longer held and the guerrillas
smashed. Remnant groups still harassed
the Guatemalan army but they were
unable to launch major challenges. What-
ever the future holds for Guatemala,
Rigoberta Menchid's book is a signif-
icant contribution to the history of
political movements in Latin America.
David Bray
Inter-American Foundation
Washington, D.C.

BYE BYE BABY

Haiti in Caribbean Context: Ethnicity,
Economy and Revolt. David Nicholls.
St. Martin's Press, 1985. 282 p.

Among other things, in this book,
Nicholls explains why, to everyone's
surprise, the transition from Frangois
Duvalier's presidency to that of his
18-year old son Jean-Claude was ef-
fected smoothly and the family's reign
consolidated. Nicholls perceptively anal-
yzes the shift in power which marked
the evolution of the regime: he points
out that the noiriste ideology which
enabled the father to enjoy the support

of most of the classes moyennes had
been all but abandoned by the son. As
his marriage to the daughter of "a rich
and ruthless mulatto businessman"
symbolized, Jean-Claude's support came
to rest on the mostly mulatto bour-
geoisie and business community. Accord-
ing to Nicholls, this power basis was
fragile: motivated entirely by self-
interest, it could easily be eroded by
adverse economic conditions. Since the
power of the tonton macoutes had gradu-
ally been curbed, and the Black classes
moyennes felt neglected by the regime,
they would feel no compulsion to defend
it if it were endangered.
Nicholls' conclusion is a scathing
indictment of the policy of foreign
powers toward the Duvalier govern-
ment, and of the operations of aid
programs financed by Western gov-
ernments and by various international
agencies, operations which reinforced
dependency and "the power of corrupt
and oppressive governments." One re-
grets that Nicholls' discussion of the
problem, while perceptive indeed, is so
cursory, and one hopes that in the future
he will broaden his analysis. Even so,
the conclusion should be made required
reading for all those who naively be-
lieve that development aid programs
do or indeed are meant to help
the poor and downtrodden.
While, by its very nature, Nicholls'
Haiti in Caribbean Context is a less
thorough and systematic book than his
seminal From Dessalines to Duvalier,
it is a valuable contribution to our
understanding of Haiti and its problems.
He once again demonstrates his mastery
of the scholarly literature and his ability
to find much original material in the
Haitian press and in various archives.
His elegant style and pungent wit make
this book a pleasure to read.
Lion-Frangois Hoffmann
Princeton University
Princeton, New Jersey

SMALL STATES

Foreign Policy Behaviour of Caribbean
States: Guyana, Haiti and Jamaica.
Georges A. Fauriol. Univ. Press of Ame-
rica, 1984, 338 p.

The author selected these three coun-
tries because he thinks that they repre-
sent the Caribbean as a whole. Their
most significant aspect is their "small-

ness." Determining whether a state
should be characterized as small, in-
vokes factors such as physical size,
population, level of economic devel-
opment and military capability.
The author claims that unlike others
who have written on the subject, he has
relied heavily on quantitative methods.
The quantitative approach has its advan-
tages but it should not be assumed that
its use makes the forecasting of a
particular state's behaviour any less
hazardous. Foreign policy behaviour
will remain a difficult and complex
subject as long as those who formulate
policy do not act in a rational manner,
a fact often ignored by quantitative
scholars.
A thorough and comprehensive review
of the literature greatly enhances the
quality of the book, but one senses on
occasions that the writer lacks a knowl-
edge of the hopes and aspirations of
Caribbean people.
Anselm Francis
University of the West Indies
St. Augustine, Trinidad

CARIBBEAN WHIRLPOOL

The International Crisis in the Carib-
bean. Anthony Payne. The Johns Hop-
kins University Press, 1984. 177 p.
$18.50.

When compared with violence-wracked
Central America, the Caribbean projects
an aura of tranquility. But look more
closely, says Anthony Payne, and one
finds an environment where recession
and other economic problems, com-
pounded by growing uncertainty about
what constitutes the most appropriate
developmental strategy, have injected a
significant element of sociopolitical
instability into the picture. This instabil-
ity, in turn, has sparked a new and
possibly dangerous round of regional
rivalry. Among the main protagonists
in this drama whose roles the book
examines in detail are the United States,
Cuba, the "old" European powers (Eng-
land, France, the Netherlands) and
several "new" Latin American partici-
pants in Caribbean affairs (Mexico,
Venezuela, Colombia, Brazil).
Unfortunately, having established this
potentially productive framework
stressing the linkage between compet-
ing development ideologies and the
dynamics of the area's emerging power

42/CARIBBEAN REVIEW

struggles, Payne does not persue it very
vigorously. Instead, what is presented
is a series of basically disparate policy
overviews.
The book's strongest chapters are
those focusing on the United States and
the European nations. Payne is ex-
tremely thorough in chronicling Wash-
ington's metamorphosis from cautious
tolerance for ideological pluralism in
the early Carter administration to
Reagan's Cold War revivalism. But
perhaps most intriguing to area special-
ists is the author's suggestion, which
merits serious further investigation, that
the EEC may be able to function as a
major external stimulus for the in-
creased integration among Caribbean
countries.
The section regarding the Caribbean
activities of the new Latin American
powers, especially Mexico and Vene-
zuela, is quite solid, although it may
be questionable whether Brazil should
be included in the discussion since, as
Payne admits, "its interest in the region
is not particularly well developed."
Rather than probing the entire com-
plex constellation of foreign policy
alternatives available to Caribbean gov-
ernments, the concluding material con-
centrates almost exclusively on their
dealings with the United States. Such a
heavy American orientation seems a bit
incongruous since the book purports to
highlight challenges to Washington.
H. Michael Erisman
Mercyhurst College
Erie, Pennsylvania

BERGMAN ON THE BEACH

Estatuas sepultadas y otros relatos.
Antonio Benftez Rojo. Hanover: Edi-
ciones del Norte, 1984. 233 p.

One cannot avoid wondering on which
side of the political fence this contem-
porary Cuban author sits. His political
position will influence the reader's inter-
pretation of those symbols found, or
thought to be found, in his work.
This feeling is reinforced by Roberto
G6nzalez Echeverria's foreword. He
explains that in these stories one can
find as many ambiguities as in the
author's own life. Benftez Rojo had a
lengthy career in Cuba's cultural bureauc-
racy, during which he wrote these
stories. He left for the United States in
1980 and now teaches at Amherst

College. My first advice to a perspec-
tive reader is to read the foreword last.
This collection of stories illuminates
certain aspects of Cuba's environment
and society at different points in time.
However, there are so many characters
in the stories that it is difficult to keep
track of them. One is forced to go back
and forth in the text to keep them
straight. My second advice is to read
one story at a time.
My third advice is for those whose
mother language is not Spanish: have
a dictionary handy. Actually, almost
any reader will benefit by using one.
The author makes no concessions in his
vocabulary to easy-going readers.
My final advice: do not read this
book if you do not like Bergman's
films. These comments should not lead
one to believe that this book is anything
but a thoroughly enjoyable collection
of short stories. The author gives us an
artist's view of Cuban society and it is
an intriguiging but complicated sight
indeed.
Guillermo S. Edelberg
INCAE
Managua, Nicaragua

TECHNOLOGISM.

Capitalism, Socialism and Tech-
nology-A Comparative Study of Cuba
and Jamaica. Charles Edquist. London:
Zed Books, 1985. 182 p.

This book is a meticulous blend of
theory and practice in the field of
technology transfer. Although it deals
eloquently and instructively with the
varied ramifications inherent in attempt-
ing mechanization of sugar cane har-
vesting in two small developing coun-
tries, the author's rigorous analysis of
field data and subsequent thougthful
conclusions, carry strong messages con-
cerning the acquisition of technology
to all developing countries.
Using the actor oriented concept of
social carriers of techniques, Edquist
undertook a detailed comparison of the
different directions taken by socialist
Cuba, and capitalist Jamaica in the
mechanization of sugar cane loading
and harvesting.
A strong case is made for recogniz-
ing the pivotal importance of time in
evaluations of attempts to introduce
technological improvements to foster
development. Also the wisdom inherent

in making technological selections based
on hard socio-economic rather than
pure political consideration, was amply
demonstrated. The descriptions and dis-
sections of these two case studies high-
lighted the fundamental dilemma of
choosing between short and long term
benefits in poor capitalist developing
countries faced with high unemployment
when they seek to upgrade industrial
methods. The vital role which the state
may have to play in such circumstances
was contrasted with what often tran-
spires when resolutions are left to market
forces.
If there is any weakness in this
expos it is the fact that the comparison
between Cuba and Jamaica is not com-
plete. For example, the impact of size
(Cuba is ten times the size of Jamaica),
cultural heritage (Jamaica is predomi-
nantly British in outlook and Cuba
Spanish) and other factors, such as the
Jamaican population being overwhelm-
ingly descendants of African slaves, are
not mentioned.
The foremost message in this book
iis that technological change is never
exclusively a technological problem and
that socio-economic and political
considerations loom large in the quest
for technological improvement in all
societies.
Arnold K. Ventura
Florida International University

SWEET TEMPTATION

My Little Island. Frane Lessac. Lip-
pincott, 1985. 39 p.

This delightful book will tempt the
young and the young-at-heart. Frane
Lessac's colorful naif paintings evoke
rich memories for those who know and
love the Caribbean. The narrative is
done in the words of a young boy on a
return visit to his native island with his
best friends. They invite the reader to
join their intimate tour past brightly-
painted houses "like little rainbows
sitting on the hill," they walk through
fragrant forests of yellow poui and red
flamboyant trees, side-stepping three-foot-
long iguanas, and then venture into the
market where soursops, christophines,
and other tropical fruits await the hungry.
During their stay, the boys sample
island cuisine, attend a wedding, fish,
snorkel, and dance to carnival music.
Joann Biondi

CARIBBEAN REVIEW/43

Recent Books

On the Region and Its Peoples

Compiled By Marian Goslinga

ANTHROPOLOGY & SOCIOLOGY

Bitter Sugar: Slaves Today in the Carib-
bean. Maurice Lemoine; Andrea Johnston.
trans. Chicago: Banner Press, 1985. 308 p.

Chicanos, Catholicism, and Political Ideol-
ogy. Lawrence J. Mosqueda. Univ. Press of
America, 1986. 228 p. $24.50; $12.75 paper.

The Christina Disaster in Retrospect: Error,
Tragedy, Challenge, and Hope. Whitman
Browne. St. Croix, V.I.: Browne, 1985. 140 p.
$9.95. The 1970 ferry disaster off St. Kitts.

Cities and Society in Colonial Latin Ame-
rica. Louisa Schell Hoberman, Susan Migden
Socolow, eds. U. of New Mexico Press, 1986.
400 p. $30.00; $14.95 paper.

Colonial Madness: Mental Health in the
Barbadian Social Order. Lawrence E. Fisher.
Rutgers Univ. Press, 1986. 275 p. $32.00.

Conflict, Violence, and Morality in a Mexi-
can Village. Lola Romanucci-Ross. Univer-
sity of Chicago Press, 1986.

Death and Resurrection in Guatemala. Fer-
nando Bermidez; Robert R. Barr, trans. Orbis
Books, 1986. 96 p. $7.95.

Educaci6n y sociedad: Chile, 1964-1984.
Guillermo Labarca. Amsterdam: Centro de
Estudios y Documentaci6n Latinoamericanos,
CEDLA, 1985. 145 p. $9.75.

Etnografia cronol6gica de los Andes venezo-
lanos. Jacqueline Clarac de Bricefio. Mdrida,
Venezuela: Universidad de los Andes, 1985.

Faith of People: The Lives of a Basic
Christian Community in El Salvador. Pedro
Galdamez. Orbis Brooks, 1986. 112 p. $7.95

La floor mas bella de la maquiladora: his-
torias de vida de la mujer obrera en
Tijuana, Baja California Norte. Norma Vic-
toria Iglesias Prieto. Mexico: Secretaria de
Educaci6n Publica, 1985. 166 p.

Marion Goslinga is the Latin American and
Caribbean Librarian at Florida International
University.

Frontier Expansion and Peasant Protest
in Colombia, 1850-1936. Catherine LeGrand.
U. of New Mexico Press, 1986. 352 p. $27.50.

Housing, the State, and the Poor: Policy
and Practice in Three Latin American Cities.
Alan Gilbert, Peter M. Ward. Cambridge Univ.
Press, 1985. 319 p. $44.50. Bogota, Mexico
City, Valencia (Venezuela).

Inequality In a Post-Colonial Society: Tri-
nidad and Tobago, 1956-1981. Jack Hare-
wood, Ralph Henry. St. Augustine, Trinidad:
ISER, UWI, 1986. 150 p. $8.50.

Intellectuals and the State in 20th Century
Mexico. Roderic A. Camp. U. of Texas Press,
1986. 293 p. $25.00; $10.95 paper.

The Jombee Dance of Montserrat. Jay D.
Dobbin. Ohio State Univ. Press, 1986. 167 p.

The Kuna Gathering: Contemporary Vil-
lage Politics in Panama. James Howe. Univ.
of Texas Press, 1986. 320 p. $27.50.

Late Lowland Maya Civilization: Classic
To Postclassic. Jeremy A. Sabloff, E. Wyllys
Andrews V., eds. U. of New Mexico Press,
1985. 576 p. $37.50.

Latino College Students. Michael A. Olives,
ed., Teachers College Press, 1986, 384 p.
$24.95.

The Martyred City: Death and Rebirth in
the Andes. Anthony Oliver-Smith. Univ. of
New Mexico Press, 1986. 296 p. $29.95;
$14.95 paper. About Yungay, Peru, destroyed
by a 1970 earthquake.

Mary, Michael, and Lucifer: Folk Cathol-

icism in Central Mexico. John M. Ingham.
U. of Texas Press, 1986. 160 p. $20.00.

Movimientos sociales y crisis: el caso
peruano. Manuel Castillo, et. al.; Eduardo
Ball6n Etchegaray, ed. Lima: Centro de
Estudios y Promoci6n del Desarrollo, 1986.
268 p. $10.00.

The National Unified School in Allende's
Chile: The Role of Education in the Destruc-
tion of a Revolution. Joseph P. Farrell. U.
of British Columbia Press, 1986. 288 p.
$11.95.

Neither Black Nor White: Slavery and Race
Relations in Brazil and the United States.
Carl N. Degler. U. of Wisconsin Press, 1986.
320 p. $11.75.

Population Growth in Latin America and
U.S. National Security. John Saunders, ed.
Allen & Unwin, 1986. 224 p. $25.00.

The Princes of Naranja: An Essay in Anthro-
historical Method. Paul Friedrich. Univ. of
Texas Press, 1986. 336 p. $29.95; $12.95
paper.

Religion and Political Conflict in Latin
America. Daniel H. Levine, ed. U. of N.
Carolina Press, 1986. 320 p. $24.95; $9.95
paper.

Surinaamse kinderen op school. Willem
Cornelis Jozef Koot, V. Tjon-A-Ten, P. Uniken
Venema. Muiderberg, Netherlands: Coutinho,
1986. 138 p.

Tales of the Yanomami: Daily Life in the
Venezuelan Forest. Jacques Lizot; Ernst
Simon, trans. Cambridge Univ. Press, 1985.
222 p. $37.50; $8.95 paper.

Vascos en Colombia. Francisco de Abris-
keta, Jaime de la Kerexe. Bogota: La Oveja
Negra, 1985. 390 p.

Welfare Politics in Mexico: Papering Over
the Cracks. Peter M. Ward. Allen & Unwin,
1986. 160 p. $24.95.

The Women of El Salvador: The Price of
Freedom. Marilyn Thomson, Nora Wintour.
ISHI, 1986. 192 p. $26.95; $9.95 paper.

World of Sorrow: The African Slave Trade

44WCARIBBEAN REVIEW

to Brazil. Robert Edgar Conrad. Louisiana
State Univ. Press, 1986. 256 p. $25.00.

BIOGRAPHY

Against AIFHope: The Prison Memoirs of
Armando Valladares. Armando Valladares.
Andrew Huxley, trans. Knopf, 1986. $18.95.

Anna Seghers' Exile Literature: The Mexi-
can Years, 1941-1947. Kathleen J. LaBahn.
New York: P. Lang, 1986. 208 p. $25.70.

Commandant Mortenol: un officer gua-
deloup6en dans la Royale. Oruno Lara.
Centre de Recherche Caraibe Amerique, Uni-
versit6 de Paris Nanterre, 1985. 250 p.

Gobernantes de M6xico: desde la 6poca
prehispinica hasta nuestros dias. Fernando
Orozco Linares. Mexico: Panorama Editorial;
1985. 476 p.

H. Aubrey Fraser: Eminent Caribbean Jurist.
Francis Alexis. Bridgetown, Barbados: Antil-
les Publications, 1986. 189 p. $22.95.

The Haitian Journal of Lieutenant Howard,
York Hussars, 1796-1798. Roger Norman
Buckley, ed. U. of Tennessee Press. 1986.
194 p. $24.95.

The Horses of the Morning: About the Rt.
Excellent N.W. Manley, Q.C., M.M., Na-
tional Hero of Jamaica. Victor Stafford Reid.
Kingston, Jamaica: Caribbean Authors Pub-
lishing, 1985. 548 p. $34.95.

'I Think of My Mother': Notes of the Life
and Times of Claudia Jones. Buzz Johnson.
London: Karia Press, 1985. 195 p.

Jorge Alessandri: su pensamiento politi-
co. Gisela Silva Encia, ed. Santiago, Chile:
Editorial Andrds Bello, 1985. 241 p. $11.50.

Pedro Moya de Contreras: Catholic Reform
and Royal Power in New Spain, 1571-1591.
Stafford Poole. U. of Calif. Press, 1986. 350
p. $30.00.

The Road Not Taken: Memoirs of a Reluc-
tant Guerrilla. Colin Dennis. Jamaica: Kings-
ton Publishers, 1985. 224 p. $11.95.

The Still Cry: Personal Accounts of East
Indians in Trinidad and Tobago During
Indentureship, 1845-1917. Noor Kumar Ma-
habir. Tacarigua, Trinidad: Cataloux Publica-
tions; 1985. 190 p. $8.95.

DESCRIPTION & TRAVEL

Bird of Life, Bird of Death: A Naturalist's
Journey Through a Land of Political Tur-
moil. Jonathan Evan Maslow. Simon and
Schuster, 1986. 249 p. $17.95. Guatemala.

Guide to Puerto Rico. Harry S. Pariser.
Chico, Calif.: Moon, 1986. 210 p. $7.95.

Nature in the New World: From Christo-
pher Columbus to Gonzalo FernAndez de
Oviedo. Antonello Gerbi; Jeremy Moyle, trans.
U. of Pittsburgh Press, 1986. 736 p. $39.95.

Plantes fabuleuses des Antilles. Claude
Sastre, Jacques Port6cop. Paris: Editions
Carib6ennes, 1985. 187 p.

Sea Shell Treasures of the Caribbean.
Lesley Sutty. Basingstoke, Eng.: Macmillan
Caribbean, 1986. 128 p. $19.95.

Who Goes Out in the Midday Sun?: An
Englishman's Trek Through the Amazon
Jungle. Benedict Allen, Viking, 1986. 249 p.

ECONOMICS

Colombia: The Investment Banking System
and Related Issues in the Financial Sector.
World Bank, 1985. 128 p. $8.00.

Commercialization of Technology and
Dependence in the Caribbean. Maurice A.
Odie, Owen S. Arthur. Kingston, Jamaica:
ISER, UWI, 1985. 225 p. $17.50.

Crises in the Caribbean Basin: Past and
Present. Richard Tardanico: Sage, 1986. 320
p. $29.95.

Debt, Adjustment, and Renegotiation in
Latin America. Economic Commission for
Latin America and the Caribbean. Boulder,
Colo.: L. Rienner, 1986. 280 p. $32.50.

Development Banking in Mexico: The Case
of the Nacional Financiera S.A. Miguel D.
Ramirez: Praeger, 1986. 252 p. $36.95.

Export Agriculture and the Crisis in Cen-
tral America. Robert G. Williams: U. of N.
Carolina Press, 1986. 260 p. $29.95.

La Fuerza de trabajo en el agro: expe-
riencia del desarrollo capitalist en Panama.
Marco A. Gandasegui. Panama: Centro de
Estudios Latinoamericanos Justo Arosemena,
1985. 404 p.

La hacienda ganadera en Guanacaste:
aspects econ6micos y sociales, 1850-
1900. Wilder Gerardo Sequeira Ruiz. San
Jose, Costa Rica: Editorial Universidad Estatal
a Distancia, 1985. 220 p.

Indice de debates econ6micos del parla-
mento ecuatoriano, 1830-1950. Julio Oleas
Montalvo, Bruno Andrade Andrade. Quito:
Banco Central, 1985. 484 p.

Industrialization and Urbanization in Latin
America. Robert N. Gwynne. Johns Hopkins
Univ. Press, 1986. 274 p. $30.00.

Industry, the State, and Public Policy in
Mexico. Dale Story. U. of Texas Press, 1986.
280 p. $27.50.

Labor Force Participation and Fertility in
Three Caribbean Countries. Norma Abdulah,
Susheela Singh. St. Augustine, Trinidad: ISER,
UWI, 1986. 205 p. $11.50.

The Last Frontier: Fighting Over Land in
the Amazon. Sue Branford, Oriel Glock.
London: Zed, 1985. 336 p.

Latin America: Bankers, Generals, and the
Struggle for Social Justice. James F. Petras,
Howard Brill. Totowa, N.J.: Rowman and
Littlefield, 1986. 200 p. $32.50.

Latin American Political Economy: Finan-
cial Crisis and Political Change. Jonathan
Hartlyn, Samuel A. Morley, eds. Westview
Press, 1986. 340 p. $36.00; $16.95 paper.

Medieval Iberian Tradition and the Develop-
ment of the Mexican Hacienda. Syracuse
Univ., 1986. 117 p. $10.00.

Multicountry Investment Analysis. Loet B.
M. Mennes, Ardy J. Stoutjesdijk. Johns Hop-
kins Univ. Press, 1986. 240 p. $25.00; $12.00
paper. Latin America's fertilizer industry.

The Myth of Market Failure: Employment
and the Labor Market in Mexico. Peter
Gregory. Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1986.
320 p. $34.50.

The Panama Hat Trail: A Journey from
South America. Tom Miller. Morrow, 1985.
$14.45. Ecuador's hat trade.

Panama Money in Barbados, 1900-1920.
Bonham C. Richardson. U. of Tennessee
Press, 1985. 308 p. $24.95.

Politics, Foreign Trade, and Economic Devel-
opment: A Study of the Dominican Repub-
lic. Claudio Vedovato St. Martin's Press,
1986. 220 p. $27.50.

Post-Revolutionary Nicaragua: State, Class,
and the Dilemmas of Agrarian Policy.
Forrest D. Colburn. University of California

CARIBBEAN REVIEWI45

Press; 1986. 145 p. $17.50.

Regional Integration: The Latin American
Experience. Altaf Gauhar, ed. London: Third
World Foundation, 1985. 282 p.

Scrambling for Survival: How Firms Ad-
justed to Recent Reforms in Argentina,
Chile, and Uruguay. Vittorio Corbo, Jaime
de Melo. World Bank, 1985. 226 p. $10.00.

A Study of Cuba's Material Product Sys-
tems, Its Conversion to the System of
National Accounts, and Estimation of Gross
Domestic Product per Capita and Growth
Rates. Carmelo Mesa-Lago, Jorge P6rez-
L6pez. World Bank, 1985. 120 p. $30.00.

Technology Generation in Latin American
Manufacturing Industries. Jorge M. Katz,
ed. St. Martin's Press, 1986. 592 p. $39.95.

Technology Transfer and Capability in Se-
lected Sectors: Case Studies from the
Caribbean. Steve DeCastro, et al. Kingston,
Jamaica: ISER, UWI, 1985. 249 p. $17.50.

The Transformation of Mexican Agriculture.
Steven E. Sanderson: Princeton Univ. Press,
1986. 323 p. $42.00; $10.95 paper.

Two Crises: Latin America and Asia, 1929-
38 and 1973-83. Angus Maddison. Develop-
ment Centre, Organisation for Economic Co-
operation and Development, 1985. 105 p.
$14.00.

Underdevelopment is a State of Mind: The
Latin American Case. Lawrence E. Har-
rison. Univ. Press of America, 1985. 192 p.

HISTORY & ARCHAEOLOGY

Alemanes en America. NicolAs Federmann,
Ulrico Schmidl. Madrid: L.E. L6pez; 1985.

Les Ameriques Indiennes: le retour a I'hi-
stoire. Christian Rudel. Paris: Editions Kar-
thala, 1985. 198 p. 68F.

Los Aztecas. Elizabeth Baquedano. Mexico:
Panorama Editorial, 1986.

Bolivia: Land of Struggle. Waltraud Q. Mo-
rales. Westview Press, 1986. 197 p. $28.00.

A Civilization That Perished: The Last
Years of White Colonial Rule in Haiti.
Mederic Louis Elie Moreau de Saint-Mery;
Ivor D. Spencer, trans. Univ. Press of Ame-
rica, 1986. 318 p. $27.50; $14.25 paper.

Cuba, 1753-1815: Crown, Military, and Soci-
ety. Allan J. Kuethe. U. of Tennessee Press,
1986. 224 p. $23.95.

L'Exp6dition Leclerc, 1801-1803. Claude
Bonaparte Auguste, Marcel Bonaparte Aguste.
Port-au-Princs: Auguste, 1985.345 p. $23.50.

Fort-de-France: les hommes d'hier dans
nos rues d'aujourd'hui. Association Femmes
Actuelles. Fort-de-France, Martinique: L'Associ-
ation, 1986. 260 p.

Haiti: mort d'une dictadure. R.-M Brunet.
Blagnac, France: Brunet, 1986. 160 p. $13.50.

Heaven Born Merida and Its Destiny: The
Book of Chilam Balam of Chumayel. Munro
S. Edmonson, ed. and trans. U. of Texas
Press, 1986. 304 p. $37.50.

Historia de la pirateria en Am6rica espa-
fiola. Carlos Sdiz Cidoncha. Madrid: Editorial
San Martin, 1985, 396 p.

Historla de Puerto Rico. LucAs MorAn Arce;
Andr6s Palomares, ed. Hato Rey, Puerto
Rico: Librotex, 1985. 401 p.

Historia her6tica de la revoluci6n fidelista.
Servando GonzAlez. San Francisco, Calif.:
Ediciones El Gato Tuerto, 1986. 160 p. $9.95.

In Resistance: Studies in African, Carib-
bean, and Afro-American History. Gary Y.
Okihiro, ed. U. of Massachusetts Press, 1986.
272 p. $30.00; $12.95. paper.

The Mexican Revolution. Alan Knight. Cam-
bridge Univ. Press, 1986. 2 vols. 1264 p.
$99.00.

The Origins of Maya Art. Lee Allen Parsons.
Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks Research
Library and Collection, 1986. 224 p. $30.00.

Peruvian Prehistory. Richard W. Keatinge,
ed. Cambridge Univ. Press, 1986. 250 p.
$39.50; $11.95 paper.

Response to Revolution: Imperial Spain
and the Spanish American Revolutions,
1810-1840. Michael P. Costeloe. Cambridge
Univ. Press, 1986. 256 p. $39.50.

The Selling of Fidel Castro: The Media and
the Cuban Revolution. William Ratliff, et al.
Transaction Books, 1986. 193 p. $19.95;
$12.95 paper.

The Southeast Maya Periphery. Patricia A.

Urban, Edward M. Schortman, eds. Univ. of
Texas Press, 1986. 376 p. $32.50.

Twentieth-Century Mexico. W. Dirk Raat,
William H. Beezley, eds. U. of Nebraska
Press, 1986. 318 p. $25.95; $9.%5 paper.

Understanding Central America. John A.
Booth, Thomas W. Walker. Westview Press,
1986. 130 p. $26.50; $12.95 paper.

LANGUAGE & LITERATURE

An Apprenticeship: Or, The Book of De-
lights. Clarice Lispector; Richard A. Mazzara,
Lorri A. Parris, trans. U. of Texas Press,
1986. 112 p. $17.95; $8.95 paper.

Black Characters in the Brazilian Novel.
Giorgio Marotti: Center for Afro-American
Studies, UCLA, 1986. 510 p.

Caribbean and African Languages: Social
History, Language, Literature, and Educa-
tion. Morgan Dalphinis. London: Karia Press,
1985. 288 p.

Frases c6lebres de M6xico. Jorge Mejia
Prieto. Mexico: Panorama Editorial, 1986.

The Lost Rib: Female Characters in the
Spanish-American Novel. Sharon Magnarelli.
Lewisburg, Penn.: Bucknell Univ. Press, 1985.
227 p. $32.50.

The Old Gringo. Carlos Fuentes; Margaret
Sayers Peden, trans. New York: Perennial
Library, 1986. $5.95. About American journal-
ist Ambrose Pierce who vanished in 1914 in
Mexico.

The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta. Mario
Vargas Llosa; Alfred Mac Adam, trans. Farrar,
Straus and Giroux, 1986. 309 p. $16.95.

Speaking Mexicano: The Dynamics of
Syncretic Language in Central Mexico.
Jane H. Hill, Kenneth C. Hill. U. of Arizona
Press, 1986. 400 p. $40.00.

Toward Octavio Paz: A Reading of His
Major Poems, 1957-1976. John M. Fein.
Univ. Press of Kentucky, 1986. 216 p. $20.00.

Voices of the Storyteller: Cuba's Lino
Novas Calvo. Lorraine Elena Roses. Green-
wood Press, 1986. 160 p. $27.95.

Voices, Visions, and A New Reality: Mexi-
can Fiction Since 1970. J. Ann Duncan. U.
of Pittsburgh Press, 1986. 280 p. $24.95.

West Indian Literature and Its Social Con-
text. Mark A. McWatt, ed. Cave Hill, Bar-
bados: Dept. of English, UWI, 1985. 163 p.
$9.95.

El Yanqui: A Novel. Douglas Unger. Harper
& Row, 1986. $18.95.

46CARP KEAN REVIEW

POLITICS & GOVERNMENT

Can Governments Learn? American For-
eign Policy and Central American Revolu-
tions. Lloyd S. Etheredge. Pergamon Press;
1985. 228 p. $13.95.

The Caribbean in World Affairs: The For-
eign Policy of the English-Speaking States.
Jacqueline Anne Braveboy-Wagner. West-
view Press, 1986. 150 p. $16.95.

The Catholic Church and Politics In Brazil,
1916-1985. Scott Mainwaring. Stanford Univ.
Press, 1986. 352 p. $36.00.

Central America in Transition: Challenges
to U.S. Policy. Robert Kennedy, Gabriel
Marrella, Richard Millett. Westview Press,
1986. $27.85; $13.85 paper.

Conflict In Latin America: Approaches to
Peace and Security. Jack Child, ed. St.
Martin's Press, 1986. 230 p. $27.50.

Contadora: desafio a la diplomacia tradi-
clonal. F.C. Ulloa, Rodrigo Garcia-Pefia.
Bogota: La Oveja Negra, 1985. 185 p.

Contestation politique et revendication natio-
naliste aux Antilles frangaises: les elec-
tions de 1981. Maurice Satineau. Paris:
I'Harmattan, 1986. 282 p.

De Sandino al triunfo de la Revoluci6n.
Lucrecia Lozano. Mexico: Siglo XXI Editores,
1985. 343 p.

Democratic Socialism In Jamaica. Evelyne
Huber Stephens, John D. Stephens. Prince-
ton Univ. Press, 1986. 423 p. $55.00; $14.50
paper.

The Dominican Republic: Politics and Devel-
opment in an Unsovereign State. Jan Knip-
pers Black. Allen & Unwin, 1986. 168 p.
$22.95; $11.95 paper.

Elections and Ethnicity in French
Martinique: A Paradox in Paradise. William
F.S. Miles. Praeger, 1985. 284 p. $36.95.

The Falklands War: Lessons for Strategy,
Diplomacy, and International Law. Alberto
R. Coll, Anthony C. Arend, eds. Allen &
Unwin, 1985. 252 p. $27.50; $12.50 paper.

From Military Rule to. Liberal Democracy
in Argentina. Carlos H. Waisman, M6nica
Peralta-Ramos, eds. Westview Press; 1986.
175 p. $23.00.

Grenada: A Study in Politics and the
Limits of International Law. J.S. Davidson.
Brookfield, Vt.: Gower, 1986. 220 p.

Grenada mir protiv prestupleniia: sbornik
dokumentov I materialov. Oleg T. Daru-
senkov. Moscow: Progress, 1985. 272 p.

The Grenada Revolution: Why It Failed.
Robert F. Millette, Mahin Gosine. Africana
Research Publications, 1985. 172 p. $9.95.

Islands of Discontent: The Caribbean
Today. Hilbourne Watson, ed. Synthesis Pub-
lications, 1985. 186 p. $6.00.

It's No Secret: Israel's Military Involve-
ment in Central America. Margo Guti6rrez,
Milton H. Jamail. Mass: Assoc. of Arab-
American Univ. Graduates, 1986. $8.95.

Jamaica: Class, State, and Democracy.
Carl Stone: Praeger, 1986. $32.95.

Latin American Views of U.S. Policy. Robert
G. Wesson, Heraldo Mufioz, eds. Praeger,
1986. 170 p. $33.95.

Mexican Politics in Transition. Judith Gentle-
men, ed. Westview Press, 1986. 350 p.
$28.50.

Mexico and the Soviet Bloc: The Foreign
Policy of a Middle Power. Z. Anthony Krus-

zewski, William Richardson. Westview Press,
1986. $17.00.

Militarization in the Non-Hispanic Carib-
bean. Alma H. Young, Dion E. Phillips, eds.
L. Rienner Publishers, 1986. 150 p. $18.50.

Nicaragua: Unfinished Revolution. Peter
Rosset, John Vandermeer, eds. Grove Press,
1986. 416 p. $9.95.

Operation Corporate: The Falklands War,
1982. Martin Middlebrook. Viking, 1985. 430
p. $18.95.

The Panama Canal in American Politics:
Domestic Advocacy and the Execution of
Policy. J. Michael Hogan. Southern Illinois
Univ. Press, 1986. 264 p. $24.95.

The Political Status of Puerto Rico. Pamela
S. Falk, ed. Lexington Books, 1986.

Redemocratization In Bolivia: A Political
Economic Analysis of the Siles Zuazo
Government, 1982-85. Jerry R. Ladman,
Juan A. Morales, eds. Center for L.A. Studies,
Arizonia St. Univ., 1986. 150 p. t$30.00

Response to Revolution: The United States
and the Cuban Revolution, 1959-1961.
Richard E. Welch, U. of N. Carolina Press,
1985. 243 p. $9.95.

Revolution and Foreign Policy in Latin
America: The Case of Nicaragua. Mary B.
Vanderlaan. Westview Press, 1986. 300 p.

Sandinismo y political anti-imperialista.
Bayardo Arce. Editorial Nueva Nicaragua,
1985. 129 p.

Sentinels of the Empire: The United States
and Latin American Militarism. Jan Knip-
pers Black. Greenwood Press, 1986. 256 p.

Soviet-Latin American Relations in the
1980s. Augusto Varas, ed. Westview Press,
1986. 260 p. $31.50.

State and Society In Contemporary Co-
lombia: Beyond the National Front. Bruce
M. Bagley, Francisco E. Thoumi, Juan G.
Tokatlian, eds. Westview Press, 1986. 260
p. $26.00.

Toward an Alternative for Central America
and the Caribbean. George Irvin, Xabier
Gorostiaga, eds. Allen & Unwin, 1985. 273 p.
$27.50; $12.50 paper.

Trinidad and Tobago: Democracy and Devel-
opment in the Caribbean. Scott B. MacDo-
nald: Praeger, 1986. $31.95.

U.S. Policy Toward Latin America. Harold
Molineu. Westview Press, 1986. 242 p. $35.00;
$14.95 paper.

Le volcan nicaraguayen. Marie Duflo, F.
Ruellan, eds. Paris: La D6couverte, 1985.

REFERENCE

Bibliografia paraguaya. Margarita Kallsen.
Asunci6n, Paraguay: G & K, 1985.

Dictionary of Guyanese Biography. Arthur
J. Seymour, Elma Seymour. Georgetown,
Guyana: Seymour, 1985. 115 p. $20.00.

Directorio latinoamericano 85/86. Ediciones
de Informaci6n Econ6mica Latinoamericana.
Quito: EDIEC, 1986. 4 vols. $350.00.

Primer diccionario gardeliano. Jos6 Barcia,
Enriqueta Fulle, Jos6 Luis Macaggi. Buenos
Aires: Corregidor, 1985. 283 p.

Qui6n es Qui6n: A Who's Who of Spanish-
Speaking Librarians in the United States,
1986. Arnulfo Trejo. Tucson: Hispanic Book
Distributors and Publishers, 1986.74 p. $8.50.

The South American Handbook. John
Brooks, ed. Rev. ed. Rand McNally, 1986.
1472 p. $24.95.

CARIBEAN REVIEW/4

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 International Affairs Center promotes international
education, training, research and cooperative exchange by en-
couraging a wide variety of faculty and student activities, and
helping to develop the University's international programs. Con-
tact: International Affairs Center, (305) 554-2846.
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

Miami, Florida

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	Front Cover
	Table of Contents
	Front Matter
	Main
	Back Cover

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