ExiledOne Commentary

Usain Bolt of Jamaica

 

Will The World Rush And Help The Caribbean Region With Its Ills?

 

There are few people that would turn down a chance to sit or frolic on a beach under the sparkling azure skies of the Caribbean. Indeed, from all over the world the privileged travel there on cruise ships, land on jumbo airplanes and in private sea and aircraft, floating down or through silent sun drenched atmosphere. Delightful could be the word to describe even one week in the climes famous for relaxation, romance and, if one maintains property there, luxury.

 

A Culture Has Been Buried Under Commercialism

Those who leave to return to Japan, Canada or Denmark or another ‘developed’ country may never see or care that the people who reside there are suffering. There may be no consideration for those who may never leave the islands between North, Central and South America, among the millions of kilometers of ocean water. Cuba’s state apparatus, once more supported by a score of neighboring Caribbean governments and 187 countries, was defended in international circles in the four decade call to end sanctions by those in Washington DC.

 

Sugar, now ruining peoples’ diets, was once what they were forced to produce 

Whether this is rooted in systematic oppression and still maintained by the earliest periods of recent historical European contact in the Western hemisphere is of little concern to the visitors. But to the people there are no escape routes: life expectancy ranges from 50 to nearly 75 years old. At least 18,000 people lost their lives due to climate related disasters in the new century in the Caribbean region. HIV AIDS, Type 2 Diabetes and homicide are raking countries such as Jamaica. Two questions: how do guns appear on an island? Are poor people and crime synonymous if they cannot leave their streets of shacks and open sewage gutters?

 Allen Stanford In custody

Shocked by the results, United Nations resolutions on diabetes is debated by otherwise vacationing panelists from the outer world. Murder, rape and hostility to foreigners isn’t likely put into a context that is reasonable. Islands and small populations remain dominated by Dutch, English, French, American and other former colonizers, whether individuals (Allen Stanford, the Texan $7 Billion Madoff of the Caribbean) or the Dutch Royals in far off Amsterdam deciding that this or that island can be “independent”.

  

England, for one place, has changed “territory”, “colony” to “commonwealth” and retained economic and political control of numerous islands such as Jamaica. It unilaterally dictates who can visit Birmingham, Liverpool, Bristol or London, much less immigrate to study, work or live long term in the country.

 

Peter Fryer, editor of Staying Power: The History of Black People in Britain explains some history of the Birmingham, England metalworking industry:

 

“…The Birmingham manufacturers took swift advantage of the opening of the African trade in 1698, and their exports of all sorts of increased enormously. The first order for flint-lock muskets to be exported to Africa was in fact executed at Birmingham in 1698. Soon the hammers and anvils were resounding more than ever. By 1707 the gunmakers, cutlers, and other manufacturers of wrought iron in Birmingham were petitioning the House of Commons…The steady demand for slaves and guns created a mass market capable of supporting what was for the time a large labour force.

 

By 1766…100,000 guns a year to the African coast…between 1796 and 1805, 161, 531 guns yearly…5,000 persons employed in Birmingham (1788) Despite the Abolition of the British slave trade in 1807…guns to Africa did not begin to decline until after the middle of the nineteenth century. In 1907…20,000,000 (20 MILLION) Birmingham guns had gone to Africa."

The triangular points from Northern Europe to West Africa and then to the Western hemisphere, principally the Caribbean in the 1500s and 1600s provided Europe with a genocidal profit in human beings. The basis of today’s capitalism mostly eradicated the Indigenous peoples of the Caribbean, worked till death generations of Africans, brought in indentured Chinese, Europeans and Indians, Arabs and various of the world’s peoples. The forces that brought this about allowed pirates and thieves to establish themselves. Still others gained enough wealth from the activity to distance themselves from it and spread the money out. Networked people from Alaska to Zanzibar watched the profits grow and involved their children, friends, fellow school graduates and business partners. They became known in the recent past as stockholders in corporations.

7 November 2009

From Exile,

Bankole

 

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A few facts about this part of the world:

Frantz Fanon (1925-1961), author of Black Skin, White Mask and The Wretched Of The Earth was born in Martinique.

An African woman, Nanny, Queen of the Maroons, was key in ending direct English control of Jamaica.

Cuba is the most populous of the islands at 11.5 million people.

Andros Island, Bahamas was a refuge for African/Indigenous Seminoles who had retreated from Florida and the Americans in the 1820s.