Caribbean cauldron of class struggle

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islands which stretch over the 2,000 miles of sea in the crook of Central and South America belie their strategic importance.

This is due not only to their significance for international shipping. but also because surprisingly they provide two-thirds of the bauxite and refine 25% of the oil required by the US.

High inflation

Most of the newly independent islands in particular are relics of old plantation economies with scarce resources and a chronic unemployment which runs between 30 and 50%.

The oil has in fact partly contributed to the decline in agriculture and high inflation in these countries.

Only. Trinidad and Tobago and Barbados, with the help of heity Us investment, nave achieved relatively high per capita incomes and can be regarded as politically stable imperialist lackeys.

There has been a longstanding US, French, British and Dutch military presence in the region plus about 200 Peace Corps workers.

But since the contrived alarm over Soviet troops in Cuba and the stepping up of the cold war, Carter has increased US navy patrols and military manoeuvres in the area and a combined services "task force" headquarters TOH Caribbean operations has been set up in Florida.

Much of this is also due to US paranoia over 'communism' on their doorstep after the coup in Grenada in March last year.

200 poorly armed members of the 3,000 strong People's Revolutionary Army seized the radio station and the army barracks and overthrew the repressive regime of Eric Gairy.

Mercenary force

Gairy was granted refuge in the US where he immediately set to recruiting a mercenary force from the Mafia and the right wing Cuban exiles Condor Group. -The pleas of the new Prime Minister Maurice Bishop for international military and economic aid were ignored by the imperialists, foolishly driving him into the arms of the Cubans by offering an insulting $5000 and refusing. to extradite Gairy.

20 people were eventually arrested in November after the cracking of a plot involving three US boats and 100 mercenaries in Miami.

Cuba iecognised the new regime almost immediately and granted $9.2 million in cash and equipment for a new airport, 250 Cuban experts and shipments of arms and ammunition.

Bishop with Castro Bishop evidently enjoys wide popular support but the material problems of introducing a planned economy into an island which produces almost nothing but nutmeg, bananas, cocoa and maijuana are exacerbated by an inadequate political Icadership.

The Cuban answer to their own domestic unemployment and inflation is simply to empty Walle out their surplus population, while Bishop himselt is an idiosyncratic figure who nationalises concerns according to his personal whims.

However the Grenadan revolution did not have the instant domino effect feared by the American State Department.

St Vincent, only newly independent, is controlled by Milton Cato's extremely conservative Labour Party and Antiga and St Kitts-Nevis recently elected a government even further to the right than before.

In St Lucia Alan Lowsy's Labour Party defeated the right wing a few months ago on the popularity of its left' faction led by George Odlum but the right wing reneged on the powersharing deals it had agreed and the government is in severe crisis.

In Dominica a new left" government expelled two of its ministers for holding 'communist views', , a stipulation laid down by the US as a condition for the massive aid desperately needed after the ravages of hurricane David.

The Dominican Republic and Haiti are clearly considered 'safe' by the imperalists and it is worth remembering that in 1965 there were more American troops in and around Santo Domingo than in Vietnam.

Nowadays power is exercised just as crudely through feeding aid to the right and by multinationals such as Gulf and Western-recently hauled up in the UN for buying the services of thousands of itinerant slave workers from their cronies in Haiti, a flourishing trade despite the officially closed borders.

In Jamaica, Michael Manley's People's National Party faces a strong challenge from the right wing Jamaica Labour Party led by Edward Seaga.

Indictment

The possibility of a Seaga victory-a standing joke in Kingston is that a JLP cabinet meeting would be one of the Chamber of Commerce-is itself an indictment of Manley, whose left talk boiled down to severe public spending cuts, high inflation and unemployment and an economy in the stranglehold of the IMF.

The collapse of the sugai market and recent floods have also contributed to an eight year period of 'austerity' lef PNP St lec un ele fo: th pe th of wl wi ca be de Ter murder of Walter Rodney should be sent to the Guyana High Commission.

ANGUILLA MAARTEN • BARBUDA ST. KITTS.

NEVIS® • • ANTIGUA MONTSERRAT® A GUADELOUPE I DOMINICA MARTINIQUE ST. VINCENT @ ST. LUCIA ribb BARBADOS GRENADAÉ 8 TOBACO TRINIDAD The ousting of prominent its from their positions in the VP has strengthened the alinist Jamaica Workers Party. 1 by Dr Trevor Munroe, which successfully sought an ectoral alliance with Maniey = 1981.

Seaga favours the Puerto can' model of industrialisain by invitation which failed smally in the late 50s and rly 60s.

Foreign investment was red in by generous incentives, ovided a tiny fraction of the bs promised and saw 160,000 maicans emigrate to Britair. one in that period.

The Caribbean itself reflects e crisis of leadership for the orking class and poor asantry internationally and e specific economic features backward capitalist countries here the most backward odes of production coexist ith the most highly sophistited oil refining technology, icause their economies are formed by their depedency / imperialism and therefore spond to its needs alone.

Yet from this situation it is lly Trotskyists who point to e necessity for a programme id a proletarian leadership rected towards the overthrow capitalism.

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1980