Strike for Power

THE BAHAMAS Strike for Power

Few island resorts have prospered more happily from the postwar tourist boom than the Bahamas, where last year 194,618 visitors--six times the 1949 total--enjoyed the other-century feel of picturesque streets, cheerful native servants, and dress-for-dinner luxury in a sun-washed tropical setting. Last week the pastel shops of Nassau's Bay Street were shuttered light at the height of the winter season, the colony's 16 major hotels were closed and empty. In a matter of days all but 24 of some 3,500 tourists fled home by cruise ship and plane. As they cleared out, a company of British troops flew in from Jamaica and a frigate steamed in from Bermuda to stand guard with local police. A militant Negro labor union had frozen sunny Nassau with a general strike, aimed at breaking the white minority's grip on political power.*

Minor Issue. Taxi drivers touched off the trouble over a relatively minor issue: the tourist agencies' plan to provide bus or limousine service from the new Nassau International Airport, cutting into the taxis' business. Drivers massed their cars at the entrance halting all air traffic when the airport opened in November. They abided by a cooling-off period of six weeks, then struck again last week. Some 2,000 workers from hotels, construction projects, water works and the power plant went out in sympathy and locked up the island.

Money was not the real question. By island standards, the drivers and hotel workers are well paid, make up to $85 a week in season. Even semiskilled construction workers get nearly $1 an hour. But the Bahamas Federation of Labor and the Progressive Liberal Party want not just good pay but to be governed "like our brothers in Trinidad. Barbados and Jamaica." In those crowded islands universal suffrage has given control of the legislative assemblies to colored delegates. Bahamian voters must own real estate or pay at least $6.50 rental a year--and only one tenant in each building may vote. The admittedly archaic code also allows corporations to vote in each district where they own $14 worth of property.

Tempers Rise. Even with these restrictions 80% of the voters in last July's Assembly election were Negro. But owing to the loyalty of many backlands Negroes to their white employers, P.L.P. got only six of 29 seats. P.L.P. tempers went higher three weeks ago over Governor Sir Oswald Raynor Arthur's annual appointments to the executive boards that help manage the islands. Negro appointees were in the minority and no Negro was named to the Development Board, which runs the key tourist industry. Hungering for an issue, the union and P.L.P. let the drivers' dispute serve.

Night after night strikers gathered in the colored quarter for inflammatory speeches: "If a Negro falls, let 25 whites go with him!" When Governor Arthur and the delegates left for an Assembly meeting one morning, they were greeted by boos and catcalls. But with troops on hand, no violence flared. To keep tempers down, the government canceled all liquor licenses, closed the bars and shops, where Scotch normally sells at $3.50 a fifth. Supervisors kept the power plant going; a few white housewives learned to bake bread at home. Though the strike dragged on, the union had little chance to gain its real goal of political power this time, or in this way. Meanwhile the colony was losing some $110,000 a day in tourist dollars.

*Of the 90.000 people on the Bahamas' 22 inhabited islands, 85% are Negro.

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