"Tourism Is Whorism"

Tourist brochures fancifully refer to it as the "eighth continent," a palm-fringed paradise of emerald bays, gleaming beaches and sybaritic hotels. Just beyond the thin strips of sand, however, lies a very different West Indian world, one of discontent and outright anger.

Listen to Evan X. Hyde, 22, a summa cum laude graduate of Dartmouth who has become a Black Power leader in his native British Honduras--or "Afro Honduras," as he chooses to call it: "You don't dig living in houses fit for pigs, you don't dig having to work for $20 a week so the white people and the corrupt black rulers can get rich. How long are you going to take this crap? The white man is your enemy, and don't you forget it. Tourism is whorism. I say live black. Black and proud."

Common Element. The Caribbean region is being swept by its worst social unrest since the trade union troubles a generation ago. "In the face of rising unemployment and increasing social problems," says Lynden O. Pindling, the black Prime Minister of the Bahamas, "the reincarnated forces of the 1930s have stepped onto the 1970 scene and are moving like a mighty avalanche. This avalanche is called Black Power --the Caribbean variety."

Ironically, it has begun rolling at a time when blacks--not whites--rule in much of the area. This is true not only of the countries in the Caribbean littoral that remain colonial outposts of the U.S., Britain, France and The Netherlands, but also of those that won their independence during the 1960s. During the past 18 months, riots or demonstrations have hit one West Indian land after another (see map). The advocates of Black Power range from Maoists to religious fanatics, but within this diversity there is a common element of explosive discontent.

Afro-Saxon. In Jamaica, a sugar-plantation economy in which less than 1% of the nation's farms occupy 56% of the total acreage, the sharp division between rich and poor has been perpetuated since independence from Britain in 1962. On the one side are the prosperous and well-educated blacks and mulattoes with clipped British accents and comfortable homes in places like the Blue Mountains overlooking Kingston. On the other side are the impoverished, ill-educated blacks whose unemployment rate among some groups reaches 50%.

The rowdier members of this group can make West Kingston an uncomfortable spot on a Saturday night for a white tourist, or even for an affluent black. A riot two years ago took two lives and caused $2,500,000 in property damage. Now the government nervously bans the works of Malcolm X, Stokely Carmichael and Che Guevara, and forbids entry to suspected troublemakers.

Before independence, a Trinidadian politician named Eric Williams turned Port of Spain's Woodford Square into a radical forum during the 1950s. This year militants again used the Square as a "people's parliament," but to denounce Williams himself, now the Prime Minister of Trinidad and Tobago, as an "Afro-Saxon"--a black man with a white mentality. The government's arrest of 14 militants last April set the stage for a week-long mutiny by half of the island's 750-man defense force; it also led to riots in which four lives were lost.

To restore confidence, Williams proclaimed a new five-year development plan that included an ambitious housing and rural development program. "We have already gone further than any other Caribbean territory except Cuba," he said. But the local population--49% black and 40% East Indian--does not seem overly impressed. Says a 60-year-old plumber who has been out of work for eight years: "I will never live to see half of what he is promising."

Safety Valve. On many of the smaller islands, the trend is the same. In Grenada, a self-governing British state. Prime Minister Eric Gairy proposes to deal with rising militancy by reintroducing the cat-o'-nine-tails for arson and other serious offenses. In independent Barbados, the government passed a law banning public meetings that stir up racial hatred and proposed a similar law for statements by members of Parliament. It also called off a conference of U.S. and West Indian Black Power leaders early in July. After radical workers and students sacked Willemstad, capital of the island of Curac,ao in the Netherlands Antilles, last year, one of their leaders, Stanley Brown, explained: "Holland has a hell of a debt to Curac,ao --something similar to the Germans' debt to the Jews. They didn't kill us, but they stole our culture."

Like the black African, the West Indian is discovering that national independence and black political control have failed to bring prosperity. Some blame foreign economic dominance for this: most of the Caribbean's existing industries, such as oil refining, sugar, bauxite mining and banking, are foreign-controlled, and the top jobs are held by whites or a handful of privileged blacks. The fact is, however, that the Caribbean's natural resources are relatively scarce, and even if all the industries were run by blacks instead of whites, a serious shortage of jobs would still prevail. Unemployment is rising and the birth rate remains high; 62% of Trinidad's population are under 25. To make matters worse, the Caribbean's traditional safety valve--emigration--has been almost shut off by both Britain and the U.S.

The Caribbean Black Power movement can be traced to the writings of Haiti's Jean Price Mars in the 1920s. Long before Senegal's Poet-President Leopold Senghor had defined his concept of negritude, Price Mars was writing of the black man's need to accept his African heritage and to use it as a cultural resource, a theme echoed today by Martinique-born Poet-Dramatist Aime Cesaire. Accordingly, many of the Caribbean's contemporary radicals, like their counterparts in the U.S., talk about a spiritual return to Africa. Says Jamaica's Marcus Garvey Jr., whose late father emigrated to Harlem and founded a Back to Africa movement there in the early 1920s: "We want to be linked with the Greater Africa." Similarly, Dr. M.B. Abeng Doonquah envisions a Jamaica based on the "African socialism" of Ghana's deposed leader Kwame Nkrumah and speaks of the island as "this African outpost."

Busboy Nations. Against the romantic notion that West Indians can solve their present problems by rooting about in their past, Trinidad and Tobago's Eric Williams protests: "There can be no Mother Africa, no Mother England, no Mother China. The only mother we recognize is Mother Trinidad and Tobago." Even more vehemently, Barbados' Prime Minister Errol Barrow dismisses Black Power militants as a "collection of misfits and dropouts" who are "against anybody who is successful."

To some extent, of course, Barrow is right. But he overlooks the fact that the militants have a politically potent point --that relatively few of the Caribbean's blacks have managed to reap the benefits of nationhood or industrial development, and instead have seen their newly free countries being turned into what some refer to as "nations of busboys."

In a more elliptical manner, a Barbadian calypso singer named Lord Radio manages in a single stanza to deride both Whitey and the Black Power advocates as symbolized by Stokely Carmichael. After hearing one of Stokely's sulfurous speeches advocating immediate apocalypse, Lord Radio wrote in Black Power Situation:

Everybody telling Stokely to go,

Martin Luther King was my lie-ro.

I may be a bum,

But I am not dumb.

So you try your cocktail,

I'll drink my rum.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.