Caribbean cowards

By Bukka Rennie
February 15, 2003

It is of the utmost importance that this present generation of Caribbean people be informed that the demand for Caribbean integration and a Caribbean nation is not an overnight quirk or some aberration that some queer dreamed up.

We must state boldly, and without apologies to anyone or to any social grouping, that the struggle for freedom in this region from time immemorial, from the time the first slave landed here, from the time the first indentured servant landed, was geared to resist the chains of plantation economy and to make all those who came as "labour" political masters of the islands.

The struggle here was always about fashioning a particular and unique Caribbean civilisation and therefore there was always a conscious effort to link all forms of resistance from below as means towards a Caribbean regional unity. That is an historic truism. Hence any upheaval in one island always tended to spread quickly and have reverberations all cross the region.

In fact during the years 1937-1956, the working-class forces were centre stage and their struggles for the establishment of trade unionism and home rule united the Caribbean islands on the ground as never before. The Caribbean masses had by their action and demonstration placed the issue of Federation of the West Indies squarely on the agenda as the climax to any anti-colonial movement.

"Independence" and "Federation" were inextricably tied according to their demands. However, it was the middle-class politicians, professionals and commercial elites who betrayed the mass movement and in whose interest it was to de-link Federation from Independence.

One can even go further in the process of informing the present generations by outlining the major policy planks that were projected by t he West Indian Federal Labour Party (WIFLP) in 1958. The WIFLP was the party associated with Manley, Adams and Eric Williams. Its manifesto stated the following demands:

A Customs Union to integrate trade policies in the region; the need for equitable distribution of capital investments for industrial development throughout the region; the quest for closer contact in the wider region with all countries and islands such as Cuba, Haiti, Suriname, Guyana (then British Guiana) and Belize (then British Honduras) which have some cultural and or geo-political affinity to the West Indies;

The establishment of a single currency and a Federal Central Bank, much like the CDB that came later; a central Economic Planning Division, a Federal Bureau of Standards to ensure uniform quality of West Indian products; the establishment of a university (that idea became UWI later), etc.

Those are the planks that were betrayed when we all went for Independence singly and destroyed the Federation. Today, some 45 years down the road, we are still twiddling our thumbs and seem to lack the will and moral fortitude to march forward to establish the Caribbean Single Market and Economy (CSME).

Leaders appear to be scared stiff at even the mere mention of political integration. And that despite all the threats of brutal competition within the global market and the WTO removal of all subsidies and preferential treatment for our goods, such as sugar and bananas, and the coming into existence of the Free Trade of the Americas (FTAA) that is to be functioning by 2005.

It is as if we are standing on a precipice looking down into an abyss of no return and we are too frightened to take immediate and appropriate action.

Regularly today one hears the talk in Trinidad that suggests that political integration means surrender of T&T's sovereignty. When what it really means is sharing equitably in the sovereignty of a larger and much more sustainable entity given the realities of present-day globalisation. We are fighting for the continued existence and further fashioning of a whole Caribbean civilisation.

Of course there is talk about the ethnic demographics of T&T and Guyana and the morbid fear and "aversion to political integration appears to be embedded in the Jamaican psyche". What is not being said is that the Jamaican manufacturers and captains of industry were the leading commercial class back then in 1958 and saw the rest of the Caribbean as a burden.

Today that very shoe is on the T&T manufacturers who hold the largest percentage of Caricom trade and the question is whether they will make the same mistake today that their Jamaican counterparts made back then. Would they shoulder their logical responsibility and see that, given the globalisation context, that their objective and subjective interests lie in furthering Caribbean integration?

If they do not and project ethnic considerations before all else then they will most certainly feel the results in their pockets just as the Jamaicans were made to feel it in the '70s and '80s.

It is not that "national economies" are no longer a reality but that globalisation has forced a new requirement of "regional economies". Those who cannot see that do so at their own peril.

Our ancestors had the vision and the guts to struggle for the Caribbean nation, are we to be known as the Caribbean cowards?