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Neo-colonialism In The Caribbean Hanky-panky With The Multi-nationals

Neo-colonialism In The Caribbean Hanky-panky With The Multi-nationals image Neo-colonialism In The Caribbean Hanky-panky With The Multi-nationals image
Parent Issue
Day
12
Month
August
Year
1976
Copyright
Creative Commons (Attribution, Non-Commercial, Share-alike)
OCR Text

Neo-Colonialism in the Caribbean

 

Hanky-Panky with the Mult-Nationals

 

by Herb Boyd

In the Caribbean, as in much of Africa, the consolidation of the "dictatorship of the petty bourgeoisie, " under the sheltering wing of international monopoly capital, is becoming more and more a menacing political reality. With the obvious exception of Cuba, and especially n the English speaking portion of the West Indies, neo-colonialism with all its retrogressive aspects (corruption, electoral fraud, political repression, etc.) -is clearly the most significant socioeconomic contradiction confronting the dazed but unyielding masses.

 

Jamaica's growing instability, where over 60 per cent of the people are under 30 years of age, and 30 per cent of those are unemployed, offers a good example oj the problems common to most of the tourist-minded Caribbean. And the Rastas, Dreads and such organizations as New Beginnings and the New Jewel movement, as well as countless strikes and riots, are visible indicatons of the dissatisfaction wrought by pseudo-socialism and the neo-colonial . policy.

 

In an attempt to further understand the declining living conditions in the Caribbean, the Detroit Committee for the Liberation of Africa recently conducted an interview with Wilbert Holder. who was in Detroit through the Phelps-Stokes student-faculty exchange program. Holder, who was born in Guyana and has worked all over the Caribbean, is living now in Trinidad, where he continues his highly-acclaimed work in the media, It has been suggested thatthe newly release film Bim, in  which Holder stars (and which he co-produced) will be as well received as Jimmy Cliff's tour-de-force, The Harder They Come.

 

DCLA: ! would like to ask you, first of all. if you can give a brief analysis of the economie structure of Trinidad in the Caribbean.

 

HOLDER: Well.I would I like to confine my argument at the outset to Trinidad. in so far as 1 have been I living there for the last 13 years, having been born in Guyana. In Trinidad the economic structure is such that oil is the chief revenue earner. Sugar, or cane sugar, as it relates to the Caribbean, is number two. and then you will get tourism, possibly lying third or fourth.

 

Unlike the rest of the Caribbean, this is where Trinidad is unique. Oil is the chief revenue earner, and in the smaller Caribbean -I'm talking about islands such as Barbados, Granada, St. Lucia, Dominica and Antigua, Martinique. Guadalupe, those are the French islands -tourism is the chief revenue earner. In Jamaica, tourism plays a great part, too, even though there is a very large bauxite industry.

I'm talking about the Caribbean, one must include Guyana, because the destiny of Guyana is very much that of the Caribbean. [t is the only English-speaking territory on the mainland of South America: there the chief revenue earners are bauxite and sugar, and certainly there is no tourism at all.

 

DCLA: Some of the Caribbean governments have pretended socialism. supposedly under the guise of nationalization of natural resources. Have the masses benefitted from this so-called nationalization?

 

HOLDER: I do not think so at all, because what exists in the Caribbean today-and I must say when I talk about the Caribbean, 1 talk of the ex-British Caribbean, and I like to confine myself to that. because I know of those better- what exists today is neo-colonialism. Most of the territories- Jamaica, Barbados, Trinidad, Guyana and now Granada-are independent. Granada was the last of them to become independent, in 1974. Trinidad became independent in 1962. Jamaica about the same period, and Guyana in 1964. Most of them became independent, and everyone thought that here was our chance to control our own destiny, so to speak. and to remove ourselves from the horrors of colonialism, to make full use of our natural resources tor the betterment of everyone.

But because of the interference of the multinational corporations, or rather the investment which is tantamount to interference, the government has insisted that they should own 51 per cent of the shares of the multinational corporations. And the Marxists, who make up the majority of the workers, haven't really gained. Most people feel that these territories are now literally like a tinder box. It's extremely explosive.

 

DCLA: Are you familiar with the strikes that were going on in Trinidad earlier this year?

 

HOLDER: Well, Trinidad has always been a community that seems to be plagued with strikes. When I first went there in 1962, 1 worked in radio. Í was a newscaster. Each newscast contained about four stories on four different strikes. One felt that this might have been the peeving problems of independence and moving from one kind of political ideology to another. But up until recently and I'm talking from 1970 to now this has remained very much the same, because workers are very dissatisfied with their conditions. They're agitating for better salaries, but even if they get better salaries, the situation will not change, because we're facing an inflationary situation: as salaries go up, so does food, so does rent, so does everything. In other words, the cost of living increases almost concomitantly with the rise in pay.

Those activists. I like to call them political activists who are considered left or radical, are stating quite definitely that the way for us to approach this would be to marshal our own resources, both natural and also human resources, and literally restructure our economy and start from scratch again. I mean Cuba is used very much as a blueprint here. But of course, I don't know if this will be done, because as I said, the political party in power plays hanky-panky with the multi-national corporations, and they're concerned about remaining there.

 

DCLA: You spoke earlier of the "Seven Sisters" in one cf your discussions. Could you tell what specifically is the relationship between the multi-national corporations and the economic dependency of the Caribbean on the United States?

 

HOLDER: When I mentioned the "Seven Sisters" in my discussions here at Shaw College, I was referring to the seven big oil companies in the world- this is a term given to the seven largest. One o! them, for instance, is in Trinidad- Texaco-and she's been there for years. She has a 361 ,000 barrel-per-day capacity for oi! refinement in Trinidad. What has happened recently, within the last four years or so, is that another oil company called Amoco. which is a subsidiary of Standard Oil, has come onto the islands, and a lot of off-shore drilling is going on, because off-shore finds have been very good in terms of natural gases and oil. And then there's another company called Trinidad Casoral, which is a combination between the Trinidad government and a company in Texas, and they're also doing a lot of off-shore

 

continued on page 26

 

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 As it is, what really worried the government in power earlier this year was that for the first time in the history of Trinidad and Tobago, the oil field-workers' trade union- made up mostly of citizens of African descent- and the sugar estate workers - who are mostly East Indian, because they came into Trinidad many years ago as indentured laborers after the emancipation of slavery, when the blacks were freed and literally left the land and came into the town to look for white-collar jobs- for the first time they had got together, the Indians and the Blacks, who historically had some kind of conflict between them, they'd got together and were seen as a very powerful force to be reckoned with. I think they are marshaling their forces now, and I think you will see some activity in the political arena by them soon.

 

DCLA: The Caribbean has been called the playground of the western world, and we all understand what these various kinds of myths can impose upon the masses of people. Could you relay specifically how the tourist industry has affected the masses of people in the Caribbean?

 

HOLDER: The tourist dollar is very important and is the chief revenue. From what I have experienced in places like Barbados, the north coast of Jamaica, and St. Lucia, you find that tourist dollars' importance with the government enters into all sorts of programs to attract people there.

But the poor natives, not knowing any better, fall into the trap of literally prostituting themselves-I don't mean becoming prostitutes, don't get me wrong, I'm using the word in its absolute sense here- but prostitute themselves for the tourist dollar.

 

DCLA: How does the government of Trinidad relate to Cuba?

 

HOLDER: Well, I think I'm going to start with the government. The government in Trinidad and Tobago has established diplomatic relations with Cuba. As a matter of fact, recently the Prime Minister of Trinidad and Tobago paid a state visit to Cuba. One of the members of the party was a Minister of Education, and at that time the Trinidad Government was having problems with its educational program, in that they had instituted an intermediary stage between primary school and secondary it was called the "junior secondary school"- and these junior secondary students had come to the stage where they had graduated or qualified to go into secondary school, but there were not enough places.

Well, it is reported that the Prime Minister of Trinidad noticed the educational program in Cuba and saw many good things in it, and he immediately sent back his Minister of Education to try to do something about the educational program in Trinidad, whereupon they increased pay for teachers by $600 and are generally trying to straighten out the whole thing. The way the masses of Trinidad see Cuba, I think that the masses might have been influenced by the American attitude to Cuba many many years ago, when they didn't know any better. Well, the masses are now feeling the pinch of neo-colonialism themselves and have started to examine things more. In other words, they don't quite accept everything that is put out just like that. They're reading a great deal more about Cuba nowadays, and they're hearing of the successes of Cuba. I think they look to Cuba as a place that is really trying and achieving something for the people.