Home | About us | Activities | Contact | Countries and Issues | Newsletter-Enlace | Get involved | Links | Notices | Resource Centre
by James Falconer
Selling to Survive
Exploitation ad poverty best describe the lot of ordinary people here today. There is no welfare state, you either sell something – even your body, or starve, and the Jamaicans are survivors. They could sell you anything and even have a bobsleigh team! The poor, however, seldom see beyond the ghettoised perimeter of their Kingston Rent yard her thousands eke out a living at the market selling mangoes, cheap clothes and toothpaste. West Kingston looks like a cross between Beirut and Belfast with crumbling ancient houses, pothole-cratered streets and the Rat Patrol by police and military in four-wheel-drive landrovers and US GI Jeeps, their eyes peeled for known drug-gang leaders – transhippers of Colombian cocaine to the lucrative markets of New York and Toronto.
In short, Jamaica has a lot of problems within its free market, having to compete with its neighbours to sell bananas and sugar to Europe and North America. Ganja or marijuana is still the largest cash crop but this is changing as the US demands Shiprider agreements of hot pursuit within national territorial waters and “issues clean bill of health certificates” to developing countries in the Caribbean Basin whom they feel are putting he screw on drug traders. The Jamaican Police make much of any sizeable seizure of drugs – marijuana more often than not – sounds a bit like Ireland? The comparisons don’t just stop at drug seizures, there’s cold Guinness too in this former British Colony, Arthur owns the local “Red Stripe” Brewery and sell Heineken and Pepsi to thirsty native ad tourist alike. In the countryside there are walled Victorian pastures filled with brown cows and Sunday Newspapers are sold outside village churches to the echo of clinking glasses from behind the closed doors of the local pub! Jamaica is even in the Caribbean equivalent of the Common Market, CARICOM, the regional attempt to create and economic bloc within the competitive global economy.
Cuban Cordiality
The Jamaicans are eager for their big neighbour Cuba to join this bloc too and play a fuller part in the regions growth but they have to cross the diplomatic minefield laid by Uncle Sam. Last year Clinton went to address the CARICOM conference; Jamaica got its Anti-Drug Certificate; the US got its Shiprider Agreement; Castro came to pay respects at Michael Manley’s State Funeral in Kingston when thousands of Jamaicans, remembering the Cuban Builders of some of their schools in the 1970s, remains of his old “companero” through the specially whitewashed, media friendly, streets. A few weeks later the Jamaican Prime minister was in Havana on the first state visit in over 20 years – put that in your Peace Pipe and smoke it!
To conclude, the vital statistics of Santa Gloria are bad, one of the highest debts per capita in the world, a murder rate of 1,000 a year and rising, in a population of 2.5 million; emigration safety-valves have slowed down as the US closed its doors and tears up the criminals’ green-cards, deporting them back to the trigger-happy Concrete Kingston Jungle; Bauxite exports are slowing down and some fickle cruiseships don’t call anymore because of the gun violence. Jamaica is up against it. Will it become Like Puerto Rico, just another State in the Union? No Christian Churches hold the hearts of the old, the minds of the young are lost in satellite T.V. beamed from Miami. Bob Marley’s Rastas are a house divided and socialism is a very dirty word!