The Rastas Are Coming, the Rastas Are Coming!

Michael Monley, the prime minister of Jamaica, was paying his last respects. A ranking PNP (People’s National Party) hard-liner had been shot point-blank. Probably some JLP (Jamaica Labour Party) sportboy did it, although plenty of people had reason, considering the guy in the coffin was known to have a few notches on his gun – that’s not a manner of speaking, that’s literally. Apparently this cowboy used to pull it out wherever he was – at a cocktail party or a King’s House reception for the Cuban hospital committee – he’d get it out and just oh so nonchalantly feature the notches on the butt. At one point he was Michael’s chauffeur. So this was a solemn state occasion.

Michael doesn’t show up on the street so much these days, not like he used to before the bottom fell out. He can’t take the chance. This day, as the funeral procession wound through the streets of downtown Kingston, it took a wrong turn; the graffiti changed from Seaga Is a CIA Agent! to PNP! Assassin! and Michael found himself in JLP territory. It was a near thing. Six of Seaga’s sportboys came hauling past in a hot Cortina shooting everything in sight and the PM was lucky to escape unscathed.

It’s possible, of course, that this is not what happened. They may have been PNP sportboys in the car – by what oversight, after all, did the procession swing right? – it’s possible the thing may have been staged so Michael could blame it on the JLP, if not the CIA, and get all the Gleaner correspondents off his back, not to mention most of his old friends who’ve been giving him a lot of pious libertarian cant on his proposal for a paramilitary palace guard to protect all those stupid little party buildings that have been going up in flames and safeguard the rights of passage of public figures. Everybody suspects the PNP of burning their own buildings…and so on. Nobody really knows, so you end up believing everything you’re told and not believing a word anybody says. What’s certain is that the heat’s on down here.

You don’t hear a lot about it. So far, the government has done well to keep the lid on. Manley shows up on the BBC in his sharp bush jacket talking a lot of dapper radical common sense about the endemic psychology of dependence afflicting the psyche of any post-colonial society, and the essential need to direct all that useful energy going bad into something productive and pride enhancing, like digging ditches on the Spanish Town Road. And everybody is disarmed by the amiable high-minded couth of it all. Not until this year, now that Bob Marley’s Top Ten, has the word got out and spread. The bottom’s fallen out. There’s a war on in Jamaica, the government is under siege, and Manley’s in the hot seat.

Manley, remember, came to power in his shirt sleeves. He went up into the hills carrying the rod that Selassie had given him – the Rod of Correction he called it – and they flocked to him in jubilant throngs. He wept for them. After ten years of slack JLP government, Manley won in a landslide. His campaign record, “Better Must Come,” went to Number One in Jamaica, and he took to the job right away.

There was something a bit ominous about the LP he put out, a kind of sampler of his thinking. And then there was a little white book of resonant pensées and a hardcover called The Politics of Change. On the cover was a moody head shot of Manley in shadow, his chin in his hands, his brow furrowed, grappling with the imponderable gravities of post-colonial adolescence, thinking. Well, the Rastaman out at the beach has a look at that portrait and he says, “It look like Michael write the book, but him not sure if he write the book right…”

That was in 1972, and Manley looked good for a run. He won not only because he milked the aspirations of the dirt poor and downtrodden, he had the support of the money too – he wasn’t going to be pushed around anymore by the big bauxite outfits and the hotel owners. He had the right idea about that. And he started wrong. For a while there, if you hit the spot in Jamaica, the word was “bauxite!” That was the charisma of the whole bauxite adventure. Michael staged an OPEC-style face-off on bauxite, the Alcoa and Reynolds board rooms quaked and grumbled and threatened to go to the World Bank, but Michael kept it up, refused to accept arbitration, and the companies started talking about all that bauxite in white Australia. But they’ve got close to $800 million invested in Jamaica and they gave ground. Manley won a hefty new levy, and the right to see the figures. And just then, the bottom fell out. Aluminum slumped, and it’s still slumping. Nobody says “bauxite!” anymore. Now it’s “Roots!,” “Natty!” or “Ites!,” meaning “Higher Heights!” Meaning the Rastas are coming.

Bauxite was the main vein of the economy. And now, now that Time and the Wall Street Journal and all those hysterical yentas from the weekly magazines have been down, the word’s out about the tanks in the streets and the six o’clock curfew and the Gun Court and how you might be woken up at three in the morning with a flashlight in your eyes and a machete at your jugular and some jumpy cowboy full of white rum snarling, Bloodclooot! Sodomite!

Tourism’s off as much as 50%. And now most of the tourists are low-rent small fry who come in on an Air Canada charter from Quebec or somewhere and eat all their meals free and spend about $30 in a week, maybe buy a straw hat. The big fry, the backgammon players playing for ten percent of their declared income per point, are in the Bahamas. Up in Ocho Rios, Bunny is feeling the pinch. He runs boat trips out of Montego Bay and Ocho Rios, deep-sea fishing trips where as soon as you get out to where they’re biting the client is sick from the swell and wants to go home. What Bunny’s been thinking about is selling the island off by the square fool. You buy a square foot of beautiful Jamaica for, say, $5 and you get a joke certificate for the rumpus room wall, and all the money would go to buying land and, say, building a playground for the kids. Not all the money; you could put up a playground for around ten grand, and the way Bunny’s got it worked out that’s only your first 2000 investors.

What’s killing Manley – and what may get him killed – is that he hasn’t been able to deliver what he promised in the way of creating employment and decolonizing and socializing the economy. His best moves have backfired. His vision of himself at the head of a powerful Caribbean coalition is split down the middle. Trinidad and Barbados are sitting tight on their fattening GNP and buying British, while Guyana’s so far gone into delirious doctrinaire Marxist hyperbole, they’re all going round calling each other “comrade.” Manley remains on the brink, head in hands. Guyana refueled the Cuban airlift to Angola. Barbados refused. Manley, just 90 miles to the south, was saved from playing his last card too fast.

The fact is, the island is just about bankrupt, and a lot of what’s left is leaving. Thirty thousand Chinese fled last year. And a great deal of money is going out in stereo cabinets and teddy bears. Food prices are going up fast, unemployment is epidemic, there are sudden shortages. They even ran out of rum for a couple of days before Christmas, another day and it could have gotten really ugly. Macabre, somehow symptomatic ballups keep happening, like all the poison counter flour that went out this spring. About 20 people died, one father of six took his youngest to hospital, only to see the other five come in and die, one by one.

The reason it may get Manley killed, and killed by one of his own guns, it because it’s all gone to his head. His best punches have fallen short. But he’s not finished yet. He worked for years in the sugar unions, and he came to power with a vision, a grand missionary design to rescue Jamaica from its rudderless drifting and remake the nation in his own image – like Nyerere did, or Mao, or Castro. A whole nation in bush jackets! He can’t stop now. That would betray his manifest destiny, to abdicate the vision to all those meatheads in the JLP. From where Manley sits, he has been charged by a higher authority than the fickle affections of the electorate, a kind of historical imperative, clear only to him, to save Jamaica or die trying. So he’s digging in. If it means he has to devalue the dollar or suspend the elections, even if it means having to lean on Seaga and the JLP and stir up a bit of burning and looting – he won’t stop now.

Down in West Kingston, rival party gangs run the streets. When they collide, and they collide all the time – they can’t help it; they’re all so wired up and trigger-happy and they’re breathing down each other’s necks – the whole street goes up. Manley blames it on the CIA. CIAga, the smart graffiti say. But not everybody believes him. They’re more curious, not to say alarmed, about all the Cubans everywhere. Building schools, building hospitals, nobody seems to know how many of them there are, and the Gleaner correspondents and a lot of Michael’s old friends who helped him get elected can’t see why he’s so stoked to have them when half the island’s unemployed. There’s news in Spanish on the radio. And nobody speaks Spanish in Jamaica.

There have been cabinet resignations. The minister of national resources quit recently, claiming Michael was smitten with Castro and the way he’d put the country to work and accused him of maneuvering to turn Jamaica into a totalitarian communist fiefdom. Michael said forgive the guy, he’s cracking up (we’ve been keeping it a secret) – and whoever says they’ve seen a secret crack corps training in the hills is lying. And they’d better watch out, because he’s come up with a new law, what’s called the utterance law, which makes it a felony to make an utterance designed or construed to undermine the elected authority and disbars the felon from ever holding public office. Meantime, Castro is due in Kingston on Labor Day.

The frightening thing about Jamaica is not the cowboys with the machetes. It’s that you can be stopped at a roadblock and your car searched, and if they find so much as a single bullet, bam! you’re gone to the Gun Court, and you’re in jail for the rest of your life. And a bullet’s not very big. The Privy Council in London ruled that indefinite detention was unconstitutional, but Manley got around that.