“Jamaica is probably the most dominant island as far as influence goes…” Joey Badass

 

Ask this question to any citizen of one the 28 Caribbean island nations, “What is the best island in the Caribbean?”.  The answer is most likely to come as the island they were born on. Yes, every Caribbean person is absolutely convinced that his island is the best. Jamaicans, of course, are no exception.

 

The reality is: the most visited country in the Caribbean is the Dominican Republic with 6.2 million annual visitors.  Cuba comes second with 4.7 million. Jamaica is third with 2.3 million.  It is reported that when Christopher Columbus first came in sight of Jamaica on May 5, 1494, he considered it “the fairest isle that eyes have beheld”.

 

The island was then inhabited by Arawak-speaking Taino who called it Xaymaica. Today, there hardly exist some pockets of this population and their culture. They were all exterminated by forced labor and diseases. The Spaniards named the island Santiago.

It 1655, the British chased the Spanish, and renamed the island Jamaica. They soon brought in the sugarcane as a source of wealth, and western Africans as the slave workforce to generate the wealth. At the peak of the exploitation period, Jamaica had more than 300,000 black slaves serving 15,000 colonists, on a ratio of 20 to 1.

After the French Revolution, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, it became indecent to keep slaves in Jamaica. In 1834, Great Britain proclaimed the emancipation of the slaves.  But soon after, they brought in coolies (from China) and Indians (from India), as indentured laborers, to do the job they would never do. That was a new form of slavery.

 

With the industrial revolution, the norms of production changed. Machines replaced human muscles.

Slavery was abolished.  Emulating the American colonists, the Jamaican landowners wanted to secede from England. But the population makeup was different, the probability of success was feable.

 

In 1962, they came down to a decision.  They would become independent under British protectorate, within the boundaries of the British Commonwealth.  An islander will run the country, with the title of Prime Minister.

 

During the 1970s, under Michael Manley, Jamaica was quite tempted to join the socialist bloc as a solution to its problem of poverty. The trend was bucked, the effort was sapped, the regime was destabilized, imported violence set in. Manley was replaced by Edward Seaga who bowed to the rules and regulations the IMF (International Monetary Fund).

 

Today, the country contends with a heavy debt load. Its main revenues are tourism and bauxite. Agriculture and manufacturing are down; Jamaica thrives to become a service economy.  In the meantime, more Jamaicans live outside of Jamaica (3.2 million) than inside Jamaica (2.9 million). Contributions and remittances of the diaspora are strategically irreplaceable.

 

The positive outlook for the future of Jamaica is its political stability, and its large percentage of literate citizens: 89%, an achievement of the socialist movement of the 1970s. Its greatest challenge would be to reform the tax structure with the goal of wealth redistribution, along with doing away with an growing problem with political corruption ..

The Traveller

(Odler Robert Jeanlouie, Saturday, August 18, 2018)

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