They say that in the American music and entertainment industries, there is something people call a “glass ceiling.” What this means is that when performers (especially those of color) reach a certain level, they cannot rise any higher unless they play games with the power structure. The power structure is a reality which is very quiet, very discreet, practically invisible. But, it is real.

Stretch Lightburn has a saying which I have now memorized. It goes: “Black is beautiful; tan is grand; but white is the color of the big boss man.”

The irony in the business situation for “troublesome” people like myself, is that diversification is one way business people seek to protect themselves from market fluctuations and irregularities, not to mention actual crashes. But when a troublesome, maverick-type seeks to diversify, the power structure here becomes concerned: diversification may increase the market power of the maverick.

In 1981, this newspaper became the leading newspaper in Belize, and in 1989 we sought to diversify by going into the broadcast radio business. This alarmed the big boys here. Personally, I knew it would, so I envisioned a radio station whose signal covered only Belize City, our nation’s population center. But once we actually began broadcasting in the old capital, there were people around me who became excited and wanted to go national. Of course, people outside of Belize City wanted to hear this new KREM. But, this was the glass ceiling, you see. You have to know your place.

Now, the complication in all this was that some of the young boys, roots youth, who worked at our newspaper had begun to excel as basketball players, specifically in the Princess Royal Youth Hostel Under-17 Basketball Tournament. 

By the late 1980s, going into the early 1990s, two outstanding junior basketball teams had emerged whose stars, a large number of them, worked in the Kremandala yard. The two teams ended up in the junior basketball finals (Under-19) two years in a row—1990 and 1991. The rivalry in our yard was intense. But, that rivalry is another story.

Remember now, KREM came on the air in November of 1989, the same time some of our young workers were becoming basketball stars. KREM Radio, though popular with the masses, struggled as a business, because the power structure never intended for it to survive. But a series of developments occurred which made KREM viable, at least temporarily. First, the legendary Pulu Lightburn united the two rival Kremandala teams as one inter-office entity, and that Kremandala team won the 1991 inter-office tournament. 

Semi-pro football had been introduced into Belize earlier in 1991. This tempted basketball to enter the semi-pro marketplace, so to speak, and so when semi-pro basketball began in early 1992 in the old Civic, the Kremandala Raiders, featuring seven rookies, was an entry.

 The sensational play of the Raiders made KREM Radio more relevant, for promotional and broadcast reasons, and so the radio station survived. The Raiders were the semi-pro sub-champions in 1992, but they were real threats to win the championship in 1993.

There were four teams in the 1993 playoffs—Raiders, Santino’s Hotpoints, Crown Stadium, and Penta Lakers, the defending champions from 1992. Incredibly, the commissioner of the league, Gus Perera, resigned just before the playoffs to become the chief executive of a new Pepsi soft drink franchise. The league secretary, the late Ricardo Aguilar, was left in charge, by default, as the 1993 basketball season entered its most important phase—the playoffs. 

Ricardo did not have a lot of credibility in the basketball community, but we managed to complete the playoffs, and the Raiders won their first championship of four consecutive.

The following year, 1994, a new commissioner arrived, as if out of nowhere, one Daniel Fabro. His first controversial move was to have the league take over game security at the Civic, whereas in the 1992 and 1993 seasons, game security was handled, quite successfully, by the home team in the games. This Fabro initiative was a failure from the start. 

Fabro’s second controversial move, and a massive one, was to propose, arbitrarily, that Channel 5 broadcast the 1994 semi-pro basketball games live, and Penta Lakers agreed. Fabro’s argument, although Channel 5 would pay the teams absolutely nothing for these broadcast rights, was that live broadcasts would lift the league’s profile and raise our revenues down the road.

Interestingly enough, Fabro held his meetings in the BTL executive offices on St. Thomas Street. This was in late/1993, early/1994, I suppose, just a few months after Lord Michael Ashcroft had acquired the coveted “golden share” in BTL, assuming control of the then monopoly telecommunications company in Belize. 

The United Democratic Party (UDP), when they established Belize Telecommunications Limited (BTL) as a statutory body in 1988 or thereabouts, under the direction and advice of the late Manuel Esquivel and the late Net Vasquez, had specifically stipulated that no private individual should acquire the “golden share” and take control of BTL. The day before the June 30, 1993, general election, the then ruling People’s United Party (PUP) made arrangements to allow Ashcroft to acquire the “golden share.”

The fact that Daniel Fabro was holding his meetings in the BTL executive office had significance. Lord Ashcroft had influence at Channel 5 (he ended up buying it from Stewart Krohn). I absolutely didn’t see through the schemes. Call me stupid. All I know is that Greg Moguel’s Crown Stadium and our Raiders depended on revenues from live basketball attendance, which would be seriously reduced by live television, which wasn’t giving us a red cent for our product. As it turned out, Stadium and Raiders were saved from Ashcroft/Channel 5 domination when Santino’s Hotpoints’ accountant, Marion Usher, voted against the Channel 5 proposal.

NOTE from The Publisher:  As an addendum to my column in this issue: after writing the column I remembered that there were employees of BTL (secretaries, I guess) who were politely sitting in on these Daniel Fabro-chaired basketball meetings at the BTL executive offices when Fabro (and in retrospect it is obvious that he was acting for and on behalf of Michael Ashcroft) sought to have the semi-pro basketball industry come under the jurisdiction of Channel 5 in 1994. 

I could not believe that, after all the work our basketball players had put in for two years at the semi-pro level, Channel 5 could want to broadcast our product free. I didn’t know then who the real Michael Ashcroft was, you see. Or, put it another way, I was a fool, confused, or just plain blind.