The Christmas experience in Belize was, in some respects, a substantial stress. You had obligations and responsibilities you simply had to live up to if you were a functional adult citizen. Anything that you have to do, becomes pressure, respect Grandmaster. All I?ve been saying so far is by way of saying that I?m cool with Christmas. I don?t put a lot of pressure on myself. I do the best I can, and after that they can say what they want about I. So.

I will drink some alcohol here and there, but I will not get drunk. I will try not to eat too much. I will, to a great extent, keep my wits about me. The various people who are enemies of our people generally pick this time, or Easter time, to perpetrate some weird stuff or the other. Our people are not very focused, to put it mildly, at Easter and Christmas time.

The introduction is to explain why my column this week is not Christmas?y. I hear on the radio the news that the Caribbean (CARICOM) countries will make a strong effort to establish connections by air and sea among themselves, and I had previously heard, on the Kremandala Show, that the laws are now pretty much in place which will allow Caribbean professionals and skilled workers to travel between CARICOM countries without any restrictions.

I thought that it was important that I give you a sense of where Belize is today with respect to our Caribbean brethren and sistren, this in the light of a black consciousness era which began, for argument?s sake, in October of 1968 when there was an uprising on the Jamaica campus of the University of the West Indies to protest the Jamaica government?s decision to refuse the re-entry into Jamaica of Walter Rodney, a Guyanese history professor and social activist.

Rodney was a revolutionary catalyst in Jamaica because he had left the campus to create linkages with Rastafarian communities, and the Jamaican Rastas were roots people who had kept alive Marcus Garvey?s message of African redemption from the 1920?s. Walter Rodney himself had studied in Africa while doing his Ph.D. dissertation, so he ?had the sense.? In Jamaica, as is the case all over the world, intellectuals had tended to be elitist. Rodney broke the mould, and the result was a social ferment in Jamaica which the pro-United States Hugh Shearer government decided was becoming dangerous, hence the ban on Rodney?s re-entry.

The background to some of Jamaica?s energy in 1968 was the visit to the island of Haile Selassie I, King of Ethiopia, in 1966. Thousands of Rastafarians jammed the airport and environs to welcome the Conquering Lion of the Tribe of Judah, he whom the Rastas saw as a divinity on earth. In the lyrics of Robert Nesta Marley, ?My God is a living man?? In 1966, on the occasion of Haile Selassie?s visit, the Rastas had shown their numbers and flexed their power publicly for the first time.

Even though the radio and television stations and the newspapers in the Caribbean were controlled by the white and high brown element, word had filtered into the Caribbean of the civil rights struggle in the United States and the militant stance of new and younger American black organizations like the Black Panther Party. The high priest of black American non-violent militancy, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., had been murdered in March of 1968. Remember now, that the cross-pollination between the Caribbean peoples and the United States black population, a process effectively begun in the 1920?s by Marcus Garvey, a Jamaican national who built his organization from headquarters in New York City, had speeded up in the 1960?s. The mother of the slain Black Muslim leader, Malcolm X, was a native of Grenada. The radical leader of SNCC, Stokely Carmichael, had been born in Trinidad.

The main point I?m making is that there were reasons for a black conscious movement which swept the Caribbean (and Belize) in the late 1960?s and early 1970?s. The UBAD movement in British Honduras/Belize was not an isolated phenomenon. There were black conscious movements in Jamaica, Trinidad, Guyana, Belize, Dominica, Grenada, and Antigua that I know of.

In assessing the present situation, we must first give maximum respect to the Haitian people, who successfully fought to free themselves from slavery between 1791 and 1804. The Haitian people have been singled out by regional and international white supremacy for special punishment, because it was vital to white supremacy for the example of the Haitian people not to be copied by other slave populations in the Caribbean and the United States.

Secondly, we must give maximum respect to Fidel Castro and the Cuban people, because the Cuban Revolution of 1959 has manifestly improved the lot of the majority black population of Cuba. Fidel Castro?s contributions to black people in Africa and all over the world are greater than the contributions of any black leader in the region, and probably the world.

If the uprisings of the 1960?s began in Jamaica in 1968, then they reached their most militant in Trinidad, the most wealthy Caribbean nation, in the early 1970?s. There was an army rebellion in Trinidad, not to mention an actual guerrilla revolutionary movement whose leader, Guy Harewood, the scion of a wealthy Trini family, was killed by the Trinidad police and army. There was an extremely powerful trade union movement in Trinidad, led by George Weekes and featuring workers in Trinidad?s petroleum industry, which gave an organized flavour to black resistance in Trinidad.

(NOTE: Guy Harewood?s death was reported by Greg Chamberlain in the Friday, January 11, 1974, issue of Amandala. Chamberlain reported: ?The leader of Trinidad?s fledgling but effective guerrilla movement, 23 year old Guy Harewood, has been killed in a battle with police and troops who ambushed him and three aides in a shack at Curepe, in the eastern suburbs of the capital, Port-of-Spain. The death of Harewood, who had a 2,000 pound price on his head, provides an important psychological respite for the Government, which is in the throes of crisis over the impending resignation ?in disillusionment? of Dr. Eric Williams, the Prime Minister. Part of this disillusionment has been caused by the activities of the guerrillas, who call themselves the National Union of Freedom Fighters. Operating from the hills over the past year with considerable skill, they have dynamited Government installments, stolen arms, and held up banks. Harewood was from a well-to-do upper middle class family.?)

The governments of post-colonial Caribbean states in the Caribbean were generally led by black politicians who had made their bones as trade union leaders during the anti-colonial struggle after World War II. Having achieved political power, these leaders had become corrupt, insensitive to the suffering of the masses, and they had become collaborators with white supremacy. The classic example of such a corrupt leader was Eric Gairy of Grenada, a small Eastern Caribbean island. In Grenada, the black movement in the 1970?s was called the New Jewel Movement, and it was led by Maurice Bishop, a London-educated lawyer. Bishop staged an armed coup and seized power in 1979. He was murdered by his communist allies in 1983 or 1984, after which the United States invaded Grenada and installed a puppet government.

While Grenada was the only black Caribbean movement to take power through armed revolution, in Dominica the black conscious leader, Rosie Douglas, became Prime Minister through electoral means. Like Bishop, Rosie had socialist and communist friends. He was the only black power Caribbean leader I ever met, as he visited Belize several times on his way to Europe and Eastern Europe during the 1980?s. Rosie became Prime Minister of Dominica in the middle 1990?s but died of a heart attack a few years ago while he was in office.

Michael Manley was not considered a radical black power leader before he came to power in Jamaica. His father, Norman Washington Manley, had been a Prime Minister of Jamaica in the 1960?s, and his mother was white. But Manley?s Jamaica government was socialist during the middle 1970?s, and was black conscious enough to be supported by pure Rasta messengers like Bob Marley and Burning Spear. I give Michael Manley his respect.

In Guyana during the time of UBAD, black resistance was led by a man called Eusi Kaywana, previously known as Sidney King. When he was expelled from Jamaica in 1968, Walter Rodney did not return home to Guyana. He went to Tanzania (in East Africa), where he lectured from 1968 to 1974, after which he decided to go home to Guyana. The Forbes Burnham government of Guyana refused to allow Rodney to teach at the university in Guyana, whereupon Walter became active in revolutionary politics. He was murdered by the Burnham government on June 13, 1980.

Guyana was a very interesting situation because Burnham was a black man who came to power as a socialist, but then became a self-aggrandizing strong man. Guyana is very similar to Trinidad in that half the population is African, and half is East Indian. So a lot of the politics is ethnic, but Walter Rodney was an enemy of laissez-faire capitalism. It is for that reason that Rodney, a black man, was murdered by a black Guyanese government.

The way ideology and ethnicity criss-cross is an aspect of Caribbean politics which complicates matters. As I have written, Castro, a Hispanic, is the blackest man in the Caribbean. You can?t judge a man just by the color of his skin. In Belize, we have seen that a Prime Minister of Palestinian descent has supported the African and Mayan history initiative, while an Opposition Leader of African background is hesitant to do so.

It is in the matter of the African and Mayan history in schools, as foetal as the project is, that Belize, driven by the legacy of UBAD, has stepped ahead of the rest of the Caribbean. As far as I know, no other Caribbean state has been as bold in this area as Belize has been. I believe the legacy of UBAD lasted long enough for the other ethnic groups in Belize, most importantly the majority Mestizo or Latin population, to lose their fear of the UBAD message. Dr. Leroy Taegar, the principal fund raiser for the African and Indian (Mayan) History Library, has pointed out that most of the library?s financial assistance has come from Belizean Hispanics. The Belizean expert on black revolutionary movements in the Caribbean is probably Bert Tucker, who was an active participant in both the Michael Manley government (Jamaica) and the Maurice Bishop government (Grenada).

Another scholar who knows a lot about the revolutionary Caribbean since the 1960?s is Assad Shoman.

Myself, I have never even been to a Caribbean island. This is because of my problem with airplanes. Perhaps the new Caribbean linkage initiative will make it possible for me to take a fast boat to the east. It?s not a big deal anymore, however. It appears that the Caribbean will now begin to come to Belize. There weren?t all that many differences between us from Day One. Let?s get it on.