“The Ongoing Efforts of the Imperialist Powers to Foster Separation, Division and Contention in the
This topic is pregnant with possibilities for discourse. None of us alone will do justice to it by trying to cover all outside of a five-hour address or a book. So, I will not try to swim against the tide. Instead, I’ll let it float me downstream, paddling my way through, until I get where we all want to go today: to the marketplace of ideas with our varying and common interpretations and understandings of the various elements of this broad theme.
I attended the 11th World Festival of Youth and Students in Cuba in 1978. I know Jamaica politics well enough. I lived and worked the Grenada Revolution. I have very deep ties with the progressive political movement in the French Antilles. I therefore consider myself a Caribbean man who’s been fortunate enough to grow with the region’s progressive movement.
But before all of that, on 17th August 1976, the anniversary of Marcus Garvey’s birthday, a group of like-minded young men and women launched the Workers Revolutionary Movement (WRM).
Teachers and students, professionals -- self-employed and unemployed – got together, spurred by emerging access to revolutionary thought and ideas, progressive thinking and literature either previously banned or unavailable, built Saint Lucia’s first pro-socialist, anti-imperialist, progressive organization.
Driven by words and actions of solidarity with Cuba, with access to all the written literature to help us explain why we stood in solidarity with the Soviet union and the Socialist community, we were increasingly able to make the local connections to explain the differences between socialism and capitalism, as lived in the socialist and capitalist communities of the time.
But there was another element that bonded us and moved us towards unity of action and purpose. Directly rejecting the law of physics that says like poles repel and unlike poles attract, the like poles among us were attracted to the WRM like magnets, while each of us could identify, in our small society, those unlike poles that we needed to keep poles apart from.
The concept of Caribbean nationalism was a seed well planted, but taking time to grow. (Like the Jamaican would say, ‘Rain ah fall, but de dirt it tough!’)The likes of Eric Williams, CLR James and George Lamming, had well planted those seed of progressive Caribbean thought into a region anxiously emerging from direct colonialism to new nationhood propelled by imperialism.
While they – some of whom are here -- plodded on and the likes of Gabby sang against “Boots” landing on our beaches, even when Sparrow warned the region that ‘Capitalism Gone Mad’ and St. Lucia’s De Invader sang against ‘Rambo Diplomacy’, it was hard to get our best brains to fertilize the seeds planted by our forebears.
We spent much time resisting Cultural Imperialism, but even we didn’t sufficiently dig deep enough into our consciousness to do enough to learn as much about our own Caribbean processes to allow that knowledge of our own history to help guide our own regional and national processes. Some did it well enough – mostly Jamaica – but in the main, most we did was latch on to what was known from what was written without engaging in sufficient research to better understand the leafy branches of our rich and diverse history as many people in one region with separate and common destinies all intertwined by history and culture, race and politics.
We championed the well know Caribbean heroes, from Sam Sharpe and Paul Bogle to Marcus Garvey and Eric Williams, from Fidel Castro and Che Guevara to Cheddi Jagan and Maurice Bishop. But we hardly paid sufficient attention – especially in the progressive regional political movement outside Jamaica – to the published works of Marcus Garvey and the available documentation of his impact and that of the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) on each of the West Indian islands and territories he visited.
UNIA branches were set up in most (if not all) the islands, but even that fact was hardly known in Saint Lucia, not even by the descendants of the Guyana-born St. Lucian Secretary of the UNIA Wilberforce Norville or by the current descendants of the family that owned the Clarke’s Cinema where he held his meeting in saint Lucia, and which still stands at the original location.
We embraced Bob Marley and the wailers and the role of their Reggae Music for their clear manifestations or progressive and radical, anti-establishment music. But because marijuana was illegal and many progressives opted not to chance being accused of indirectly promoting a ‘dangerous and illegal drug and substance’, we didn’t do enough to trace the role of the Rastafari Movement in development and sustenance of the Caribbean’s struggle. We embraced the ‘return to Nature’ promoted by more recent converts to the link between man and nature, but never sufficiently recognized the early Rastaman’s continuing call on us all to eat what we grow and grow what we eat.
But oh how times have changed. If you thought change was only about Climate Change, then you’d be totally wrong. The climate is changing in every aspect of our lives in the Caribbean today. For example, CARICOM governments – all 15 – are examining whether to decriminalize or legalize marijuana, while regional entrepreneurs are lining-up to rake-in the fortunes demonstrated in those US states where ‘Medical Marijuana’ has been legalized.
Interestingly, it was the same CARICOM group of governments that, 40 years earlier, willingly passed ‘Dangerous Drugs Ordinances’ proposed by the UK and USA to illegalize the plant, resulting in a sustained use of those new laws in the following decades to virtually illegalize the Rastafari Movement.
Another point: You couldn’t get no group of CARICOM governments to take up the cause of Repatriation or Reparations espoused by the Pan African Congress at its inception over a hundred years ago, reiterated by Marcus Garvey and kept alive by the region’s Rastafari Movement. But Climate Change has hit CARICOM and today all 15 CARICOM governments are together calling on the UK and Europe to atone for Slavery and Native Genocide in the Caribbean through Reparations. Similarly, some CARICOM member-states (including St. Vincent and the Grenadines) have established direct bilateral ties with African states that have removed visa restrictions, which can allow for those wishing to be ‘Repatriated’ to be able to also consider that option in their wider planning.
So, Climate Change is visiting our politics and forcing progressive change on our politicians at the regional level. We too, have to examine the impacts of regional political Climate Change on our own different national and common regional realities. We must ask ourselves whether we have been adapting to our own climate change as well as most of us are encouraging our people to engage in Climate Change adaptation at the environmental level.
This meeting reminds me of earlier progressive political change that was forged by earlier meetings of this type. Back in time at the outset of the modern progressive movement of the 20th Century and right through until the Grenada revolution, gatherings like these occurred as important sidelines of party congresses and other events that lent to the possibilities of taking advantage of the presence of progressive minds in the same place, at the same time. But climate change has also visited the standing of progressive and revolutionary parties today in the region and in the individual states. As a result, gatherings like this only lend themselves once in a while as the climate surrounding the issues that dominate national political agendas has also changed.
We need to be part of and to influence the political climate changes needed today to continue the struggle for genuine Caribbean liberation and development to the next stage. Technology has left us all behind because no one can keep up with it. But we need to accelerate our own political speed if we are to keep up with the times and understand how to better react to the people’s changing needs and aspirations, their changed and changing values and the general effect of the continuing effects of the after-effects of Slavery in the Caribbean, 180-plus years after Abolition.
We have to widen our scope and look beyond traditional horizons. We have to re-draw the Caribbean’s map in our own image and likeness. We have to create the new architecture too, for the infrastructure that will ensure we can make the 21st Century “Our Century” and a 20th century of imperial conquest in lands afar.
So, how do we start or continue to plan and construct that new infrastructure?
This meeting is a perfect start. It continues from wherever and whenever the last of its kind brought the likes of us together. For some of us, it’s been the party congresses we attended in different parts of the region, for others it’s at regional meetings of the CARICOM Reparations Movement – even the convocation of a new Vice Chancellor for the UWI.
We can start here by mapping out the strategy that will allow us to identify those new structures, needed and existing, that will provide the strands and tentacles that will allow us to branch across together and to each other. We need to redefine those elements of regional multilateralism that will allow us to better correlate and coordinate across old and new platforms, in old and new ways.
We need, most of all, to decide this will be Our Century – and if so be the case, map out the road maps that will take us through the start and set the pace for the continuity of the future.
But in all our planning we must not ever believe that the other side is sleeping, lying down and doing nothing. Far from that, the refugee crisis following the continuing effects of the recent grave political and economic crises facing the Euro Zone, the social explosions, the groundswell against domination of the 99% by just the 1% is an endless migraine headache for West in general.
Taken vis-a-vis the rise of China, the emergence of the BRICS as a block, Russia’s growing power and influence, a growing Africa, a strengthening Asia and a Caribbean and Latin America that continues to better position itself on the world stage independent of historical external influences, the chieftains of capitalism in the citadels of imperialism are not about to sit back and allow China, Russia, South Africa, India and Brazil to continue to redefine the rules for international development capital.
At the same time, Washington – more than any other – cannot but be concerned that the Caribbean and Latin America have been able to so close the gaps that earlier divided them on the world stage and in a region still seen and regarded as America’s backyard.
Nor can Washington and the rest of the West be unconcerned about the way in which CARICOM has stood steadfastly by Cuba over the period since the Grenada Revolution died its brutal death.
Worst of all, Washington has made it absolutely clear that it does not like the new axis of regional integration and cooperation that has taken root across the Caribbean through Venezuelan and Cuban initiatives over the past decade.
China’s increasing presence in the Caribbean and Latin America is another cure source of worry that extends from the construction of ‘a new Panama Canal with Chinese capital’ in Nicaragua to the generous aid disbursements being made by China to its allies in CARICOM.
Washington’s change of mind on relations with Havana was not because Barack Obama woke-up one morning and decided the USA should go to bed with Cuba or that Uncle Sam had suddenly agreed with Jose Marti. Instead, stated the aim is to strengthen Washington’s ability to influence change in Cuba. The real test, however, will come in how Washington will react to Havana’s demand that the criminal US embargo be lifted and Guantanamo Bay be returned to sovereign Cuban control.
Similarly, UK Prime Minister David Cameron’s recent announcement in Jamaica of a US $546 million aid package to the 15 CARICOM members states must not be seen as a mere deflection from the more costly CARICOM demand for Reparations for Slavery and native genocide in the Caribbean. Instead, it is also aimed at shoring-up Britain’s presence in the region at a time when China’s cooperation with the wider Latin American and Caribbean region is growing faster than with any other part of the world than Asia.
So, the West isn’t taking its eyes off what it still considers its West Indies.
The new correlation of forces that have given rise to the PetroCaribe and ALBA groupings, establishment of the ALBA Bank with PetroCaribe profits and the establishment of the CELAC grouping are of major concern to Washington. The role of Cuba and the continuing influence of Chavez’s Bolivarian revolutionary ideals on the process, the creation of the PetroCaribe Economic Zone and the more recent establishment of a new Caribbean bank in Antigua to be financed by PetroCaribe, alongside Venezuela’s increasing friendship with the English-speaking CARICOM and OECS member-states – all these developments cannot but worry Washington, which has already started on the offensive against Venezuela.
Treating Nicolas Maduro and the ruling Socialist Unity Party of Venezuela (PSUV) as no less enemies than Hugo Chavez and Fidel Castro, Washington has not only supported overt and covert operations aimed at regime change in Caracas. The US has also continued its own open hostilities against Venezuela, most recently through President Obama’s signing of a decree declaring Venezuela a virtual enemy of the American state. But even before that, US Vice President Joe Biden had followed-up on an Obama initiative when he met CARICOM leaders in Jamaica and summoned CARICOM leaders to Washington to try to impress them to break PetroCaribe ties with Venezuela by shifting their dependence on Venezuelan fossil fuel to ‘fracking’ shale-based US natural gas.
Fact is: Washington has never taken its eyes off Venezuela or Cuba. With no Michael Manley, Errol Barrow, Forbes Burnham or Maurice Bishop left in the region’s leadership, the traditional recent view was that current CARICOM leaders may be easier to convince. But they have been finding that difficult, what with the likes of Dr Ralph Gonsalves and Dr Kenny D. Anthony being the longest-serving CARICOM leaders and decisively influencing CARICOM and OECS decisions in directions that continue to be sources of worry for Washington.
On the other hand, CARICOM and the OECS’ engagements with China through CELAC (of which neither the USA or Canada is a member), Cuba’s return to the Organization of American States (OAS), the continuing isolation of Washington by the rest of the world’s opposition of the US Blockade against Cuba at the United Nations, the emergence of new regional blocs that exclude Washington (MERCOSUR, UNASUR, CELAC, etc) is naturally forcing Washington to up its ante in the region.
And now, Washington has found just that opportunity it has been seeking to take the fight to Chavez and Maduro’s Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela and to again divide CARICOM, like it did over Grenada in 1983.
The current stage of the long-running dispute or quarrel between Venezuela and Guyana over the Essequibo region has come about precisely because US-based Exxon-Mobil has been invited by Guyana to search and drill oil in the disputed territory.
This quarrel over the Essequibo goes back to 1899 (then between Britain and Venezuela) and after Guyana’s independence in 1966 it became a Guyana-Venezuela dispute. In the 116 years since 1899, the two sides haven’t fought a war. In the 50 years since Guyana’s Independence, the most they have had are minor border skirmishes while the United Nations undertook a so far unsuccessful mediation process. But while the UN’s mediation process has failed to solve the problem, it has successfully kept the two countries talking – even quarreling – in the past five decades, without the two neighbours ever declaring war on each other. But all this has changed now – climate change has terribly hit the relations between two Caribbean neighbours sharing borders on the north-eastern shoulder of South America.
The very nature of the PSUV-led Maduro administration will not allow it to in any way accept Guyana’s ‘right’ to invite an acknowledged US-based multinational oil company to drill and extract oil in the disputed area. The Venezuelans have made it clear they will not allow an acknowledged stellar American imperialist company to sink its roots in territory it considers its own, by all means necessary and to the very end.
The Guyana government led today by ex-Guyana Defense Force (GDF) Chief of Staff Brigadier David Granger, on the other hand, not only insists it has a right to invite a US based multinational oil company to drill in what it does not consider disputed territory, never mind Venezuela’s continuing claim. President Granger has made it clear that the GDF is no match to the Venezuelan armed forces and has therefore called on Guyanese to be ready to join the GDF to defend Guyana against territorial claims.
Interestingly, President Granger has indicated that Guyana is facing territorial claim, not only by Venezuela but also by neighbouring Surinam (another fellow CARICOM member-state). As such, he says, the GDF must be strengthened and built into a military force capable of defending Guyana against any military attack or intervention by either Venezuela (a fellow PetroCaribe, ALBA and CELAC member-state).
The ex-GDF Chief of Staff, who is now the Commander-in-Chief, is also a literary man who knows and chooses his words well. Explaining why the Brigadier-cum-President wants to build-up his army, Commander-in-Chief Granger said, the dispute with Venezuela “hasn’t been solved in the past fifty years and won’t be solved in the next 50 months.” But more than just an expression of near-eternal pessimism, President Granger’s timeline suggests tool that over the next 50 months (a little over four years) he, as President and commander in Chief will ensure an adequate injection of funds, soldiers and arms into the GDF to bring it up to par with at least the Venezuelan armed forces. In others words, in what left of the rest of his current term as an elected president of Guyana, the GDF will be restored to its earlier glory days when it was seen as being capable of defending Guyana’s territorial integrity to such an extent as to ensure Venezuela got ‘not a blade of grass’ in Essequibo.
The declaration of intent to build the GDF into a fighting force does not lend to hopes of a negotiated settlement. President Granger speaks like a soldier in the seat of power. The President says Guyana is no longer interested in the current UN-brokered process and is now more interested in a legal settlement by an international judicial body that will made a decision that will bind on both sides. The Commander in Chief then says, just in case that judicial settlement doesn’t come during the next four years, he will ensure the national army is sufficiently built-up and well-equipped to take on any territorial invaders from across any of its borders. (Brazil and French Guiana also border Guyana.)
In the context of Guyana’s political history, it will be understandable why an old party under a new name would be interested in restoring past glory by restoring an institution that has had its political history within Guyana’s still present ethnic maze. But CARICOM and Caribbean citizens cannot afford to be led into a ‘for or against’ position on the quarrel between Caribbean neighbours. Nor must the region be allowed to glide into a seemingly natural or expectedly normal sense of CARICOM nationalism that will result in automatic support for Guyana.
Venezuela, on the other hand, has to find a way to avoid the usual pre-election pressures from the powerful conservative elite to revive Venezuela’s claim to the Essequibo and remain committed to a peaceful solution. Recent statements and military manoeuvres by Venezuela, though sensible abated, only serve to strengthen the motive and accelerate the haste to build a responsive military force across the border.
Venezuela cannot expect Guyana will not respond to any claim to two-thirds of its territory. Nor can it expect, in these circumstances, for Guyana to pull Exxon-Mobil out of the play.
The US has always made it clear it will always be ready to military intervene in any conflict or situation overseas involving ‘US interests’ that will give it the slightest strategic or tactical advantage and opportunity to deploy troops.
The war hawks in Washington cannot wait to deploy the US Navy to the disputed Essequibo region in the name of ‘defending US lives and interests’ related to the Exxon-Mobil presence. That would give Washington the perfect fig leaf to enter the dispute and place itself at a strategic and tactical military location advantage from where to also be capable of expanding covert operations against Maduro’s socialist Bolivarian government.
CARICOM and Caribbean forces need to urgently seize the moment now, to intervene in this neighbourly dispute and keep it within the Caribbean family. All must be done to convince Guyana and Venezuela to keep this within CARICOM and CELAC, PetroCaribe and ALBA. All must be done to avoid and prevent intervention by any third party from outside the Caribbean. And all must be done to convince Guyana that it will not be worth the cost of a war with either Venezuela or Surinam, with or without US backing.
We cannot afford another invasion in the name of a rescue mission. We cannot afford to have CARICOM soldiers hanging on to the jackboots of American soldiers to reverse the progressive political process through regime change in Venezuela. As was the case with Grenada, the end will not justify the means, as wars tend not to end on the battlefield.
Guyana and Venezuela need to be encouraged to continue to smoke the occasional peace pipe, even if they continue quarreling over the fence. They need to be asked to stop the continual quarrel over who should ‘take all’ and start talking about how to ‘share all’ between them. The resources above ground and below water in the Essequibo also have veins and tentacles that stretch into other CARICOM territories as well.
So, what will happen when it is next discovered that Guyana also shares more other newly-discovered rich natural resources with Venezuela and its other neighhbours (Brazil, Surinam and France’s French Guiana)? Will CARICOM policemen and soldiers be expected to each time fly into Georgetown and (like Barbados in support of the UK’s war effort in the two world wars) chant ‘Go ahead Guyana, we are behind you!’?
The narrative must change. Yes, we must bring climate change to the narrative on Guyana and Venezuela if we are to start paving the way for the planning the future architecture for the current and new political dynamics emerging from the changed political circumstances since Grenada was turned back 33 years ago.
As subscribers to the universally accepted principle that change is the only constant, we have to change with the changes. Let this conference be the one where we change from the constancy of responding to the maneuverings in our region – inside our backyard – to a changed focus on taking the offensive in defense of our region, our people and our resources.
Let’s get it on!
-Earl Bousquet is a veteran Saint Lucia-born Caribbean journalist and founding General Secretary of the Workers Revolutionary Movement (WRM) of Saint Lucia.-
