“...it is like a knee-jerk reaction in the U.S – this consistent, insistent and persistent anti-Caribbean policy in the U.S. from 1776 to the present.”
Is the US Anti-Caribbean? The late Antiguian journalist Tim Hector posed this question in April, 1997, on the eve of a summit between US President Bill Clinton and the leaders of the CARICOM nations. Hector’s answer to the question was a resounding “yes.” His evidence: a long history of US hostility and enmity towards the Caribbean that began as early as the Haitian Revolution and has continued through to the late-twentieth century efforts by US multinational corporations to fleece Caribbean economies. In between, Hector noted the history of US efforts to undermine Caribbean sovereignty in Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Guyana, and elsewhere.
And today? Today, that anti-Caribbean animosity has only intensified. Haiti, constantly battered by the US, has now been sold off to US mercenary Erik Prince’s terrorist mercenary outfit, Vectus Global. Cuba has suffered through the most vicious phase of the US economic embargo since the Cuban Revolution. Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands remain US colonies, while Guyana, Jamaica, and Trinidad are treated as neocolonial client states – with the full consent of their misleaders.
Meanwhile, at the time of writing, 163 Caribbean citizens have been extrajudicially murdered in Caribbean waters by the trigger-happy yahoos of US Southern Command.
So yes, as Hector wrote, the US is Anti-Caribbean. But Hector was also quick to distinguish between the US state, and the US people. He had faith in the possibilities of an alliance of Caribbean with “U.S. black and mass organisations”— leaving behind “Caribbean corrupt leaders”— to create new regional economic and political orders based on Popular Power.
“Time, though, is not on our side,” wrote Hector in 1997. Thirty years later, for the Caribbean, is it too late?
We reprint Tim Hector’s essay “Is the US Anti-Caribbean? How to overcome it then” below.
Is the US Anti-Caribbean? How to overcome it then
Tim Hector
The more I think of the upcoming Summit between President Clinton and CARICOM Heads of Government, the more I am convinced that both sides fail to see the problem.
That problem is this: The U.S. has always been hostile to the Caribbean. Its unyielding hostility to little Cuba, is but part of a long and continuous tradition of U.S. hostility to the region. The Caribbean has never been anti-American. It is America that has always been anti-Caribbean.
When slaves abolished slavery, for the first time in human history in Haiti 1804, this did not meet with the approval of the “Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave.” The U.S. was a slave-building society. Haiti dared to abolish slavery. The U.S. remained implacably hostile to Haiti. Then there was no Cold War. Yet for sixty years, the U.S. refused to recognise Haiti. Not till the end of the U.S. Civil War, fought over slavery, was Haiti recognised by the U.S. Recognition did not bring good relations, it brought direct U.S. invasion and seizure of Haiti, with a domination so total, that Haiti never really recovered.
Cuba is much the same. From the notorious Platt Amendment of 1901, which made “independent” Cuba a colony of the U.S., depriving Cuba of the independence it had won in the War of Independence, to the Helms-Burton Act, which seeks to deprive Cuba of all foreign investment needed for its recovery, the implacable U.S hostility is the one enduring factor in U.S.-Cuba relations.
Nor need we mention the Dominican Republic, which the U.S. invaded in 1965 to topple the democratically elected government of Juan Bosch, and to restore the rule of the terrible dictator Trujillo, without Trujillo. Trujillo’s secretary, Joaquim Balaguer was to replace Trujillo with U.S blessing. The U.S. is not known, even to itself, for promoting good governance in the region. It is a point too clear for even the U.S. to quibble on it.
Cheddi Jagan in Guyana was to feel the full weight of U.S power. To turn the freely elected Jagan out of power, the U.S. fostered, the deadliest of all social vices, race hatred. Race riots erupted in Guyana, sparked off by an innocuous budget. Guyana has not recovered to this day. Another Caribbean nation brought to its knees by the mighty U.S. And so, on and on, the story goes it is like a knee-jerk reaction in the U.S – this consistent, insistent and persistent anti-Caribbean policy in the U.S. from 1776 to the present.
Slaves abolishing slavery, or persistent revolts of slaves forcing imperial governments of England and France to abolish slavery, always irritated and angered the United States. Indo-Caribbean and Afro-Caribbean, overcoming slavery and indenture, trying to establish their own identity and new economic foundations, never sat well with the U.S. Its protestations to the contrary notwithstanding.
Indeed, when the Caribbean became independent in the 1960’s, the U.S. was then seeking to consolidate its world hegemony gained after World War II. Caribbean independence ran counter to U.S. hegemonic objectives. The traditional U.S. hostility to the Caribbean would intensify, no matter how Caribbean governments were willing to become their running-dogs.
Take the current banana crisis. Tiny Caribbean island-states, gaining political independence as late as 1962, more than 150 years after Haiti so gloriously did so, must, of necessity, have fragile economies. Fragile economies based on narrow export sectors. The banana-producing Windward Islands, Dominica, Grenada, St. Lucia, St. Vincent, or for that matter, Jamaica, must find themselves in a losing battle against cheap “dollar” bananas shipped from Central and South America, where often brutal working and living conditions are enforced by U.S. suppliers of bananas.
Such conditions in which bananas are produced by American companies in Central and South America are far worse than the sweat-shop horrors found in Honduran garment factories or those in Thailand. Yet the U.S. today fulminates against sweat-shop garment factories the world over, while itself maintaining worse conditions in the banana Republics of South and Central America where its multinationals, like Chiquita, dominate, presenting a worst-case scenario of the exploitation of man by man at the end of the 20th century and the dawn of the 21st.
Why does the U.S. not seek to end sweatshop horrors in banana production in Central and South America? Such a policy will make Caribbean bananas more competitive, more viable. The U.S. prefers to ensure the non-viability of Caribbean societies. It is that abiding reality that Caribbean leaders have failed to grasp. It divides and rules, setting Central and South American countries against their Caribbean brothers in order to benefit from the horrific conditions of banana workers.
The Council on Hemispheric Affairs had to conclude that “Washington’s pandering to domestically powerful special interest lobbying by Chiquita Brands International Inc. has accentuated a bitter dispute between the U.S. and CARICOM over the lucrative banana market.”
“A bitter dispute”, their words mark you, not mine.
Fuelled by Chiquita, nothing stops the U.S. from pursuing the non-viability of Caribbean societies. “Dollar bananas” – which is a polite way of saying U.S. Multinational Controlled production of bananas in Central and South America, already constitutes more than two-thirds of the European market, but the U.S. multinational wants more. Not more. But all. They want monopoly control of the European banana market. And Washington is relentless, unwavering and ruthless in securing monopoly control of the European banana market by its Latin American producers. There lies the gravamen of the banana problem.
For instance, in the last quarter of 1996, the European Union, responding to ceaseless American pressure increased the quota of “dollar bananas” from 2,200,000 to 2,533,000 tons. This increase took place, but it failed to persuade the U.S. to suspend its petition to the World Trade Organisation challenging the preferential agreement under which Caribbean banana gained access to the market in the European Union. Even though there was an oversupply of cheap “dollar bananas” in the European Market, the Giant U.S. remained relentless against the Gnats of the Caribbean, so to speak, in its remorseless drive for monopoly control of the banana market.
Follow the banana argument a little closer. The Clinton Administration claims that an EU-CARICOM banana Framework Agreement discriminates against U.S. firms which market “dollar bananas” from Latin American countries.
This Framework Agreement, ratified in 1994, and based on the Lomé Convention of 1975, allocates only 10 per cent of the entire European banana market to Commonwealth Caribbean countries and French territories in the Caribbean.
The U.S. at Marrakesh gave its approval to the Framework Agreement, which had set up a quota limiting the number of “dollar bananas” which could be imported by Europe. Note well the U.S. agreed at Marrakesh to this Framework Agreement. At the signing in 1994 the U.S. agreed that the European Union banana quotas were designed to protect traditional trading interests and did not impede market access to U.S. “interests”, meaning of course, U.S. Corporations. This U.S. agreement allowed the successful culmination of the 1994 Uruguay Round of GATT negotiations on the subject.
No sooner than the ink was dry on this U.S.-signed agreement, in mid 1995, Washington shifted from its signed position and began complaining that the Framework Agreement was discriminatory, and against U.S. interests, and, of course, free trade – the U.S. agreed in 1994 to the Banana Framework Agreement only to sabotage the very agreement in 1995! U.S. duplicity is a recurring factor in U.S.-Caribbean relations.
Now follow the trail a little closer. Even after the U.S. got an increase of “dollar bananas” in the European Market at the expense of the Caribbean, it could not end its combative and remorseless policy against the Caribbean. No sire! It was intent, and best content if it got the whole hog. All or nothing. The U.S. thus ahead with its appeal to the WTO, that the small protected market space for Caribbean bananas was “discriminatory.” Small states have no place in the U.S. one super-power world.
Naturally, as you would suspect and expect, dear reader, the U.S. appeal to the WTO was instigated at the demand of Carl Lindner, CEO of Chiquita.
Chiquita claimed it had a net loss of roughly US$65 million in 1994. Chiquita claimed and maintained that the Framework Agreement had grievously damaged Chiquita in the European Market, hence its net loss.
Washington failed to notice the blindingly obvious. In 1992, two years before the Framework Agreement was implemented Chiquita had net losses of over US$250 million. Washington overlooked truth to pursue its combative and hostile trade policy against the Caribbean. Neither truth, not fairness, nor even the smallness of the Caribbean’s banana market share got in the U.S. way.
Even though the European Union enlarged the quota for “dollar bananas” to 70.5 per cent of its market, this did not appease Chiquita, Lindner or Washington. The whole hog was the U.S. objective. The Caribbean be damned.
The WTO, naturally ruled in favour of the U.S. The Caribbean had as much chance of succeeding against the U.S. before the WTO as does a snowball in the middle of hell. If the European Union cannot ration the importation of “dollar bananas”, then there is no way that the Caribbean can uphold its share of the banana market. Even before the recent ruling against the Caribbean by the WTO in favour of the U.S and “dollar bananas” the combined African, Caribbean and Pacific (ACP) banana exports under Lomé already have fallen from 20 per cent of the total EU market, to sixteen per cent in the 70’s! I predict it will fall below 12 per cent by 1998, and the Caribbean’s 3 per cent will fall by a third, by then too. The Clinton administration will watch the Caribbean free fall, despite his sugar water words at the upcoming summit.
Am I then saying that the Caribbean will ineluctably and inevitably be trampled underfoot by the giant of the north, in the relentless sweep of the multinational juggernaut for monopoly control of the banana market?
The answer to that is a categorical No! I remain convinced that U.S. Multinationals, and special interests, by definition, do not represent the U.S. people. The Caribbean leaders made the mistake to believe they could outlobby, lobbyists like Chiquita and beat them in the Washington beltway. It was a cardinal political error. Little did Caribbean leaders know that for all its lobbying of U.S. Congress, Senate and President, it would be beaten and knocked out cold with the massive contributions of Chiquita to both U.S. parties. The multinational dizarchy makes a mockery of democracy. In the era of Monopoly Capital, monopoly control of world markets for U.S multinationals is U.S. national policy, not freedom or democracy around the world.
The Caribbean has to find a way to take its case, not just on bananas, to the U.S. people, through U.S. black and mass organisations. That requires a new type and mode of diplomacy and politics. I have every faith it can succeed.
But it will not succeed if we have in the Caribbean corrupt leaders whose corruption will itself preclude or undermine the support of the American people. We have to clean up our own domestic act, in order to gain friends and influence people abroad. It is these new relations that hold new possibilities for the region. The Caribbean must eliminate waste and corruption and become efficient producers. That requires new production relations. With that, we can become the gateway between Europe and the Americas. But that can only be accomplished by a Caribbean Regional State based on Popular Power at the base. Time, though, is not on our side. A thorough-going change from corruption, to efficient production, in new democratic relations at the workplace, will amount to a quantum leap in terms of time. Nuff said, for now at any rate.
Tim Hector’s “Is the US Anti-Caribbean? How to overcome it then” was first published in Outlet, 25 April 1997. It was transcribed by Christian Høgsbjerg and reprinted at the Marxists Internet Archive.
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