Tourist brochures fancifully refer to it as the "eighth continent," a palm-fringed paradise of emerald bays, gleaming beaches and sybaritic hotels. Just beyond the thin strips of sand, however, lies a very different West Indian world, one of discontent and outright anger.
Listen to Evan X. Hyde, 22, a summa cum laude graduate of Dartmouth who has become a Black Power leader in his native British Honduras—or "Afro Honduras," as he chooses to call it: "You don't dig living in houses fit for pigs, you don't dig having to work for $20 a week so the white people and the corrupt black rulers can get rich. How long are you going to take this crap? The white man is your enemy, and don't you forget it. Tourism is whorism. I say live black. Black and proud."
Common Element. The Caribbean region is being swept by its worst social unrest since the trade union troubles a generation ago. "In the face of rising unemployment and increasing social problems," says Lynden O. Pindling, the black Prime Minister of the Bahamas, "the reincarnated forces of the 1930s have stepped onto the 1970 scene and are moving like a mighty avalanche. This avalanche is called Black Power —the Caribbean variety."
Ironically, it has begun rolling at a time when blacks—not whites—rule in much of the area. This is true not only of the countries in the Caribbean littoral that remain colonial outposts of the U.S., Britain, France and The Netherlands, but also of those that won their independence during the 1960s. During the past 18 months, riots or demonstrations have hit one West Indian land after another (see map). The advocates of Black Power range from Maoists to religious fanatics, but within this diversity there is a common element of explosive discontent.
Afro-Saxon. In Jamaica, a sugar-plantation economy in which less than 1% of the nation's farms occupy 56% of the total acreage, the sharp division between rich and poor has been perpetuated since independence from Britain in 1962. On the one side are the prosperous and well-educated blacks and mulattoes with clipped British accents and comfortable homes in places like the Blue Mountains overlooking Kingston. On the other side are the impoverished, ill-educated blacks whose unemployment rate among some groups reaches 50%.
The rowdier members of this group can make West Kingston an uncomfortable spot on a Saturday night for a white tourist, or even for an affluent black. A riot two years ago took two lives and caused $2,500,000 in property damage. Now the government nervously bans the works of Malcolm X, Stokely Carmichael and Che Guevara, and forbids entry to suspected troublemakers.
Before independence, a Trinidadian politician named Eric Williams turned Port of Spain's Woodford Square into a radical forum during the 1950s. This year militants again used the Square as a "people's parliament," but to denounce Williams himself, now the Prime Minister of Trinidad and Tobago, as an "Afro-Saxon"—a black man with a white mentality. The government's arrest of 14 militants last April set the stage for a week-long mutiny by half of the island's 750-man defense force; it also led to riots in which four lives were lost.