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To restore confidence, Williams proclaimed a new five-year development plan that included an ambitious housing and rural development program. "We have already gone further than any other Caribbean territory except Cuba," he said. But the local population—49% black and 40% East Indian—does not seem overly impressed. Says a 60-year-old plumber who has been out of work for eight years: "I will never live to see half of what he is promising."
Safety Valve. On many of the smaller islands, the trend is the same. In Grenada, a self-governing British state. Prime Minister Eric Gairy proposes to deal with rising militancy by reintroducing the cat-o'-nine-tails for arson and other serious offenses. In independent Barbados, the government passed a law banning public meetings that stir up racial hatred and proposed a similar law for statements by members of Parliament. It also called off a conference of U.S. and West Indian Black Power leaders early in July. After radical workers and students sacked Willemstad, capital of the island of Curaçao in the Netherlands Antilles, last year, one of their leaders, Stanley Brown, explained: "Holland has a hell of a debt to Curaçao —something similar to the Germans' debt to the Jews. They didn't kill us, but they stole our culture."
Like the black African, the West Indian is discovering that national independence and black political control have failed to bring prosperity. Some blame foreign economic dominance for this: most of the Caribbean's existing industries, such as oil refining, sugar, bauxite mining and banking, are foreign-controlled, and the top jobs are held by whites or a handful of privileged blacks. The fact is, however, that the Caribbean's natural resources are relatively scarce, and even if all the industries were run by blacks instead of whites, a serious shortage of jobs would still prevail. Unemployment is rising and the birth rate remains high; 62% of Trinidad's population are under 25. To make matters worse, the Caribbean's traditional safety valve—emigration—has been almost shut off by both Britain and the U.S.
The Caribbean Black Power movement can be traced to the writings of Haiti's Jean Price Mars in the 1920s. Long before Senegal's Poet-President Léopold Senghor had defined his concept of négritude, Price Mars was writing of the black man's need to accept his African heritage and to use it as a cultural resource, a theme echoed today by Martinique-born Poet-Dramatist Aime Cesaire. Accordingly, many of the Caribbean's contemporary radicals, like their counterparts in the U.S., talk about a spiritual return to Africa. Says Jamaica's Marcus Garvey Jr., whose late father emigrated to Harlem and founded a Back to Africa movement there in the early 1920s: "We want to be linked with the Greater Africa." Similarly, Dr. M.B. Abeng Doonquah envisions a Jamaica based on the "African socialism" of Ghana's deposed leader Kwame Nkrumah and speaks of the island as "this African outpost."