Jamaica: Race with Unrest

“The government say we got to creep before we walk,” said a Kingston shoeshine boy, snapping his cloth. Then he looked up. “Hell, mon, we been creeping forever.” Just finished celebrating its second anniversary of nationhood after 307 years of British rule, Jamaica is an impatient country, increasingly dissatisfied with merely creeping toward the accouterments of modern life that newly independent peoples feel they have coming to them. Jamaicans want TV sets, washing machines, new autos-and they want them soon.

Short of the Goal. Under Sir Alexander Bustamante, 80, a white-maned half-Irishman who organized the island’s labor unions in the turbulent 1930s, the government has an ambitious, five-year plan for new schools, hospitals, roads and housing. Shrewd tax benefits have attracted foreign companies to Jamaica -Esso has opened an $18 million refinery, Sterling Drug and International Telephone & Telegraph are building plants. Tourism is thriving, will probably hit about 230,000 people this year. But last year’s overall economic growth rate fell short of the plan’s intended 5% annual gain, and there are other worries.

Jamaica’s galloping birth rate (40 per 1,000 v. 22 per 1,000 in the U.S.) will boost the Connecticut-sized island’s population 18% to nearly 2,000,000 by 1970. Emigration to Britain, formerly Jamaica’s main outlet, has been cut off, which means more food, more jobs must be found. As matters stand, Jamaica cannot feed even its present population, has spent some $30 million to import food in the first six months this year.

Most Jamaicans regard farming as too servile; by the thousands they drift into the Kingston capital seeking clerk and factory jobs, but these are so scarce that an estimated 22% of Jamaica’s 650,000-man work force is unemployed.

Quiet Wishes. No one expects violent explosions in Jamaica in the near future. Jamaicans are a smiling, gentle people with an abiding respect for British-style law and order. Yet Bustamante’s cousin and arch political rival, Norman Washington Manley, 71, has a point when he charges that the government has failed to get the country moving as fast as it should. In private, some of Bustamante’s own ministers tend to agree.

They quietly wish that their honored but aging chief would step aside. After a cataract operation in April, Bustamante can work only part time. Yet he insists on making all decisions and continues to run the Jamaica Labor Party as absolute-and sometimes capricious-boss. Recently two of his senators failed to vote for a government bill making flogging mandatory in rape sentences. An enraged Bustamante ordered them to resign. They did.