In the years after World War II, most of the Antilles passed from under the rule of Old Europe. They took their place beneath the “soft” umbrella of a new hegemon whose imperial sway was perhaps felt less in new military bases, as Leigh Fermor wrote in 1952, than in the creep of “Coca-Cola advertisements, frigidaires, wireless sets and motor-cars.”28 The Cuban revolution forcibly removed both Coca-Cola ads and the CIA from the region’s largest island. But the United States grew only more determined, after that event, to maintain the Caribbean as an “American lake.” In 1983, Ronald Reagan went so far as to send the Marines to Grenada to prevent the emergence, on that tiny island, of “another Cuba.” But geopolitics aside, postwar Caribbean culture has been most crucially shaped by its people confronting all that their new nations lack: stable populations, shared ancestral tongues, “stable” cultures with ancient roots—all the qualities, in other words, that “nations” are traditionally supposed to have.
But the more time one spends in those nations, the more one realizes that these perceived lacks have often been the source of their cultures’ riches. For people whose ancestors were brought to work strange islands in chains, the question of how to best salve history’s wounds was key long before the challenges of modern “nation building.” In the Caribbean, two features often invoked as uniquely modern in their effects on identity—the mixing of cultures and peoples from different continents, and migration and displacement as facts of life—have been plainly evident for centuries. The deep question those facts prompt, which has in many ways defined its arts, was posed by one of Kingston’s great vocal groups, the Melodians, on their contribution to the soundtrack of the classic reggae film The Harder They Come:
By the rivers of Babylon / where we sat down
Ye-eah we wept / when we remembered Zion
The wicked carried us away in captivity / required from us a song
Now how shall we sing a song of joy / in a strange land?29
The search for “roots,” and their figuring in culture, is, of course, not a theme unique to the Caribbean: all people are seekers after “that which binds, and with which one can relate,” as Simone Weil put it.30 But in an era of mass migration and the World Wide Web and globalization, when cultures everywhere are contending with “rootlessness,” perhaps it makes sense that a region so versed in those challenges has found its season. In 1972, The Harder They Come introduced Jamaican music to the world. A few years later, reggae’s biggest star supplied a potent answer to the Melodians’ query. “We know where we’re going / we know where we’re from,” sang Bob Marley on Exodus, the record that cemented his global fame. “We’re leaving Babylon / we’re going to our Father’s Land.”31 The universality of human desire to feel that way, and the success with which the Caribbean’s finest voices have translated it into the idiom of pop, are key reasons why, one suspects, their work has gained the global resonance it has.
A sense of place, as Marley suggested in those lines about heading for Zion, matters to humans. It’s only in and through place—the places that we call home, or the ones to which we want to go—that we figure out who we are. And it’s through place, too, that we route our lives and our hopes: the places we live and the ones we recall; the places we imagine; the places we want to be.
It’s perhaps not hard to understand, given those truths, the fierce hold that islands have long seemed to exert on our imaginations. They’re at once “places apart” and connected to everywhere by the sea. They have figured in our literature, from Homer on, as sites of desire and fear; as the loci of prisons or paradise; as places on which to be marooned, reborn, or transformed. “Western culture not only thinks about islands,” observed the historian John Gillis, “but thinks with them” as well.32 Islands are potent places, and for five hundred years this exemplary sea of islands in the imagination has proved irresistible to adventurers and poets and protestors and hedonists alike. As the place where “globalization” began, and the region, too, where the West’s still-ongoing conversation about universal human rights began, the Caribbean has been anything but marginal to the making of our modern world.
PART I
The Greater Antilles
Jamaica: The Wages of Love
CHAPTER 1
BRANDING
ON TV, IT LOOKED LIKE the others were jogging.
Halfway through the Olympic 100-meter final, Usain Bolt—Jamaican hero, fastest man in the world, performing in London before eighty thousand flashbulb-popping fans—pulled away. At six-foot-five, hurtling down the tile-red track, Bolt stretched his stride in a way none of his rivals—compact, muscular men all—could match. One moment, eight Lycra-clad figures were sprinting in a pack. Then there was one: long legs churning, face calm. In Beijing four years before, he’d turned this race, as one oft-quoted account had it, into “a palette on which an emerging and transcendent talent could splash his greatness.”1 Slapping his chest before the line, exulting as he crossed—Bolt charmed the world with his brash joie de vivre. Now, as he pulled away, TV replays caught him glancing at the stadium clock: in Beijing, he’d entered history; here, he wanted to make it. And so he did. The clock showed the time—a new Olympic record. And Jamaica’s pride, his nation’s black, yellow, and green flag draped over his broad back, grinned and danced as he circled the stadium, soaking up its warm lights’ love.
For most of the few hundred million around the globe watching on TV, the scene showed what the Olympic Games, Visa-sponsored corporate dross aside, could still be. Here was a beautiful human, from a little nation, moving with supernal grace on the world stage. But to Jamaicans, this win meant much more. In Kingston that night, they’d ignored tropical storm warnings to gather in their thousands, by one of the city’s main crossroads, at Half Way Tree, before a big screen to watch him run. Dressed in yellow or green, blaring plastic horns, they could be seen, on videos posted to YouTube, hopping in place as the race began—and then, when Bolt won (and as his young Jamaican teammate Yohan Blake took silver for good measure), leaping higher. They raised their fingers to the sky, hands held like pistols, yelling out Jamaicans’ favored expression for affirming joy, in this city as well known for gunplay as for Bob Marley. Brap, brap, brap! The sound mimicked the sound of shots fired in the air. Behind them, on a big screen, was Usain Bolt in London performing dance moves that may have looked, to the world, like so much wiggling; people here knew, though, that they were moves born at street parties nearby.
In Jamaica, at any time, Bolt’s win would have been a big deal. In this athletics-mad nation of two and a half million souls, sprinting—the source of fifty-two of the fifty-five Olympic medals Jamaica has ever won—matters. But what made the resonance of this triumph, at these London Olympics, extra deep, was its timing. August 5, 2012, fell on the eve of Jamaica’s Golden Jubilee. The very next night, in Kingston’s National Stadium, the island would celebrate its fiftieth birthday as a sovereign state. At midnight on this date in 1962, Princess Margaret lowered the Union Jack, which flew over this island for 307 years, and watched Alexander Bustamante, independent Jamaica’s first prime minister, raise a bright new standard in its place. As Jamaica’s sprinters, in London, raised that standard in the old empire’s capital—Bolt and Blake followed up their 100-meter sweep with one