by Ian Thomson
All this displeased Seaga, who perceived Manley as anti-Western and anti-capitalist. In fact, Manley’s government had been careful to allow private enterprise to flourish, but that was not enough for Seaga. In the mid-1970s the Americans (and, to a lesser extent, the Canadians) embarked on a campaign to discredit Manley and the PNP. New class wars were prophesied with a final catastrophic crumbling of Jamaica’s post-colonial society. Marxist sugar cooperatives were about to infest Jamaica! Kingston was about to have its own Red Square! ‘Don’t let the comrades Castro-ate you,’ warned the JLP; Manley was suffering from ‘Castro-enteritis’.
Manley’s ‘anti-capitalist’ cause was not helped by the increasingly repressive measures he adopted against crime. In 1974, in a bid to curb the political violence, he set up the Gun Court detention centre in Kingston. The centre, today encased in barbed wire with laagerlike watchtowers, was used to isolate anyone found in possession of an unlicensed firearm or just ammunition. Now Jamaicans could not only be arrested, tried and sentenced all on the same day, they could be detained indefinitely. Manley was determined to put Jamaica ‘under heavy manners’ and make an example of wrongdoers. Even films that ‘depended on violence for their theme’ were banned and scenes with gun-play edited out.
As the killings began to ratchet up, neither the PNP nor the JLP was prepared to take responsibility. It was far easier to blame the ubiquitous (but conveniently nameless) ‘gunmen’ than the corrupted politicians. By now the PNP were doling out guns quite as generously as the JLP. The party of rectitude and reform was becoming tainted by the corruption it had decried.
Manley, it was clear, had not materially improved life for poor Jamaicans as he had promised. In the depressed areas of Kingston the inhabitants were getting hungrier and more angry. Manley and the PNP were now seen as traitors. ‘All of them a Judas, can’t you see,’ sang the wild-eyed reggae star Junior Byles. The economics failed to add up; the PNP could no longer afford to pay for its social policies. Washington began to withdraw aid and investments. In 1971, Jamaica had received $23 million from the United States; by 1975, that amount was down to $4 million.
Ironically, Michael Manley’s growing stature as a Third World spokesman made him increasingly important to US policy-makers. Henry Kissinger, visiting Kingston in 1975 as Secretary of State for America’s post-Nixon government, tried to persuade Manley into withdrawing his support for Cuba’s intervention against South Africa in Angola. Manley refused: Jamaica, he reminded Kissinger, had been the first country to break off diplomatic relations with the apartheid regime and back the African National Congress.
In July the following year, a bomb exploded in a suitcase at Kingston airport as it was being loaded on to an Air Cubana plane. Four months later, an Air Cubana fight en route to Jamaica exploded in mid-air; all seventy-eight passengers were killed. Anti-Castro groups in Miami claimed responsibility for the attacks. Fears of an imminent civil war - PNP versus JLP - were now heightened by an extraordinary reggae song, ‘Two Sevens Clash’, by Culture, which invoked a prophecy uttered decades earlier by Marcus Garvey, that apocalyptic violence would erupt on 7 July 1977. The song’s predictive wail was heard on radios across Jamaica as another general election loomed.
Steel-helmeted soldiers began to patrol the political borderlines downtown. And in August 1976, as the killings multiplied in the build up to the election, Manley declared a State of Emergency. He had come to suspect (rightly, it turned out) the existence of a JLP-Seaga-CIA-backed campaign to destabilise him and his government. In spite of the opposition, Manley won the election. Visitors to Kingston at this time - among them Joe Strummer and Mick Jones of the Clash - reported a frightening place on the edge of bloodshed. (‘Yes, i’d stay an’ be a tourist but i can’t take the gunplay,’ Strummer sang on ‘Safe European Home’, an oblique comment on mid-1970s Jamaica.)
Seaga, brooding over his electoral defeat, claimed that Manley was turning Kingston into the ‘subversion capital of the Caribbean’. Cuban doctors, nurses and construction workers were increasingly a presence (if scarcely a political influence) in the Jamaican capital, with the Cuban Embassy seen as a hotbed of indoctrination. While Fidel’s Cuba actually had very little bearing on PNP policy, fears of a red insurgency only encouraged Washington to see Jamaica in terms of East-West, Cold War prescriptions.
Most American citizens living in Jamaica endorsed the American campaign to discredit Manley. Among them was Errol Flynn’s former wife, the much younger screen actress Patrice Wymore. In Wymore’s estimation, Manley was a dangerous radical bent on leading Jamaica into the Red Bloc. In particular she feared his socialist ideas about the rationalisation of land ownership. On Errol Flynn’s death in 1959 she had inherited over 1,600 acres of farmland on the outskirts of Port Antonio. Locals claim that Flynn obtained the land in the most underhand way, by inviting Portland farmers on board his yacht and plying them with so much rum that they signed away their tenures for a pittance. The story of the matinee idol’s chicanery was told to me by an intimate of the Flynn circle in Port Antonio. Whether it is true or not (a tincture of exaggeration is allowed), it has become part of local legend.
As most of Flynn’s land lay unused, the Manley government understandably had plans to make use of it (it would not have done so otherwise). Project Land Lease was launched by the PNP in 1975 with the purpose of leasing out idle land such as Flynn’s for peasant cultivation. No Manley reform was more contentious. Land tenure was - still is - highly inequitable in Jamaica. In 1961, the year before independence, 10 per cent of the population owned 64 per cent of the land; today the imbalance may be even greater. The Manley government failed to make any significant expropriations. Patrice Wymore refused to loan out even a portion of the Errol Flynn Estate. In 2000 the Wall Street Journal listed the Estate for an asking price of US $50 million. The rumour is that the Errol Flynn International airport will be built on the property.
I met Errol Flynn’s ex-wife at her ranch-office outside Port Antonio. Considered to be a difficult and withdrawn person, her life in Jamaica (apart from the few details she cared to volunteer) could only be guessed at, and I was a bit nervous about meeting her. The Errol Flynn Estate, a vast expanse of pampas rolling to the sea, looked unkempt as I made my way across it one hot afternoon. The grass was sere and grazed by tired-looking cattle: Jamaica Reds, Jamaica Blacks. A notice by a cattle trough announced: ‘STRAY GOATS WILL BE SHOT’. Feeling like an extra from The Magnificent Seven I went up to the door, where a tethered horse dozed.
‘Haven’t we met before?’ Patrice Wymore said to me as I walked in after knocking. ‘You remind me of somebody I know.’
She was a gaunt woman in a pair of pink skinny jeans, her reddish-blonde hair concealed beneath a scarf, Bette Davis-style.
‘I don’t think so,’ I said warily, taking in the riding crops and spurs hanging on the wall.
‘Oh,’ she said, lighting a cigarette. Patrice Wymore was eighty-four but looked younger, her eyes a cornflower-blue like a china doll’s. After eight years of marriage, in 1958 she had divorced Flynn, who died the following year at the age of fifty having more or less boozed himself into the grave. Since then, she has denied rumours that Flynn enjoyed sex with men (‘Errol, gay? Don’t you think that I would have noticed?’). However, by the time she costarred with him in the movie King’s Rhapsody (1955), his sexual philandering and drinking had become so bad that he was having to play sexually philandering drunkards. (By Wymore’s admission the film was ‘quite dreadful’.)
By good fortune, Wymore had not been cut out of Flynn’s will, and when she returned to Jamaica after his death to inherit paintings and jewellery, she also took on 800 head of cattle and the Port Antonio estates, which she began to manage in 1968. ‘That was no easy thing,’ Wymore said, fixing me with a baby-eyed stare, ‘especially not in those Manley years.’ Almost every week in the 1970s thieves threatened to steal (and in fact did steal) her cattle. ‘There was nothing I could do,’ Wymore pulled a face. Manley
was inciting the ‘rabble’ to racial hatred and vengeance. As a wealthy white woman in a poor black country, Wymore claimed she was despised.
She lit another Benson and Hedges, exhaled elegantly. ‘You don’t believe me? I tell you, the poor were out to butcher what remained of the middle classes.’ Listening to Patrice Wymore, it occurred to me that politics under Manley were no longer a question of Left and Right, but black and white. Politics had shifted to a form of post-colonial nationalism in which ‘colour’ increasingly determined whose side you were on. In 1978, during Manley’s second term, gangs of farmhands began to squat on the Errol Flynn Estate and glared murderously at the white woman as she drove past them on her way to the office. ‘I was cussed and verbally assaulted,’ Wymore recalled.
The PNP’s ‘race ideology’ was motivated chiefly by envy, she insisted. ‘Envy’s the number one problem in Jamaica.’ Did Wymore mean black Jamaican ‘envy’ of white privilege? ‘No,’ she said, ‘it would be the same if I were black, the envy would still be there. I mean, look at Bob Marley - Jamaicans hated Marley in the beginning, oh yes they did, he was hated and he was envied.’ Jamaicans generous? Rubbish: Jamaicans are a ‘shiftless, shady, jealous kind of people [quoting the title, unwittingly or not, of an O’Jays song]. Yes, jealous, and always have been.’ Wymore was a harsh judge. ‘Jamaicans feel a tremendous envy and suspicion towards their own successful children,’ she said.
At the dawn of the 1980s, it was literally a fight to the death between PNP and JLP. Even Jamaicans of moderation and decency were tempted to commit grotesque acts of political violence. The violence was exacerbated at this point by the spectre of national bankruptcy. Between 1975 and 1980, Jamaica’s foreign debt had doubled to reach US $2 billion - the equivalent of 90 per cent of the gross domestic product. The worldwide oil crisis had hit the Jamaican dollar hard, and Manley agreed, reluctantly, to accept emergency relief from the International Monetary Fund (IMF). A combination of financial mismanagement and muddle-headed ideology had obliged him to reverse his anti-capitalist course. Manley’s revolutionary spirit, it seemed, was giving out amid more strikes, walkouts, and ever higher rates of inflation.
A minority of PNP activists, feeling betrayed by Manley’s sudden reliance on foreign loans, veered further to the left. A Marxist-Leninist offshoot of the PNP, the Workers Party of Jamaica, began to send brigades of Jamaican youth to Cuba for military training. The PNP’s covert alliance with this pro-Moscow splinter faction was later denounced by Manley who (in spite of his anti-imperialist rhetoric) had come to realise the risks he ran in alienating the business sector. Officially the Kingston-Havana PNP Brigadista programme was intended to train Jamaicans in construction skills (some 1,400 were indeed sent to Cuba for that purpose). Training Jamaicans in guerrilla tactics was not endorsed by the mainstream PNP.
Horace Jackson, in his early sixties now, still had something of the former Workers Party of Jamaica activist in his studious, concentrated expression. In his thirties he had had contributed articles to the WPJ journal The Struggle; I liked him, he had believed in something. Yet he seemed uncomfortable, embarrassed even, to talk of his experiences under a Cuban sun in 1980, when he had received instructions in how to infiltrate and deploy troops. Cuba had been an experiment he would never quite recover from, a kind of ‘political folly’, he called it.
We were speaking in his office at the Jamaica Bauxite Institute in Kingston, where he had worked these thirty years. Of the twenty brigadistas flown out with Jackson to Cuba, only three were known to him. All were under strict instructions not to discuss their activities with anyone outside the group. On arrival in Havana the Jamaicans still did not know the purpose of their visit. A truck drove them to an ‘undisclosed location’ in ‘hilly terrain’, recalled Jackson, about ten miles from the Cuban capital. The camp, when they got there, had barrack-sheds, bunkbeds and lecture halls; the Cuban instructors, didactic to the last, had chalked diagrams of guns and grenades on the blackboard. A photograph of Che Guevara with saintly eyes and straggly black hair hung above the door. Che had been dead for thirteen years, but the Jamaican brigadistas worshipped him still.
At thirty-eight, Jackson was the oldest of the Jamaicans in the group, too old, he says now, for ‘Third World revolutionary stuff’. He had never handled a gun and accidentally almost killed one of the instructors with a grenade. ‘I wasn’t properly in control of that grenade,’ Jackson told me, adding, ‘I wasn’t properly in control of anything.’ He was taught how to dismantle rifles and dress correctly in olive-green fatigues. He went into woods, he waged mock war and, armed with M16s, Uzis and SLRs, crawled on his belly across semi-swampland. By the end of his two-week course, Jackson said he was ready to kill, but he added in mitigation: ‘The Cold War had frozen our ability to think - it had killed off interesting thoughts, interesting people, interesting ideas.’ Worse, Manley’s Cold War rhetoric of ‘US and Them’ served to draw a line in the sand, which one crossed at mortal risk. Nevertheless there was something about the conflict that ‘got your blood going’, Jackson remembered.
Back in Jamaica, meanwhile, events were occurring that terrified him: PNP activists were being killed in their sleep. Seaga was about to overthrow Manley in a CIA-sponsored coup, it was believed. Practically anyone could get hit at any time. ‘Seaga was - is - a very scary man, who surrounded himself with very scary, dangerous types,’ said Jackson. ‘My recollection is that Jamaica was on the brink of anarchy.’ He looked at me intently and shook his head. ‘Anarchy, I say, anarchy.’
On his return to Kingston, Jackson began to research CIA suspects living in the city, took photographs of their houses, and borrowed an automatic rifle from WPJ headquarters. The rifle was ‘necessary’ to protect himself, his mother (with whom he lived) and her house, ‘because any day someone could come for both of us,’ Jackson explained.
In the summer of 1980, with ten other WPJ activists, he got the order from high up to storm a pro-Seaga radio station in Kingston. The saboteurs waited, their M16s cocked, in their bandanas and fatigues; but the signal for attack never came. ‘We were taking on something much bigger than ourselves - and that made us very, very dangerous,’ Jackson recalled. ‘Yes, we were arrogant - full of the possibility of power.’ As it happened, the JLP won the October 1980 election, gaining a landslide fifty-one of the sixty seats in Parliament. Seaga was set to govern by rejecting all that Manley had stood for, or so it seemed.
The reality is more complicated. Though Seaga is often seen as the man of the establishment and Manley as the renegade leftist, both views are misleading. It was Seaga who had written scholarly papers on the Afro-Christian religions of the ghetto and was one of the early producers of reggae, while Manley, the son of the nation’s revered founding father, had published a 600-page history of the West Indian cricket team. Nevertheless, Seaga was able to please the Reagan White House and the IMF by preaching free enterprise and selling off the industries that Manley had nationalised. Yet Seaga’s administration during the eight and a half years that followed Manley’s was no more successful. His unthinking reliance on the goodwill of the Washington administration - his blinkered faith in Regan’s free market - was to leave Jamaica even more violent and poverty-stricken. By accepting International Monetary Fund loans in excess of US $ 2,000 million, moreover, Seaga helped to double Jamaica’s external debt.
Jackson, for his part, continued to wear a Lenin badge to the Bauxite Institute but was prompted to renounce violence when, in February 1985, three WPJ activists were killed in a shoot-out with the police in the Redhills district of Kingston. The men were known personally to Jackson. ‘SLAIN THREE HAD COMMUNIST HISTORY’ reported the Gleaner. Jolted into reality, Jackson returned his rifle to the WPJ headquarters and washed his hands of his old militancy.
Not that a Castro-style communism was ever going to happen in Jamaica. Cuba, a hybrid of Hispanic and African cultures, remains quite distinct from its ‘British’ neighbour. Jamaicans, by virtue of their fierce individual
ism and gift for self-assertiveness, are more prone to see the state as an evil to be kept at bay than as a saviour. Jackson put it another way: ‘There’s not much of a tradition in Jamaica of mutual cooperation. Socialism in Jamaica would have meant total war.’ He went on, ‘We Jamaicans can’t agree on anything. Put us round a conference table, we’ll only end up fighting.’ In their decisions and actions, Jackson concluded, the ‘I’ is often more apparent in Jamaicans than the ‘We’.
When Michael Manley was returned to power for the third time in 1989, incredibly, he sided with a Ronald Reagan-like capitalism. If nothing else, his political about-turn indicated a continued hunger for power. Manley had changed allegiances with the same enthusiasm, untempered by pragmatism or caution, with which he embraced his earlier nationalist-socialism. The Reagan market model, unfettered and deregulated, pro-IMF, was once more unleashed on a society of gross inequalities. ‘You just can’t improve on Adam Smith,’ Manley is said to have remarked. By now the PNP was virtually indistinguishable from the JLP. And, as the erosion of the ‘old time’ values of service, decency and respect for others continued apace, so a murderous anti-social behaviour was fomented at all levels of Jamaican society.
With the abandonment of Michael Manley’s ‘Third World’ ideology, at least tourism picked up again. The prevailing anti-white mood in the 1970s had been a calamity for a country whose livelihood depended in part on the hotel business. By the early 1990s, hordes of Britons and North Americans were flocking back to the West Indian ‘paradise’ for its promise of oblivion, reggae, rum, sun and cheap sex. Patrice Wymore organised ‘Errol Flynn Tours’ of her estates, but so many tourists turned up unannounced that she called a halt and, for good measure, removed ‘Flynn, Errol’ from the Port Antonio telephone directory.