By Peter Polack

Peter Polack

The Caribbean has usually been conjoined in the media with beaches, reggae and rum but there is a darker side, not reparation for slavery, but the iniquity dub plate of big landowners.

The historical association of large tracts of land in the Caribbean is of slavery, plantations, violence and death. Entire families consigned to the meat grinder of cane fields or the sugar boiling house, or for a lucky few, the master’s house. 

There are some major brands today that have their roots in slavery.

A BBC reporter recently acknowledged her part in this paradigm and her family sought to acknowledge the past and try to make reparation. Good for her.

One would have thought that large scale property ownership had become unfashionable even prohibited in many Caribbean islands but some persist in the ultimate self glorification.

Symbols of those islands or even attempts to limit excessive ownership have disappeared over the horizon in favor of development with excessive land areas even as the population is squeezed into smaller and smaller urban residence. 

From gated communities to vast estates, history is now repeating itself. 

Money talks and well, you know the rest.

These owners are not part of the tragic string of generations of natives intimately familiar with poverty whether in the sugar cane fields or on boats to seek turtle in Nicaragua before coming home to the debt of overpriced goods by rapacious merchants. 

They are recent visitors, come to provide a spectacle for the underclass.

Those businessmen have evolved today using paper instead of whips.

Modernization has only caused the iteration of house slaves to super slaves with all the trappings of power including obedience to the unknown overseer but for that damning name, landowner.

Governments pursue the little man with bureaucratic fervor as their ambitions are stifled but they quail and concede when the big man makes demands.

Soon we will all be wearing calico as we dance to the sound of the new fiddlers.

From frying pan to fire.

Peter Polack is a former criminal lawyer in the Cayman Islands for several decade. His books are The Last Hot Battle of the Cold War: South Africa vs. Cuba in the Angolan Civil War (2013), Jamaica, The Land of Film (2017) and Guerrilla Warfare: Kings of Revolution (2019). He was a contributor to Encyclopedia of Warfare (2013). His latest book is a compendium of Russian espionage activities with almost five hundred Soviet spies expelled from nearly 100 countries worldwide 1940-88. 

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