Polack Post: Caribbean Christmas Messages – New Year Regrets
By Peter Polack
Peter Polack
The Caribbean is awash during the December festivities with messages from our leadership that do not reflect the reality of the homeless, the unemployed and poor finances. This year, those bon mots will vaporize into the New Year hangover as many wait for a roof, electricity and water.
In smaller and richer islands the mantra is spend every last penny, fast, sovereign fund or economic diversification be damned.
The biggest Santa wish would be subterranean electricity and upgraded building codes that would make hurricanes seem almost harmless.
The Jamaican leader has directed the local utility to start burying their lines with priority given to tourist hubs. Visitors must have their lights even if the rest of us are in darkness. A bold statement. Even the young head of the super rich Cayman Islands is reluctant to put that requirement on their local supplier, however beneficial to voters, and resistant to future weather disasters.
For an entity about to lose their license, it will be the last thing that Jamaican utility will consider. There is a word for governments that direct the operation of private business, it is socialism, just like financing business enterprises.
That company will just about have finished hurricane renovation before they leave the Jamaican shores unless the Jamaican mega million creditor government backslides into licence renewal. It would not be the first time and does not consider potential years of expensive litigation.
Like the old Scottish proverb, if wishes were horses, beggars would ride.
Leaders who are elected to serve the people should be agents of change to translate their wishes into reality, perhaps, this was what Chosen Brown also meant.
The grass is no greener on the other side, such as the unincorporated American territory and Caribbean island of Puerto Rico, that has the least reliable electricity system among Americans with substantially more service interruptions and outages than US mainland. They have been struggling since 2017 with repeated hurricanes and a failing system supply, despite being a child of Washington for well over a century. No calls to go underground there.
Famous native son, Bad Bunny, has been openly critical of that failure, unlike Caribbean entertainers, who are neither critical of that or US intervention in the Caribbean.
Must be something to do with visas.
In the unwelcome event the Caribbean is adsorbed by the new world order, this would be their highest expectation. An outside child, even American, unincorporated and a territory, owned by a faraway master. Sounds familiar. Not back to the future but to the colonial past, some are more equal than others.
There but for the grace of God go I.
Notes
Peter Polack is a former criminal lawyer from the Cayman Islands for several decades. 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.
His views are his own.
