CARIBBEAN, A US LAKE

The United States of America has, since 1904, adopted and put into effect the utterly absurd position that it reserved the right to intervene militarily in any Caribbean country if it felt that the country’s ‘political stability’ was threatened. Or more to the point if it considered US investments in the country to be under threat.

This policy, enunciated in the Roosevelt Corollary of the Monroe Doctrine, has made a mockery, not only of its own protestations of democracy and the Rights of States, but as well of the insistence by Caribbean Governments of sovereignty of their island homes. It goes against the concept of the Charter of the United Nations and proclaims to Caribbean nations that they are free to say that they are free just so long as they behave themselves as good little boys and girls according to the gospel of Saint Theodore (Roosevelt), author of the Roosevelt Corollary.

Several Caribbean nations — Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Grenada, Haiti, Nicaragua and Panama — have fallen victims to the Roosevelt nightmarish politics of intervention. In 1953, Guyana, then British Guiana, was in a larger sense an indirect victim of the Roosevelt Corollary, when the United States demanded that the United Kingdom Government remove the People’s Progressive Government of Dr Cheddi Jagan. Commentators insisted at the time that there was an “or else” to it.

Trinidad and Tobago escaped by the skin of its teeth (forgive the cliche) following on the intervention of some of the officers and soldiers of the Regiment, who had protested orders which they felt could have possibly led to the shooting of several of the leaders, as well as followers of the so-called Black Power Revolution. It is a matter of history that late Prime Minister, Dr Eric Williams, ordered United States warships out of Trinidad and Tobago’s waters, which clearly had been given conditional intervention orders by the then Administration of later disgraced US President Richard Nixon.

Again, in 1990, the George Bush (senior) Government had contemplated military intervention, I am told, in Trinidad and Tobago following on the July 27, 1990 attempted coup by the Jamaat al Muslimeen. My advice was that it would have been a limited intervention to protect American interests in South-East Trinidad — Amoco et cetera; interests in Point Lisas; United States citizens here and the US Embassy at Queen’s Park East.

Instructions were given to all United States citizens in Trinidad and Tobago to register with the US Embassy, and tentative arrangements were made to evacuate them in the event that an emergency was considered to have arisen. American helicopters touched down in the Queen’s Park Savannah in an area opposite to the US Embassy. Grenada was not so fortunate. United States planes bombed Grenada in October of 1983, and later US forces landed in that island State, in the wake of the overthrow of the then Grenada Prime Minister, the late Maurice Bishop. I have written before, beginning shortly after the US military intervention there, that United States warships were directed to sail for Grenada even in advance of the takeover by Bernard Coard and company.

Their orders were to overthrow the Bishop regime! However, when Bishop was removed by another set of impractical Communist romantics, the Americans shifted to an intervention theory founded on their “horror” at a legitimately elected Govern-ment bring overthrown. But the United States was careful to ask Caribbean governments (with the notable exception of Trinidad and Tobago) to invite it to invade Grenada. I was first made aware of this by a Caricom Prime Minister while on a visit to his country.

It was virtually the same tactic it had employed, when in 1965 it had despatched a force of approximately 20,000 to the Dominican Republic to remove Juan Bosch, the country’s elected President. The only difference, and it was one of detail, was that it had asked the OAS to intervene. This meant that the US as a member would have been entitled to that right. The United States was, for long, intent on a physical presence in the Caribbean, in much the same manner as many of the other colonial powers. From relatively early, in fact as early as the 1850s, a critical part of its Caribbean policy was to have Cuba as the principal jewel in its Imperial crown. It made overtures to Spain in 1854 with a view to its purchasing Cuba.

Unfortunately, arrogance was never far away, and in that year the Government formulated the clearly offensive Ostend Manifesto, through which it arrogated unto itself the right to invade and takeover Cuba should Spain rebuff its efforts to acquire Cuba via purchase. It would later rule Cuba for a period following on the Spanish-American War. In 1917 it would acquire three of the Virgin Islands from Denmark for some US$25 million. We in the Caribbean parade ourselves as being independent, and speak of guarding our sovereignty. But until world events force or encourage a change of USA’s Caribbean policy, we shall remain but a jest in America’s Imperial mind, and the Caribbean Sea, a US lake.