The Caribbean Must be a Zone of Peace

With American warships intruding into the southern waters of our Caribbean Sea, and with much accompanying disturbing loose talk about the Americans establishing military bases in the territory of our Caribbean Community (CARICOM), it would do us well to hearken to the admonition that the Rt. Excellent Errol Barrow, Prime Minister of Barbados, made in his iconic 3rd July 1986 Address to our Caribbean Community Heads of Government Conference in Georgetown, Guyana. 

This is what Prime Minister Barrow said on that historic occasion:

“My position also remains clear that the Caribbean must be recognised and respected as a zone of peace.  In this connection, I should like to make further references to Eric Williams by saying that his speech, From Slavery to Chaguaramas, made in 1960 over the issue of the United States base, should be required reading in every school of the Caribbean and in every language of the Caribbean.” 

And so, in strict adherence to Mr. Barrow’s admonition, I now reproduce an abridged version of the text of tvhen Premier Eric Williams’ “From Slavery to Chaguaramas” – not only for the benefit of our Caribbean students – but also for the benefit of our governmental leaders, and indeed, for all of our people:

From Slavery to Chaguaramas

A speech delivered by the Premier, Dr. Eric Williams, at Arima, Trinidad, July 17, 1959

Mr. Chairman, ladies and gentlemen, 

I am very glad it was possible to arrange this meeting here tonight in Arima. We thought that it would be an appropriate opportunity for me to speak on the relations between the Governments of Trinidad and Tobago, the United Kingdom and the United States of America, on what has become the Chaguaramas question. 

We will discuss here in Arima problems facing us as we march along this road to independence. And we take this opportunity of proclaiming to Trinidad and Tobago and to the West Indies, and in fact to the world, the stand of our Party, the stand of our Government, on this question of Chaguaramas. 

I suppose that many of you here tonight tend to regard this particular issue as something that has arisen within the last couple of years and that is related to what is by now well known as the agreement of 1941 between the Governments of the United Kingdom and the United States surrendering to the United States certain extensive and valuable areas of Trinidad and Tobago and certain other territories of the West Indies for a period of 99 years.  This is not correct. The problem of this 1941 agreement dates back long before 1941. It goes back indeed to the very origin of these territories of the West Indies, including Trinidad, as integral parts of the modern world, integral parts of the modern world economy. It goes back in fact to the very discovery of these West Indian territories by Christopher Columbus. 

There was a tremendous international conflict preceding the departure of Columbus on his voyage of discovery.  That voyage, successful as it was, ended up with the first division of the West Indian territories among the conflicting imperialist powers in Europe in an age when religion played a very important and decisive part in politics, both domestic and international. 

The two rival powers of the day, Spain and Portugal, both Catholic countries, decided to submit their competing claims for ownership of the world. Both Spanish and Portuguese explorers discovering new 

places (the West Indies, Brazil, India, the Philippines and so on), decided to submit their dispute to the arbitration of the Pope, and the Pope issued what is known historically as the Papal Donation of 1492 in which, drawing an imaginary line dividing up the world, he gave one half to Spain and the other half to Portugal. 

The West Indies fell within the Spanish Zone and this bartering of West Indian soil, this donation of West Indian inhabitants, was the signal for over four centuries of international rivalry for possession of our West Indian territory which, as far as this phase of our history is concerned, as far as Trinidad is concerned, culminated in the 1941 agreement by which Britain donated, ceded, gave up a part of Trinidad soil to the United States of America for 99 years, for purposes of defence of the USA. 

As soon as the Papal Donation was announced, there was the conflict, there was the opposition, there was the protest, the most famous statement: “I would like to see the clause in Adam’s will which denies me a share of the world.”

And the trouble started – periods of constant, unrelenting warfare in which emerged from the very start one of the decisive features of our West Indian history. The West Indies in terms of this conflict between the powers were regarded principally as naval and military bases.  The Spaniards were the first to organise garrisons, forts, military installations. Some of them still exist today. 

We in the West Indies begin our association with modern world economy as naval and military bases, attacked, defended, captured, retaken, repossessed, etc., traded, donated, any word you like, the result is the same. That is the beginning of our connection with the modern world and international economy. The bases were organised to protect the trade between the West Indies and these metropolitan powers, to protect from pirates and buccaneers who raided the Spanish treasure fleets, some-times (more often than not) with the full support of the metropolitan governments to which the pirates claimed allegiance.

When war wasn’t going on, what went on, another familiar word to us in Trinidad associated with the bases, is smuggling, large scale smuggling, each country trying to sell its own products to keep out the products of other countries…to invade the monopoly of their rivals.  One of the worst examples was the result of war between England and France or England and Spain, I don’t remember which. It didn’t matter to us, we of the West Indies used to be one day with this flag, another day with another flag. As somebody once said, we in the West Indies lived in a state of “betweenity”, between possession by one power in the past and possession by the other power in the future. 

Bases, smuggling, protection of international trade routes, concentration of West Indian islands as part of the international game of power politics, that was how we began our career in the West Indies. Most of us, our ancestors, didn’t have much to say. It didn’t matter to the man working on the sugar plantation, subject to the lash, who, what flag flew over him, the sugar cane waved in the breeze as he toiled, his sole purpose in life, his only place in the world was to work in the Caribbean sun on the sugar plantation, producing sugar, for the tea and coffee cups of Europe and America. 

That went on all the time, until Europe lost interest in the West Indies with the emergence of India and the British turned to India. And when the French lost their most important West Indian possession, they turned their attention elsewhere. 

And as Europe went out, the USA came in. After getting their independence, which had been based on large scale trade connections with the West Indies, most of them illegal, most of them involving smuggling, the new USA began from the very start to look upon the West Indies and the Caribbean Sea as their “sphere of influence.” They began shortly after independence by publishing their Monroe Doctrine, stating that they would not want to see any extension of European colonialism in the West Indies. 

They began to look at Cuba, and their presidents and their statesmen stated in the early days of American independence that it was a matter of political, moral and economic absurdity to have territories in the West Indies dependent on metropolitan countries in Europe.  And followed it up by a statement that there were laws of political as well as physical gravitation, just as an apple severed by the storm from the tree fell to the ground, so Cuba, severed from its metropolitan power, Spain, and incapable of self-support or self-government, would be bound to gravitate politically to the North American Continent. 

The ambition, clearly stated in those days, was to dominate the entire Western Hemisphere including the possessions of Britain which are now known today as the Dominion of Canada.

The Americans coined the phrase: The Caribbean Sea is the American Mediterranean. You know what that means. The Mediterranean, until Nasser came on the scene, was the lifeline from Britain to the Far East. The Caribbean Sea was to become the American Mediterranean and they proceeded to make it so.  In 1898 a war between America and Spain. Spain lost, the Americans got their first colony, Puerto Rico, and a few years later they were able to establish a protectorate over Cuba. They later bought the Virgin Islands from Denmark for 15 million dollars. In the first World War they established a protectorate over Haiti and Santo Domingo by which American troops took possession of the country and American Fiscal Officers took possession of the finances of the country. By 1917 it looked as if the Caribbean Sea was really the American Mediterranean.

The position was exactly what it was 100 years before that, 200 years, 300 years before that, the West Indies to be bases. The West Indies were to be related to the defence of some metropolitan country. The West Indies were important in the world for their strategic value, exactly as Spain had said in the 15th and 16th century.

But above all the West Indies were not to govern themselves. 

It is in this context, ladies and gentlemen, that we have to examine the 1941 agreement between the United Kingdom and the United States of America - and they had to wait until 1941.

But what happened in 1941? Again it was international war. The complications and difficulties of Europe provided the opportunity for American expansionist tendency. Nineteen-forty-one followed logically, it was the culmination of the dream of Theodore Roosevelt that he would begin with Spain, and they began in 1898, and he would end with England. But the policy had changed somewhat. The U.S.A didn’t want the West Indies. 

Mr Roosevelt said that he didn’t want to take two million headaches who would be an economic drag on the U.S, who would be two million headaches to him, and who by reason of the racial shocks in the country, the British West Indies (BWI) would aggravate the already difficult American problem of colour. 

And why must you take two million headaches, if you could get them without exposing yourself to the charge of running the administration, without exposing yourself to the responsibility of permitting them to come freely to the country which had taken them over? 

You didn’t need colonies, what you needed was bases. So they took bases. Here, there, somewhere else in Jamaica in the Bahamas, in British Guiana, in St. Lucia and in Antigua, a little spot here, there and everywhere else, in Trinidad, almost all of Trinidad, large quantities, later increased, and subject to any increase at all, as long as they wanted it, because the agreement gave them the power to make supplementary leases.

That was the situation in the 1941 agreement. They gave a few destroyers to the United Kingdom, most of them old. 

A Trinidad Government which had an expatriate Governor, Sir Hubert Young, generally considered an autocrat, who didn’t have to act on the advice of his Executive Council but who took the advice in this instance of an Executive Council, which included Captain Cipriani – they opposed this agreement. They did not want to give up Chaguaramas, they said, “Don’t just choose a place like that. The population of Trinidad and Tobago can no longer be traded and bartered as if they were still chattel slaves. Slavery was finished in 1833. Let the population feel that their wishes had been taken into account.” That was the Governor of Trinidad and Tobago and the Executive Council in 1941. Every now and then a Governor comes on the scene who is quite sympathetic to the nationalist aspiration.  He feels that his job is to work with the people instead of to work against them. 

He was completely ignored and the same problem in British Guiana, the same problem in the Leeward Islands and in Jamaica, the Governors were ignored. The Governor of Trinidad and Tobago said: We cannot do anything with the Americans. They don’t really want a base to protect themselves or to protect the West Indies. They particularly want Chaguaramas, they don’t want to give up Chaguaramas, because it is to be aimed not at defending the West Indies, (I am not saying this, this was said at the time). It was a base aimed at jumping off at South America and particularly at Venezuela if the necessity should arise. 

And then the Peoples National Movement comes on the scene, and as soon as we come on the scene, the West Indies decides that the Federal Capital – the Capital if the West Indies Federation - is to be located in Trinidad and then the West Indian leaders (with Trinidad not participating), decide that Chaguaramas is to be the site of the Federal Capital, and they decide (with Trinidad protesting) that a delegation is to be sent to seek the restoration of Chaguaramas and we go along to be with the West Indies, not to oppose our West Indian brothers, and we go along and find ourselves in the whole tangle of the future Chaguaramas: base or capital; for American interests or for West Indian interests. 

And the ball is pushed in our court and we carry that ball and we have been carrying out the decision of the West Indian leaders and provide the Federation with a capital of its own choice.

The whole West Indian movement is moving towards control of its own affairs. I, too, would like to know the clause in Adam’s will which denies the West Indian people a share of the world, especially a share of the world that rightly belongs to them.

Now that we know these things, we have to take some sort of action on it. It is no point going about the place saying that we are antagonising this, that or the other. (Editor’s note: It is no point saying that we are antagonizing the Americans). All that we know is something has to be done about it. So don’t let anybody go rushing about the place (some idiots) saying: you are antagonizing people. 

This is a political problem and in this brief resume of the relations between the Governments of Trinidad and Tobago, the United Kingdom, the United States, we have to end up finally by asking the question: after all that we have said and that has been made public, where do we go from here? We can’t stay where we are. 

If you want self-government, self-government means in Trinidad what self-government means in England and can’t mean less. And we stated that if there is to be any surrender of some parts of Trinidad’s soil or something it cannot be justified or rationalised on the basis of a colonial agreement made 18 years ago, in which we had no part at all. 

The issue is the political one. There is no vehemence about it, no antagonism. We are the ones being antagonised, because as we in the West Indies, led by Cipriani and the others who followed him, have known what it is to fight against Colonialism, in order to reach the half way house we have reached now, so we will know to fight and to agitate in order to maintain inviolate the gains that we celebrate here in Arima tonight. What else to do? The children to come after us, we have to turn over something to them of which they can be proud. 

When we deal with Chaguaramas, we are not merely dealing with what has become today the symbol of self-government and the symbol of independence for the Federation. What all this means, ladies and gentlemen, is that we in Trinidad and Tobago, you in the West Indies, have begun a long overdue attempt which India has started, which Ghana has started, which all the former colonial territories have already begun – we too in Trinidad and Tobago are well on the road, we who have been passive agents of a history made and written for us by other people, we in the PNM symbolise today the determination of Arima and Trinidad and Tobago to write their own history themselves. 

We are the standard bearers of the nationalist movement.  But more than that, ladies and gentlemen, in fighting for Chaguaramas, in stating our claim to what our calypsonian puts simply, but so forcefully: “We want back Ian”, in doing that, in attacking the problem of bases, in opposing the conception that our problem is one of defence – it is defence. But the enemy is not the submarine, or not the weapons which would be changed in 10 years and then changed in 100 years after that, continuing this pattern into which we have been caught up for four and a half centuries. The enemy is poverty, the enemy is suppression of the talents of our population, the enemy is all the PNM has opposed ever since it was formed January 24th, 1956. 

What we are doing, what I came here to tell you tonight, what we feel so proud, most of us, to be associated with, is that we have begun to make our own history. 

The only two alternatives available to you in Arima and to the people of the West Indies: forward to independence, backward to colonialism. The PNM is forward. 

Thank you for your support. Thank you for the opportunity of speaking to you. 

The Caribbean Community (CARICOM) is the regional body of the peoples in the Caribbean States.