A General History of the Caribbean

When one undertakes an historical study, any success in the undertaking is arguably predicated on an
understanding of the subject to be studied. Knowing the culture of a given people or region, the
geography and climate of its habitation, the attitudes of the people and their current political
comportment all of these breathe life into the subject. It is this deepening familiarization that gives
life to the historical figures and events of that subject.

Perhaps nowhere is this preliminary requirement more necessary than when undertaking an
historical study of the Caribbeanislands. This archipelago of fifty small to moderate sized inhabited
units that span a coarse 2,500 mile arc above the north side of Central and South America represent
a very similar and yet very diverse group of people and cultures. Sharing a common climate, they
contain a variety of terrain. Subjected to European invasion and conquest, then populated
involuntarily by black African slaves under an oppressively dominating plantation system, the
dissimilar timing of these very common circumstances lead to a curious variety of cultures.
Conversely, the many languages spoken and the several cultural manifestations that are apparent in
this region do not obliterate an essentially consistent ambience, a common rhythm that is
unmistakably Caribbean. It is this contradiction, this sameness and yet difference, that makes a
vigorous introductory approach such a compelling and, in itself, such a diversified component of this
historical study.

Even more important than the natural lure of anthropological or sociological considerations in
their own right is the insufficiency of chronological political events alone to frame a general history of
the Caribbean. Unlike many regions that experience clear, defining events and forces in a more or
less cohesive fashion, periodization is difficult to construct for Caribbean history. Some pivotal events
were confined to the particular island on which they occurred, while others had a regional impact.
Furthermore, these latter sometimes did so with the uneven yet certain rhythm of the waves that
come across the sea to lap the shores of the receptive neighboring island. This tendency yields a
certain proclivity towards eclectic explanatory approaches.

Three different yet mutually supportive approaches illustrate the utility of this eclecticism. The
Caribbeanist Sidney Mintz employs the analytical approach of a social scientist to identify conditions
of common description in his article "the Caribbean as a Socio-Cultural Area". Antonio Benitez-Rojo
injects a decidedly cultural emphasis to his historical narrative of the region in his chapter "From the
plantation to the Plantation", taken from his book The Repeating Island. And Michelle Cliff weaves a
story of emerging adolescence in Jamaica during the late 1950s with a parallel story of relevant
historical memories in almost stream-of-consciousness manner in her novel Abeng. Cliff offers some
autobiographical insights as well in the recollections, both childhood and adult, in her article "If I
Could Write This in Fire, I Would Write This in Fire".

The Plantation

In all these approaches, the plantation is identified as a central ingredient in defining the cultural
development of the Caribbean. In Michelle Cliffs novel, the ongoing importance of its place in
Jamaican history is demonstrated in Clares visit to her ancestral compound. One hundred years after
the emancipation and no longer owned by the Savage family, the great house stood as a ramshackle
relic of a past enterprise.
Having ancestors from both the slave and master class, the feelings generated by this visit are mixed
for this young mulatto girl. The faded wallpaper depicting scenes of an equally fading British upper
middle class gentility and its notions of aristocratic grandeur contrast with the harsh image of the
burned down and once squalid quarters of the enslaved black laborers. Clares father engaged in a
running monologue about the refinement in furnishings that once adorned this room or that, while
Clare visualized the brutal treatment that had once taken place in the outbuildings. This aroused in
Clare deep consternation, for the great house was a part of her as well as Jamaicas identity.

It was for her "(d)ingy and mindful of the past. Both the source of her and not the source of her.
The house carried over to her a sense of great disappointment maybe a great sadness. It was a dry
and dusty place not a place of dreamsShe had had expectations of the great houseNow she
wished that the fire (that Justice Savage had set) in the canefields would spread to the house and
that it would burn to the ground. She didnt need the house, now she had seen it. If it burned, only
the stories she knew would be left." (Abeng, p37)

This visit to the great house is interwoven in the novel with the recalled story of Inez, the involuntary
concubine of the former plantation owner and Clares ancestor, Justice Savage. The connection
between the two stories is multifaceted and symbolic. The fire that engulfed the fields marks a
passionate reaction to emancipation, is simultaneous with the escape of Inez, and demarcates the
onset of poetic justice in the reversal of the Savage family fortunes.

As powerful as this literary device is, it cannot be regarded as any sort of overstatement of the
ongoing impact of the plantation. Nor is this a condition found exclusively in Jamaica, but is evident
throughout the Caribbean. Sidney Mintz, in the course of describing nine major features of
Caribbean regional commonality, declares the establishment of the plantation system as salient in its
overarching impact. The plantation system was not only an agricultural device, according to Mintz,
but became the actual basis for society there. It also became completely dominant on the islands
where it matured. "The inability of freemen to compete in any local sphere with slave labor
complimented and intensified a sort of manorial self-sufficiency in plantation areas, sharply inhibiting
the development of occupationally diverse communities of freemen in the same region." (Mintz,
p27) This tended to inhibit cultural development of any kind outside of the strict regimen of the
sugar plantation.

The thrust of, and indeed, the very title of Antonio Benitez-Rojos chapter "From the plantation to the
Plantation" speaks to the very primacy of this institution as a defining development in the Caribbean.
He describes the onset of the small-scale experiment as undertaken by the Spanish in Hispanola, the
plantation, being the model for subsequent refinement and development. This first series of
establishments, controlled as they were by the Spanish monarchy, did not cover entire islands or
completely overwhelm the emergence of creole culture and alternative economic activity, much to
the chagrin of the colonial officials. The mature, pervasive Plantation system, as established by the
British, French, and Dutch in the 17th century, serving the larger and growing European market for
tropical produce, fashioned an overwhelming structure that either precluded or arrested cultural
growth. "In plantation conditions, in spite of the enormous percentages reached by the number of
slaves in relation to the total population, the African was reduced to living under an incarcerating
regimen of forced labor, which stood in the way of his being able to exert a cultural influence upon
the European and creole population." (Rojo, p70)

The Legacy of Slavery

Connected to the institution of the plantation was its source of labor, which was the institution of
slavery. It is this involuntary installation of Africans on the Caribbean islands that substantially
composes the regions population. And it is the power of present effect that makes past slavery such
an important factor in understanding the Caribbean. A system in which a few white plantation
owners had absolute control over a far greater number of African slaves set into motion a caste
system, the impact of which extended and extends far beyond emancipation. Its monumental impact
can best be understood in relation to its huge demographic accomplishment. "Antillean slavery
constituted one of the greatest phenomena in world history." (Mintz, p25)

"There was no cash compensation for the people who had labored under slavery. No tracts of land
for them to farm. No employment for the most part. No literacy programs. No money to book
passage back to Africa. Their enslavement had become an inconvenience - ad now it was removed.
All the forces which worked to keep these people slaves now worked to keep them poor. And poor
most of them remained." (Abeng, p28)

Not only does this legacy have an economic component, which can be overcome in time and by
succeeding generations of frugality and sacrifice, but also a social stigma component as well.
Centuries of distinction made along racial lines, where darkness denotes inferiority, made an
indelible imprint on all members of society. The introduction of mulatto members merely
transformed the distinction from a bipolar one to a spectrum, that is to say, differentiation by degree.
"Under this system, light and dark people will meet in those ways in which the light-skinned person
imitates the oppressor. But the imitation goes only so far: the light-skinned person becomes the
oppressor in fact." (Fire, p368)

It cannot be overstated the ways in which arbitrary presuppositions of superiority and inferiority
along racial lines maintain themselves. Even children, whose innocence generally renders them
immune to such matters as class and rank, quickly become inculcated to such distinctions in the
subtlest ways. Cliff alludes to this in describing the friendship of the light-skinned Clare and the dark-
skinned Zoe. "This was a friendship a pairing of two girls kept only on school vacations, and
because of their games and make-believe might have seemed to some entirely removed from what
was real in the girls lives. Their lives of light and dark which was the one overwhelming reality."
(Abeng, p95)

The stubborn persistence of differential treatment based on degree of apparent African ancestry
seems rather remarkable given the substantial percentage of people of obviously African decent
throughout the Caribbean. Mintz explains that an active program to prohibit any meaningful cultural
development within the community of imported African laborers was a principle element in the
design of the sugar machine. He declares that "the formation of any cultural integrity always lagged
behind the perpetuation of traditional bipolar social and economic structures, usually established
relatively early in the period of settlement of each territory." (Mintz, p37)

A Diverse Archipelago

The preceding comments regarding the importance of the plantation and slavery to Caribbean
identity may seem to suggest a homogenizing affect which would certainly be no more evident to a
traveler to the region than it would be to its residents. Naturally, a certain difference would exist
owing to the language of the occupying colonial power. The spoken French in Haiti, the English in
Jamaica, Barbados, and Trinidad, and the Spanish in Cuba and Puerto Rico, are all obvious
distinctions at the surface. Also, an islands size and soil, as various as they are, certainly did
determine whether and to what degree sugar or any other plantation would be established, and to
what extent it would saturate the available landmass. The unifying categorization that Sidney Mintz,
at the outset, makes clear that each islands particular geography dictated its suitability to plantation
development.

Probably the most important determinant in cultural variation is the relationship between the
European conquest of a given island in relation to the onset of a mature plantation system. The rapid
introduction of large-scale plantation enterprise soon after acquisition is a model followed by the
British and Dutch and as well to a certain extent by the French. Mintz points out that the Hispanic
colonies deviated to some extent from this model. Here, Europeans or Creoles always outnumbered
slaves, with settlement patterns established centuries before large-scale plantation developments
were underway. Augmenting this paradigm, Rojo concludes that, even to the extent that slaves
composed a given islands population "the Negro slave who arrived at a Caribbean colony before
the plantation was organized contributed much more toward Africanizing the Creole culture than did
the one who came within the great shipments typical of the plantation in its heyday." (Rojo, p70)

Even among the more monotonous models of British plantation construction, differences in the
relative dates of acquisition had some effect on the attainment of critical mass, and therefore on the
resulting cultural consequences, as Barbados, Jamaica, and Trinidad bear witness to. More textured
is the various responses to any alternative economic enterprise that may have emerged in the more
creolized Hispanic colonies. The 16th century development of a vibrant Creole economy in leather on
the northwest side of the island of Hispanola represented a potentially more lucrative activity than
did Spains dwindling agriculture near Santo Domingo. Situated as it was outside of the Casa de
Contratacion, the enterprise of this banda norte was subjected to devastation by the colonial officials
in 1605-06. According to Rojo, "As a coda to this episode of the devestations, one would have to
add that the colony took centuries to recover from the adverse economic and social consequences
that the incident produced." (Rojo, p48)

A similar alternative economic development in Cuba at about the same time produced very different
results. Cubas eastern region, just as its nearby northwest Hispanola neighbor, was engaged in a
leather trade of its own, and its creole practitioners were themselves removed from the official
Spanish port of Havana. Under these circumstances, they too were subject to threat of punitive
sanction. Here, however, a fortuitous avenging of a mediating bishops kidnapping gained this
renegade community a reprieve and allowed it to continue its activities unmolested. "The regions
inhabitants continued to smuggle more than ever, and the type of society generated by the leather
economy lasted until the beginning of the nineteenth century. Its complex cultural forms also
endured and, sometimes withdrawing into themselves while at other times extending outward, they
made up a long lasting creole culture." (Rojo, p51)

Rhythm of the Waves

The common and recognizably Caribbean and simultaneously island-distinct qualities of the music,
style, and cuisine of the region can assuredly provide ample material for a study of its own.
Interesting and less obvious are the parallel attributes of political developments in the region.
Common themes of emancipation, independence, and economic development animate the
discussion of political direction on each island at some time, but each in its own unique context while
still influenced by others of them. Michelle Cliff has Clare recall a fleeting image from the car window,
unexplained, but a relevant message for 1958: "CASTRO SI, BATISTA NO. In black paint. In large letters
against the cathedral." (Abeng, p22)

This message would resonate in Jamaica some years later, not in a violent Communist revolution, but
with independence and later with the socialism of Michael Manley. Same rhythm, but different. And
the wave was uneven, for it would not resonate sufficient to alter the autocratic regime of Papa Doc
in Haiti.

These waves had been undulating back and forth for some time. The Haitian revolution that resulted
in her independence in 1804 sent its waves across the sea to Jamaica to inspire slave revolts and
producing emancipation for its slaves, but the wave took three decades to achieve its full effect.
Curiously, Cuba, situated between the two, was meanwhile accelerating its slave-driven sugar
plantation and did not absorb that rhythm for still another half century.

The eclectic examinations of a diverse and yet similar group of people and the islands on which they
dwell help capture the essence of a most curiously heterogeneous accumulation of cultures that
share a common sea, a common climate, and a remarkable history that makes it hard to understand
one without first understanding them all.