Caribbean Time Bomb

The Book of the Week is “Caribbean Time Bomb” by Robert Coram, published in 1993. This is a book on Antigua describing the Bird family’s dictatorship in the second half of the twentieth century.

Antigua’s history is largely similar to that of Haiti– an eastern Caribbean island with sugar plantations, dictators and generous financial aid from the United States to ward off overtures from nearby Communist Cuba.

In 1674, Antigua became a colony of Great Britain, whose military kept slave uprisings at bay. Abolitionism in 1834 saw the slaves freed but they had no where else to go, and needed jobs. Therefore, plantation owners got away with paying them slave wages, and didn’t have to feed, house and clothe them.

In 1951, the unions extracted major concessions from management, thanks to V.C. Bird. However, in 1968, he had his law enforcement team spray tear gas at protesting workers. Tim Hector, a journalist/activist/newspaper publisher educated the workers on what to do.

In the 1970’s, Antigua’s economy switched from one based on sugar plantations to that on tourism. The nation achieved independence in 1981, but there was still plenty of black-on-black violence and racial tension with wealthy white tourists.

In the next few decades, the country became a source of huge scandals perpetrated by the government, some of which were clandestinely aided and abetted by the CIA. It also harbored foreign-national white-collar criminals on the run. There was excessive money to be made in infrastructure projects whose planners (corrupt government workers) lined their own pockets with public funds and fed their own egos.  There was no shortage of greed, incompetence, criminality, cost overruns and delays.

Read the book to learn of the Sovereign Order of New Aragon, the would-be aristocracy of Antigua’s sister island of Redonda, the environmental destruction of it and its other sister island, Barbuda, plus the reasons the Birds were able to maintain their stranglehold on power in Antigua for so long, despite its unbelievably bad financial condition.