Originally published in 1983, this anthology was the first to integrate the political experiences of the Central American mainland and the Caribbean archipelago and provides analyses of some of the most explosive events of the 1970s and 80s in this region, including the Jonestown massacre, the failures of the Burnham regime in Guyana, the tumultuous elections in Jamaica in 1980, the army officers’ coup d’état in Suriname, the revolutions in Grenada and Nicaragua and the revolutionary upheaval in El Salvador. It also shows how the regional crisis affected such prosperous countries as Trinidad and Tobago and such politically stable regimes in St. Vincent and the French colonies of Martinique and Guadelope. It also discusses the development of the first Socialist regime in the region, Cuba
1.Crisis in the Caribbean: Internal Transformations and Eternal Constraints Fitzroy Ambursley and Robin Cohen 2. State Capitalism in Guyana: An Assessment of Burnham’s Co-Operative Socialist Republic Clive Y. Thomas 3. Achievements and Contradictions of the Cuban Workers’ State Jean-Pierre Beauvais 4. Jamaica: From Michael Manley to Edward Seaga Fitzroy Ambursley 5. Nicaragua: The Sandinist Revolution Henri Weber with a postscript by Patrick Camiller 6. Class Structure and Socialist Strategy in El Salvador James Dunkerley 7. Guadeloupe-Martinique: A System of Colonial Domination in Crisis Philippe Alain Blérald 8. Class Formation and Class Struggle in Suriname: The Background and Development of the Coup d’État Sandew Hira 9. Granada: The New Jewel Revolution Fitzroy Ambursley 10. The Changing Pattern of State Control in St. Vincent and the Grenadines Philip Nanton 11. State Capitalism in a Petroleum-Based Economy: The Case of Trinidad and Tobago José Miguel Sandoval
Biography
Robin Cohen is Emeritus Professor of Development Studies at the University of Oxford. For the first decade of his academic career, he worked on comparative labour issues. His books included Labour and Politics in Nigeria (1974) and the co-edited collections The development of an African working class (1975), International Labour and the Third World (1987), African Labor History (1978) and the current title, Peasants and Proletarians. He subsequently wrote on the themes of migration, globalization and diasporas. His best-known work is Global diasporas: An introduction (3rd edition, 2022).
Fitzroy Ambursley was born in London. However, his parents came from Jamaica as part of the ‘Windrush generation’. Fitzroy’s Jamaican origins gave him a strong affinity with Caribbean politics, and his PhD thesis was the first attempt to describe the Grenadian revolution and its aftermath written by somebody who was actually in the country during that period. He obtained a BA Honours Degree in African Studies and Geography from the University of Birmingham in the UK, and a PhD in Sociology from the University of Warwick in the UK. He went on to be come a Senior Lecturer at the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa and followed this with a career as an international HIV/AIDS consultant developing strategies for international development agencies such as UNAIDS, the World Bank, USAID, and the former UK assistance agency, the Department for International Development. Fitzroy’s current activities include teaching English to international students online and maintains an active interest in Caribbean and world politics.
Review of the original edition of Crisis in the Caribbean:
‘Readers not accustomed to work in the Marxist tradition might expect the book to be fawning toward Cuba and the Soviet Union, polemical rather than argued in a scholarly manner, devoted to crude dependency theory and jargonistic in style. Such readers would be wrong in all four expectations ... a significant work of scholarship’. Robert O’Connor International Education Review, Fall 1984
‘[Chapters] on Guyana by Thomas and Nanton on St Vincent are outstanding while that of Hira on Suriname contains much useful information previously denied English-speaking readers, as does that by Blerald on the French Antilles. The latter is particularly interesting in its analysis of “assimilationist hegemony”, a cultural variant upon the dependencia theme.’ Tony Thorndike International Affairs, 60 (2) 1984.
‘The authors are especially concerned about the development of state bureaucracy as a surrogate mechanism to private capital. … The collection is packaged with an excellent overview essay by the editors. Highly recommended for upper division and graduate levels’. E. M. Dew Choice, September 1984
