Cuba Then, Cuba Now by Joshua Jelly-Schapiro

Author:Joshua Jelly-Schapiro
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2019-03-04T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 3

REDEMPTION SONGS

“Badness! And bad men. Dat’s wha gwaan deh.” It’s certainly true in Nine Miles, where Busta Brown’s wake was the party of the year; it’s true all over Jamaica. But most of all, it’s true in the capital, where the forging of the Jamaican state corresponded with the building of a garrison complex whose construction, housing scheme by housing scheme and brick of coke by brick of weed, made the state Jamaicans know today: a twisting concatenation of overlapping interest and contested concern whose presiding logic and larger course are perhaps nowhere better distilled than in the story of the first garrison. That tale is inextricable, like Jamaica’s history as a sovereign nation, from the career of the politician who became known as the “bigges’ bad man of all.” Edward Seaga, the man who built Tivoli, and who used the garrison as a springboard to becoming Jamaica’s elected leader long before the gangster Dudus became its “first president,” was never one to let holding office stand in the way of wielding real power. Seaga never let his background or views—he was born to a prominent Syrian family from Kingston’s merchant class—prevent his winning its poor’s love. A pro-Washington right-winger who was born in Boston (his parents were there for school), he was long chided by supporters of his great rival, Michael Manley, with a tune touting their man’s native-born cred: “He was born here.” But the man PNPers called CIA-ga grew up in Kingston. Seaga attended Wolmer’s Boys School there before earning his BA at Harvard and returning home, in the mid-1950s, to settle—surprisingly, for a young man of his class—by downtown’s poor western edge. His career as a politician, even before he was one, began brilliantly.

Seaga worked as an ethnologist in the downtown slums of Denham Town and Back-o-Wall, becoming one of Jamaica’s leading scholars of black religion. He also became a record producer and promoter whose ties to downtown’s poor, and recordings of their songs, made him a crucial figure in building Jamaica’s music industry. When “independence time” came, Seaga became West Kingston’s first member of Jamaica’s parliament—and Jamaica’s first minister of development and welfare. Still in his early thirties, he was perhaps the only figure in Jamaica’s new government who could have pulled off convincing his constituents and friends in Back-o-Wall to abide the ministry’s bulldozing of their neighborhood. He oversaw the razing of the zinc-sheet and cardboardwalled shacks where they lived, and directed the building of the new community—Tivoli Gardens—into which these once-and-future supporters of his JLP, thrilled to join the era of cement walls and indoor plumbing, moved in 1965. Legend says the garrison’s walls were laid out with their ramparts aligned for armed defense. Whether or not that’s so, Tivoli soon became the potent base of its builder’s growing sway.

In Seaga’s early years downtown, his most crucial source of support came from the congregation of a Revivalist preacher named Mallica “Kapo” Reynolds, a charismatic figure whose talents as an artist—Kapo was

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