Understanding ALBA: Progress, problems and prospects of alternative regionalism in Latin America and the Caribbean by Asa Cusack

Author:Asa Cusack [Cusack, Asa]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Institute of Latin American Studies, School of Advanced Study, University of London
Published: 2018-05-07T00:00:00+00:00

Table 7.1. Basic, social, and external dependence indicators for Eastern Caribbean ALBA members in the 2000s

In terms of ideological narrowing, the US shift from Communist ‘containment’ to ‘rollback’ under Reagan in the 1980s saw both carrot (the Caribbean Basin Initiative, 1982) and stick (structural adjustment) applied to any leftward shift, a strategy so effective that the US managed to ‘[reshape] the agenda of Caribbean politics and economics to the point where, in almost every arena, it was able to lay down the parameters of what could be done and even what could be thought’ (Payne, 1998, p. 210). Direct intervention to remove Marxist Maurice Bishop in Grenada in 1983 demonstrated the limits of permissible ideology, while the USSR’s stunning collapse and prime minister Michael Manley’s switch to accommodation of global capital in Jamaica removed other radical resistance models (Meeks, 2014). Meanwhile, anti-Communism at home was so strong that graduates of free Cuban scholarships could (as in Dominica) be banned from public sector positions, signalling that radicalism would affect life chances. ‘Firm-handed’ security-focused governments, domestic reforms enforced by international financial institutions (IFIs), and a shift from agricultural economies towards tourism and financial services also weakened the union base of traditional labour parties (Honychurch, 2005; Meeks, 2014). Neoliberal reforms only reduced fiscal revenues further and intensified vulnerability, whereas the World Trade Organization’s erosion of preference regimes for agricultural products (especially bananas) was particularly damaging to Eastern Caribbean states unusually reliant on tariffs for tax revenues.

Yet, there are important caveats where ALBA is concerned. First, physical smallness amplifies the political impact of initiatives in its priority areas (poverty reduction, health, education, infrastructure). Crudely illustrated, in Dominica it requires only that 42 people know 42 other people, who each know 42 other people, to create links between the entire population of 72,000. If the building of a new road does not affect you directly, it almost certainly affects someone you know, or at the very least someone they know. Information about the investment source passes via fewer Chinese whisperers, with even the effect of polarised media potentially reduced by access to relevant personal experience. Second, ideological narrowing was externally imposed and relatively recent, which is quite different to a more endogenous shift over a longer period. Many of those involved at senior levels in politics and activism are of the generation steeped in the radicalism of the 1960s and 1970s. Though external constraints have increasingly limited their policy options, neither ‘Comrade’ Ralph Gonsalves in St Vincent and the Grenadines nor veteran trade unionist Baldwin Spencer in Antigua and Barbuda, for example, has undergone any Damascene conversion. Rather, the array of structural factors tying their hands means that their true colours might only be glimpsed when circumstances allow them fiscal room to manoeuvre.

The political context of ALBA accession in the 2000s

The more immediate political context of the Alliance’s early Eastern Caribbean members is remarkably similar. As table 7.2 (below) shows, the three early adopters of full ALBA membership – the third being Roosevelt Skerrit of

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