LITMIR.BIZ

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one summer month here in 1661, the place’s pirate governor, Henry Morgan, granted no fewer than forty new licenses for taverns in a town where the parrots, reported a scandalized Dutchman passing through, “drank from the large stocks of ale with as much alacrity as the drunks.”⁹ When Morgan’s men returned from another raid on Spain’s galleons with thousands of coins, in another niblet historians like citing, a group of them “gave a strumpet 500 to see her naked, and . . . [sic] other impieties.”¹⁰ Such tales of rakish glamour, if not tawdry gangbangs, survived the centuries to inspire Disney’s Pirates of the Caribbean—and served, long before that, as the setting for a passion play from which the New World’s men of cloth won great mileage. At just past 11 a.m. on June 7, 1692, a massive earthquake struck Jamaica’s southern shore. The act of God rudely woke Port Royal’s rowdies from their hangovers, and liquefied the loose sand on which their town sat. A massive tsunami overswept the Palisadoes’ spit. By noon, nearly all the buildings of the New World’s Sodom, and some thousands of the inhabitants, lay under the waves.

      Today, Port Royal is a forlorn cluster of seaside shacks from whose owners you can buy delicious roast fish best eaten, while gazing at Kingston across the harbor’s chop, with local pepper sauce and fry bread called “festival.” Back in the 1990s, the government announced a redevelopment scheme, in partnership with the Walt Disney Corporation and aimed at boosting tourism, that would turn the Palisadoes’ tip into a site-specific theme park. Two decades later, there’s nary a replica saloon or plastic parrot souvenir shop here. And absent those mooted tourist traps, and the deepwater berths Disney wanted for its cruise ships, the Palisadoes is still best known for the key bit of infrastructure—Kingston International Airport—to which Jamaica’s émigrés return from their exploits abroad, and that welcomes its non-tourist foreigners: businessmen like those from my flight, whether from Milwaukee or Montreal, who fly down to check on their investments in bauxite or gas, and perhaps to see the island whores still patronized, three centuries after Port Royal’s fall, by men from many lands.

      Badness. Certainly, that was part of the story. Especially in the aftermath of the saga that saw Tivoli Gardens’ notorious don, Dudus, deposed. My cabbie, who said his name was Delroy, related that the government’s long-promised report on the massacre had been delayed again. No one, in any case, imagined that the report would establish the truth of what had happened. This is a country where asking too many questions about such things, as Delroy said and journalists often repeat, “is a good way to get dead.”

      “How is downtown these days?” I asked. How was Kingston’s inner-city zone of dons and gunplay faring with its kingpin gone?

      “Is worse!” he yelled. “Use’ to be you could park a car deh—now? No mon. Who know who in charge, wit di presi him gone?”

      “Di presi”? The president: that’s what they called the don of dons. Jamaica’s FIRST President: Dudus—that’s the title of a book I picked up, a few days later, at a shop in town.¹¹ Hard to imagine a better indicator than that, in this city with its ghetto districts named for war-ripped places like Angola and Gaza, that Jamaica is a “failed state” whose top gangster’s path to power, and to winning his countrymen’s esteem, corresponded precisely with their leader’s dwindling ability to do the same. Not only had the gangster won a monopoly on socially sanctioned violence; none of Jamaica’s actual heads of state, as that book on Dudus detailed, had been able to replicate it. They’d also proved considerably less good than the gangsters they’d helped create, in many areas, at attracting revenue and tending the common good. Now a new set of leaders, from the PNP, was facing a familiar problem on an island whose descent into violence, in the 1970s, commenced when it took on unpayable debts from the International Monetary Fund, that world institution set up after the war to shore up the Third World’s listing little states and keep global capitalism humming along—but that then ended up, as those little economies came to grief, playing far larger roles in their citizens’ lives than their elected leaders did.

      Delroy passed me a copy of the day’s Gleaner, Jamaica’s main daily. Its headline could have been from 2001, or ’93, or ’76: “IMF Visit Raises Concerns.”

      The IMF was in town to “evaluate a new loan program . . . to help Jamaica meet its obligations.” Since Jamaica accepted its first IMF loan in 1973, it has borrowed some US$19 billion. During that time, it has paid back over $20 billion—and still owes $8 billion more. Most countries carry public debt; the richer ones’ deficits make a little Caribbean island’s look Lilliputian. They haven’t had to borrow, though, at rates that have forced Jamaica’s budget makers, for years, to spend some 45 percent of their internal revenue paying interest. This math, to a grad-student freelancer with a wallet full of maxed-out plastic from Visa and Discover, was familiar. It is also familiar to any member of Jamaica’s political classes born in the past half century. Their government’s rising debt payments, long ago outstripping what it spent on such trifles as health care and schools, increase by larger degrees each year. (Later that spring, the government would accept a new “rescue loan” of US$1 billion to help it “meet its obligations.” Its creditors were surely chuffed. Jamaicans, less so: the loan came with familiar conditions mandating further cuts in already-gutted social spending.)

      “You see dat?” Delroy glared in his rearview mirror. “We all mash’ up! Politician’ mash up the country.”

      He asked my business in Jamaica; I told him.

      “I’ll tell you something to write about.” He proffered his suggestion by saying that listening to the BBC World Service, on his cab’s radio, was one of the few bright bits of a job he didn’t relish. “You saw what happened in the Falklands?”

      I wasn’t sure. What of world-newsworthy note had occurred, of late, on those semi-British rocks in the South Atlantic? “You mean when Thatcher invaded?”

      “No man! Dem just had a vote! Dey say: We wan’ the queen back again.”

      It was clear from how he said it: his countrymen, he thought, should follow suit.

      “You think Jamaicans want to rejoin the empire?” I asked.

      “Guarantee!” he shouted in the rearview mirror. “You hold a vote tomorrow, we bring back di queen! Guarantee.”

      This seemed a stretch. Could the views of the Falklands’ shepherds, vis-à-vis their British parents’ home, ever match those of a nation founded by Britain’s slaves? But here was one Jamaican, anyway, whose vision for Jamaica’s good clashed with its leaders’ rhetoric about a country where, he told me when I changed the subject, he’d grown up the son of farmer parents who still lived in “a lickle village way past Mandeville.” The village was called Good Intent. His surname was Hibbert. Was he related to Toots Hibbert, the reggae singer of Toots & the Maytals fame? “Him me cousin!” Of course he was.

      Delroy Hibbert dropped me at my hotel, and, nodding at the bored man in starched shirt and black pants whose job it was to open and close the carpark’s creaking gate for guests, bumped away into the night.

      * * *

      KINGSTON IS SPREAD ACROSS a deep valley wedged between the harbor and the Blue Mountains, to whose slopes its better-off cling. The social geography of Jamaica’s capital, like its social order, is divided strictly in two: where “downtown” is comprised of the city’s blighted old business district and newer ghettos, “uptown” is defined by its denizens’ loftier class position and their condescension. My hotel, if hardly posh digs, was squarely uptown. Hidden up behind the big clapboard house where Bob Marley lived, once he escaped downtown’s streets, it sat amid ranch-style homes guarded by barred windows and barking dogs. Its hopeful name—the Prestige—was painted, in badly fading paint, on a cement wall by the gate.

      The Prestige’s dimly lit lobby was adorned with another version of that airport pantheon. This one featured green construction-paper cutouts of Garvey, Bogle, and Queen Nanny in her kerchief. It looked like it had been crafted by someone’s school-age kid for the Jamaica 50 celebration. Such homey touches, along with a big mango tree–shaded patio out back and rates for “fan-only rooms” far cheaper than the cheapest Motel

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