Aboard the Commandante Pineres: Dominica, The 11th World Festival of Youth & Students, Cuba July 1978, & the Caribbean Struggle for National Liberation

By Gabriel J. Christian, Dr. Cecilia Green and Dr. Irving W. Andre

"Aboard the Commandante Pineres, Dominica, the 11th World Festival of Youth & Students, July 1978 and the Caribbean Struggle for National Liberation" is a riveting memoir by Caribbean trial lawyer Gabriel J. Christian of his early years on the British colony of Dominica. Born to a civil service family of modest means in 1961, Christian had six siblings who were reared in a family led by a stern World War II British Army veteran, Wendell McKenzie Christian. Christian's mother Alberta, a former 4-H Club leader, Women's Institute secretary, and Red Cross volunteer, was the manager of the Workshop of the Blind and a strong proponent of economic self reliance by his family. Both of Christian's parents were part of the striving middle class in the post war Caribbean. It is a time of the Cuban Revolution, Pan Africanism and a surging Black Power movement, set amidst the strident calls for self determination by the youthful leaders of the British colonies in the Caribbean. Christian becomes a leader at his high school and President of the Dominica Federation of Students, a left leaning pro-independence organization allied to Rosie Douglas' Popular Independence Committee. Douglas, a well known 1960s Black Power radical in Canada, forges links between Dominica and the Cuban Revolution and arranges for the trip to the 11th World Festival of Youth & Students in Havana, Cuba. Christian makes that trip aboard the Cuban ferry Commandante Pineres, after first flying to Barbados and Jamaica. His visit to Cuba is transformative and the Eastern Caribbean's history is changed thereafter, with left leaning political changes taking place in Dominica and St. Lucia, and the Grenada Revolution erupting on March 13, 1979. This memoir provides a detailed and hitherto unknown insight into a dynamic time in Caribbean history by one who was there.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: May 30, 2016
• ISBN: 9781495171703

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Author

by

Dr. Cecilia A. Green

Associate Professor, Sociology

The Maxwell School

Syracuse University

This memoir by Gabe Christian has recreated a period of our history that might otherwise be lost to young Dominican and Caribbean people, and the memory of which many retired activists such as myself have somewhat shamefully suppressed. I am touched and refreshed by this poignant and unabashed evocation of the proud legacy of pan-Africanist and anti-colonial activism and solidarity movements of the 1970s and beyond. I may not share every nuance of Mr. Christian’s political positions, but I definitely see in him a fellow-traveler, and, as one of his former high school teachers, I remain alternately proud and in awe of the astonishingly wide-ranging and multilayered documentation of Dominican history and historic lives that has been undertaken by him and his distinguished colleague, Judge Irving André, under the aegis of their own, independent Pont Casse Press.

Two features of this memoir are particularly noteworthy. One is the historically unique and noteworthy perspective of a radicalized son of the emerging black professional middle class, founded on modest public service careers during the pre-independence period. Christian describes his neighborhood as the middle class enclave of assorted civil servants such as nurses, policemen and teachers amongst whom we lived, and a family headed by a patriarch steeped in the values and traditions of British colonial order and Christian discipline. Mr. Christian is disarmingly candid about his rejection of some of his father’s values and his embrace of others, and the pragmatic, but steadfastly anti-colonial political path enabled by this complex (but familiar) amalgam. The other feature of note is the palpable evocation of the near-forgotten, indomitable spirit of resistance and actual political accomplishments of the national liberation, civil rights, and independence struggles of the scattered children of the African Diaspora and other Third World peoples during the 1970s and 80s. Gabe Christian was there, in the midst of some of the most significant world-historic Caribbean (and Dominican) events, and we are indebted to him for reminding us, in a most timely fashion, of the emboldened awakening of our consciousness, the standing up for ourselves, the connections we forged in solidarity and common struggle with others, the sometimes horrific mistakes we made, and the lessons we learned … and should never forget. This is an important testimonial to the unfinished struggle for Caribbean nationhood and independence.

by

Dr. Irving W. Andre

Gabriel Christian’s Commandante Pineres takes us on an excursion into history when the Eastern Caribbean in general, and Dominica in particular, was bristling with political upheaval. Union militancy, Rastafarianism, an incipient socialist movement and political radicalism coalesced and found expression in publications, public meetings and political activism. The return of Rosie Douglas to Dominica in 1976, after being deported from Canada, and the proliferation of study groups in Roseau, Portsmouth, and Grand Bay, leavened the bread of militancy that nourished Dominica’s intelligentsia within the 1970s. Among secondary school students, youthful leaders such as Christian and future Prime Minister Pierre Charles fought an ideological battle with their political rivals who nested in the Roseau-based Young Freedom Movement, whose political leader was the intrepid Dame Mary Eugenia Charles.

Within this turbulent period, when the ideological lines in Dominica were rigidly drawn, Gabriel Christian and a few members of Dominica’s radical intelligentsia embarked on a Cuban vessel, the Commandante Pineres, in July 1978 to attend the Eleventh World Festival of Youth and Students, the theme of which was Anti-Imperialism, Solidarity, and Friendship. Christian chronicles his experiences in Cuba with comrades from the international socialist movement and that of their hosts. Christian has an eye for interesting details, recounting how – in preparation for their march alongside thousands of delegates through Havana – the Cubans gave each member of the delegation a plastic pouch with rations of Polish tuna, Bulgarian beef stew, Cuban fruits and crackers, Czech juice, and sweets from the USSR. As they tramped through the streets of Havana, or navigated the cavernous halls of their residence at the Lenin Vocational School, (the campus of which Christian remembers as being as expansive as Dominica’s modest capital, Roseau) the delegates were serenaded by the sounds of Besame Mucho and Guantanamera.

A thirst for educational opportunity by the youthful leaders in Dominica’s independence movement permeates this work. On his trip, Christian reveals that he is in awe of the expansive and sophisticated Lenin Vocational School where the Latin American and Caribbean delegates are housed; he is also impressed with the Cuban Revolution’s self-reliant and industrial/scientific prowess in making their own medicines, toilet bowls, and buses. Christian captures the idealism of the historical moment, when the Eastern Caribbean, specifically St. Lucia, Grenada, and Dominica, were on the verge of a political upheaval that would significantly change the trajectory of the region’s history.

And yet, this euphoria or idealism is seduced by the siren song of authoritarianism from 1979 onwards. Christian writes about the Grenadian Revolution, or Revo, as it was affectionately known, and the internal struggles that culminated in the massacre of Prime Minister Maurice Bishop and dozens of Grenadians in the Red Summer of 1983.

As one who was front and center in the struggle for political change, Christian does not sugarcoat the fundamental reason for the Grenadian debacle. He does not attribute it to the machinations of U.S. imperialism or the Grenadian bourgeoisie, but on the personal shortcomings of those who knelt at the altar of socialist revolution in Grenada.

But Christian’s remarkably frank analysis does not end with the Grenadian revolution. He is brutally frank about the schisms and chasms that divided members of the political left in Dominica in the 1970s. Indeed, Christian has a refreshingly objective assessment of the political ideologues who battled for supremacy in Dominica during the 1980 general elections that were swept by a political tsunami led by Dame Mary Eugenia Charles, whom Christian has written about in a wonderful book entitled Mamo. Christian observes that the rivalry between the leaders of the Democratic Labour Party led by O.J. Seraphin, Michael and Rosie Douglas, and that of the Dominica Liberation Movement (the DLM.) led by Dr. Para Riviere, was sufficiently toxic that had they combined forces and triumphed in the 1980 General Elections, the wanton bloodshed in Grenada would also have taken place in Dominica.

There are those who will be offended by Christian’s candour. But that is the stuff of which scholarship is made. Christian, however, has the advantage of being an active participant in the ongoing political activism of the period, and paid a price for this involvement. He was denied a scholarship largely on account of his radicalism, but subdued his ideological demons and moved to the United States in the early 1980s for further study. His success in the United States, however, did not extinguish the ideological commitment to the national development philosophy that drove him in the 1970s. In the over three decades that Christian has lived in America, he has played a seminal role in the founding of the Pont Casse Press, which is devoted to publishing books about Dominica; resuscitated the Dominica Cadet Corps; and co-founded the Dominica Academy of Arts and Sciences, which has made a sterling contribution to the development of Dominica.

The Socialist fervor in Dominica was once again ignited with the triumph of the Rosie Douglas-led Dominica Labour Party in 2000. However, this fervor ended with the premature demise of Douglas in October 2000. Pierre Charles carried the social democratic flame, but succumbed to cardiac arrest in January 2004. Since then, the social democratic principles espoused by Douglas and Charles, have been smothered and replaced with a theology in which personal self-aggrandizement stands as the sole commandment.

Gabriel Christian’s Commandante Pineres fills a lacuna in the history of Dominica. Other works have focused, in varying degrees, on the turbulent decade in which Dominica attained political independence. These include Christian and Irving André’s In Search of Eden, Dr. Lennox Honychurch’s The Dominica Story, and Patrick Baker’s Centering the Periphery. But none of those books has explored, with such intimate knowledge and detail, the ideological struggle waged in Dominica during the decade of independence. In writing such a masterful account of the history of Dominica within that period, Christian has assessed all the forces that impacted the lives of Dominicans then – and continuing.

This is a highly important, informative and insightful book, which makes a significant contribution to our understanding of the evolution of the Dominican society.

Where history is not recorded in print or on stone, or otherwise memorialized for the ages, it disappears. The oral tradition only works as long as the witnesses to the events under consideration are still among the living. I had the good fortune to have been a witness to, and participant in the post-World-War-II liberation struggle by Caribbean people toward statehood, and toward a more profound sense of African and indigenous pride and heritage denied us by slavery and colonialism. We sought to better the lot of our people who had resided as mere cogs in the wheels of Western development and industrialization, producing natural resources such as oil, bauxite, sugar or bananas as the times and needs of our rulers demanded. Our own ability to produce technology and realize innovation in management and societal structure, were cramped by our lack of authority over our affairs.

Despite being holders of British passports, as well as loyal British subjects, we had no elected representatives in the British parliament, and our local parliament had only limited dominion over our internal affairs – with none over our foreign affairs. It was for those reasons I became part of that national liberation struggle.

This work is a personal memoir from the inception of my political awakening. I date that awakening from 1970 and the mutiny of the Trinidad & Tobago Regiment during the Black Power surge in that sister nation, which caused much debate in our home. I recall the days of the Black Power movement; the Dread War; the return of Rosie Douglas and the independence movement; the trip to Cuba aboard the Commandante Pineres and meeting Fidel Castro; the rise and fall of the Grenada Revolution; the rise of Eugenia Charles to power and the Operation Red Dog invasion plot to unseat her; my departure for the United States, and what followed afterwards, to include the untimely deaths of Prime Minister Rosie Douglas and Pierre Charles. Finally, I will discuss the efforts we have made in the mobilization of Dominica’s overseas communities to aid the development process on the island.

*    *    *

The natural orientation of human beings tends towards freedom. In that respect, Caribbean people had a great history of rebellions against slavery and agitation in the cause of self-government. Jamaica had gotten Universal adult suffrage in 1944; Dominicans got the right vote in 1951. A semblance of democracy – at least the right to vote – was something that had come to the ordinary Dominicans only ten years before I was born in January 1961. The Caribbean of my generation was one in which change was hurtling along.

By 1959, the Cuban Revolution had taken place. That event was one of the most dynamic political changes ever to take place in human history. Under its gifted leader Fidel Castro, Cuba was to arise from the role of mere casino and tourist playground to a perch of respected leadership among the newly emerging nations.

With the advent of the Cuban Revolution, illiteracy was abolished, the savage fissures of race and class in a former slave state were lessened, and workers and peasants were given a place at the table of nationhood. The role of the Cuban Revolution in awakening Latin American and Caribbean people of my generation to their disabilities and to the possibility of another path forward to social justice and development was unparalleled. Even the United States was compelled to alter its foreign policies as a result. No longer was the Latin American/ Caribbean region an untended and forgotten backyard. Rather, the people of that region gained a new voice in their affairs, demanded greater democratization amongst the political classes, demanded better health and education models, and demanded access to economic power. By 1962, U.S. President John F. Kennedy had initiated the Alliance for Progress to ensure that those needs of the majority of the Latin American and Caribbean people were met.

By the 1970s, the uprisings against the brutal Portuguese oppression of Africans in lands such as Angola, Guinea Bissau, and Mozambique gained our attention. We held marches and raised funds for the liberation movements in those countries. Additionally, we demanded the release of Nelson Mandela and for an end to apartheid before it became popular around the world. In the Caribbean, we were the first to protest against apartheid at an international forum, when British West Indian Federation Minister of Social Welfare, Dominica born, Phyllis Shand Allfrey, led a walk-out of the West Indian delegation to the International Labour Conference in Switzerland in 1960. Allfrey, born of an aristocratic local white family, had become a Fabian socialist during her time in London and had been associated with Aneurin Bevan and the left wing of the British Labour Party. Together with local Emmanuel Christopher Loblack, she founded the Dominica Labour Party in 1955.

The socialist advocacy of Allfrey, alongside that of trade unionist Emmanuel Christopher Loblack, was part of the foundation that radicalized my generation. Dominicans had long fought for freedom; the Carib natives had fiercely resisted colonization and enslaved Africans had fled the plantations on the island for the mountains in great number. Dominicans, therefore, had a long history of political activism, to include strident calls for Universal adult suffrage and self-government by the free colored leaders in the 19th and early 20th centuries. By the end of World-War-II, those calls for self-determination were surging across the Caribbean.

Dominica’s Phyllis Shand Allfrey, politician and author (1908-1986); a Fabian socialist and writer in London and active in British Labour Party circles before and during World-War-II, she returned home to found the Dominica Labour Party alongside trade unionist Emmanuel Christopher Loblack. She was the Minister of Social Welfare, and only female cabinet member, in the short lived government of the British West Indian Federation (1957-1961).

The first local to serve as Chief Minister of Dominica was Frank Baron. From Portsmouth, Baron was a successful businessman and fruit exporter. His time in office will be remembered for bringing Dominica into the British West Indian Federation, and starting the building of the Princess Margaret Hospital and Dominica Grammar School. Baron’s Dominica United Peoples Party, associated with the commercial and planter elite, was defeated in the 1961 general elections.

When the socialism inclined Dominica Labour Party took office in 1961 under agriculturist and poet Edward Oliver LeBlanc, opportunities for high school and college education expanded. The ordinary Dominicans now had a greater pride in their heritage, and a sense of nationalism soared.

Frank Andrew Merrifield Baron (1923-2016) was Dominica’s first Chief Minister (1959-1961).

Edward Oliver LeBlanc (1923-2004), Dominica’s first Premier and the architect of self-government and associated statehood.

Emmanuel Christopher Loblack MBE, (1898-1995) mason, trade unionist, and politician was the father of the Dominica trade union movement and co-founder of the Dominica Labour Party.

I was born on January 1, 1961 to Wendell M. Christian (1921-2011), fireman, and Alberta Christian, then a housewife and Red Cross volunteer. Our parents were hard working, of firm Christian faith, and ran the home with a firm no-nonsense approach. I had three brothers – Wellsworth, Lawson, and Samuel – and three sisters – Christalin, Esther, and Hildreth. Over time Christalin, the first of my siblings, showed evidence of developmental disability, and was taken out of school, where she had faced abuse. She became our mother’s constant companion at work, church, and play; she showered us with love and care when we were younger. All my other siblings went on to excel in professional accomplishments – Wellsworth became the first Dominican-born Chief Veterinary Officer; Lawson became a Civil Engineer; and Samuel became a General Surgeon. Among the girls, Esther became a Certified Public Accountant and Hildreth became an Environmental Scientist. Our parents drilled the importance of education into our heads with a relentless passion.

The Christian family at Delices, Dominica in 1947, the year Wendell Mckenzie Christian returned from his World-War-II Service in the British Army (Courtesy Henckell L. Christian, Gatecrashing into the Unknown (SPAT Press, 1993).

We did not grow up in a vacuum. A radical intelligentsia had erupted from the urban educated classes to which my family belonged. Our father, Wendell Christian, was born in 1921. His upbringing was nourished on the warm embers of Victorian era conservatism and the principles of thrift, education, and a strong Christian faith. The Christian family had its roots in Antigua. Both my father’s parents, William Matthew Christian and Beryl Christian (nee Jones) came from Antigua to Dominica in 1918. William Matthew was an officer in the Leeward Islands Police Force and was responsible for Dominica’s eastern district for many years. He was a kind policeman, and a skilled guitarist, whose good deeds benefited his eldest son Henckell Christian later in life. Due to the noble reputation earned by his father, who with integrity and respect for the locals, policed the eastern district of LaPlaine, Rosalie, Petite Savanne, and Victoria – as well as his own good work as an elementary school principal – Henckell Christian never lost an election in the east.

Our family in 1972. Front row-L/R: Dad, Hildreth, Esther, Mum. Back row L/R: Wellsworth, Lawson, Christalin, Samuel, and Gabriel. (Depex Photo Studio). By 1972, I was fully engaged in the search for knowledge about Dominica, Africa, African Americans, and the roots of our history in freedom struggle.

Dad had served in the Windward Islands Battalion, South Caribbean Forces of the British Army in World-War-II. He was a proud member of the ex-British military veterans from our island, the Dominica Legion – a branch of the Royal Commonwealth Ex-Servicemen’s League. Our father was fond of his wartime leader, Winston Churchill.

The Patriarch: Our grandfather William Matthew Christian (1879-1961) of Antigua was a Police Sergeant in the Leeward Islands Police Force and a skilled guitarist. He was in charge of Dominica’s eastern district from 1920-1940. He imparted a love of music to his family and spurred the formation of the Christian Family Orchestra in the 1930s, which preceded the Christian Musical Class and Commercial School founded by his son Lemuel McPherson Christian.¹

A public servant with a keen sense of commitment, he was always fond of recalling the final call to duty to the members of the Royal Navy made by Lord Nelson on the eve of the Battle of Trafalgar: "Tomorrow, England expects every man to do his duty!" To him, those words meant that one should be possessed with an indomitable spirit in the pursuit of noble ideals; and that to be victorious, one must exhibit a steadfast commitment to duty.

Our parents’ generation was the first to enjoy the benefits born of the 20th Century surge for self-government advocated by the 1932 Dominica Conference. At that event, Cecil A. Rawle, Captain Arthur Cipriani of Trinidad, and John Baptiste JB Charles, the West Indian leaders called for a British West Indian federation and a similar British Dominion² status as with Australia and Canada. Essentially, the British West Indian islanders would have Universal adult suffrage³, independence in association with Britain, full sovereignty in way of their internal self-government, foreign affairs, and membership in the League of Nations. Jamaica had gained Universal adult suffrage in 1944. Dominica, along with most of the Leeward/Windward Island gained Universal adult suffrage in 1951. This was the framework of social transformation, which colored the epoch into which I was born.

In that period, the University of the West Indies (UWI) opened its first campus at Mona, Jamaica in October 1948 with the admission of 33 medical students from across the West Indies. The increase in educational opportunity as evinced by the founding of UWI, alongside enhanced access to high school education, upended the old plantation mentality of colonial subordination, which had so dominated the lives of our people. Despite such progress in education and overall opportunity, leading segments of our community still held fast to the colonial mindset with which they had been raised, and were suspicious of the radical ideas favored by the new generation born in the period after World-War-II. That older generation had no problem with improved educational opportunity per se; instead their disdain was for any radical posture, which offended the conservative framework of the church and state, or that which offended the cultural moorings to which they had been anchored.

Our father had served as a drill instructor in the Dominica Police Force after World-War-II at the Fort Young, which was then Police Headquarters. Even after he joined the fire service, he remained manager of the police canteen for several years. As a son of a policeman who had reached respectable rank, and as a former policeman himself, our father did not abide by what he called wayward behavior. At home, where one broke the rules, you knew punishment was coming any time Dad said Come over here for a flogging! Bloody slack! As a result of that background and disposition, our father was often dismissive of the creeping radicalism of the 1970s, and held utter disdain for those who wore afros or Dreadlocks. He did not see such style as anything but a departure from the discipline that his standard crew-cut hair style, born of his army days, evinced. To that end, he would diligently take the hair clipper to our heads to enforce his standards of appearance until teenage rebellion allowed for us to escape his rigid barbering. Wellsworth took over as the family barber by the late 1960s and went with the prevailing styles – but he ensured our afros were always on the short side so as not to raise a tempest from our father. Despite his relaxation on small afros in the home, Dreadlock-wearing persons could not visit our inner sanctum, as he considered them marijuana boys. I recall an incident from 1974 to illustrate that point.

In 1974, a friend from my days at the Goodwill Junior High School visited me at home. He had not made it in the 1972 Common Entrance Exam, and therefore, had left school and had started wearing Dreadlocks so common among young unemployed people in that time. When he came by, our Dad was standing in the front yard, garden hose in hand, watering the flower pots in front of our porch. Gruffly, he challenged my friend:

Who are you? he asked.

Laurel Joseph, replied the young man.

What do you want? our father went on.

I am here to see Gabriel, he said.

At that time, I was in the drawing room and could hear the dialogue as I was approaching the front door. I slowed my steps as I sensed the embarrassment that was coming.

Gabriel is not here! And by the way, what sort of bush is that on your head? Are you one of the marijuana boys? My father spoke with a hard edge to his voice. He was speaking of Laurel’s Dreadlocks.

It is just a style, Sir Laurel stammered.

Before he could continue, I heard our father say:

Move along, boy. And don’t you ever come back here.

I was shocked and felt humiliated because of the way my friend was treated. Later, I remonstrated with my father, telling him how he had embarrassed me. He said nothing. That was his way, and it reflected the generational gap at a time of dizzying changes in what was a conservative colonial society. It was also the time of the notorious Dread Act⁴ that made the wearing of any such badge of an illegal society prohibited.

*    *    *

In that time, the older boys at home, such as Wellsworth, Lawson, and Samuel took up the Black Power cause and spoke against colonialism. I joined with them, chiming into their discussions whenever I could. The Black Power revolt in Trinidad & Tobago and the mutiny of its regiment under the Sandhurst Military Academy-trained, Lieutenants