The Caribbean: Troubles in a Pauper's Paradise

An archipelago of tiny democracies faces economic woes

One of the more important pieces of legislation that got lost in the rush of last month's lame-duck session of Congress was President Reagan's much heralded Caribbean Basin Initiative. Originally proposed in February 1982, the CBI offered $350 million in short-term cash aid and a variety of long-term trade and tariff benefits for the struggling ministates of Central America and the Caribbean. Approved by the House and the Senate Finance Committee, the plan must be presented anew to the 98th Congress, although the short-term aid money has already been disbursed.

In Central America, the main aim of the CBI is to fight Marxist-led subversion and insurgency. But in the 2,000-mile-long sweep of islands that dapple the Caribbean Sea, the problems are very different. The area's twelve sovereign nations, nine of which have become independent since 1961, face poverty, high unemployment, crippling debt and declining income from their few marketable commodities. TIME Caribbean Bureau Chief William McWhirter and Correspondent Bernard Diederich visited much of the archipelago and interviewed its worried leaders. Their report:

It was the search for gold that brought the first voyages of discovery to the Caribbean. The intrepid explorers found little gold, but they fell upon a pauper's paradise of emerald seas, swaying palms and scented hillsides. Marveled Nicolo Syllacio, a writer who traveled with Christopher Columbus on his 1493 expedition to the islands of the New World: "The beauty of its mountains and the amenity of its verdure must be seen to be believed." The natural allure remains, but the modern quest in the

Caribbean is both more practical and more urgent. It is a search for the means of basic political and economic survival.

The U.S. has much at stake in the outcome of that search. Not only do the Caribbean islands (total pop. about 26.5 million) extend across vital American shipping lanes, but most of the tiny nations, ranging in population from Barbados' 79,000 to Cuba's 10.3 million, have another special asset that is rare in the developing world. Despite a cruel history of imported slavery, colonialism and harsh exploitation, the fledgling states remain among the most democratically governed in the world. The major exceptions: Cuba, Grenada and Haiti. Most of the other governments are aware of, if not always responsive to, a barrage of scrutiny from independent newspapers and opposition parties that extend across a spectrum ranging from conservative monetarism to Maoism with a calypso beat. Political apathy is rarely a problem. On minuscule Dominica (pop. 80,000), for example, virtually everyone seems to tune in to daily radio broadcasts of debates in the 30-member House of Assembly. As a U.S. State Department expert puts it, "We can take solace in the fact that the parliamentary system is fundamental in the Caribbean, and holding up well almost everywhere."