The Year After

When the Union Jack was lowered over Jamaica and Trinidad-Tobago last year, the joy that greeted these two new nations was mixed with doubts. Both had a proper, if sometimes unpopular, British upbringing. They both had rapidly growing populations, 15% to 25% unemployment, and a heavy dependence on outside capital. Though their problems remain, Jamaica and Trinidad-Tobago seem to be finding their way with hardly a skip of a calypso beat.

Jamaica. Upon getting independence, the 1,600,000 Jamaicans made no headlong rush to erase their British past. Coins and currency still bear Queen Elizabeth's likeness, and British-trained civil servants, both white and black, retain a firm grip on important ministries. Spry old Sir Alexander Bustamante, 79, the craggy-faced patriarch of a Premier, preaches patience, order and unswerving friendship with the West.

Last year 23 new industries set up shop under Jamaica's tax incentive program, and both Alcoa and Reynolds Metals Co. have launched multimillion-dollar expansions. Despite a mild recession, Jamaica is also off to a good start on an ambitious five-year development plan. The government will spend $255 million on housing, schools, roads and land improvement. To increase farm output, Bustamante will slap heavy taxes on idle fields and buy up uncultivated lands to distribute to peasant families at a rate of 10,500 acres per year.

Bustamante's cousin and chief critic, former Premier Norman Manley, 70, complains that all this is not enough, that the government lacks the "dynamics of independence." Busta only snorts: "What my cousin means by dynamics is nationalization of business. This government will never get involved in that."

Trinidad-Tobago. In Trinidad-Tobago, two islands just off the coast of South America, Premier Eric Williams, 52, talks more wildly than Bustamante. Williams is a fiery critic of colonialism, professes to admire British Guiana's rabble-rousing Cheddi Jagan.

But while Williams gets all the political mileage he can out of anticolonialism, he has not led his infant country of 900,000 people into the leftist camp or driven away business. With a relatively high $500-per-capita annual income, Trinidad could expect no great influx of U.S. or British government aid. But the U.S. came through with a pledge of $30 million over a five-year period for development projects, and has promised to build a road from Port of Spain to the U.S. Chaguaramas Naval Base. So far, despite Trinidad's own slight recession, industrialization is proceeding faster than in Jamaica.

On the main island of Trinidad, Williams' Industrial Development Corp. recently celebrated the opening of the 100th factory attracted by tax incentives. And last July Texaco demonstrated its confidence in the new nation by moving its Latin American headquarters from Caracas to oil-rich Trinidad.

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