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The Cuban Revolution had a significant influence on the whole Caribbean. It introduced Marxist ideas and organizational strategies into an area largely shaped by European-styled social democratic ideas. The clash between these two dominant ideologies heated up in the 1970s, largely led by Jamaica’s charismatic labor and party leader, Michael Manley. The social democrats and socialists defeated the Marxist parties in each of the many elections in the region, whether English, French, or Dutch Caribbean, because the people were attached to the ideas and practices of pluralist, electoral politics.

When Rastafarians began to petition the Tanzanian government for the “right of entry” in 1976, they benefitted from a history of linkages between Jamaica and Tanzania, facilitated largely by the personal and political friendship between Julius Nyerere and Prime Minister of Jamaica, Michael Manley. This is the subject of the third chapter, which provides essential context for the repatriation. The chapter begins by unearthing the pan-African politics of Michael Manley, which he constructed after appropriating Rastafarian symbols and consciousness into his political campaigns. It also puts a spotlight on the extent to which African leaders of newly independent states helped to define the pan-Africanism of this period by detailing the impact of Julius Nyerere on Manley’s thinking. Finally, it juxtaposes Manley’s acceptance in pan-African circles across Africa with his personal struggle over his own perceived distance from blackness, as a member of Jamaica’s “brown’ elite. In the end, Rastafari was absolutely central to generating the brand of politics surrounding race, color and class in the moment of decolonization. The history of repatriation transgresses analytical boundaries between state and nonstate actors.

This chapter examines the notion of charismatic leadership, coined by Max Weber, which refers to a leader who is respected by his followers beyond the normal limits. According to Weber, charisma is essentially a localized, ethnically based phenomenon, and the emergence of modern bureaucratic society signals its downfall. The dynamic of the hero and the crowd had always been at the center of modern politics; for instance, Michael Manley as a charismatic leader to the people of Jamaica. The chapter demonstrates how Manley's involvement in the political process at critical times greatly affected the future development of Jamaican politics and society; he was highly admired by the people that his longtime rival, Edward Seaga, pales in comparison.

In the last decades of the twentieth century, the Caribbean saw multiple and dramatic political efforts to transform state and society. New governments sought to embrace popular classes as equal members of society as almost never before and to create unprecedented forms of equality, both economically and culturally. This chapter explores three such attempts at transformation: Jamaica under Michael Manley, Maurice Bishop and the Grenada Revolution, and Jean-Bertrand Aristide’s first government in Haiti. Unlike the Cuban Revolution, these leaders excited expectations for change within still mostly capitalist economies. Manley and Aristide led democratic governments, while Grenada sustained one-party rule. The outcomes of reform efforts in these three nations varied from enduring progress to poignant tragedy. The chapter explores the powerful challenges these new Caribbean governments faced, domestic and foreign, economic and political. It shows how after the English-speaking Caribbean gained independence in the 1960s and 1970s, their trajectories began to overlap with that of the older independent Caribbean, as national sovereignty made them suddenly more vulnerable to the region’s predominant twentieth-century empire, the United States.

This chapter presents an analysis of Jamaican masculinity. It begins by asserting that both gender and culture are largely intersecting discourses, and that the only way to make sense of Jamaican masculinity is to view it through the intersections of colonialism, race, and class. It locates U.S. male “leadership” models of masculinity within colonialist ideals that assume a universalized, idealized subject. It investigates sites of resistance among two iconic Jamaican figures: the late reggae artist Bob Marley and the late, former Jamaican prime minister, Michael Manley. Using these examples, it weaves together a deeply textured account of Jamaican life, and charts the construction of masculinity among three groups: the Rastas, rude boys, and mimics. It examines differential male and female socialization patterns and argues that among the rude boys, masculinity is constructed through the use and control of public space. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the scholarly debate about the implications of the masculinities in present-day Jamaica.

This chapter offers personal reflections on the forty years since the upsurge of Black Power in the Caribbean. Four nodal points of the period are examined from the perspective of an analysis of radical politics in the Caribbean: the Rodney events of 1968 in Jamaica; the 1970 Black Power uprising in Trinidad and Tobago; the period of PNP government in Jamaica under Michael Manley; and the rise and fall of the Grenada Revolution. The chapter assesses the significant but ambiguous impact that the Caribbean Black Power movement had on subsequent social and political events in the region. It argues that the Caribbean movement must be located within the broader global wave of resistance of the late 1960s as part of a wave of anti-systemic insurrection that challenged the authority of dominant states and systems.

This chapter discusses how the Jamaican cultural hegemony is further sealed by the growth of an increasingly integrated Caribbean diaspora, resulting with several phases in Jamaican politics. The first phase took the form of symbolic clashes between groups of supporters. The second phase was the emergence of distinct urban enclaves, wherein the majority was used as a means of securing political control. The third phase involved Michael Manley's “democratic socialism” movement, and the 2010 Dudus events involving Christopher “Dudus” Coke and his Shower Posse. Ultimately, Jamaica's thirty-year crisis, which culminated in the Labor Day Dudus events of May 2010, provided the opportunity to reconfigure the arrangements that have reinforced Jamaicas postcolonial journey.