Hurricane Beryl at the Gates: The Grenadines and Caribbean Autonomy
For several weeks, the Caribbean braced for the arrival of what many have projected as the most devastating hurricane season to date. On July 1, it arrived with terrific and deadly force when Hurricane Beryl cut across the Caribbean. Beryl shook Barbados before it made landfall in the Grenadines. St. Vincent and Grenada suffered significant damage. But the storm winds were least forgiving toward the smallest and least populous islands in the archipelagic chain between them — Carriacou, Petite Martinique, Union Island, Canouan, Mayreau, and Bequia. In the Grenadines, Beryl flattened homes and took lives. After it briefly intensified to a Category 5 storm, Beryl’s eyewall scraped Jamaica’s south coast and again lifted roofs, destroyed homes, and left flooding and debris in the most impacted parishes of St. Elizabeth and Manchester.
Beryl’s superlatives warrant serious concern. The first Category 4 hurricane to form in the Atlantic during the month of June. The earliest Category 5 storm on record (besting 2005’s Hurricane Emily by more than two weeks). But more than thresholds of wind speed and intensity, it is the path that Beryl took and the truths it reveals about our region that demands our closest attention.
LIKKLE BUT TALLAWAH
Unfortunately, for many, Beryl placed the Grenadines on the map of the Caribbean. Prior to the hurricane, many struggled to name or identify the islands of the Grenadines. The shame of this fact does not rest with the people of the Grenadines. This is the error of a Caribbean political consciousness that too often disregards our smallest islands and territories. Typically overlooked as appendages to the larger islands of Grenada and St. Vincent, the Grenadines contain vibrant histories of autonomy and direct democratic governance.
Carriacou, the largest island in the Grenadines, boasts a population of just ten thousand. But Carriacou remained a hotbed of resistance to the dictatorship of Eric Gairy in the decade prior to the Grenada Revolution of 1979. The Grenadian ancien régime responded with contempt. Gairy did not withhold his disdain for Carriacou and Petite Martinique. When drought conditions plagued the Grenadines in 1972, Gairy delivered a speech that described the drought as a Biblical “form of punishment” that he attributed to “the sinful way of life which prevails in Carriacou and Petite Martinique today.”
Gairy’s religious fanaticism exemplified his repression of the two less-populated islands. The people of the Grenadines did not take this lying down. In 1972, a street procession in Carriacou confronted the Gairy dictatorship and his Mongoose Gang secret police force with a song that went:
We are going to walk down Freedom Street
With our shoes on our feet
After the New Jewel Movement seized power from Gairy in March 1979, this spirit of autonomy stretched beyond the islands of Carriacou and Petite Martinique. Their neighbor to the north, Union Island, fell under the jurisdiction of St. Vincent, which attained independence on October 27, 1979. Frustrated by the neglect of municipal services in the Grenadines by the postcolonial government in Kingstown, a group of rebels launched an armed takeover of Union Island ‘s police station and government buildings on December 7. The rebels, led by Lennox “Bumba” Charles, declared independence with a promise of diplomatic recognition from Maurice Bishop and the People’s Revolutionary Government in Grenada. Forced into a premature confrontation with Vincentian and Bajan troops, the rebellion proceeded without the weapons cache and plainclothes soldiers expected to be dispatched by Bishop from Carriacou. The untimely defeat of the rebellion foreclosed the independence dream for Union Island.
AUTONOMY FOR THE GRENADINES, AGAIN?
Where the Grenadines once entered a Caribbean political consciousness through insurgent protest and armed rebellion, they enter it once again after the unforgiving winds of Beryl. This does not mean that the tradition of self-emancipation that pervaded the Grenadines in previous decades has disappeared. The suppression of the Union Island uprising did not put an end to the marginalization of the Grenadines by their absentee rulers in Kingstown and, after the collapse of the Grenada Revolution, St. George’s.
Before Beryl, residents of the Grenadines decried the neglect of roads and civic infrastructure and lack of economic opportunities beyond the tourist and informal sector. Meanwhile, taxes and foreign exchange earnings from tourism are funneled from the Grenadines to the state houses in Grenada and SVG. The beaches and placid waters of the Grenadines are targeted by metropolitan capital and regional political elites. For instance, Storm Gonsalves, son of Vincentian Prime Minister “Comrade” Ralph Gonsalves and self-described “property mogul,” is a chief financier of the “One Bequia” luxury residences on Bequia that he christened the “first fully Bitcoin-enabled community” in the Caribbean. Bequia has a residential population of 5,300, and historically boasts a predatory creole elite of its own.
After Beryl, this bleak situation is likely to worsen. Nearly all of the dwellings on Carriacou and Union Island have been severely damaged or destroyed. And, in turn, state proclamations testify to the unique vulnerability of the Grenadines. Commenting on Beryl’s devastation of Union Island, Prime Minister Gonsalves treaded into the apocalyptic: “Union Island has been devastated…Their roofs … the Union Island airport’s roof is gone. It’s no more.” Meanwhile, Grenada PM Dickon Mitchell — in a widely shared post on social media — framed the crisis in the Grenadines in celestial terms: “This hurricane has put the people of Carriacou and Petite Martinique light years behind and they are expected to pull themselves up by the bootstrap on their own.”
Indeed, this rings true for the people of the Grenadines. The people of the Grenadines are fiercely independent as a matter of necessity, representing some of the most militant strands of autonomy in the history of the Caribbean. Yet, the Grenadines are still derided as vassal states that cannot thrive independently, are economically unviable, and drain government resources. This myth must be confronted as hurricane relief proceeds. We must emphasize, too, that this state of dependence is not of their own making. It is a result of their subordination by the political classes of St. George’s and Kingstown.
Yet as representatives of this political class, Gonsalves and Mitchell are quick to invoke the plight of the Grenadines as evidence of their own subordinate status at the peripheries of metropolitan capital. In his comments on Carriacou and Petite Martinique, Mitchell lambasted “countries that are responsible for creating [climatic events who] sit idly by with platitudes and tokenism.” Gonsalves struck a blunter chord: “you have a lot of talk from [the international community], but you don’t see the resources.”
Indeed, we can expect that the images of flattened houses in Union Island, Mayreau, Carriacou, and Petite Martinique will become fodder for negotiations at international climate summits such as COP29 in Azerbaijan. But when Gonsalves and Mitchell invoke the suffering of the Grenadines in their pursuit of “climate financing” and loss and damage funds, will the people of the Grenadines be invited to construct their own designs for the new society after Beryl?
Let us presume for a moment that Gonsalves and Mitchell are genuine in their concern for the Grenadines. If so, they will defer to ordinary people in the most devastated islands who may organize mass assemblies to take responsibility for the planning, logistics, and governance. Again, the largest of the Grenadines, Carriacou, claims a residential population of ten thousand. If CARICOM stakes its pursuit of climate financing to the misfortune of the Grenadines, it stands to reason that the people of the Grenadines should take the lead in the management of their own affairs.
To be clear, a democratic experiment of this sort cannot be limited to community meetings or consultations in which the people may speak but the rulers need not follow. Indeed, opportunistic leaders often pay lip service to community governance and autonomy while nonetheless maintaining that the masses cannot govern themselves. We must anticipate similar maneuvers by the Caribbean political class as we have seen elsewhere in Tobago, Barbuda, and Bonaire, for instance. If we do not, we will fail to preserve popular democratic control of such assemblies when they do form.
Despite their insistent words, there is ample reason to question the earnestness of Mitchell and Gonsalves. As with the petroleum-fueled political classes of Guyana and Trinidad and Tobago, the leaders of SVG and Grenada do not oppose the extraction of fossil fuels in principle. Since taking office, Mitchell has sought desperately to facilitate oil and gas production along its maritime borders with T&T. In a campaign rally, opposition leader Keith Mitchell insisted that “Grenada is now on its way to becoming a major oil-producing country so when we say we shall become the dominant Caribbean economic powerhouse in 10 years — this is neither pipe dream nor idle boast.” The other Mitchell continued this effort after taking office, blaming his predecessor for failing to secure exploration contracts during his tenure.
In concert with this mas of oil and gas development disguised as climate vulnerability, both Mitchell and Gonsalves participated in the Saudi Arabia-CARICOM Summit in Riyadh last November, where they shook hands and advanced partnerships with the oil giant. They reprised this role weeks later at COP28 in Dubai, where CARICOM leaders brokered a US$50m UAE-Caribbean Renewable Energy Fund with the Emirati hosts of the world climate summit.
While this is no small pot of funds, it pales mightily in comparison to the oil largesse of the Gulf States. Whether this payout justifies doing business with the principal drivers of anthropogenic climate change remains an open question — at least for those who like to talk about environmental racism as a prelude to empowering the Caribbean political class.
CARICOM governments persist in their efforts to court North American and European “green” capital even as they denounce the carbon emissions of wealthy countries in the Global North. Instead, CARICOM nations display the suffering of the Caribbean’s smallest and least populated territories to finance projects that rarely reach these communities and do not embrace popular democratic politics of self-emancipation for the Grenadines.
We can look further north for parallels to the challenge of the Grenadines. In Antigua, Gaston Browne’s government invokes the devastation of Barbuda by Hurricane Irma in its appeals for funding and redress, only to suppress the participation of Barbudans in climate negotiations or municipal planning. Rather than emboldening Barbudans to govern their own affairs, the Government of Antigua seized upon this devastation to dismantle communal land tenure and enclose lands for the construction of golf course and airstrip to accommodate private planes and commercial jetliners. In other words, state officials seized upon the hurricane as an opportunity to court billionaire developers and foreign capital. Most critically, the developments have not addressed the vulnerability of Barbudans to future storms.
John Mussington of the Barbuda Land Rights and Resources makes this clear in a statement released during the SIDS4 UN Climate Summit in Antigua this May:
Should a storm make landfall in the 2024 hurricane season Barbudans will be worse off than they were in 2017. In fact, the good environmental stewardship that was responsible for creating the resilience of the island in 2017 is in danger of being nullified as the government administration attempt to unilaterally and forcibly change the Barbudan communal land tenure system.
We must hope that a similar fate does not await the Grenadines. The coming months will be critical, however, to ensure that the Grenadines are not reduced to mere bargaining chips for their globetrotting statesmen at climate summits in Dubai, Riyadh, and Baku. The people of the Grenadines must take the reins as disaster capital circles like vultures above their shores. As some of the smallest islands in our archipelago, Carriacou, Petite Martinique, Union Island, Mayreau, and Canouan can lead our region forward by enacting models of direct democratic self-government.
SMALL ISLAND PRIDE, LARGE VISION: RUNAWAY FEDERATION COMING
In popular song and calypso, we hear echoes of small island pride and visions of Caribbean federation from below. In the Grenadines, this tradition runs counter to the projects of “national development” that embrace the logics of propertied individualism and extractive accumulation.
As disaster capital flocks to the Grenadines (as it has in Puerto Rico, Barbuda, and Dominica in the recent past) the people of the Grenadines must prepare to confront multinational developers, imperial states, and a Caribbean political class that carries out this dispossession in their name. In the Caribbean, we are familiar with members of this class who play the role of savior by providing “relief” for a month or two, before declaring disaster-struck areas open for business to multinational developers and the private sector. We must prepare for this moment when the mask is lifted from their masquerade in the Grenadines.
In the weeks ahead, the Grenadines can heed the experience of their comrades in Barbuda as they gather themselves and begin the long process of recovery. And in doing so, they will draw on the long histories of autonomy. It would be remarkable, but not unprecedented, if these territories with populations of a few hundred to a few thousand, gathered in associations of self-governing producers. While those rebuilding from Hurricane Beryl remain half-hidden or unknown to the world at large, the heritage of self-organization is known intimately by the people of the Grenadines — yesterday and today.
