Letter from Antigua

Caribbean rains wash de Birds away
May 19, 2004

On the morning of 21st March 2004, two days before the general election in the eastern Caribbean country of Antigua and Barbuda, I was driving to English Harbour in the southeast of the island. On the car radio, Lester Bird, the prime minister, was in full cry: "I am the essence and the personification of what this country is all about," he said, before adding that Beenie Man (a Jamaican dancehall musician) had told him that he was a Caribbean icon and that he (Beenie Man) wished that he (Lester) were prime minister of Jamaica.

Lester urged Antiguans to vote for him, promising that the Antigua Labour Party (ALP) would enter the Guinness Book of Records by being the first party to win seven consecutive general elections in a democratic country.

For over 50 years, the Birds have ruled Antigua as their personal fiefdom. Vere Bird, Lester's father and, apparently our Queen's favourite politician, assumed the leadership when a ministerial form of government was introduced in 1956 and, apart from five years in opposition between 1971 and 1976, thereafter dominated Antiguan politics. When Vere retired in 1994, Lester took over.

I had just been to mass at the Roman Catholic church at Tyrells where the sermon was partly given over to exhorting people to participate in a free election and not to be bribed for a mobile phone. My neighbour in church, a young woman with two infant daughters clad in dresses with layers of white, frilly petticoats, had taken the opportunity towards the end of the service to ask me to "help her out." She wanted money to buy ointment for the younger child's imperceptible heat rash. I didn't give her any. I had put all I had with me - $2 - in the collection plate, but the incident left a nasty taste.

I had arrived in Antigua the previous afternoon. My friend, Makeda Mikail, met me at the airport. Makeda had once been Lester's chief of staff and she knew him well. Ten years previously, when Lester first became prime minister, she had told me, "Lester wants to be good - he knows that to be a great statesman you have got to be good - but he has a genetic flaw. He carries too much excess baggage both with his name and his personality." Now she greeted me with the news that Observer Radio (the opposition radio station) was claiming that Lester was a product of incest between his maternal aunt and uncle.

Observer Radio is a relatively recent phenomenon. In the early 1990s, when I first got to know Antigua, the ALP or the Bird family controlled all the media with the exception of the weekly Outlet newspaper, edited by the late, great Tim Hector. Ten years ago two brothers, Winston and Samuel Derrick, started a daily newsletter, Observer by Fax, and then set up Observer Radio. For the first time, Antiguans got a chance to hear another point of view. It was thanks to Observer Radio that people learned, on the Saturday night three days before the election, that boxes of documents were being moved out of the prime minister's office and loaded on to a truck. A large crowd rushed to the scene to prevent their removal.

Antigua felt very odd this visit. The split between the two worlds of the Caribbean - one for tourists and one for locals - seemed even wider than usual. In the hotel where I was staying, I don't believe that any of the guests knew that there was an election happening.

The rest of the island was in the grip of election fever. It looked as though the ALP might actually lose. The Birds had been in power for so long that the idea they might soon be out was startling. The United Progressive Party (UPP), campaigning under the Pollyanna-ish slogan, "Government in the sunshine" (as opposed to the ALP's unconvincing "We love and care"), had looked credible for the first time.

Election day brought torrential rain. People had to stand in line for up to two hours to vote. The Pizza in Paradise in St John's, where I went for lunch, was not serving alcohol because of the fear that there might be trouble.

The following morning, Observer Radio announced that both Lester and his brother, Vere Bird Jr, a spectacularly corrupt individual, had lost their seats. The ALP had retained just four MPs (out of 17), including Asot Michael, who had been implicated in a recent scandal over medical benefits which played a big part in bringing down the government.

Baldwin Spencer, the UPP leader and prime minister elect, described events as a day of judgement for the ALP. The weather was suddenly glorious, a perfect Caribbean day. One elderly woman caller to Observer Radio said, "De rain came and washed all de corruption away"; another that, "Two Birds had been killed with one stone." There were lots of jokes in that vein.

Antigua was euphoric. Even ALP supporters seemed to relish change. But I found myself wondering. An Antiguan friend had told me, shortly before the election, "Lester is credibly corrupt and very smart, which is why he got away with it for so long. But Baldwin is just credibly stupid." Years ago, the same friend had said, "There's no idea of accountability in Antigua. As the calypso song says, 'Antigua is a democracy/ Everybody do as they please.'"

We'll have to wait and see. Fifty years is a long time, and everybody, while thinking they wanted change, had got used to the ways things were and the way they are likely to be for some time yet.