Jamaica: from Michael Manley to Edward Seaga

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Abstract
The landslide victory of Edward Seaga’s Jamaica Labour Party (JLP) in the October 1980 general elections brought about an abrupt end to the People’s National Party’s (PNP) eight-year-old experiment in ‘Democratic Socialism’. The fall of Michael Manley, the Socialist International’s most important representative in the Third World, dealt a serious, if not fatal, blow to the gradualist strategy of social change advocated by broad sectors of the Caribbean left and endorsed in recent years by the Cuban leadership. At the same time, the restoration of the stalwartly anti-communist JLP provided the Reagan administration with an invaluable collaborator in its crusade to contain and roll back the wave of revolutionary mobilization that has swept the Caribbean and Central America since 1979. In particular it has increased the grave danger of intervention against the revolutions in Grenada and Nicaragua, both of which had enjoyed Jamaican support in their efforts to escape the noose-hold of US economic and political isolation.

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