A look back at Barbados' brutal history and hopeful future-good read

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2017/05/barbados-slavery-colonialism-revolt-independence
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Last fall, the people of Barbados celebrated fifty years of freedom. Calypso music and tuk bands took over the streets of Bridgetown, and the general joie de vivre of Crop Over — the island’s Carnival — extended until November 30, Independence Day. The blue and gold flag, often accompanied by the national slogan, “Pride and Industry,” flew over the detritus of British rule, which persists in street names, political titles, and cricket matches.

The year 2016 was also one of somber anniversaries: two hundred years since a desperate slave rebellion, and forty years since the CIA-backed bombing of a Cuban airliner just after it took off from Barbados. (The mastermind of that mass murder, the anti-Castro exile Orlando Bosch, enjoyed political asylum in Florida until his death in 2011.) The island’s unions also organized “Labor Marches On,” a celebration of their part in the nation’s jubilee.

Few Americans or Europeans noticed. Barbados is a small and distant island of only a quarter million people, known mostly as the birthplace of Mount Gay rum and Rihanna.

Even for leftists, the island’s national struggle pales in comparison to the more dramatic stories of Haiti, Cuba, and Jamaica. Barbados is known for piety and stability, for British moderation rather than revolutionary change. “Little England,” people call it.

But the Bajans know better. They are the survivors of the first, most brutal, and most profitable slave state of the modern era, the descendants of a radical venture in wealth accumulation and human deprivation. Today, they are coping with the long-term effects of that calamity — and fighting to build a future free of neoliberalism.