Foreign Service life in Jamaica: Land of Red Stripe, reggae, and romance

Part 1: Settling into a new career and a new home

How did I end up being posted to a glamorous tourist paradise like Jamaica my first time out? The answer is both simple and complicated. Kingston was on the list—two jobs out of 32 total—I was given to choose from. All incoming Foreign Service Officers had to serve one tour as a consular officer, and Kingston was one of the busier “visa mills” for the Department of State. (Because no language training was required for the embassies in English-speaking countries, a lot of J.O.’s—junior officers—without fluency in a foreign language ended up serving there, along with other busy consular operations like those at Mexico City and Manila, where some language training might be needed.)

There were also posts available in Europe (Frankfurt), Canada (Calgary), South America (Maracaibo), Africa (Algiers), Mexico (Mexico City), Asia (Manila), and elsewhere in the Caribbean (Port-au-Prince). But none of them appealed to me. Kingston, on the other hand, struck my fancy. It was also available quickly—and as it was served by U.S. airlines, fairly easy to get to—and for reasons I did not yet understand, carried a 10-percent hardship differential (extra salary). For personal reasons, I wanted to be able to get home as needed, initially—to visit my five-year-old daughter, who lived with my ex-wife, and my aging parents—until I was better acclimated to Foreign Service life.

Spending 18 months there—the truncated version of a two-year tour given many first-tour officers, who were delaying language training until a second posting—sounded like a romantic vacation for a newly-single guy. So after six weeks of consular training and a few days in Miami, at the Immigration and Naturalization Office which served the Caribbean, I stepped off my plane into blinding sunlight in June 1983—Kingston was suffering from its worst drought in recent history, I soon discovered—and my new life began.

I had dropped out of graduate school for this, and was fascinated by the vibrant pulse of the country. Reggae was everywhere—Bob Marley had passed on a couple of years earlier, but his spirit was ubiquitous—and a cold Red Stripe, the wonderful local beer, was just right at the end of a long day slogging through the visa mill. I lived in a comfortable, modern two-bedroom apartment in a low-rise complex across the street from my New Kingston office—to which I could walk, but rarely did, for security reasons. Not for fear of street crime, but to avoid harassment by the long lines of determined tourist visa-seekers—up to 90 percent of whom would soon be refused—who begged and wept and pleaded with anyone on the street who looked like a “visa man.” All they wanted was a 3-week vacation in the States …

It was disheartening to say “no” to so many people—one woman fainted dead away outside my interview window one day—but our duty under the law was to refuse anyone without strong, documentable economic ties to ensure their voluntary return. Overall economic conditions in Jamaica were daunting—unemployment was high, few jobs were available outside the now-struggling tourist industry, public debt was high, and the Jamaican dollar, once on par with the U.S. dollar, was struggling to hang on at 3-to-1 exchange rates, all a direct legacy of the Michael Manley years. Foreign exchange was absolutely critical for business—but equally difficult to obtain in the still-controlled economy.

The current Prime Minister—a former U.S. citizen of Syrian descent named Edward Seaga, leader of the Jamaica Labor Party—had defeated Manley’s People’s National Party (PNP) in an 1980 upset by promising to restore a sense of order to the economy, after eight years of PNP mismanagement, and control crime and illegal drugs, but the problems were proving all but intractable. Both the major parties were left-of-center politically, and Seaga’s center-left JLP had refused to roll back the major “reforms” of the farther-left Manley era—social safety-net programs with a distinctly socialist flavor—which had driven so many prosperous Jamaicans, and their money, away in the turbulent 1970s. So far, Seaga had not made much progress, but remained determined. On the international side, he had ended Manley’s close alliance with Fidel Castro’s Cuba, and his reward was his new nickname, “CIAga,” scrawled on public walls.

Convincing foreign investors to come back to a barely-stabilized Jamaica was proving a lot harder than Seaga had hoped. Even his close alliance with President Ronald Reagan, and an agreement to risky new IMF loan conditions, had produced few results so far. Several years earlier, Manley’s government had been forced to tighten its belt significantly during an economic downturn, in exchange for a lifesaving IMF loan to cover public debt payments; he had then abandoned the austerity program in frustration, stalling and effectively dooming his experiment with “democratic socialism.”

The once-dependable bauxite industry had largely moved on to less onerous locations after a heavy new export tax was levied. Agriculture, once the mainstay of a fairly prosperous island, was struggling, and exports were generally limited to processed rum and Blue Mountain coffee. Imported items like U.S.-quality toilet paper—the local paper felt almost like sandpaper—were rarely available in stores. “Higglers” abounded—businesswomen who traveled frequently and brought back many retail items (clothing, laundry detergent, and the like) from the States for quick, profitable resale in small stores or sidewalk stalls.

I don’t mean to exaggerate Jamaica’s economic situation. It was not dire—life remained comfortable enough for the middle class and the wealthy, the only ones who could afford the prohibitive duty on imported cars, for instance—and even lower-class people were not starving. But it was not encouraging, either. Life was a daily struggle, and there seemed to be no long-term future here for the majority of Jamaicans. So Jamaica’s biggest export in those days, sadly, was its people: affable and well educated, by Third World standards, and proven as versatile, productive wage-earners once they emigrated.

Almost every other Jamaican, it seemed, had at least one family member or close friend already in the United States—and the lure of “adjusting status” after arrival almost irresistible. (More Jamaicans lived outside the country—largely in the U.S. or the U.K.—than the 3 million inside.) Especially vulnerable were otherwise-unskilled Jamaican women, in high demand as live-in nannies or health-care aides—courtesy of a burgeoning corps of immigration lawyers. Thus, applicants without a full-time job and significant property were viewed with extraordinary skepticism—and some who did produce documentation of both, as it turned out, had actually bought forged papers from ingenious local scamsters. So our anti-fraud office was kept busy …

In addition to interviewing applicants for tourist visas (NIVs, or nonimmigrant visas), we J.O.’s also screened prospective applicants for immigrant visas (IVs), most of whom were family members being “sent for” by relatives legally in the States—and occasionally, locals who had married American citizens after whirlwind courtships. In many cases, we got to see firsthand the results of misused tourist visas—how one “overstay” could lead, inexorably, to the whole family immigrating years later. We also dealt with cases involving U.S. citizens who got into trouble with the law—most often for attempting to smuggle illegal drugs back to the States—or who were imprisoned or even died in Jamaica. All in all, it was a demanding job.

Now it was hard enough to turn down so many earnest and productive “tourists” for lack of strong ties in a country always one or steps away from economic downturn or collapse—that, at least, you could leave at work. But it was another thing entirely to find the problem still on your doorstep when you got home. A normal social life could produce discomfort at almost every turn, once people found out where you worked—and at a cocktail party, even harder to change the subject—because almost no one “bought” the rationale we employed; explaining it was pointless. Many Embassy employees, therefore, solved the problem by avoiding social lives outside the diplomatic corps entirely, mixing only with the large community of Americans and “safe” Brits, Canadians, and the like—or by vacationing at any of a number of beautiful beach resorts, along with actual tourists, where the only annoyance was being harassed on the beach by persistent sellers of “ganja” (marijuana)—illegal but profitable.

But I was determined not to miss out on life with the locals. Indeed, why take the trouble to live in an exotic foreign country and miss most of the fun?

* * * * * *

A word or two about Jamaicans, their demographic make-up, and their views on race. About 75-80 percent of the country’s residents were of mixed African descent, with a wide variety of skin colors—ranging from jet black (what many still called “maroons,” runaway slaves from the 18th century who had fled into the country’s mountainous interior) to much lighter shades, what some called coffee-colored or coffee-with-cream, indicating decades of racial intermarriage on one or both sides. Less than 20 percent of Jamaicans were considered “fair”—or “white,” mainly British or European with no known African ancestors, if frequently reflecting Chinese or South Asian immigrants in the family. (There was also a small but prosperous community of Lebanese and Syrian immigrants, and even a near-pure German “colony” left over from the early 19th century, at Seaford Town.) Jamaica was definitely a melting pot …

But Jamaicans sported a refreshingly different, somewhat irreverent attitude about racial differences. They often said we Americans were way too hung-up on the matter. Their motto was “Out of many, one people,” close enough to ours (E Pluribus Unum), but they actually meant it and lived by it. We are all Jamaicans, mon, many would say to me privately, once they determined I was “safe” to talk to. We may tease each other about skin color, but it’s all a matter of class—socioeconomic status, not how light or dark we are. Some of them resolutely refused to be categorized by race in traveling to the States—and would mark “other (Jamaican)” on forms they considered rude, silly, or intrusive.

And now, a word about my own background. I am a mixture of Danish and English ancestries, with maybe a little French thrown in, I’m told. I grew up in a strictly segregated, somewhat provincial Southern environment in North Carolina—complete with different drinking fountains, restrooms, and schools, almost as strictly enforced as South African apartheid—and until I went to college, had very few opportunities to make friends who were not white. My town, about 80 percent white, had two high schools, one for each race—only a handful of black students transferred to my white school, at first, and none stayed to graduate with my class. So it was logistically difficult to “mix” socially with African Americans—although the Ku Klux Klan was a minor player in North Carolina politics, the KKK played an outsized role in my redneck rural county. It was a bit risky just to be seen in public talking to a black kid, must less invite him to visit my house, even after our schools were racially integrated in the 1960s.

Frankly, I saw nothing to be afraid of—I thought segregation was silly, but endured the pointless restrictions until the civil rights movement began changing the landscape. In college, I had a few black classmates in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s—UNC-Chapel Hill was known as a very “liberal” school, if still overwhelmingly-white at that point. I was studying journalism, and in the working world, soon began developing easy friendships with black coworkers at a series of N.C. newspapers. As a journalist, I covered all kinds of stories, from crime to politics, but specialized in education-related topics, and met many black professionals as a result. I also met many emerging national leaders who were black—Congressmen Andrew Young of Georgia and John Conyers of Michigan, SCLU leader Ralph David Abernathy, and many others came to speak at Fayetteville State University, the well-known HBCU. Later, when I ran my family’s small retail office-supply firm in Fayetteville, near Fort Bragg, I began having routine encounters with patrons of all races from the base. I started graduate school part-time, at first, then full-time, and my classes reflected the newer, biracial reality.

I also loved to travel. My family had traveled extensively in the U.S. while growing up—my father’s folks lived in Utah, and we drove out to see my grandparents several times, as well as my mother’s sister in Texas and her uncle in Florida—but I had spent far less time abroad. By the time I entered the Foreign Service, I had vacationed in two other countries—a two-week skiing trip to Norway, and shorter trip into Mexico with California friends—and had spent a honeymoon week in St. Croix, a Caribbean U.S. territory (of Danish heritage!) which was a microcosm of Jamaica.

In 1983, the world around me was changing rapidly, and in retrospect, I think my world-view was gradually evolving with it. I still had a reporter’s boundless curiosity, and in Jamaica, found I had entered a completely different world—one where the tables were turned, making my white face and background a minority in a largely-black environment. It was my task to accommodate myself, and explore whatever social ramifications this new world involved.

* * * * * *

I had been in Jamaica for about two weeks when the Ambassador—a wealthy U.S. businessman, very approachable, named the year before I arrived—threw a large outdoor Fourth of July party at his residence, a wonderful estate just outside Kingston. The highlight of the evening, a fireworks display, was not unusual elsewhere, but apparently our planners had neglected to advise the Jamaican government in advance. (Fireworks had been officially banned during the Manley era; this display apparently frightened many island residents still wary of frequent violence, triggering silly rumors that a war had broken out.)

But that, of course, I learned only later. This evening was my first real opportunity to meet, on a social level, Jamaicans who were not affiliated with the Embassy but invited to have a good time at our national holiday. So far, I had been only to homes of other Embassy employees or diplomatic gatherings. The evening at the Ambassador’s house was fun, but got me to thinking, and spurred me to strike out on my own. I still wanted more.

One of my Embassy colleagues with USAID, the international aid arm of the U.S. government, had brought along a young Jamaican man she was dating, so I asked if he might be willing to introduce me to some of his friends—some “real” Jamaicans, I think I said. My car had arrived from the States, and I was up for exploring Kingston if he was willing to show me around.

He was. That was how I ended up a couple of days later in the comfortable living room of one of his friends on a typical Jamaican Friday night, with folks dropping in and hanging out for food, drinks, and music before heading elsewhere. The house was in a tidy, middle-class neighborhood; the host ran a small garment-manufacturing plant. Most of these folks already apparently had visas, and just seemed to enjoy having regular conversations. I don’t know who else knew I was coming, but at least no one seemed to want anything from me. It was fun. It was a challenge.

I didn’t realize it when I walked in, but fate had singled me out for what turned out to be the biggest surprise of my life—and a life-changing one, at that.

Next time: Romance in the air and on the ground …