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Rum and Coca Cola: The United States in the British Caribbean 1940-1945

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 December 2015

Annette Palmer
Annette Palmer*
Affiliation:
Howard University, Washington, D.C.
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Extract

The presence of American bases and troops in the British Caribbean during the Second World War was the catalyst to an anti-Americanism which has continued to dominate political thinking in the area. This has been a rather ironic turn of events. Prior to the arrival of the Americans, there had been a growing sentiment among sections of the population for some sort of American take-over of the islands. After the Americans arrived, however, relations with the people of the islands soured. The idea of an American take-over died aborning, and by the end of the war, such ideas were no longer being entertained by the people of the British Caribbean. They were replaced instead, by an aggressive nationalism which called for self-government for the islands as an entity. Whereas in 1938, a British journalist could have written that “Trinidad (and Barbados and Jamaica) wants to be American,” it had long ceased to be true by the end of the war. A Trinidadian labor leader, at a regional conference in 1945, succinctly summed up the ideas of all of his confreres. “Whenever we pass into other hands,” he declared, “both hands must be our own.”

Type
Research Article
Information
The Americas , Volume 43 , Issue 4 , April 1987 , pp. 441 - 451
Copyright
Copyright © Academy of American Franciscan History 1987

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References

1 American bases were located on the islands of Trinidad, St. Lucia, Antigua, Jamaica and in British Guiana on the South American mainland.

2 Calder-Marshall, Arthur “Trinidad wants to be American”Living Age, 355(December 1938), 322–24.Google Scholar

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21 Anglo-American Caribbean Commission, “Social and Political Forces in Dependent Areas of the Caribbean,” December 1944. Ms. in Box 953, CPF, Kingston, Jamaica, 1944, p. 171.

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23 811.34544/616. Letter from President, West Indian National Committee, New York, to Secretary of State, February 21, 1941, SDDF.

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39 Ibid., 5:139.

40 United States Consul, St. Lucia, to Secretary of State, August 13, 1942. CPF, St. Lucia, to Secretary of State, August 13, 1942. Consular Post Files, St. Lucia, Vol. 8, 1942.

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42 Caribbean Defense Command, History, 5:28.

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51 The Barbados Advocate, September 20, 1945.