Introduction

Abstract

British decolonization in the Caribbean, the backyard of the United States, was based on two key principles: that all the island colonies, including Jamaica, should enter a single federated state, the Federation of the West Indies, which began its short life as a British supercolony in 1958, with its capital in Trinidad; and that the process of decolonization should involve a competitive two-party political system from which, given the global Cold War situation, communism and communists (or Marxists) were to be excluded. By 1961, British Guiana (not a member of the British West Indies Federation) was a colony under crypto-communist leadership, and in Jamaica (a British colony since 1655) the communists had been expelled from the People’s National Party (PNP)¹ in 1952, yet continued to lurk on the fringes of the two-party system. Two years earlier Castro had established a radical government in neighboring Cuba, though it was not declared communist until late 1961 (Parker 2008).