The Power and the Money

Greater Trinidad?

  This is a strange story.  Sometime in 2007, the prime minister of Grenada tried to “associate” his country with the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago, in order to get access to “Trinidad and Tobago's education system, health system, transportation system, et cetera.”

Prime Minister Patrick Manning loved the idea; he's been trying to annex his neig ... unite the Caribbean for some time now.  His cabinet, however, was less than thrilled.  “The only thing that the letter didn't speak of having access to was the Trinidad and Tobago treasury. But, of course that was an unspoken word. But clearly we would have been in effect minding Grenada,” said one former minister.  Another more colorfully said that the Grenadian PM was trying to get Trinidad “to pay his bills” and was “mamaguying” — mocking — Trinidad and Tobago.

As you might expect from reactions like those, it didn't happen.  But now there is another union proposal on the table.  The intention is to unite the OECS and Trinidad in something slightly more than the European Union but less than straightforward annexation.

I'll be honest and say that I suspect nothing will come of it.  Which is, I think, too bad. 

Barbados, Jamaica, institutions, and a great reason for a research trip

  There is a debate inside the economics profession about the importance of institutions, broadly defined.  One side of the battle holds that institutions are everything.  Countries can institute all sorts of bad policies and still prosper over the long run if they have “good” institutions — France is a common example.  A subset of this group likes to argue that a particular set of legal institutions is very important.  You can sum their argument up as “Common law good, civil law bad.” 

The “institutions as epiphenomena” side of the debate has mostly given up, with the valiant exception of Greg Clark.  That said, strong opposition still exists in the form of two arguments: “institutions aren't everything” and its subset, “legal origin theory is total b@ll$#/t.”

One obvious experimental laboratory is the British West Indies.  Not a whole lot of good came out of the collapse of the West Indian Federation, but one bit of lemonade coming out of that lemon was that it left us with a collection of independent and quasi-independent states with a similar institutional background.  Now come two authors with a comparative paper on Barbados and Jamaica, arguing that it is macroeconomic policy, not the legacy of history, that explains the different paths of the two nations since independence. 

Are their arguments convincing?  More below the fold.

Reason to fear

I worry about Venezuelan government spending.  I just don't believe that oil prices are going to stay this high for long.

I could be wrong, but one of the things I learned in Venezuela was that Belize started producing oil in 2006.  They quite literally found oil on some dude's farm.  Production is now up to 3,000 barrels per day.  That's about 15 trips per day for a typical tanker truck.

Even more strangely, Venezuela gives Belize money through Petrocaribe.  Chávez, I would think, gets even less out of his spending there than in the rest of the Caribbean. He is, in essence, giving away money to up global oil production with only a very small claim on the corresponding returns. 

So, nothing in the global scheme.  But when prices are so high that Belize gets into the oil industry, you've got a tidal wave of other producers waiting in the wings.  They'll be high-cost, of course, so given the increase in global demand the days of $20-per-barrel oil are over.  In fact, I'd bet that the days of $40 oil are over.  But I wouldn't bet on triple-digit prices being with us for much longer.

Strangely enough, I'd like to be wrong.  For the planet.   

Big day

My father and I (along with a slew of other friends and relatives) are in Trinidad at the moment for some very very very important business, after which I'll be travelling for a bit and posting only sporadically, if at all.

For those of you who don't know him --- and I plan to start posting a bit about his experiences when I return to the States --- here's a picture of the grand old man and myself:

See y'all later!

In a Free State

Did you know that Trinidad almost became part of the United States?

OK, that’s not quite true.  What happened was that at a summit at Camp Rapidan in October 1929, President Herbert Hoover told Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald that the U.S. would cancel Britain’s war debt in exchange for Trinidad, Bermuda, and British Honduras.  Hoover only wanted Belize in order to split it up between Guatemala and Mexico, and nobody expected London to part with Bermuda.  (Strangely, MacDonald drew the opposite line at the summit, insisting on retaining Belize but showing no objection to giving up Bermuda.) 

The real prize was, of course, Trinidad. Hoover had worked there, the place had oil, and its location was perfect.  Between Trinidad and Puerto Rico U.S. planes could overfly the entire Lesser Antilles (and Venezuela), pretty much turning the Caribbean into an American lake.

How much did Hoover offer, you ask?  Well, in nominal terms, a little less than £1.0 billion.  In 2006 terms, £44 billion.  And as a percentage of Britain’s GDP, the equivalent of £254 billion today.  Not a bad deal for the U.K. 

MacDonald, of course, eventually said no.  Hoover later wrote that MacDonald knew that Hoover had previously suggested a moratorium on war debts, and therefore the perfidious British saw no reason to pay off what they owed. 

But what if MacDonald had said yes?

Newsflash: a most excellent election result

Well, I must say that this is good news, if it holds up.  But before I get to that, a picture of the suburban sprawl of the east-west corridor from a mountaintop monastery:

And now, the news:

PORT OF SPAIN, Nov 5 (Reuters) - Trinidad and Tobago's ruling party looked set to hold onto power after winning Monday's election for a new government in the energy-rich Caribbean country, preliminary results showed.  The results from the Election and Boundaries Commission showed Prime Minister Patrick Manning's People's National Movement winning 26 seats for control of the newly expanded 41-seat parliament.

In other words, the PNM won, but not by too much.  The magic number for most (but not all) constitutional amendments is 31, although it's nice to stay below 27, just to be sure. 

Of course, it isn't all good.  The UNC won the remaining 15 seats, wiping out the COP, which I think is not a good thing.  Mr. Panday's rhetoric, meanwhile, has ... well ... see for yourself:  “The people have lost and the 'mafia' has won. Crime has won, high prices have won and other problems in T&T have won since all of those things will continue. If that is what people want, well they will have it.” 

But what do you want, Canada?  Some sour grapes are understandable. I'll take the results.

A Million Mutinies Now

Trinidad goes to the polls tomorrow.  (Yeah, yeah, Tobago too.  Nobody who isn’t either from Tobago or employed by a multilateral lending institution could care less.)

The constitution has turned out to be an unexpected campaign issue.  The preamble, pictured above, is not the issue.  Rather, the issue is about the rest of the constitution — should Trinidad become more American, or stay British?  The government wants to adopt an elected executive presidency; the opposition accuses the government of trying to establish a dictatorship.  Ironically, the push for a U.S.-style presidency — and the American example is the one bandied about — came from groups worried that the current Westminster system gave the Prime Minister and ruling party too much power.  I won’t say whether events in the United Kingdom had anything to do with that conclusion in the (probably forelorn) hope of attracting commentary from our British readers. 

There wasn’t much evidence that the government took reform seriously — about all you could hear about the topic was from a goo-goo group at the University of the West Indies and two draft constitutions posted here.  But one of the opposition parties knew a good issue when it saw it.  One day, nothing, the next, accusations of “secret drafts” and cries of “dictatorship!” Much more fun than boring debates about the management of the Heritage and Stabilization Fund, or which highways should be widened, or whether it is better to hire lots more cops or lots and lots more cops. 

The irony, of course, is that by declaring that they’re against it, the opposition has made it more likely that it’ll happen.  Now if Patrick Manning wins the election he will — assuming his party gets enough votes — have a popular mandate to reform the country’s charter, something he never planned on until the opposition figured that it had an issue. 

More beneath the fold.

Miguel Street

Or the Maracas Royal Road, as the case may be.

This is where Amma and I are going to get married next June. You can't tell how hilly the area is from aerial view, but you can make out how beautiful it is.  Seriously green!

Welcome to suburbia, Caribbean-style.  Amma didn't grow up out there:  her family lived in the Belmont section of Port-of-Spain when she was growing up.  This house is a product of upward mobility and economic growth, not Latin American-style intergenerational economic aristocracy.  One sign of that (not visible in the picture) is that there is a chicken coop right off to the left outside the frame.  Yes, with actual chickens.  That lay eggs.  And occasionally get eaten themselves.

Amma was very disappointed to discover that most American suburbs will not let you keep chickens in your backyard. 

The Middle Passage

Is a nation more like a business or a family?

OK, now that I’ve got your attention, I’ll point out the obvious and confirm that the above picture is not from Trinidad.  It is, however, one zip code over from the old stomping grounds of Vincent Chase and the boys.  More relevantly, it’s in the middle of one of the largest Trinidadian communities in North America.

So, yeah, this post is about emigration.  The World Bank estimates that 361,596 Trinidadians live outside the two islands.  That number is so precise as to be obviously false, but it’s what we got.  Anyway, of that number, 55 percent live in the U.S. of A. (another 14 percent live in Canada), and of those who live in the United States, 13 percent live in Queens.  (Another 26 percent, of course, live in Brooklyn.  Yeah, Brooklyn!)

What can I say about the Trinidadian-born population of the United States?  68 percent of them are Afro-Trinidadian, 9 percent Indo-Trinidadian, and 4 percent Euro-Trinidadian, with the rest “mixed.”  The median household income is $40,168, or 90.4% of the median for the white native-born population.  Median full-time male wages are $33,000, or 90.0% of the U.S. median, while the same number for Trini females is $28,933 . . . or 108.3 percent of their native-born sistern.  Only 18 percent of Trini-Americans over age 25 have a bachelor’s degree or higher.   

Man, that bored even myself.  A (slightly) more interesting discussion below the fold.

A Flag on the Island

I had three more posts planned, but since the rightful owners are back, this will be the last one.  Interest in Trinidad and the West Indies seems limited, anyway. 

To an American unfamiliar with West Indian history, it seems strange that they aren’t one country.  The cultural differences are relatively small, the economic advantages obvious, and the geographic distances (save isolated little Belize, and to a rather lesser extent Jamaica) easily manageable. 

To an American unfamiliar with West Indian history, it seems equally strange that the islands aren’t part of the United Kingdom.  After all, their inhabitants wouldn’t have been there at all without Britain, their political traditions and institutions stem from the U.K., and both France and the Netherlands integrated their Caribbean colonies.  Hell, even the United States integrated its Caribbean colonies, giving Puerto Ricans citizenship in 1917 and Virgin Islanders the same thing in 1927.   

(The singular shameful non-British exception is Suriname, which the Social Democrats gleefully shoved out of the Netherlands on the basis of a one vote margin in the Surinamese parliament, against the wishes of 74 percent of the population.  A few violent strikes in Paramaribo provided a pretext, but the real reason was too many brown people moving to Holland.  By that “logic,” Dwight Eisenhower would have been perfectly justified in throwing Alabama out of the Union.  Ironically enough, foisting independence on the place managed to precipitate the very flood of migrants that the Dutch had hoped to avoid.  But I digress.) 

So what’s going on?  And what’s it got to do with the picture of the flags and the pretty lady? 

Beyond Belief

Hinduism isn't the only religion India brought to Trinidad, of course.  Twenty-thousand Muslims (20,007, to be precise) arrived in the great migration.   

For reasons that I don't know, the Muslim population grew slowly at first, numbering only 26,000 as late as 1922.  (Conversion to Christianity?  Reverse migration?  Undercounting?)  After that, though, it began to swell.  It's now about 68,000.

Most of the growth came from natural increase, but conversion played a role.  In 1922, Indo-Trinidadians made up the overwhelming majority of Muslims.  Today, they make up only about 85%, according to the Guardian newspaper.  The remaining 10,000 are Afro-Trinidadian converts or their children. 

And that's caused trouble.  Trouble worthy of the phrase "beyond belief," trouble that would be downright hilarious in a comic opera way if it hadn't gotten 40 people killed.  More below the fold.

Among the Believers

Trinidad is a very religious country.  It's also very British.  These two things interact in strange ways that I'm only beginning to understand.

I didn't think this was a particularly British country at first.  In fact, I made the mistake of telling that to a proudly patriotic and most un-British middle-aged Trini individual. 

Oh boy did I get a talking-to.  First, the proper term here is "English."  You can refer to "Britain" and "British" until you're blue in the face, and they'll come back with "England" and "English."  This is especially true of the Hewitt family, who have traced their last name back to a Scotsman who came to Barbados in the 1840s and married a local woman. (His children moved to Trinidad.)  "We were both colonized by wankers," explained a film buff who also shared Scottish ancestry.

Second, it was pointed out to me—at great length and with no small amount of passion—that the "English" heritage lives on.  The school system.  The uniformed kids.  The parliamentary government.  The Privy Council.  The driving on the wrong side of the road.  The architecture.  Cricket.  Soccer.  (Although by that last count, Bolivia has a strong English heritage.)  And the blurry line between the churches and the state. 

Consider the Hindu temple in Waterloo, on a pier extending into the Gulf of Paria.  It's at the end of a road that passes by suburban bungalows on one side and an abandoned sugar fields—probably slated to become future bungalows—on the other.  The entrance to the temple's parking lot is marked by a modest statue of Sewdass Sadhu, the grocery-store owner who in 1947 built the original temple on the site of what's now a parking lot. 

More below the fold.

A House for Mr Biswas

That’s it.  That’s Mr. Biswas’s house.  Right behind the white car.  The street now resembles Union Turnpike more than anything in the novel, but the house is still there. 

Between San Fernando and Port-of-Spain lie the towns of Chaguanas, Waterloo, and Couva, the demographic center of the country’s East Indian population. 

When the British finally got around to abolishing slavery, the sugar plantations decided to import Chinese and East Indian indentured servants instead.  The Chinese soon stopped coming, because their government insisted on free return passage for its nationals.  Only 1500 arrived, mostly from Guangdong.  They now form an influential but small community of about 15,000 — a fellow named Dereck Chin built the island’s first multiplex, and as already-mentioned the NGC is led by one Frank Look Kin.  The white population — mostly Syrian Christian, with a few Portuguese and the strangely-named French Creoles, who are neither French nor Creole — is about the same size.   

The Indians, though, arrived in massive numbers.  By the time all was said and done, 150,000 of them had made a one-way trip to Trinidad.  Their descendents make up 40.3% of the population, as against a Afro-Trinidadian share of 39.5%.

A Turn in the South

Point Lisas isn't the only must-see that Trinis will point you to.

Southern Trinidad’s central tourist attraction is a few miles south of San Fernando, in the suburb of La Brea, which is called that for the exact same reason as the eponymous neighborhood of Los Angeles.  It’s the "famous" Pitch Lake, the planet’s largest source of high-quality asphalt, what Trinidadians call the "eighth wonder of the world." 

If so, I wonder about the other seven, because Pitch Lake really resembles nothing so much as a badly-paved parking lot.  What’s the seventh wonder?  Newark? 

Hype aside, Pitch Lake is really neat, and worth visiting.  The surface is soft and warm, with tar right underneath a fragile skin and methane bubbling up.  Local kids bathe in the surphurous puddles—in fact, "swim" is a better word than "bathe," because some of the puddles are pretty damn deep—and workers dig up about US$50 million worth of asphalt every year. 

You probably won’t be surprised to learn that China buys half the output.

Finding the Centre

In a parallel universe San Fernando—"Sando"—is a cute beachfront town.  We don’t live in that universe.  It has nice enough suburbs, if a little ragged around the edges.  The city center though, not so much.  Downtown seems designed by a strip-mall developer told to worry about neither parking nor pedestrians.  But it’s certainly lively. Maybe a little too full of life, like an algae bloom.  Call it the anti-Ponce.

San Fernando, in the southwest part of the island, is Trinidad's second city.  As early as the 1950s, approximately half the city's workers worked in petroleum extraction or refining.  It's still booming.

So I suppose the city center is exactly what you’d expect from a boomtown that advertises a patch of boiling asphalt as its number-one tourist attraction.  I don’t know why I expected something more charming.  A modern air-conditioned bus runs there from downtown Port-of-Spain (for only 95¢!), down a modern highway, through modern sprawl.  Why wouldn’t downtown be equally modern?   

We were in San Fernando to visit Trinidad’s best Chinese restaurant.  To get to the restaurant from downtown we had to take a taxi.  More below the fold.

The Loss of El Dorado

This post is dedicated to Bernard Guerrero.  And Carlos's aunt.

Trinidad is the sort of place when you ask somebody to show you the sights, they go out of their way to show you the industrial park.  "Point Lisas, mon.  Gotta see Point Lisas."  So we saw Point Lisas. 

It is quite impressive.  The place employs more than 11,000 people (about one out of every 50 working Trinidadians, not including ancilliary operations in the surrounding area) in a urea manufacturer, a chlorine producer, a lube-oil blending installation, a natural gas fractionation facility, 4 methanol factories, 10 ammonia plants, and one giant honking steel mill. 

The Point Lisas Industrial Estate (related to, but not quite the same as the eponymous port) started under the administration of Eric Williams, Trinidad’s first prime minister.  It could have been a poster child for the failure of 20th-century socialism.  The place took two decades to get running, and once it did its heavy industries managed to lose money at such a prodigious rate that the industrial park managed to play a large role in Trinidad’s debt-led economic collapse in the 1980s.

Past failure is not what makes Point Lisas interesting; certainly less interesting than its equivalents in (to pick two countries completely at random) Romania or Armenia.  What makes Point Lisas interesting is the place's present success, and what that says about Trinidad's economic and political future.

More below the fold.

The Enigma of Arrival

Let's turn to a different island. 

Trinidad!  This majestic isle, this historic land, this place of wonders, it grips the Western imagination with images of … of … of … uh … ah.

Isn’t Trinidad a city in Cuba?

No, Trinidad doesn’t occupy much of a place in the collective imagination of the English-speaking world.  Nor the Spanish-speaking one.  And while the plucky performance of the T&T team in the first round of the World Cup certainly changed my opinion of soccer, I really doubt that it changed too many people’s (lack of) opinion about Trinidad.

In recent travels I’ve tried to see how economic statistics translate into how things feel on the ground.  In the Philippines, for example, you could see the undervalued exchange rate in the low low prices, you could feel the screwed-up labor market in the prevalence of overmanned service businesses, and you couldn’t miss the impact of remittances in the form of giant McMansions sitting in the middle of otherwise impoverished slums. 

In Trinidad, the headline statistic would be economic growth.  Since 1995, the place has grown at an average annual rate of 8 percent—last year, in 2006, it grew twelve.  And this isn’t merely the dead-cat bounce of a once-rich petroeconomy:  GDP matched its 1982 high in 1999, only the fourth year of the boom.  The numbers are awesome.  They amaze.  They inspire.  Are they real?

An answer below the fold.