Mango Season

In 1980, after 63 days in a Cuban terrorist training camp, my first action of any importance was to see a psychiatrist. Seriously! Even though it was organized by the Jamaican government, it was a continuing struggle to come up with some logical explanation for ending up in that guerrilla training camp in Cuba. I think about this now in terms of the ongoing struggle of western forces against terrorist groups like ISIS and Al Qaeda and young men and some women leaving Canada, USA, United Kingdom and France to fight in Syria.

It is true that I had been "radicalized" but only in the sense of wanting to see a fairer distribution of wealth among Jamaicans, in essence the creation of a socialist state. However I could never make the leap from there to support for or participation in violent acts.

If I had any doubts about this, a surfeit of guns and other weapons put paid to those doubts. Besides sleeping with an empty Kalashnikov (AK-47) strapped to my bed, I learned to use rocket launchers, grenades and other weapons. The story is old now but each time I hear of young people being radicalized and heading for places like Syria and Yemen, my own experience provides me with some context.

Violence had never been a part of my socialization. Even though I had lived and worked in Kingston, and had worked with young men and women as a youth organizer, all our activities had been apolitical. Going further back to my high school days violence was limited to inconsequential fist fights. How then did I find myself in Cuba?

The best explanation -the only one that makes sense- was tied to an incident that had taken place in Mandeville in central Jamaica in late 1979 or early 1980: the high school alumni association I led had organized a fund-raising dance and I was at the door that night collecting entry fares.

A plain-clothes cop had bulled his way through the door and was throwing his way around as Jamaican policemen are wont to do. Perhaps I had said something about my frustration about being pushed around. I remembered that my associate at the door had said something about knowing how I could get toughened. It was said with real menace and that's all I could remember. It's all a blur now. That associate was also in Cuba as well.

All I knew once I arrived and then left Cuba, was that Jamaica would never be the same and I wanted none of it. I didn't want to obtain a gun; I didn't want to shoot or kill anyone, and as soon as I got an opportunity, I would leave the island. In 1983 I did just that and have never returned. In 1985 while living in Montreal, I wrote The Road Not Taken: Memoirs of a Reluctant Guerrilla. I self-published a new edition in 2008. It has sold over 10,000 copies since its initial printing. When I got an opportunity I sponsored my parents and siblings off the island as well.

This was how I decided to see a psychiatrist: perhaps there was something amiss exemplified in my faulty decision-making. Nothing came of that session, although I will argue that i have never been the same since: perhaps I have been in a permanent state of shock and a kind of paralysis. However the experience with each retelling sounds a bit passé.

When I was growing up I loved mangoes and sometimes would find one, which was ripe but had worms, and you would take a knife and excise the worms from one side of the mango and enjoy the rest. Jamaica is that mango, but after you have removed the worms it would still be tough going. Midday through 1980 before I left for Cuba there were no more than fifty murders. By the end of the year that figure neared one thousand. I knew it then that the island would never bee the same. A recent United Nations report listed Jamaica as having the third highest murder rate per 100,000, which was down 40 percent from the previous year. Damaged, apparently, beyond repair.