It seemed impossible to coordinate this interview in record time-hours after the magazine closed-so the work of the diplomat and journalist Francisco Pérez with his team installed in the office of the Prime Minister of St. Vincent and the Grenadines, Ralph Gonsalves, was vital to achieve communication, production and final edition of it.
Gonsalves arrived at the room ready for the interview. Cordial and charismatic, he greeted the physical and virtual team of Courier of Alba, and we began, with no more time to lose, to listen to one of the most emblematic men of the Caribbean and Latin America.
We were amazed by his incredible capacity for work, his eloquent verb and his kind disposition, as well as the firmness with which he defends his purest convictions of life. Also his high academic studies and preparation to face half a century of political life and 18 as prime minister.
During your speeches you refer to the historical reparation for enslaved peoples as a demand of the Caribbean and the Americas in general to overcome the history of domination and marginalization to which the great colonial powers have led us. What is the history of slavery that has moved you so much?
The Caribbean, including Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, has had a history based on colonial conquests and settlements; the slavery of the Africans, the hiring of Portuguese slaves, the Indians from the subcontinent of India and the Chinese. There are some countries that have conquest settlements in the region in earlier stages than others, for example, Barbados, Saint Kitts or Jamaica. Saint Vincent and the Grenadines was one of the last territories subject to European settlements.
When was the British settlement made?
It was in 1763 when the British assumed the sovereignty of St. Vincent and the Grenadines.
The Europeans came here, visiting us, you had Spanish, you had French, but it was not a colonization of a long-term nature. The colonial settlement began in earnest after French Bretons divided the possession of the Eastern Caribbean at the end of the seven-year war, in the Treaty of Paris; and St. Vincent and the Grenadines was arrogantly assigned to the British by France.
When the British arrived in Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, they met the indigenous peoples, the calinago and the Garífuna. The calinagos were the original inhabitants, they came from the Orinoco, the Amerindians, but since the mid-seventeenth century Africans came here, fugitive slaves from Barbados and mostly from a shipwreck in the 1670s on the coast of San Vicente, where most slaves survived and came here and, of course, on the western side of the island of San Vicente, perhaps you had about 200 Africans in captivity working on small French farms.
Between 1764 and 1795 the indigenous, led by the Garífuna, fought against the British to take a stand in a guerrilla war, until they were defeated, Chatoyer was assassinated, the supreme head of the Garífuna people, whom my Government made a national hero in 2002; After Chatoyer was murdered, there was a great rate of genocide carried out against the Indigenous. Then the British deported more than 5,000 to an island of San Vicente called Beliceaux and in six months, due to the shortage of food, water and lack of medical attention, half of them died, the other half was exiled to Honduras, to an island called Roatán, from where they went to Belize, Nicaragua and Guatemala, carrying out in each country a spiritual ritual called yurumein, one of the original names of Saint Vincent and the Grenadines.
How were the power relations in the Saint Vincent of the nineteenth century?
The sugar plantations were the formal economic structure from European white owners with African slaves. The Indigenous did small farming, fishing and things like that. When slavery ended in 1838, there was a shortage of labor because many of the African slaves left the plantations when they were released and went to what they called privileges, to work the land and as carpenters, blacksmiths and works alike. So the British recruited the first Portuguese migrants from Madeira between 1845 and 1850, only to work in the plantations, and then, in 1881, about 2,600 Indians arrived.
How the postcolonial economy is being pose today?
Without the preferential agreements, we had to build postcolonial relationships on a more solid competitive type and work together with other countries, as we have done with ALBA.
How have social relations varied in St. Vincent and the Grenadines since the era of slavery?
The social situation in San Vicente during slavery and immediately afterwards, had essentially racial, ethnic and cultural components from the population, each with its own distinctive pattern of sociocultural integration, the whites had that, the African slaves, the Portuguese, the mixed blood from India and, of course, the Indigenous, each of them with their own relatively different social-cultural integration.
Biology played a very important role in this respect and, through the history and participation of the population, we have reached today a more or less homogeneous society.
What are your country’s challenges for the future?
We have to build strategic alliances with countries and movements worldwide that share interests similar to ours, for example, the governments of Cuba, Venezuela and many other countries in other parts of the world with whom we have started good relations; in addition to establishing traditional alliances with British Europeans.
What should the world know and recognize from your country?
The history and the path of freedom in Saint Vincent and the Grenadines. From my point of view, I have put a distinctive mark on the country, since we have been more clearly than others in this new period and we have evolved in the ownership of our land.
What is your proposal for historical reparation for enslaved peoples?
We have a position of who we are in this civilization, in the entire Caribbean civilization. Although native genocide and African slavery have been critical to our development, the legacies of underdevelopment must be repaired, that is why we talk about reparations in native genocide and slavery.
Let me illustrate what I want to say about what happened with the native genocide. Imagine that the majority of the population capable of generating food, were shot at the wall during the war. You also eliminate a significant number of young women, and at the same time you take away all the land and put them on the most inhospitable road in the northeast of the country. It means, therefore, that the rest of the population that remained there cannot deal with its development, in fact historically it has remained the poorest part of our country, although governments have made significant progress in improving that part of San Vincent and the Grenadines.
There is no talk of reparation to the individual descendants, but to the community, to rebuild the economy, the education system, among others. The Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (Celac) has supported the request for reparations.
What does ALBA mean to you?
The duty and need to build together an entity in the Caribbean and in Latin America in order to help each other in a remarkable way to develop, particularly because they all suffered the domination of imperialism.
14 years of the ALBA foundation will be celebrated, what is the work agenda for this appointment?
In mid-December we are supposed to be in Cuba for the ALBA Summit. I am sure that all these things that I am talking about will be analyzed, from historical fear to the contemporary, and that we will expose the new practical ways of advancing, which are of the interest of all people and the whole of humanity.
When thinking about time and its legacy, what do you still need to do comrade Ralph Gonsalves?
I prefer to let time pass; I focus on improving the lives of the poor and the workers.
Cris González
Director
