Castro's Pal Wins Again

"We are not going to be ruled by violence but by heavy manners. No one can hold us back. We know where we are going." Those were the campaign promises -despite little evidence to back up any one of them -that Prime Minister Michael Manley, 53, made to Jamaica's 860,000 voters. But Manley's pitch was apparently convincing enough. Last week the Prime Minister and his People's National Party (P.N.P.) returned to power with 48 of 60 seats in the newly expanded Jamaican parliament, gaining 58% of the popular vote. Now Manley may find that more than "heavy manners" -slang for discipline -will be required to save the country from bankruptcy and bloodshed.

The election campaign was the most violent in Jamaican history. It was fought between the socialist P.N.P. and the free-enterprise opposition Jamaica Labor Party (J.L.P.), led by Onetime Finance Minister Edward Seaga, 46. The J.L.P. attacked Manley for financial mismanagement and more or less accused the Prime Minister of trying to turn Jamaica into a satellite of Fidel Castro's Cuba. For their part, Manley's followers talked of "J.L.P. policy and the fascist threat," while Manley himself declared that "the capitalist system has failed us."

The bitterness of the campaign caused an explosion of violence and random killings from the ghettos of West Kingston to all of Jamaica. Politicized young thugs stalked the streets of Kingston during the three-week election campaign, assaulting supporters of the other side. Police estimate that at least twelve people were killed during the campaign. thereby raising Jamaica's political-murder toll this year to more than 200. Finally, authorities were forced to ban all political rallies, which had acted as magnets for the thugs.

Political chaos was made worse by Jamaica's economic disorder, for which Manley has to shoulder some of the blame. For the past two years he has been committed to what he calls "democratic socialism" -meaning buying into the island's huge bauxite industry and lavish doses of public spending on labor-intensive road building and land reform.

Case of Jitters. Manley's new policy directions, as well as his undisguised admiration for Fidel Castro, have given Jamaica's small and relatively conservative middle class a bad case of the jitters. Many Jamaican business families have established second residences abroad. Income from tourism has dropped from $120 million in 1975 to an expected $90 million this year as a result of the violence; bauxite and sugar exports, two of the country's other major foreign-exchange earners, suffer from shrunken international markets. The upshot is that Jamaica faces a staggering $1 billion national debt. Inflation is running at nearly 15% this year, while the unemployment rate on the island is 27% -and almost twice as high in West Kingston.

It remains to be seen how Manley plans to restore both prosperity and tranquillity to his troubled, gemlike country. As the campaign proved, the ultimate in "heavy manners" -a state of emergency that Manley declared last June to curb island violence -apparently failed to do much good.

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