Edward Seaga

Edward Seaga was prime minister of Jamaica from 1980 to 1989, the leader of the Jamaica Labour Party for thirty years who beat Manley in the bloodiest election the island had held. He turned the country from Havana to Washington in a fortnight. He was the first foreign leader Reagan received, in January 1981, and the man for whom the Caribbean Basin Initiative was written. The government expelled the Cuban ambassador in 1981. It took the American aid, three quarters of a billion dollars over the decade, more per head than anywhere in the hemisphere, and the IMF's terms with it. It devalued the dollar from under two to five and a half to the American, sold the state companies, courted the tourists back. It sent troops to Grenada with the Americans in October 1983. He called a snap election two months later on the strength of it, which Manley's party boycotted. That left him a parliament of sixty seats to none. The decade was the structural adjustment before the phrase was common. There were the free zones sewing American garments, the bauxite still falling, and Hurricane Gilbert in September 1988, which took the roofs off a third of the island. There were the garrison constituencies of Kingston, his own Tivoli Gardens among them, which both parties armed and neither controlled and which turned, after the politics, to cocaine. He was born in Boston to Jamaican parents of Lebanese and Scottish descent. He read social science at Harvard and spent two years in the villages recording revival cults and the folk music that became the record label he founded, West Indies Records, which recorded the first ska. He was appointed to the Legislative Council at twenty-nine by Bustamante. He wrote the passages of the 1962 constitution on fundamental rights, and was finance minister from 1967 to 1972, when he founded the stock exchange and the development bank. He lost the election of 1989 to Manley's second coming. He led the opposition until 2005, sixteen years and three more defeats. He was the last member of the 1962 parliament in the House when he left it. He died on his eighty-ninth birthday in Miami. He had spent his last years as a university fellow writing about the revival cults he had begun with.

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