Socialist Manley Pushing Market Policies in Jamaica : Politics: Once a leftist firebrand, the prime minister has adopted the ideology of his rival, who now criticizes his program as favoring the rich.

The politics of Jamaica, where ideological loyalties once ran so deep that overwrought party gunmen often shot out their differences in the streets, have turned topsy-turvy and blissfully peaceful since the country’s last general election a little more than two years ago.

Socialist Prime Minister Michael Manley, 66, once a firebrand of the radical left and closest Third World friend of Cuba’s Fidel Castro, has adopted the capitalist, free-market ideology of his chief political opponent, former Prime Minister Edward P. G. Seaga.

As for Seaga, 60, the former right-wing leader sometimes sounds more like the socialist Manley of old than the businessmen’s favorite, who was so admired by Ronald Reagan that he was the first foreign head of government invited to the White House after Reagan’s inauguration.

Seaga’s first act upon taking office in 1980 was to eject the Cuban ambassador and, later, to break diplomatic relations.

Today, Seaga champions business links with Communist Cuba.

At times, it is as if the two Jamaican political leaders have swapped rhetorical dictionaries.

During a recent interview, Seaga sharply criticized Manley’s free-market economic management for its “horrendous effect on social conditions” and “severe impact on the poor.” He said the new prime minister’s aggressive moves to privatize government-owned enterprises favor rich Jamaicans and foreign interests, “but not one share has been offered to the public of Jamaica, not one.”

“They’ve gone a bit farther than we would have gone,” said a rueful Seaga, who aroused storms of left-wing protest in the 1980s when he proposed divesting the government of white elephants accumulated under Manley in the 1970s.

“Now we have a government (Manley’s) that not only is continuing the policies of the previous government (Seaga’s) but is attempting to accelerate them,” said Dennis Lalor, millionaire chief of an insurance and banking conglomerate and head of the Private Sector Organization of Jamaica.

Investment banker Paul Chen Young said, “This government has gone even further in liberalization and deregulation than the Seaga regime.”

And G. Arthur Brown, governor of the Bank of Jamaica, observed, “Relations between Manley and the private sector are much better than with the previous government.”

Without exception, Jamaican political and business leaders interviewed in recent weeks said there is no longer any doubt that they are watching a “new Michael Manley” in action.

“The truth is that in the 1970s we had a large number of young men experimenting with theories they had only recently learned from textbooks,” said Lalor, explaining Manley’s radical approach to government two decades ago. “Now it’s as if he said, ‘Look, one of my mistakes in life was to come under the influence of Prof. (Harold) Laski.’ ” Laski was the famed Marxist professor at Manley’s alma mater, the London School of Economics.

Manley now recalls his last stint as prime minister in the 1970s as a time of failed socioeconomic experimentation and business regulation whose main effect was to create a swollen bureaucracy and drain the treasury. At the same time, his pro-Castro, anti-U.S. rhetoric created huge problems for Jamaica abroad. “We’re not trying that again,” he declared emphatically in a recent interview. “We tried it and it cannot work.”

Musing over the nine years out of office, during which he revised his ideology and his approach to governing, Manley said he concluded that “anybody who doesn’t adapt method to experience is perhaps not entirely bright.”

Experience taught him that government can only be the catalyst for growth while the private sector must be the engine, Manley said.

The result is that most economic indicators in the historically depressed country are now positive, Brown said, although Manley’s government faces a crushing debt service that soaks up almost half of Jamaica’s foreign exchange earnings. “I think we still have some more belt-tightening we have to do,” Brown said.

Concerning Cuba, whose leader Manley once effusively compared to Alexander the Great, the prime minister has adopted a low-key approach, quietly resuming limited diplomatic relations but not much else. “Cuba has a special situation that right now is difficult to fit in,” Manley said, explaining that under U.S.-imposed restraints “you can’t really deal with them, but in due course I have to assume normalcy will return.”

Seaga, who said he believes Cuba is no longer the aggressive bad boy of the Caribbean, approved when diplomatic relations were resumed.

“History has a funny way of surprising us, doesn’t it?” Manley commented.

BACKGROUND

Discovered by Christopher Columbus in 1494, the 150-mile-long island 100 miles south of eastern Cuba was settled by Spaniards in the early 1500s. Jamaica (the name derived from the indigenous Arawak Indian word Xaymaca) remained Spanish until 1655, when it was captured by the British. Black slaves worked the sugar plantations, and runaways fomented rebellions against the white colonials in the 1700s. Abolition of slavery in the 1830s contributed to the decline of the sugar industry. Mining of bauxite for aluminum has become a major source of foreign exchange since the 1940s. Jamaica developed a two-party system before World War II, gained considerable self-government in 1944 and full independence from Britain in 1962. About three-quarters of the population of 2.7 million are of African descent, and another 15% of mixed Afro-European heritage.