U.S. Wary as Dominica’s Radical Son Rises

Rosie Douglas is proud of his past.

He delights in telling crowds about trying to use the toilet while in leg irons and handcuffs on the Air Canada flight out of Montreal after he was deported in the 1970s for leading black power protests.

In the past he has labeled the U.S. an imperialist enemy and boasts in speeches of his personal contacts with Libya, Iraq and Cuba--and the fact that those links helped earn him a 15-year ban from U.S. soil.

And he readily recounts the closest he has come to a regular job: the 15 years he headed a Libyan-based organization that financed and trained guerrilla movements throughout Africa until it was disbanded five years ago.

Meet the new prime minister of Dominica, a Caribbean nation that some analysts here and in Washington fear could become a beachhead for anti-Americanism in America’s backyard.

Born Roosevelt Douglas 58 years ago on this tropical island, the career militant sworn in this month as the Caribbean’s newest leader heads a government that includes other ‘60s and ‘70s activists, along with a younger generation of nationalists schooled in Cuba courtesy of scholarships that Douglas established. They are taking over a nation mired in nearly $200 million of debt and at least 20% unemployment, with a gross domestic product of just $234 million a year.

They have come to power at a time when the island is struggling to survive the collapse of its banana trade, which many Dominicans blame at least in part on U.S. efforts to eliminate the preferential treatment the Caribbean product receives in European markets.

In addition, U.S. and British law enforcement officials say this nation of 75,000 people has opened itself to threats from Russian and Chinese organized crime figures and international money launderers. The threat comes, U.S. officials say, through the island’s controversial Economic Citizenship Program, which has raised millions in state revenue by selling Dominican passports and nationality to hundreds of Russians, Chinese and others for $50,000 each.

The first official reaction to Douglas’ victory from the U.S. government highlighted his present and ignored his past.

Douglas released a letter from the region’s top U.S. diplomat, Barbados-based Charge d’Affaires Roland Bullen, that congratulated the new prime minister and applauded his pledge to review problems “associated with economic citizenship, money laundering and related international criminal activity.”

Even here in the Dominican capital, however, some remain wary about where this charismatic firebrand with a teddy-bear face, a disarming smile and a tireless ear for his constituents will take his nation, and perhaps the region, during the next five years.

At the core of their concern is the question: Has Rosie Douglas mellowed with time or has the world changed around this radical?

“Rosie has a lot of friends out there of his ilk . . . and they expect to see him deliver,” said former Prime Minister Edison James, who leads the parliamentary opposition after his United Workers Party failed in Jan. 31 elections to keep its majority in the House of Assembly.

“To maintain his credibility and his standing with his friends through all these many years,” James said, “he has to be seen as standing up to the Americans.”

Douglas’ supporters disagree, although even they harbor concerns.

“I think that he has mellowed. There’s the old saying that age brings reason,” said Charles Savarin, Dominica’s conservative new tourism minister and a key member of Douglas’ coalition government.

Savarin, whose Dominica Freedom Party won two of the 21 Assembly seats, describes his role now as “ensuring a sense of balance.” He formed an election alliance with Douglas’ Dominica Labor Party, which won 10 seats; James’ party won the remaining nine.

The new ruling coalition and “the realities of life in small island states in the 21st century will keep Rosie on the straight and narrow--although perhaps with some zigs and zags,” Savarin added.

Among those potential zigzags under Douglas, who kept the job of foreign minister for himself, Savarin cited closer relations with Cuba, increased trade with Libya and warmer ties with other traditionally anti-American nations.

The regional implications are potentially great. Douglas’ ascendance comes as many disillusioned voters throughout the Caribbean are turning to charismatic, traditional leftists. And several other Caribbean nations are scheduled to hold elections this year, among them Haiti, the Dominican Republic and St. Kitts and Nevis.

“What you have now here and in the Caribbean as a whole is a very deep, stable core of people who are committed to the vision we had in the ‘60s but who now have the capacity and the position to do something about it,” said Atherton Martin, 54, a prominent environmentalist, 1960s Cornell University agronomy graduate and the new minister of agriculture, planning and environment. “They’re coming back not having lost their fire but having learned how to manage it and direct it.”

To hear Douglas address the subject provides many clues but few conclusions.

At a recent gathering of several hundred supporters in his hometown of Portsmouth, Douglas recounted his radical roots, the toll his reputation has taken on him and his family, and his enduring commitment to his old friends in Africa, the Middle East and Cuba. He also spoke of his new friends in Britain’s ruling Labor Party and even in Canada--among them, Douglas asserted, the former government minister who had ordered his deportation.

“I believe I’ve got a mission, and I’m not going to turn my back on the mission,” he told the reverential hometown crowd. “I went through a lot of insults, discrimination, humiliation. . . . Everybody believes Rosie is a communist.”

He spoke admiringly of militant black leader Malcolm X, who was killed in 1965. He pledged to seek new investments from Libya, Britain and Canada. He vowed, in fact, to return to the nation that deported him to request development aid to compensate Dominica for his humiliation.

But he also promised that, by the end of his term, every Dominican primary and secondary school student will have access to a computer, that he will modernize his nation and bring it “into the promised land.”

“We have friends all over the world,” Douglas said. “The years I have sacrificed to gain respect for black people will now pay off 100-fold.”

He concluded that, only “when people don’t know me, they’re afraid of me.” In a later interview at his simple three-room wooden house, Douglas insisted that he is not a communist and his government will not be anti-West.

“I don’t pick fights,” he said. Besides, in a nation where the majority of the 200,000 annual visitors are tourists from the U.S., “our economy is so vulnerable, so dependent on tourism.”

Asked whether his views have softened since his vitriolic anti-American speech in 1996 at a New York forum, where he advocated an end to economic sanctions against Iraq, Libya and Cuba, he smiled: “I think [President] Clinton has softened a lot of the extreme behavior of imperialism. I can find common ground with Clinton now on some issues.”

As for whether he will transform Dominica into a headquarters for U.S. enemies, he said: “The Caribbean has gone past that stage. We want peace and development.”

Yet he was candid about the 15 years he served as head of the Mataba organization in Libya. And he concluded: “I, alone, cannot fight the rest of the world. It has shifted, and I have had to shift.”

The ultimate rein on Douglas’ radicalism, Agriculture Minister Martin and analysts here predicted, will be the Dominicans themselves. This is, after all, a nation that is nearly 80% Roman Catholic. Churches are packed every Sunday, abortion and homosexuality are outlawed, and headmasters still flog misbehaving children in public school.

“I don’t know the kind of [foreign] commitments or promises he has made,” Martin said. “What I do know is that, if he underestimates the conservatism and new nationalism among the young here, then he will pay the price.”

Savarin, the tourism minister and a veteran diplomat who originally sought the job of foreign minister, said he has other worries.

“The threat in the world today is not from Cuban missiles. It’s from people who travel--from terrorism,” he said, arguing that Dominica’s 9-year-old Economic Citizenship Program must end.

“It is a real nightmare that I have, that someone caught committing an act of terrorism somewhere in the world will be carrying a Dominican passport,” he said. And he noted that several other Caribbean countries have similar passports-for-purchase programs.

“At the end of the day, the question is: Are these [Caribbean] islands going to be bought either by individuals or by governments or organizations that may be seeking bases . . . to sally forth into activities they might not be able to do from elsewhere?”

In Dominica at least, Martin said he and cabinet colleagues have a strategy to prevent it.

“We have to surround Rosie with a protective cluster of people who can keep him from hurting himself,” Martin said. “His openness, his kindness, his never-say-no generosity--all of it makes him his own worst enemy.”