Word: manley
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...keyed former financial expert had just handed a devastating defeat to Prime Minister Michael N. Manley, the buoyant leader of the People's National Party. In a reversal of the landslide Manley won in the past two elections, the final count might give the Labor Party 51 of the 60 seats in the country's Parliament, a gain of 38 over the 1976 election. The People's Party was reduced from 47 to a mere 9. With that, the island nation had taken a sharp turn in its political course: away from Manley's pro-Cuban...
Food shortages, in fact, provided Seaga with a key theme. "We are in a country that produces sugar, and you can't get a bowl of sugar." The election soon boiled down to a choice between proffered economic solutions: Manley's Third World socialism vs. Seaga's Western-backed free-enterprise monetarism. A cascade of reckless rhetoric from both parties also tried to turn the election into a false battleground between "godless Communism" and "sinister fascism...
...Manley's followers claimed that the CIA was supporting Seaga and covertly supplying him with arms, while Seaga's supporters characterized Manley as a closet revolutionary who would turn the island into another Cuba...
...clear that the voters blamed Manley for the country's economic morass. During his eight years as Prime Minister, the handsome, magnetic Manley, 55, scion of the island's most prominent political family, had made some significant contributions to Jamaica: a minimum wage, free education, equal pay for women, newly built health centers and 40,000 units of low-income housing. But endemic poverty remained, and critics charged his administration with woeful mismanagement. His warm abrazo for Fidel Castro frightened the middle class as well as foreign investors. Soon Jamaica found itself with a severe brain drain...
Seaga does not have the powerful mystical appeal of Michael Manley, but his performance in government before Manley's tenure did more to help the poor of Jamaica than Manley's violent rhetoric and devastating economic policies did in eight years. Cudjoe claims that Seaga will put Jamaica back 10 years; after nearly a decade of Manley, perhaps this is just what Jamaica needs...