In a 1976 story about The New York Times titled “Fear in Heaven», Journalist Stephen Davis went to Jamaica to explain why and how the country was on the brink. At the time, Jamaica was an ever-flowing source of folklore, fanfare and fundamental misunderstandings of its socio-political reality. The island's two leading political groups – the National People's Party and the Jamaica Labor Party – were constantly in the throes of a violent power struggle with each other. But the depths of despair and tension that had built up for most of the decade went much deeper.
Davis found that the country's prime minister, Michael Manley—an ardent democratic socialist at the end of his first four-year term, won mainly by appealing to a poor, black-majority population—enacted a number of policies that prioritized reforming Jamaica's economy . He helped create cooperative farms, incentivized unionization, and increased the levy on bauxite—the raw material used to make aluminum—so that it would not be subject to the market prices dictated by Canada and the United States. Jamaica's business elite and their North American counterparts were not happy.
Manley made matters worse by developing a relationship with Cuban President Fidel Castro, one of the sworn enemies of the Western world. Although never proven, there were informed suspicions that these decisions attracted the attention of the CIA, which, as a result, helped destabilize Jamaica's economy, facilitated the dismantling of the country's international reputation through the media, and provided an unprecedented hoard of firearms on the streets. enforcement level on both PNP and JLP sides. “The visitor, once away from the resorts of the North Shore, has the feeling of being in Africa,” Davis said wryly. “The ubiquitous presence of knife-wielding peasants is terrifying to white visitors.”
But while a white journalist likened Jamaica to Africa to paint its black citizens as unruly and primitive, followers of the Rastafari faith sought to cement a spiritual, if not material, connection to their ancestral continent. Reggae music was their most successful tool in this pursuit, a romantic longing for what had been taken from them centuries before. A particularly impressive but lesser-known artist on the scene was Hugh Mundell, a prolific teenager who, New York Times article came out, he was in the early stages of recording his first album. Unlike most of the distinguished artists of his generation – and Jamaican youth in general – he did not come from the rough parts of the city. His father's job as a lawyer provided Mundell with a middle-class upbringing, but what he observed his country endure, especially its black majority, fired him to lend his voice to controversial issues.
