British Honduras

WHEN Aldous Huxley paid a visit here in 1934, he remarked that “if the world had any ends, British Honduras would certainly be one of them.” The English author, writing in Beyond the Mexique Bay, added that this Massachusetts-sized Central American colony “is not on the way from anywhere to anywhere else, has no strategic value, is all but uninhabited.”

The population of this improbable land is still only 105,000, roughly comparable with that of Cambridge, Massachusetts. Despite the arrival of the air age, the territory remains remote and isolated. Except during the dry season, it is impossible to drive from here to any other Central American country; Merida, the capital of the Mexican state of Yucatan, is twelve bone-jarring hours away by car.

But British Honduras’ importance has been immeasurably enhanced by four factors which Huxley could not have foreseen in 1934: the emergence of a Communist regime less than 350 miles away in Cuba, the approach of independence for British Honduras (probably in 1968), the existence of the United Nations (in which the new country will have a vote of equal weight with that of the United States and the Soviet Union), and heavy pressure on Washington to mediate Guatemala’s claim that British Honduras is part of its national territory.

The colony, which will change its name to Belize on attaining independence, is hardly destined to become a mover and shaker among nations. Towns with names such as Gallon Jug and Monkey River never will challenge the world’s industrial complexes. It would be a major triumph for British Honduras if it could control the wee-wee ant, which gleefully munches its crops, or capitalize on its generous supply of alligators and jaguars for commercial profit.

The annual budget is a pathetic $11 million, and even this level of expenditure would be impossible without generous subsidies from Britain, which has provided $36,400,000 over the past two decades. The annual trade deficit is on the order of $10 million. Sugar, citrus, timber, and fish products are the principal exports, worth $20 million annually. Slum-clearance programs are unnecessary here. The same effect is achieved with monotonous and terrible regularity by hurricanes which have flattened British Honduras’ matchstick towns four times in the past ten years.

Independence anytime

When the Union Jack is replaced by the blue and white banner of Belize (British Honduras’ governor, Sir Peter Stallard, asserts that the country can have its independence “anytime it wants it”), this will become the second smallest continental nation in the Western Hemisphere (smaller: El Salvador). Only French Guiana, which appears to be light-years away from independence, is less populous.

British Honduras has a single modern hotel, no deepwater port, not a mile of railway, and less than five hundred miles of spine-punishing roads. Although there is adequate land in the interior, a third of the people huddle in the capital.

Independent Belize will have fewer than one hundred university graduates. It will be hardpressed for health facilities if any of the thirty doctors and ten dentists, the majority of them colonial officials, leave the territory. There is no university, half the teachers are untrained (the school system would be in a bad way now were it not for the presence of forty-eight Peace Corpsmen and forty-one Papal Volunteers), and many qualified British Hondurans are lured out of the country by economic opportunities elsewhere. The colony claims a literacy rate of 95 percent, the highest in Latin America, but this is literacy in only its loosest sense, the test being the ability to write one’s name and the date. There is room in the schools for only 20 percent of the schoolage population.

Lack of communications and facilities inhibits the development of tourism; no oil has been found despite the expenditure of $18 million in exploration; the Hercules Powder Company, one of the few industries operating here (it extracts resin from pine stumps), is closing down its S3 million plant as a result of labor troubles and a fall in the world price of resin; and United Fruit, which was considering coming in, has decided against it.

Guatemala’s claim

Smallness of the domestic market, lack of local capital and purchasing power (the annual per capita income is about S310), inefficient and unskilled labor, depletion of natural resources, prevalence of plant diseases, threat of hurricane damage, and increased competition from synthetics all militate against the creation of a strong economy. The wonder is that Guatemala wants British Honduras, but want it she does. Mexico also has a dormant claim to the northern third of the territory; but Mexico is prepared to waive this unless territorial alterations are made in favor of Guatemala.

Guatemala maintains that British Honduras belongs to it on grounds that Guatemala is Spain’s heir. Guatemalan diplomats argue that Spanish sovereign rights over British Honduras, part of which formed a section of the colonial captaincy general of Guatemala, passed to the Central American Federation when it established its independence in 1823 (Spanish control ended two years earlier, during which time Guatemala was part of Iturbide’s ill-fated Mexican empire), and to Guatemala on the dissolution of that federation in 1838.

Great Britain contends that the Latin-American revolutions were “acts of populations” rather than of juridical areas, hence that the rebellious peoples obtained rights only over the lands which they actually possessed or occupied at the time of their independence. The English, Whitehall points out, had been in British Honduras for almost two hundred years by the time Mexico and Guatemala attained independence.

In May and June of last year, talks were held in Miami and London. After the talks, Guatemala and Britain jointly asked for U.S. mediation of the dispute, although the request was made primarily at the instigation of Guatemala.

Washington has made no definitive reply to the request, and diplomatic sources indicate that the United States, while willing to suggest a list of nongovernment American citizens as mediators, is unwilling to be dragged into the dispute as official referee. Guatemalan diplomats maintain they must insist on an official U.S. role, if only because — they say — this will give any solution arrived at a greater chance of success, since U.S. prestige would be involved.

As for the British Hondurans themselves, the people most directly affected by the dispute, they have not the slightest interest in becoming a part of Guatemala. A few years ago they similarly rejected the possibility of membership in an English-speaking West Indian federation.

Prime Minister George Cadle Price, although he has often been accused of taking money from Guatemala and of wanting to “Latinize” the country, has stated repeatedly that he wants only independence. Opposition leader Philip Goldson is even more adamantly opposed to any link with Guatemala.

One-party system.

The People’s United Party has dominated British Honduras domestic politics since the initiation of representative government fifteen years ago. In 1954, PUP won eight out of nine seats in the territory’s legislature. In 1957, the count was nine out of nine, and in 1961, eighteen out of eighteen. In the 1965 general election, PUP won sixteen out of eighteen seats in the House of Representatives and five of eight in the Senate, despite polling only 60 percent of the popular vote.

And PUP’s domination by George Price, the forty-six-year-old son of an auctioneer, is complete. Starting as one of the founders and general secretary of PUP in 1950, Price dethroned the party’s original leader, Leigh Richardson, and drove into the political wilderness ambitious lieutenants such as Nicholas Pollard and Goldson (Goldson’s National Independence Party holds two seats in the House and two in the Senate).

Price, who claims the territory can achieve economic viability within three years, is busily creating the paraphernalia and myths of nationhood. He has come up with a flag, an anthem, a national prayer, a new name for the country, and repetitious propaganda techniques which he borrowed from the Communists and has designed to instill a sense of nationality into his diverse, easygoing people.

These include the English-speaking descendants of the logwood cutters’ slaves, a small but sizable Mayan-speaking minority, Spanishspeaking mestizos (“mixed bloods”), who fled here from Yucatan during the Indian wars of the last century, live thousand German-speaking Mennonites in flight from more recent religious persecution in North America and Mexico, seagoing Caribs (people of mixed African and Indian descent who speak their own guttural dialect), and a sprinkling of whites. Although British Honduras has a three-hundred-year-old tradition of racial tolerance and has experienced none of the communal violence which has wracked British Guiana, the threat of racial violence exists, if only in a latent form.

Price describes his political philosophy as Christian Democratic, but he does not define this clearly. He intends to remain within the British Commonwealth after the colony attains independence, and is toying with the idea of membership within both the Organization of American States and the Central American Common Market, although Guatemalan opposition could block both moves.

The Prime Minister’s appeal

Part of the Prime Minister’s appeal, and possibly some of the strange quality which he exudes, stem from his ethnic heritage. Price is a racial schizophrenic in whose veins flow Spanish, Mayan, African, and Welsh blood. In appearance the handsome Prime Minister, who wears horn-rimmed glasses and white Nehru-style clothes, is more Latin than anything else, although English is his home language. Yet he cultivates a mystical Mayanism, and talks constantly of “the Belizean personality.”

Price is still a bachelor and something of a recluse, who likes to travel incognito when he goes abroad. His only recreations are music (he plays the piano and the organ well), birdwatching, and reading. He rises regularly at 4:30 A.M. (a not unreasonable hour in Belize’s blistering climate), attends Mass at 5:30, and is at his desk by 7:00. Something of his prissy, dominating character is revealed by his practice of telephoning each of his cabinet ministers at 8:00 to make sure they’re at their desks. He also circulates papal encyclicals to them as required reading.

The Prime Minister’s office in a ramshackle two-story building near the waterfront is open to the public, and Price tries to spend at least two days a week visiting remote rural areas. He normally leaves his desk at 4:30 P.M., locks himself in his unpretentious home (he lives alone), and retires by 9:30 P.M. Visitors to his home are not encouraged, and Price, who drinks moderately and smokes almost not at all, has little social fife.

Although he is a good political organizer and does not shun bareknuckle verbal exchanges with his political opponents, most of Price’s speeches are conservative, rather pedantic appeals to Belizeans to “build a nation.” His appeal is largely mystical, and rests to a certain extent on the belief widely held among the superstitious Creoles that he has almost magical powers.

The responses which Price seems to engender are admiration rather than love among his supporters, fear rather than respect in his opponents. But all agree that lonely George Price is an unusual political flower in a Latin-American garden which has produced some exotic plants. Equally certain is the fact that whoever leads poverty-wracked British Honduras into independence will have his work cut out for him.