YOU have life-long bragging rights if you witnessed Viv Richards in full batting majesty.
You would have revelled in not just Richards’ batting prowess, but also his poetic poise and bold heroism.
There are West Indian cricketers with superior statistics, but no one better captures the confidence and will of what C.LR. James called “the popular struggle for Caribbean nationhood”.
With memories of his imperious batting style and gum-chewing casualness, Viv, at 70, remains the premier sporting idol of every West Indian youth.
He deserves Caricom’s highest honour, to be bestowed upon him in early July.
In a region in which two-bit newsmakers get from honorary doctorates to national awards, the Master Blaster is a genuine legend.
He remains influential for his courage and his stand against oppression; he famously turned down US $1 million for a jaunt in apartheid-torn South Africa, and always proclaimed Caribbean pride.
His honour comes at a time when another timeless Caribbean man of struggle, Basdeo Panday, returned, even if briefly, into focus.
“I just love Bas,” a young broadcaster on urban radio gushed the day last week when the old geezer turned 89.
Among Caribbean leaders, Panday has a unique worldview.
He emerged immediately post-independence (he fought the 1966 general election on a ticket of Workers and Farmers’ Party, and lost his deposit), morphed into a labour hero, and then history-making national leader.
During his crusading trade union years, Panday advocated relentlessly for a more equitable society.
He called out the “parasitic oligarchy”, those whom Lloyd Best had earlier branded “the validating elite” and the World Bank labelled as agents of “State capture”.
Panday advanced that spoils of the economy should be divvied among the working masses, failing which they would be forever consigned to being mere “hewers of wood and drawers of water”.
He rallied for dissolving economic monopolies, creating a people’s sector, and for affording everyone a fair play in the dance.
In national office, however, he barely moved the needle.
Still, as Panday reflects on his life’s work, I wonder how he views the economic playfield, in which a pharmaceutical importation monopoly boosted profit by 49.5 per cent in its first year while hardship sweeps the land.
Or, his thoughts on a conglomerate supermarket chain opening mega-stores even as small operators collapsed under the weight of the Covid business shutdown and onerous bank conditions.
Or the unchecked domination by banks, each of which raked in staggering profits while the pandemic was zapping small businesses and mortgage owners.
Or the virtual disappearance of the middle class, while big business flourishes.
Or the capture of arable former sugar lands by business and political overlords, for American franchise stores, luxury homes and commercial warehouses.
The brazen launch of a Starbucks coffee shop in the atrium of Piarco International Airport is a disgraceful symbol of the power of the business elite and of inequitable national development.
It is not just that visitors would be greeted by a brand that has 15,000 neon signs emblazoned across the United States alone.
Nor is it that this foreign product has been given premium positioning in a land of bake-and-shark, doubles, callaloo and other native cuisines that the Ministry of Tourism hails as “world-class dining”.
The Starbucks outlet at the nerve centre of the Trinidad and Tobago experience is an indication of how big business has captured our national identity.
It is a representation of what the World Bank describes as “systemic political corruption in which private interests significantly influence decision-making processes”.
It shows the crumbling of our national pride, from an era when we believed in our red-white-and-black nationhood, acclaimed our heroes, and had convictions – like Viv Richards – in our common destiny.
We did not reach this position overnight: Our collective self-esteem has been continually devalued by aimless national leadership.
In contrast, the pungent aroma of ackee-and-saltfish and the image of Usain Bolt flutter at Jamaica’s Manley and Sangster airports.
That self-esteem is helping to power JA to economic revival and to further international athletic dominance, personified in my current sporting heroine, Shelly-Ann Fraser-Price.
The symbolism of Viv’s flashing blade and the idealism of Bas have clearly not empowered a shiftless Trinidad and Tobago.
It’s a crying shame that Starbucks occupies our prime national location.
