Catered In A Coup

In 1990 I went on a study abroad tour with the University of Michigan and Michigan State University students, we went to Trinidad & Tobago, Guyana, and Barbados, ostensibly to study the, “Sociology of Developing Nations,” though really it was just a vacation for all of us from Michigan, we did have to attend classes and turn in a few papers, but we were in the Caribbean. We had already gone to Guyana and Barbados, Barbados is a tiny island, and Guyana is in the rainforest, in Guyana we took a Riverboat upriver and stopped along the side where there was an Amerindian village where we bought large red-skinned avocados and fresh baked large bread rolls, from two different lady’s stalls, and the lady at the avocado stand cut open the bread and avocados and put them together and put salt on it, and that was what we had for lunch and the avocados were better than the best hass avocados.

Then we went to Trinidad and Tobago, which are two different islands, and as soon as we got off the airplane there was a row of carts that looked like hot dog carts, but they were carts that sold either, “Shark-n-bake,” which was a breaded piece of shark meat and a fresh triangular wedge of ciabatta style bread, served with lime dill cilantro sauce, as well as a red hot sauce, or, “Doubles,” which were two 5 inch pieces of Roti on a piece of wax paper with chickpeas in a red sauce, also served with the same lime dill cilantro and hot sauce, and each cart represented family recipes for the sauces, so all of the carts tasted slightly different.

And for a while we were on Trinidad which is a beautiful place with different cultures of people all living side by side, Chinese, Indian, Afro-Caribbean, European, Amerindian, and everyone seemed to get along, and there was no racism based around black and white like I had seen growing up in the United States. There was a form of colorism or tonism, but no one cared if anyone had African ancestry. What was important was the lightness of the skin, so a light-skinned person with any ancestry was inherently higher up on the totem pole than someone with darker skin regardless of if they had African or South Indian ancestors. We went to Tobago which was entirely what would be called Black in America. In other words it was an island of people from Africa without any of the Chinese, Indians, European, light skinned Afrocaribians or Amerindian that were in Trinidad.

Then we returned to Trinidad and after visiting their parliament and watching some boring speeches, we all piled into a bus and headed back to the University campus where we were staying at the University of West Indies. All of the buses were private and individually named, with their names written in cursive at the top of the rear windows, they typically had shag carpeting on the inside and high end speaker systems, and the drivers were like DJs. About 5 miles from downtown on a long, straight road someone noticed smoke behind us billowing up into the sky from the downtown we had just left, and by the time we got to the University campus the reports had come in that Black Muslims had taken over parliament in a coup and burnt the police station to the ground, the same parliament where we had just been 20 minutes earlier. The coup leaders shot the Prime Minister in the leg and gave him a bandana to wrap it with, telling him that was the kind of medical care the poor people of Trinidad got.

The Black Muslims, or Jamaat al Muslimeen were upset because they had been setting up bread distribution stands to give free bread away to the poor, and the government kept coming and knocking them down with bulldozers. In addition they were upset that money was spent on erecting a statue to the woman who was a whistleblower in the oil industry decades earlier, because it was an image that could be an idol and a waste of money. Trinidad is financially independent because of its oil fields off the coast, and because of this they don't really have a tourist economy, and other than during Carnival they don't really get that many visitors, so they treat most people like guests, and Trinidad is large enough to grow all of their own food, so prices are cheap. The Muslims thought that the government should provide free medical care to everyone with the proceeds from the oil fields, and so they took over in a coup despite the fact that they only represented 2% of the population of Trinidad.

So for about a week we holed up in the dormitory in the University of West Indies campus with the sounds of sporadic gunfire going on day and night over the fence that separated the campus from the surrounding neighborhoods. Because one of the teachers that came along with us was from Trinidad we had local connections and bought cigarettes, beer, and liquor for the guards at the gates, and we gave them all of the extra catering food to take home, because despite the coup going on, the ladies that were running the catering service that provided our meals twice a day continued to cook, and continued to deliver the catered meals. We ate flying fish and breadfruit in the coup, and many other exotic foods that were delivered in large aluminum foil trays that arrived each and every day, twice a day, and every meal was incredibly delicious. After about a week we heard that a US Navy vessel had intercepted a boatload of Cubans headed over to help with the coup, so the coup collapsed, normalcy returned, and we flew home. Before we left one of our teachers trained us on how to answer press questions, but none of us were ever interviewed about our time being catered in a coup.