PREFACE

THE BURNING QUESTION

And then the unthinkable happened: on May 29, 1967, a crowd of Anguillians gathered to protest, not unlike they had done in January of the same year, upon the arrival of the British local government expert who was forced to depart the island before delivering his message—whatever that might have been. They gathered and expressed their discontent at the notion of shared sovereignty within the tripartite state of St. Kitts-Nevis-Anguilla, much like they had done during the Statehood Queen Show of February 1967. It was precisely on that occasion when the image of Alwyn Cooke, hanging precariously from the edge of his truck, holding a wild ball of fire in his right hand, provided the people of the island with the first symbol of a revolution that had not yet started. They gathered to listen to their leaders’ appeals, alternatives, solutions, ideas. They gathered at Burrowes Park, at the heart of The Valley, the “capital,” and then they took matters into their own hands. On May 29, 1967, the people of Anguilla flocked to the streets, en masse in the park, marched toward the police station, and, spontaneously but vehemently, demanded the thirteen-man police task force leave the island, never to come back. Less than twenty-four hours later the last few policemen were boarding the freighter that would take them on their sixty-five-mile journey back to St. Kitts. Just like that, an insignificant speck of coral on the northeastern corner of the Caribbean had revolted.

At that point the situation was critical: hardly anybody was aware of the existence, let alone the whereabouts, of Anguilla; a fifteen-man peacekeeping committee acting as provisional government fruitlessly sought protection from Great Britain, from Canada, from the USA; the state of affairs on the island was precarious, and an invasion from St. Kitts seemed imminent. Intrepidly, Anguillians took the initiative, devised a shambolic attack on St. Kitts, and on the morning of June 10, 1967 embarked upon what must stand out among the most naive failures in the history of military enterprises.

When the men within St. Kitts’s Defence Force camp heard the distant drumming of the shots fired outside, they didn’t have the slightest clue of what was happening. Despite the fact that hundreds of Kittitians had been informed of the insurgency in an effort to foster local support for it, not one member of St. Kitts’s police and security forces had been privy to this particular piece of information. Not long afterward, though, once they heard the loud roar of the dynamite setting the world alight, they knew that someone had opened wide the gates of hell. Nobody cared to ask who. The pertinent question at that time was whether to run for their lives or to put in place a plan to stifle the momentum of the rebels.

As it turned out, hell was not all that adept in running loose. By the time the faux coup had crashed against the walls of its own incompetence, looking for the people responsible for this minor embarrassment was no longer relevant. Instead, the local government jumped at the opportunity to declare a state of emergency, immediately implemented measures to tighten its (already watertight) grip on the country’s structure of power, and wasted one month persecuting its political enemies. The question as to who had let hell loose in the early hours of the morning of June 10, 1967 went down in history begging.

And yet, fortuitously, the mission achieved its goals. Faced with the threat of an armed uprising—faced, really, with the unthinkable—Premier Bradshaw focused on settling the score at home first, spent the following month turning St. Kitts into a 100 percent safe, absolutely invasion-resistant bunker. Now, in the 350 years of colonial history of Anguilla, its inhabitants have not exactly built a strong reputation for the pace and efficiency of their work. Or, to put it more obliquely, if Costa Rica is the Switzerland of the Americas, Anguilla is unequivocally not the Germany of the Caribbean. However, whether it was due to the urgency of the matter, or to the whimsical turnings of Providence, the peacekeeping committee acted in all haste, with uncharacteristic foresight and prudence, to build the institutional edifice required to rule a country. By July 11, 1967, one month and one day after the attempted attack on St. Kitts, Anguilla already had a small “army” of fifty servicemen, an anthem, a constitution, a revolutionary leader, a patriarch, and a foreign advisor.

The provisional government had also organized an internal referendum to decide upon the question of secession from the state of St. Kitts-Nevis-Anguilla. The overwhelming result of 1,813 votes in favor to five against, out of 2,554 registered voters, forever changed the course of Anguilla’s destiny. Most importantly, though, Anguilla caught the eye of the world while Bradshaw’s attention had drifted toward internal affairs. By the time St. Kitts looked back in the direction of Anguilla it was too late to use force—and diplomacy was not going to lead anywhere favorable. This was the extraordinary legacy of one of the most ridiculous episodes anyone will ever find in the annals of revolutions. This was the beginning of the first success of a country whose history, up to that point, had been little more than a catalog of hardship and failure.

The following is a fictionalized and utterly false account of the events that most definitely did not happen on June 9–10, 1967. And yet, while all characters in this story are little green men and women running around inside my head, the events that served as inspiration, the historical facts, as it were, must be considered no less than a sibling of the tale contained in these pages: the story I didn’t write, but could have written—the book this could have been, but isn’t.