The people I am about to meet on the other side of the bay, along with Troy himself, have just been called terrorists by the Prime Minister of the country. Troy is taking me to meet with a group of Guana Cay natives, sometimes called ‘insurgents’ in the Bahamian press, who will ferry me along the edge of the Baker’s Bay development property.
Almost all of the 91 Bahamians that live on Great Guana Cay – 76 to be precise, as of a December 2007 petition – vehemently oppose the foreign Baker’s Bay development. In the year 2005, they, along with hundreds of part-time and foreign residents, formed an association to oppose the Baker’s Bay Golf & Ocean Club.
The development’s scope shocked the locals. A golf course, a marina, hundreds of cookie-cutter McMansions, a hotel, tennis courts – a tightly packed California-style mega-development paving and blasting 2/5ths of the island. The local’s public land is called Crown Land and Treasury Land in the Bahamas. On Great Guana Cay, where a month of groceries costs are double or triple the amount as in the States, locals could defer to the public land to the north, as their ancestors did for 200 years, and hunt for land crabs, or just escape the tiny acreage of the middle of the island. But in 2005, this last public land would be taken from them in an illegal land grab and placed behind guarded gates, their mangroves would be uprooted, and their coral reef would be destroyed.
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 Brown anole on a palm, Great Guana Cay |
The locals reacted with an honor and confidence rarely seen in grassroots movements. They reacted by fighting for their reef within the bounds of the law and their heads held high. They never destroyed personal property, they never played the popular corruption game so easily played in the Bahamas. Guana Cay Bahamians are poor folks, and without money to fund their efforts, they fought to save their reef through the courts and through Bahamian politics.
So when the Prime Minister of the country called them terrorists in front of a live audience just a few weeks ago, he used the most drastic and dreaded word a country’s leader can use against his own people. Today, the word is virtually synonymous with Osama bin Laden. It conjures up violence, anger, blood. To call your own people terrorists, especially people who have abided by every law, and even positively changed the course of history in the Bahamas and the Caribbean, may sound unimaginable.
But to understand why, I’d like you to follow me along the coast of Great Guana Cay.
Troy brings me to the Dive Guana dock, where he operates his dive shop. One of his boats, I recognize immediately. It is the boat he operates as the island’s fire chief and search and rescue expert. As a member of the Bahamas Air and Sea Rescue Association, Troy is almost solely responsible for rescues at sea, or, recovering bodies. The community on Guana is so small, a police force has never been needed. Once, when discussing Troy with a resident of Guana Cay, I was told, “Here is a man who can pull a dead man from the hold of a capsized boat without flinching, but breaks out in tears to see what is happening to his island.” Another said, “He is a community man, but he is also a family man. Men like that don’t exist, they are for fairy tales.”
I meet a small team of Guana natives and second homeowners. We assemble in a boat, and motor off the docks. Meeting these people face-to-face reminds me of how diverse the Baker’s Bay opposition is – they represent every ethnicity of the Bahamas. They are tanned fishermen, graying conservationists, school children, bartenders, housekeepers. They are all mostly barefoot.
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