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 Sea turtles feed on upside-down jellyfish, but silting in Baker's Bay is killing off turtle grass beds, upside-down jellyfish and the small coral communities on the Sea of Abaco side of Great Guana Cay. |
Fred Smith signed on as the attorney for Save Guana Cay Reef in early 2005. Fred is a charismatic attorney from Freeport, the second largest city in the Bahamas. He is ethnically Haitian.
Ethnically, Bahamas is Bahamian black, loyalist white, and Haitian; some in the nation hold fervent disdain for Haitians – those illegal voodoo worshippers who take our jobs. In this environment, Fred has sought to fight for Haitian human rights issues. His cause is a just one. Even here in the Abacos are three Haitian immigrant camps; the squalor is invisible next to marinas and mansions. Fred dresses in dark suits and perfect white shirts, but his easy-to-laugh, perverse sense of humor belies his formality.
Fred took on the Save Guana Cay Reef case pro bono.
The case was clear-cut to Fred.
But, he warned the locals at Great Guana Cay. Stephen Jenkins recalls his words, “…you are going to lose in the Bahamian Supreme Court. You are going to lose in appeals court. You have to be prepared for three to five years of incredible loss. You can’t expect this to be easy. He told the islanders of Great Guana Cay this – you have to be prepared to go all the way to Privy Council.”
There are no adequate environmental laws in the Bahamas, particularly concerning the marine environment. This may sound peculiar, since the Bahamas’ economy is based on the health of its marine ecosystems.
Fred’s case is built on the premise that the Bahamian government was irrational in its decision to enter into an agreement with a foreign developer, to give away land intended for Guana Bahamians, and that the government had no authority to circumvent local government.
At that time, the Prime Minister of the Bahamas was a man named Perry Christie.
Before all this, Perry Christie and current Prime Minister Hubert Ingraham were law partners.
But as they entered politics, the two parted ways – politically, they were opposites. Over time, darkness replaced their friendship and partnership and they became adversaries in the battle for how the Bahamas would grow.
The Bahamas’ very first Prime Minister was Sir Lynden Pindling, a lawyer who was knighted by the Queen, was accused by investigative journalists of taking bribes from Columbian drug smugglers. He denied every charge, but it quickly became clear that he could not account for all his wealth.
In came the second Prime Minister, Hubert Ingraham. Ingraham grew up on the island of Abaco, in a small village called Cooper’s Town. Ingraham’s rule from 1992 to 2002 was satisfactory; he ruled conservatively, and sometimes wisely. Ingraham is known for making decisions often unpopular with the ways of the country. I always admired him for that.
In 2002, the opposition party beat Ingraham. Perry Christie was sworn in, and almost immediately developed a national economic strategy called the Anchor Development Policy.
In the Bahamas, a political strategy is often largely, and mistakenly, a tourism strategy.
In the Bahamas, the vast majority of hotel tourism is centered around Nassau and Paradise Island. The Atlantis Resorts and other giant tourist traps line this center of the Bahamas. But the out-islands are sparsely populated wildernesses that contribute more than their fair share of the country’s GDP through quiet cottage-industry tourism and second home-owner economies.
Christie’s goal was to change all that and usher in an age of prosperity for the Bahamas by installing huge, initial mega-developments on each of the out-islands. These mega-developments would bring infrastructure, airports and marinas to places that in the 1990’s were the end of the world. Casinos in small religious communities. World-class golf on tiny atolls. Marinas cut from mangroves.
As Prime Minister, Perry Christie acted as wheeler-dealer, enticing Bahamians with the wow factor of jobs and prosperity by getting big agreements signed with foreign developers.
Fred Smith’s case against the Prime Minister and the Baker’s Bay developers rocked the nation. Other out-island communities were intensely suspicious of the anchor development policy. For one, who were these developers the Prime Minister was bringing into the country. Why did they come from strange countries in the Middle East? Why did some of them have unscrupulous backgrounds? Did they really have the financial backing to build such a place? And why were they hiring workers from Guatemala and El Salvador, instead of hiring hungry Bahamians?
What about those mangroves, many of the out-islanders were asking. What about our traditional way of life? Why is the Prime Minister giving away land that was meant for our benefit at a time when the Bahamas faces the threat of Miami-spillover; the idea that the Bahamas will be so over-developed simply because land around Miami has run out. The very real fear: that the Bahamas becomes a country only in name.
Many Bahamians were angry about the anchor development problem, even though its central enticement – jobs – indeed seemed very real.
Hubert Ingraham, initially reluctant to take on his party’s candidacy for Prime Minister, came out swinging against Perry Christie. His mantra was this: the anchor development policy must be dismantled.
The people on Great Guana Cay, 91 Bahamians in a country of some 300,000 people, were shocked. Candidate Ingraham’s platform was based on their message: local rights, sustainable development, no crown land to foreigners. It sounded, in fact, like Ingraham was borrowing heavily from Save Guana Cay Reef to win the election.
I called the Prime Minister at his home one morning. I told him I wanted to talk with him about Great Guana Cay. It appeared he thought I was someone else when he said, “Oh, don’t worry. That’s all been taken care of.”
He sounded ill, and said as much. “Why don’t we finish this up by email”, I said. A few days later, the Prime Minister had written me a long paper on his thoughts on the Guana Cay controversy. He blamed the Christie Administration, he questioned the need for the golf course and marina.
If Ingraham was elected, the locals of Great Guana Cay may have a political voice, not just a legal voice.
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