Whether providing slave labor, raw materials, or vacations for the rich, for centuries the economies of the Caribbean Basin islands have been under foreign control or domination. The Reagan Administration continued this long tradition with its "Caribbean Basin Initiative" (CBI), which provided new incentives for foreign investment in the region's telecommunications and service industries. The entire Caribbean Basin provides a sobering example of a digitized, exploitative information economy.
In Jamaica, for instance, Britain's Cable & Wireless teamed up with AT&T and Telecommunications Jamaica to build a state-of-the-art teleport facility in Montego Bay. By the end of the 1980s, Digiport International had become a "data-haven" where word processing sweatshops converted data from hard copy into digital format for American businesses. Meanwhile, only 10% of Jamaicans have their own telephones.
In Barbados, whose phone company was sold to Cable & Wireless in 1987, word processors were already exporting more than 10 billion keystrokes each day by 1988, yet were paid less than $2 an hour.
After more than a decade of heavy foreign investment in telecommunications infrastructure (including a trans-Caribbean fiber-optic cable system), these countries excel at meeting the new "demands" of foreign companies. Yet less than 10% of the English speaking Caribbean population has a telephone at home, and even fewer have access to a television.
Kevin Leppmann is a doctoral student in political science at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He teaches international political economy at Boston College.