Linda and I sometimes wonder what will happen to our house when we’re gone. Our son will inherit it, and his children after him if he leaves a proper Will. We both come from unsentimental families, where homes are concerned, so we don’t expect our Cayman one to become any kind of ancestral shrine.
Our respective childhood homes were long ago sold to strangers. So were our parents’ childhood homes – except my father’s, which his brother inherited and still lives in; his children live 10,000 miles away; they won’t want it. Our respective ancestors never had any ancestral homes worth venerating; the families shifted around within the British Isles until they emigrated. There is a lot of restlessness in our blood and in our son’s and grandchildren’s. In Norway, the girls’ father lives in a rented forest-cottage (and owns a second, bought for refurbishment and sale), and their mother lives in another.
Ross once bought a strip of hillside in Guatemala (total area 6000 sq ft), with a big tree in the middle and a fabulous view of Lake Atitlan. He and some of the local Mayans built a basic shack in the tree, and his little family lived there for a time. But last time I checked, Guatemala had no central land-registry, so how much validity could his document of title have? Anyway, a tree-house hardly qualifies as an ancestral home. Linda and I once bought a town-lot in the New Hebrides in the South Pacific, before it went independent as Vanuatu. The new government promptly stole all foreign-owned land that hadn’t been built on. Ah well, that’s what a lot of newly independent countries do.
Most young Caymanians can’t comprehend the absence of mental attachment to a home or to a settled community. They don’t realise what their commitment to their island-home costs them, in terms of opportunities. Actually, it’s a very recent cultural development. Caymanians of the same generations as my father and his father (born in the 1910s and the 1880s, respectively) were as adventurous as other British peoples scattered around the world. Unfortunately, the adventurous Caymanian spirit seems to have exhausted itself, since. And, yes, I do mean “unfortunately”.
There is much virtue in experimenting with new homes, and passing up a life of safety. Two of my Grandpa Barlow’s brothers died in their twenties while adventuring far from home. I don’t mean that dying in one’s twenties is something to aim for; I’m reasonably sure they didn’t aim for it. But one was killed by aborigines, panning for gold in the wild north of Queensland; the other died of malaria, working on a farm in Madagascar – and those were adventurous things. Plenty of Caymanians must have died of yellow fever in Panama in their twenties while digging the canal, and others in unrecorded hurricanes fishing off Cuba and Nicaragua. Not everybody’s luck is good luck.
Young Caymanian men who are trapped today under glass ceilings, or are unemployed, would get more sympathy if they brought some proof of initiative to the interview room, instead of relying on their birthright entitlement to a safe job in a safe place with a safe pension fifty years from now. I have long urged that every Caymanian school-leaver be given $1000 and a backpack and a 12-months ticket round the world. It’s a great idea.
There ought to be zero unemployment among young Caymanians – and there could be, if they were half the men their seafaring forebears were. And they would honour those forebears a whole lot more by emulating their spirit of adventure, than by staying home waiting for jobs to fall into their laps. If our MLAs had the welfare of our Islands at heart, they would tell our unemployed youth the same thing: get off your assets and go to where the jobs are.
Tuesday, March 27, 2012
Thursday, March 22, 2012
Gold, and other currencies
It’s common practice for governments (national, provincial, municipal, parish) to pledge their expected future revenues as security for borrowings. Fair enough. The loans have to be repaid out of children’s and grandchildren’s taxes, but that’s okay. After all, each generation benefits from all the governmental infrastructure it inherits from its predecessors.
A problem arises only when future revenues fall short of expectations. Then, responsible governments hustle around and cut their expenditure, by discontinuing some services and reducing others. Irresponsible governments simply borrow more money. By that measure, Cayman’s rulers (politicians, senior Civil Servants and the British FCO) are irresponsible, as are Greece’s rulers and the other PIIGS’, and indeed every European nation’s government, and America’s.
National governments that find themselves over-borrowed against future tax revenues must watch their chickens coming home to roost. Their national currencies become unstable, as their state revenues steadily decline because of economic recessions. Sooner or later, Greece will be forced out of the Euro and will default on all its debts. The cost of imported goods will rise out of sight. All the other PIIGS will meet the same fate, unless they reduce the scope of government. What about Cayman and the Cayman Islands Dollar? Well, why would different rules apply to them?
Might the Euro fall in value, and/or the Pound Sterling and/or the US Dollar? Not all at once, of course, but in some kind of progressive slippage? The logical question, rarely answered satisfactorily, is: What might they fall in value against? My personal belief is that, in time, they will all be measured against a brand-new international currency based on the prices of certain commodities (selected by the corrupt banksters, who else?). “Commodities” covers all kinds of tradable raw materials: metals, crops, land, meat, even water; the viability of the imagined new currency will depend on which commodities are selected.
In the present absence of such a currency, many financial commentators use an ounce of pure gold as the standard by which they assess the values of national currencies. In 1971 an ounce of gold could be exchanged for US$35, today it is “worth” $1700, give or take. Now, EITHER the price of gold has risen to nearly fifty times its value of forty years ago OR the US currency has fallen to a fiftieth of its former value. Which is it? Well, an ounce of gold buys about the same today as it did back then, which means that its value has remained constant. It’s the paper currency whose value has deteriorated.
Imagine a new-born baby being given a $35 gift certificate in 1971 and his twin given a one-ounce gold coin. Guess which of them would be the most pleased today. The one with the coin could today buy almost fifty times as much stuff as his brother could, with the gift. I can hear my grand-daughters now, “Grandpa, thanks for the $1700 birthday gift certificate (as if...!), but could we please have a gold coin instead?”
Gold isn’t the answer to all the world’s problems. It’s just another currency, and it pays no dividends. But an ounce of it was a better gift than $35 cash in 1971, and most years since then. In forty years from now it might be worth – well, actually, it would be worth the same as it is now. Its value remains pretty constant. But dollar-bills might be worth a whole lot less. That coin might sell for $85,000 (fifty times $1700) in grossly devalued paper currency, when my girls are approaching retirement age.
Of course their pension funds may contain some shares of even higher value (weapons-manufacturers are bound to do well between now and then), but will the fund-managers be shrewd enough to have a diverse portfolio that includes some gold coins? I certainly hope so.
A problem arises only when future revenues fall short of expectations. Then, responsible governments hustle around and cut their expenditure, by discontinuing some services and reducing others. Irresponsible governments simply borrow more money. By that measure, Cayman’s rulers (politicians, senior Civil Servants and the British FCO) are irresponsible, as are Greece’s rulers and the other PIIGS’, and indeed every European nation’s government, and America’s.
National governments that find themselves over-borrowed against future tax revenues must watch their chickens coming home to roost. Their national currencies become unstable, as their state revenues steadily decline because of economic recessions. Sooner or later, Greece will be forced out of the Euro and will default on all its debts. The cost of imported goods will rise out of sight. All the other PIIGS will meet the same fate, unless they reduce the scope of government. What about Cayman and the Cayman Islands Dollar? Well, why would different rules apply to them?
Might the Euro fall in value, and/or the Pound Sterling and/or the US Dollar? Not all at once, of course, but in some kind of progressive slippage? The logical question, rarely answered satisfactorily, is: What might they fall in value against? My personal belief is that, in time, they will all be measured against a brand-new international currency based on the prices of certain commodities (selected by the corrupt banksters, who else?). “Commodities” covers all kinds of tradable raw materials: metals, crops, land, meat, even water; the viability of the imagined new currency will depend on which commodities are selected.
In the present absence of such a currency, many financial commentators use an ounce of pure gold as the standard by which they assess the values of national currencies. In 1971 an ounce of gold could be exchanged for US$35, today it is “worth” $1700, give or take. Now, EITHER the price of gold has risen to nearly fifty times its value of forty years ago OR the US currency has fallen to a fiftieth of its former value. Which is it? Well, an ounce of gold buys about the same today as it did back then, which means that its value has remained constant. It’s the paper currency whose value has deteriorated.
Imagine a new-born baby being given a $35 gift certificate in 1971 and his twin given a one-ounce gold coin. Guess which of them would be the most pleased today. The one with the coin could today buy almost fifty times as much stuff as his brother could, with the gift. I can hear my grand-daughters now, “Grandpa, thanks for the $1700 birthday gift certificate (as if...!), but could we please have a gold coin instead?”
Gold isn’t the answer to all the world’s problems. It’s just another currency, and it pays no dividends. But an ounce of it was a better gift than $35 cash in 1971, and most years since then. In forty years from now it might be worth – well, actually, it would be worth the same as it is now. Its value remains pretty constant. But dollar-bills might be worth a whole lot less. That coin might sell for $85,000 (fifty times $1700) in grossly devalued paper currency, when my girls are approaching retirement age.
Of course their pension funds may contain some shares of even higher value (weapons-manufacturers are bound to do well between now and then), but will the fund-managers be shrewd enough to have a diverse portfolio that includes some gold coins? I certainly hope so.
Sunday, March 18, 2012
Investing for retirement
Everybody saves for retirement, some more carefully than others. Some of us rely on government pensions to sustain us in our retirement, some on company pensions, some on private Pension Funds to which we have contributed. We trust the Pensions managers not to steal our money, and we trust them to invest it sensibly – in blue-chip bonds and shares denominated in reputable currencies.
If we want to gamble on dodgy nickel-miners or Third World bonds, we’ll do it with our play-money, thank you. We certainly don’t want anybody to gamble with our retirement savings. If they lost it, what would we do when we’re too old to work?
It’s a bit disconcerting to observe the shaky status of the Euro, the European currency that is used by a ragged assortment of seventeen nations – including what are charmingly called the PIIGS, pronounced “pigs” – Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece and Spain. Greece is the Western banksters’ chosen practice ground, where they experiment with how far a nation can be degraded before it collapses into a Police state.
Bankster is a new word combining the words “banker” and “gangster”. Banker in this usage refers to an investment-banker (merchant-banker, in England) – not a traditional, respected, straight-as-a-die clerk like the nice man or woman who stamps your deposit-slips.
Many of us are uncertain whether the world’s politicians and senior Civil Servants – in general – are too corrupt and irresponsible to be trusted. We need have little doubt with regard to those in the five PIIGS. There, corrupt banksters have bribed or bullied corrupt officials into pledging their governments’ future tax revenues as security for unnecessary loans.
The loans are (as often as not) spent on weapons to ward off imagined enemies. And, as often as not, the corrupt banksters own the weapons-manufacturers. And even more often than not, all the corrupt bribers and bullies get together and persuade the victim-nations to go to war by even more bribing and bullying, so that the weapons actually get used and have to be replaced with new ones. It’s a sweet deal.
Sometimes the loan-money is passed directly to the weapons-makers. Greece, poor and bankrupt, spent the whole of one of its recent bailout-tranches on new army tanks and other equipment. It doesn’t even have an enemy at the moment! Well, never mind, the banksters will find them one. Stand by for a false-flag attack by some CIA-sponsored gang based in Turkey.
The relevance of all this is that some of our own retirement-savings are invested (indirectly, at least) in PIIGS government bonds, some of which have no likelihood of being repaid except in grossly devalued currencies.
A few years ago I attended a couple of AGMs of one local Pension Fund, just to see what it was doing with my son’s savings. What a bunch of innocents its Directors and Investment Managers were. They didn’t have much of a clue about the outside world. As long as their portfolios were beating “the benchmark” (which they themselves had set), they were happy. Never mind if the US Dollar was going up or down; they had no idea at all how that might impact their members’ retirement savings.
All our local Pension Funds’ investments are governed by the Pensions Law, passed by our local parish-councillors, which permits some specified kinds of investments and forbids others. Last time I checked, it permitted Greek government bonds and forbade gold bullion. Sigh.
Friday, March 16, 2012
A back road to Bulgaria (T 6 - 1964/5)
(The sixth in my series of travel stories for the granddaughters – November 1964)
The old peasant woman, comfortable in the passenger seat, gabbled away at me off and on for miles. I replied as civilly as I could, and asked her to tell me when we reached the turn-off to Bulgaria. Her side of the story, for her family that night, would be: “This young foreign man in his car (a car! My dear!) didn’t know where he was or why, or what I was telling him. I had to shout at him to make him stop where I wanted to get off. At that point, he didn’t know whether to go north or south!” She was relieved to be back on her feet again; I was annoyed in case I had missed the turn-off.
It was an unpaved back road that didn’t even show up on my map of Yugoslavia. The only car on the road was mine, and the old woman the only pedestrian – plodding along to who knew where for who knew how many miles. Common decency required that I stop and offer her a lift; common decency probably required that she accept. Whatever language she spoke, it wasn’t the Serbo-Croat of my dictionary. Wikipedia reckons it was a Macedonian dialect of Bulgarian, but I didn’t know that then.
I had indeed missed the turn-off. I recalled passing a weather-beaten wooden signpost with weird lettering, which probably didn’t spell “Bulgaria” anyway. Ah well, what can you do? The back road ended at the Greek border, so I crossed there and travelled for the next four months with a slowly expiring Bulgarian visa. That night I pulled up at the Youth Hostel in Thessaloniki, and the next night drank coffee on the roof with fellow-hostellers after watching the movie Zorba the Greek. I wrote about all that in January, though without mentioning the wretched old peasant woman who was responsible for the trouble and strife (Cockney slang) in my life ever since.
It’s hard to remember, now, why I had bothered to get a Bulgarian visa, back in London. Nobody ever deliberately headed for Bulgaria, except on the way through to somewhere else. Entering Bulgaria with Linda four months later was simplicity itself, with a visa from Istanbul. Leaving the country was rather more memorable, occurring on yet another back road. Yet again, my car was the only traffic for miles around – the only vehicle wanting to cross into Romania at this godforsaken spot, at least.
My side of the conversation went something like this, in pidgin German interspersed with occasional words from my Bulgarian-English dictionary. “It has been a pleasant stay in your beautiful country. Now please change our unspent local currency into Romanian currency. Oh, well, any currency will do. Well, if you don’t have any foreign currency, never mind; we will exchange it at the Romanian post just over there (a hundred yards across a bridge). What?! It’s illegal to take Bulgarian currency out of the country? Never mind, we’ll go back to the petrol pump a few miles back and spend it there. What do you mean you’ve already stamped us out of Bulgaria? Well, stamp us back in again, please. We would need another visa for that? And you aren’t authorised to issue visas? Sheesh. Tell you what, you keep our passports and we will drive back and get the petrol. Oh dear. We can’t travel in Bulgaria without a passport. So we must just give you the money, and you will give us a receipt? Hmm. I don’t think so.”
I demanded to speak with the Ministry of Tourism, then Foreign Affairs, then Internal Affairs, then the Prime Minister’s Office; oh, and the British Embassy. Please. Pronto. The phone rang hot for the next three hours, while we sulked in the car and wondered if we might have to stay in it all night.
In the end the Romanians changed the money for us without a fuss. It wasn’t illegal for them, which was just as well, I guess.
The old peasant woman, comfortable in the passenger seat, gabbled away at me off and on for miles. I replied as civilly as I could, and asked her to tell me when we reached the turn-off to Bulgaria. Her side of the story, for her family that night, would be: “This young foreign man in his car (a car! My dear!) didn’t know where he was or why, or what I was telling him. I had to shout at him to make him stop where I wanted to get off. At that point, he didn’t know whether to go north or south!” She was relieved to be back on her feet again; I was annoyed in case I had missed the turn-off.
It was an unpaved back road that didn’t even show up on my map of Yugoslavia. The only car on the road was mine, and the old woman the only pedestrian – plodding along to who knew where for who knew how many miles. Common decency required that I stop and offer her a lift; common decency probably required that she accept. Whatever language she spoke, it wasn’t the Serbo-Croat of my dictionary. Wikipedia reckons it was a Macedonian dialect of Bulgarian, but I didn’t know that then.
I had indeed missed the turn-off. I recalled passing a weather-beaten wooden signpost with weird lettering, which probably didn’t spell “Bulgaria” anyway. Ah well, what can you do? The back road ended at the Greek border, so I crossed there and travelled for the next four months with a slowly expiring Bulgarian visa. That night I pulled up at the Youth Hostel in Thessaloniki, and the next night drank coffee on the roof with fellow-hostellers after watching the movie Zorba the Greek. I wrote about all that in January, though without mentioning the wretched old peasant woman who was responsible for the trouble and strife (Cockney slang) in my life ever since.
It’s hard to remember, now, why I had bothered to get a Bulgarian visa, back in London. Nobody ever deliberately headed for Bulgaria, except on the way through to somewhere else. Entering Bulgaria with Linda four months later was simplicity itself, with a visa from Istanbul. Leaving the country was rather more memorable, occurring on yet another back road. Yet again, my car was the only traffic for miles around – the only vehicle wanting to cross into Romania at this godforsaken spot, at least.
My side of the conversation went something like this, in pidgin German interspersed with occasional words from my Bulgarian-English dictionary. “It has been a pleasant stay in your beautiful country. Now please change our unspent local currency into Romanian currency. Oh, well, any currency will do. Well, if you don’t have any foreign currency, never mind; we will exchange it at the Romanian post just over there (a hundred yards across a bridge). What?! It’s illegal to take Bulgarian currency out of the country? Never mind, we’ll go back to the petrol pump a few miles back and spend it there. What do you mean you’ve already stamped us out of Bulgaria? Well, stamp us back in again, please. We would need another visa for that? And you aren’t authorised to issue visas? Sheesh. Tell you what, you keep our passports and we will drive back and get the petrol. Oh dear. We can’t travel in Bulgaria without a passport. So we must just give you the money, and you will give us a receipt? Hmm. I don’t think so.”
I demanded to speak with the Ministry of Tourism, then Foreign Affairs, then Internal Affairs, then the Prime Minister’s Office; oh, and the British Embassy. Please. Pronto. The phone rang hot for the next three hours, while we sulked in the car and wondered if we might have to stay in it all night.
In the end the Romanians changed the money for us without a fuss. It wasn’t illegal for them, which was just as well, I guess.
Sunday, March 11, 2012
The names of God (in foreign languages)
“Any man’s death diminishes me, for I am involved in mankind.” John Donne, English priest.
This Easter, coming up, it’s worth taking a look at what mankind is doing in the Middle East at the moment, in the names of God. The native peoples of the region have for years been resisting invasion and occupation by overseas nations – Britain, the USA and Israel, mainly. Religious differences are not among the official reasons for the invaders’ brutalities, but they have been a useful tool to suck in Christians and Jews in support of all the aggression. The victims’ god is an Evil God, and people like that must themselves be evil, right? It stands to reason. Sub-humans, in fact. Vermin, cockroaches: their lives are of no account.
The West’s Christian-Jewish mass media uses false translations and false-flag attacks as evidence of its enemies’ devilish designs; the Moslem mass media probably tries to do the same, though not to the point of endorsing overseas invasions. As in every war in history, each side claims that its god is superior to the other’s. Each piles disrespect on the other’s god, and on its name.
But the names of gods come and go with the spoken languages of peoples. The name of God in the Aramaic language of two thousand years ago was, actually, “Allah”. That was Jesus’s god, since he spoke Aramaic as his native language. The same name is used today not just by all Moslems, but also by all Christians in the Middle East, to the best of my knowledge. The name derives originally from the earliest reported Biblical name of a tribal god – Elohim, which is actually a plural form from the time before the Children of Israel settled on a single deity.
Most of the names of gods began as tribal names. Germanic Gott (= God) came from the tribe that called itself Goth. Southern Europeans use variants of the name of Zeus, which is traceable back to an early Sumerian god. In all the wars fought in medieval Europe, I’ve never read that Dieu or Dios was ever hated with the intensity that Allah is today. Why is that? Did the medieval English miss a trick, or were they just not as stupid as we are? “My name for the #1 god of the world is the True Name, and if you don’t agree I will kill you and all your babies.” Even in our isolated little parish of Cayman we can see the awesome stupidity of that.
All the world’s torturers and mutilators believe their god is on their side. Well, fair enough; what’s a tribal god for, if not to be on the side of its priests and their congregations? Unfortunately, much of the torture and mutilation is done in the name of Gentle Jesus Meek and Mild, with Christian congregations praying their hearts out for more of the same while cursing the evil that is Allah. As we speak, there are eighty million Iranians waiting to be bombed out of existence by the agents of those congregations. We are asked to imagine Gentle Jesus wandering around preaching “nuke the bastards!” Not so meek, not so mild; just out for Allah’s blood.
Easter is a time to be thinking about such things. The spring equinox has been a religious born-again festival for many thousands of years. Its modern name derives from the last part of the name Zoroaster, an ancient Iranian god. By one of its variants, Aster, Istra, Ishtar, etc, it would have been the tribal god of the Hittite-era nation of Isuwa. My January blog posting The Children of Israel reckoned that Isuwa was the origin of the name Isra (-el), holy to Jews and Christians today.
Oh, the irony. Oh, how the gods must be laughing.
This Easter, coming up, it’s worth taking a look at what mankind is doing in the Middle East at the moment, in the names of God. The native peoples of the region have for years been resisting invasion and occupation by overseas nations – Britain, the USA and Israel, mainly. Religious differences are not among the official reasons for the invaders’ brutalities, but they have been a useful tool to suck in Christians and Jews in support of all the aggression. The victims’ god is an Evil God, and people like that must themselves be evil, right? It stands to reason. Sub-humans, in fact. Vermin, cockroaches: their lives are of no account.
The West’s Christian-Jewish mass media uses false translations and false-flag attacks as evidence of its enemies’ devilish designs; the Moslem mass media probably tries to do the same, though not to the point of endorsing overseas invasions. As in every war in history, each side claims that its god is superior to the other’s. Each piles disrespect on the other’s god, and on its name.
But the names of gods come and go with the spoken languages of peoples. The name of God in the Aramaic language of two thousand years ago was, actually, “Allah”. That was Jesus’s god, since he spoke Aramaic as his native language. The same name is used today not just by all Moslems, but also by all Christians in the Middle East, to the best of my knowledge. The name derives originally from the earliest reported Biblical name of a tribal god – Elohim, which is actually a plural form from the time before the Children of Israel settled on a single deity.
Most of the names of gods began as tribal names. Germanic Gott (= God) came from the tribe that called itself Goth. Southern Europeans use variants of the name of Zeus, which is traceable back to an early Sumerian god. In all the wars fought in medieval Europe, I’ve never read that Dieu or Dios was ever hated with the intensity that Allah is today. Why is that? Did the medieval English miss a trick, or were they just not as stupid as we are? “My name for the #1 god of the world is the True Name, and if you don’t agree I will kill you and all your babies.” Even in our isolated little parish of Cayman we can see the awesome stupidity of that.
All the world’s torturers and mutilators believe their god is on their side. Well, fair enough; what’s a tribal god for, if not to be on the side of its priests and their congregations? Unfortunately, much of the torture and mutilation is done in the name of Gentle Jesus Meek and Mild, with Christian congregations praying their hearts out for more of the same while cursing the evil that is Allah. As we speak, there are eighty million Iranians waiting to be bombed out of existence by the agents of those congregations. We are asked to imagine Gentle Jesus wandering around preaching “nuke the bastards!” Not so meek, not so mild; just out for Allah’s blood.
Easter is a time to be thinking about such things. The spring equinox has been a religious born-again festival for many thousands of years. Its modern name derives from the last part of the name Zoroaster, an ancient Iranian god. By one of its variants, Aster, Istra, Ishtar, etc, it would have been the tribal god of the Hittite-era nation of Isuwa. My January blog posting The Children of Israel reckoned that Isuwa was the origin of the name Isra (-el), holy to Jews and Christians today.
Oh, the irony. Oh, how the gods must be laughing.
Sunday, March 4, 2012
Cayman – warts and all
Last Tuesday at 11.30 in the morning, somebody in Switzerland was reading my “Checkpoint Charlie” posting of last December. Fancy that. I don’t even know anybody in Switzerland. What an amazing thing it is, to be able to track one’s online visitors, on such a basic blogsite as mine. The tracking is limited, of course; Switzerland is a big place.
My stats analysis doesn’t stretch to a Google Earth view of the man’s front door. In the whole of last week, he or she was my only visitor from Switzerland. There were twenty hits from Hong Kong and eight from Russia, of all places. Whoa! Are we talking KGB and the Chinese equivalent, or what?
Actually, the visitors are probably Western expats who belong to the same expat-blog.com that I joined recently. We read one another’s blogsites, those that look interesting. Some of the blog-portals on the Web have hundreds of members. Most of them are much younger than I am – boys and girls in their twenties, who post photos of beach parties and boating adventures.
Some forums are more serious – elderly folk looking for cheap places to retire, and middle-aged folk wondering where to store gold bars where their tax-men won’t find it. Many ask for information on local lifestyles, laws and customs.
Nearly all posters to the forums are anonymous – just like the posters on Cayman News Service’s forums. Most of my posts on this my own blog are about Cayman’s lifestyle, laws and customs – good and bad. The code of ethics for expat blogs requires that one tells the truth about one’s current home – warts and all, as they say. However, the only safe way to do that here in Cayman is to hide one’s identity.
In today’s CNS “Viewpoint” column, for instance, someone calling himself “Cayman Conscience” suggests that Cayman doesn’t need 15 elected MLAs. Of the forty people who have posted comments, all forty of them hid their identities. That pretty much says it all. Any expat who signed his name would risk deportation, any native Caymanian would risk being punished through the indentures-licensing system.
Still, fear can’t be the reason why most posters on international blogs and forums prefer anonymity. I’ve no idea why they do. I have (though not by choice) been a Daniel in the furnace, in Cayman, so there is no point in my hiding my identity. When Cayman’s political establishment sought to deport me (and my young son, for goodness sake) for the “crime” of opening the Chamber of Commerce’s office in 1986-88, my Directors’ intervention saved us.
When my Work Permit was pulled, a senior British Civil Servant was able to keep me on the Island. When, years later, the old establishment sought to cancel my Permanent Residency for writing an independent newspaper column, public support from the owners of the local TV station saved my bacon.
Censorship is a way of life here, for expats and ethnic Caymanians alike. Besides that, though, Cayman is a comfortable place for expats of all ages to live. The money is excellent compared with what’s available back home, wherever home is. Security of tenure is reasonable and fair for foreign workers with skills, provided the censorship rules are obeyed.
Foreign workers without skills risk being exploited by the indentured-labour system; they have limited civil rights. However, we have thousands of unskilled expats from Jamaica, the Philippines and the old British India. They don’t all get exploited; indeed, most employers treat their expats very fairly.
I expect the same applies in all places with an indentured-labour system. It’s rather shameful for a British colony to stand comparison with the Gulf dictatorships in permitting the exploitation of unskilled foreign labourers, but there it is.
My stats analysis doesn’t stretch to a Google Earth view of the man’s front door. In the whole of last week, he or she was my only visitor from Switzerland. There were twenty hits from Hong Kong and eight from Russia, of all places. Whoa! Are we talking KGB and the Chinese equivalent, or what?
Actually, the visitors are probably Western expats who belong to the same expat-blog.com that I joined recently. We read one another’s blogsites, those that look interesting. Some of the blog-portals on the Web have hundreds of members. Most of them are much younger than I am – boys and girls in their twenties, who post photos of beach parties and boating adventures.
Some forums are more serious – elderly folk looking for cheap places to retire, and middle-aged folk wondering where to store gold bars where their tax-men won’t find it. Many ask for information on local lifestyles, laws and customs.
Nearly all posters to the forums are anonymous – just like the posters on Cayman News Service’s forums. Most of my posts on this my own blog are about Cayman’s lifestyle, laws and customs – good and bad. The code of ethics for expat blogs requires that one tells the truth about one’s current home – warts and all, as they say. However, the only safe way to do that here in Cayman is to hide one’s identity.
In today’s CNS “Viewpoint” column, for instance, someone calling himself “Cayman Conscience” suggests that Cayman doesn’t need 15 elected MLAs. Of the forty people who have posted comments, all forty of them hid their identities. That pretty much says it all. Any expat who signed his name would risk deportation, any native Caymanian would risk being punished through the indentures-licensing system.
Still, fear can’t be the reason why most posters on international blogs and forums prefer anonymity. I’ve no idea why they do. I have (though not by choice) been a Daniel in the furnace, in Cayman, so there is no point in my hiding my identity. When Cayman’s political establishment sought to deport me (and my young son, for goodness sake) for the “crime” of opening the Chamber of Commerce’s office in 1986-88, my Directors’ intervention saved us.
When my Work Permit was pulled, a senior British Civil Servant was able to keep me on the Island. When, years later, the old establishment sought to cancel my Permanent Residency for writing an independent newspaper column, public support from the owners of the local TV station saved my bacon.
Censorship is a way of life here, for expats and ethnic Caymanians alike. Besides that, though, Cayman is a comfortable place for expats of all ages to live. The money is excellent compared with what’s available back home, wherever home is. Security of tenure is reasonable and fair for foreign workers with skills, provided the censorship rules are obeyed.
Foreign workers without skills risk being exploited by the indentured-labour system; they have limited civil rights. However, we have thousands of unskilled expats from Jamaica, the Philippines and the old British India. They don’t all get exploited; indeed, most employers treat their expats very fairly.
I expect the same applies in all places with an indentured-labour system. It’s rather shameful for a British colony to stand comparison with the Gulf dictatorships in permitting the exploitation of unskilled foreign labourers, but there it is.
Sunday, February 26, 2012
Wiped off the map
It’s always interesting reading about countries whose names have been wiped off the map. Anybody who has ever collected postage stamps knows exactly what I mean. With the dissolution of Yugoslavia, its name was replaced by the names of its six component republics. In the same fashion the USSR became Russia and some of the other former USSR republics. A short time later, East Germany was removed, when it reunited with West Germany.
Korea is now two Koreas, China is two Chinas. The India of the British Empire disappeared to become India Bharat and Pakistan, and later Bangla Desh too. The new India wiped the remaining European enclaves off the map when it annexed Goa and Pondicherry and a few others in the 1960s. Today’s maps show only one Vietnam, one Indonesia and one Malaysia; each of those nations once comprised several separate pages in collectors’ stamp albums.
Sometimes the mapmakers are called upon to make only minor changes in names, following regime changes. The People’s Republic of Poland dropped the word People’s (all in the Polish language, of course) after the collapse of the Communist regime. The Republic of Venezuela added the word Bolivarian in its 1999 Constitution, following an election that brought in a new Government.
The Union of South Africa became the Republic of... in its 1961 Constitution. If the place we now know as Israel ever enfranchises all its subject people it might well change its name to Palestine, following a change of regime. There has been a terrible hoo-hah since Reuters reported the Iranian President’s prediction in 2008 that the Israeli regime “...will soon disappear off the geographical scene”; but it really shouldn’t be a big deal, except for the current regime itself.
The dissolution of empires is commonly accompanied by new national names. The Austro-Hungarian Empire and the Ottoman Empire were wiped off the maps after the Great War of 1914-18 – not by military conquest, quite, but by the Peace Treaties that followed the War. Dissolutions are occasionally reversed. After a few years of political independence after the 1917 revolution, parts of the old Russian Empire were absorbed into the new USSR – a Russian Empire by another name.
Much depends on the political preferences of victor nations, after wars. The destruction of the Ottoman Empire resulted in the creation or re-creation of several nations in the Middle East, some of which were considered European colonies under League of Nations “mandates”.
The Western powers’ choice of Palestine as a new territorial home for the world’s Jewry set the stage for the savage fiasco that we see today, with each of the two ethnic groups claiming naming rights. Palestinian maps show the invaders’ land as “Occupied Territories” and Israeli ones show its native reservations as “Disputed Territories”. The cleaning-up of the old Ottoman map is proving to be a long drawn-out affair.
Empires’ and nations’ boundaries change according to the demands of history and military power. It’s no longer true that the sun never sets on the British Empire. Today, the sun never sets on the American Empire. The British people were intensely proud of their empire, brutal though it was for its conquered peoples; but that was then. Americans tend to be embarrassed by theirs, and indeed by the very word “empire”.
Britain used to rule everywhere marked pink on maps of the world, and felt no shame. The USA is not yet ready to brag about the extent of its territorial over-reach. American maps don’t even identify all its satrapies and bases by a single colour, for goodness sake.
Korea is now two Koreas, China is two Chinas. The India of the British Empire disappeared to become India Bharat and Pakistan, and later Bangla Desh too. The new India wiped the remaining European enclaves off the map when it annexed Goa and Pondicherry and a few others in the 1960s. Today’s maps show only one Vietnam, one Indonesia and one Malaysia; each of those nations once comprised several separate pages in collectors’ stamp albums.
Sometimes the mapmakers are called upon to make only minor changes in names, following regime changes. The People’s Republic of Poland dropped the word People’s (all in the Polish language, of course) after the collapse of the Communist regime. The Republic of Venezuela added the word Bolivarian in its 1999 Constitution, following an election that brought in a new Government.
The Union of South Africa became the Republic of... in its 1961 Constitution. If the place we now know as Israel ever enfranchises all its subject people it might well change its name to Palestine, following a change of regime. There has been a terrible hoo-hah since Reuters reported the Iranian President’s prediction in 2008 that the Israeli regime “...will soon disappear off the geographical scene”; but it really shouldn’t be a big deal, except for the current regime itself.
The dissolution of empires is commonly accompanied by new national names. The Austro-Hungarian Empire and the Ottoman Empire were wiped off the maps after the Great War of 1914-18 – not by military conquest, quite, but by the Peace Treaties that followed the War. Dissolutions are occasionally reversed. After a few years of political independence after the 1917 revolution, parts of the old Russian Empire were absorbed into the new USSR – a Russian Empire by another name.
Much depends on the political preferences of victor nations, after wars. The destruction of the Ottoman Empire resulted in the creation or re-creation of several nations in the Middle East, some of which were considered European colonies under League of Nations “mandates”.
The Western powers’ choice of Palestine as a new territorial home for the world’s Jewry set the stage for the savage fiasco that we see today, with each of the two ethnic groups claiming naming rights. Palestinian maps show the invaders’ land as “Occupied Territories” and Israeli ones show its native reservations as “Disputed Territories”. The cleaning-up of the old Ottoman map is proving to be a long drawn-out affair.
Empires’ and nations’ boundaries change according to the demands of history and military power. It’s no longer true that the sun never sets on the British Empire. Today, the sun never sets on the American Empire. The British people were intensely proud of their empire, brutal though it was for its conquered peoples; but that was then. Americans tend to be embarrassed by theirs, and indeed by the very word “empire”.
Britain used to rule everywhere marked pink on maps of the world, and felt no shame. The USA is not yet ready to brag about the extent of its territorial over-reach. American maps don’t even identify all its satrapies and bases by a single colour, for goodness sake.
Sunday, February 19, 2012
The Tombs of Jesus (T 5 - Jerusalem 1960s)
(Travellers’ tales, fifth episode – January 1965)
The Orthodox-and-Catholic tomb was identified by the mother of the first Christian Emperor of the Roman Empire. She comes with pretty impressive credentials, so she may have been right. Her site is protected by an ornate cathedral with all the traditional bells and whistles, and about as romantic as a brick wall.
The Protestant site – or the Church of England, at least – was identified by a famous English general more than 1500 years later. And thank God for his English perseverance, because his tomb is in a sweet little grotto – a terrifically romantic place altogether. The Emperor’s mother also unearthed four or five (I forget) nails from the One True Cross, which sounds like pretty diligent work from an old lady, three hundred years after the event.
Linda and I walked the original Stations of the Cross on the Via Dolorosa, while trying to resist the temptation to buy any souvenir crowns of thorns from the shopkeepers along the way. “You should buy, effendi! For these, two piastres (or whatever the currency was) – for those, three piastres. You should buy those!” They looked identical. “What’s the difference?” I asked. “Oh, sir! On those, the thorns are much sharper. Feel them, madam!” Our resistance fell away in the face of such logic, and we bought a wreath of sharp ones for the equivalent of two shillings Sterling.
Disappointingly, there was only one site claiming to be where the Holy Manger had stood, in Bethlehem. I have a fuzzy memory of peering into a dark hole in the floor of a second ornate cathedral. You’d think General Gordon might have come up with something better, but he must have been called away on business. The sole unrivalled site had also been identified by the Emperor’s mother. What a busy old lady she was – and so devout.
All these sites were in Palestine, in 1965 – in that part of it that had been given to Jordan in the 1949 Armistice Agreements. Since then, Israel has occupied so much of the territory that it’s hard to say which country they’re in now. All the best Old Testament sites were in Palestine, too, but probably aren’t now. So were most of the United Nations refugee camps for Palestinians expelled by the people they saw as European invaders. (Palestine has been wiped off the map since then, of course...)
We took the liberty of visiting one of the camps, and had tea with a family there. Most Christian Palestinians – Christians since the time of the Apostles, presumably – had given up and emigrated. Generally, only Moslems stayed, trusting in God and their corrupt leaders. They’re still there.
The only way out of Palestine for us was north to Syria. The Jordanian authorities would let us cross into Israel but not come back. That meant flying out to Cyprus from Tel Aviv, and we weren’t ready for that. The barbed-wire of the cease-fire line was fifteen feet from our hotel door, and that was as close as we got.
Instead, we took buses up to Damascus and were shown the very window used by St Paul in his famous escape. That was cool, not least the actual scuff-marks from his sandals on the wall, miraculously preserved. They didn’t actually look two thousand years old – although, in that dry air, who knows?
The Orthodox-and-Catholic tomb was identified by the mother of the first Christian Emperor of the Roman Empire. She comes with pretty impressive credentials, so she may have been right. Her site is protected by an ornate cathedral with all the traditional bells and whistles, and about as romantic as a brick wall.
The Protestant site – or the Church of England, at least – was identified by a famous English general more than 1500 years later. And thank God for his English perseverance, because his tomb is in a sweet little grotto – a terrifically romantic place altogether. The Emperor’s mother also unearthed four or five (I forget) nails from the One True Cross, which sounds like pretty diligent work from an old lady, three hundred years after the event.
Linda and I walked the original Stations of the Cross on the Via Dolorosa, while trying to resist the temptation to buy any souvenir crowns of thorns from the shopkeepers along the way. “You should buy, effendi! For these, two piastres (or whatever the currency was) – for those, three piastres. You should buy those!” They looked identical. “What’s the difference?” I asked. “Oh, sir! On those, the thorns are much sharper. Feel them, madam!” Our resistance fell away in the face of such logic, and we bought a wreath of sharp ones for the equivalent of two shillings Sterling.
Disappointingly, there was only one site claiming to be where the Holy Manger had stood, in Bethlehem. I have a fuzzy memory of peering into a dark hole in the floor of a second ornate cathedral. You’d think General Gordon might have come up with something better, but he must have been called away on business. The sole unrivalled site had also been identified by the Emperor’s mother. What a busy old lady she was – and so devout.
All these sites were in Palestine, in 1965 – in that part of it that had been given to Jordan in the 1949 Armistice Agreements. Since then, Israel has occupied so much of the territory that it’s hard to say which country they’re in now. All the best Old Testament sites were in Palestine, too, but probably aren’t now. So were most of the United Nations refugee camps for Palestinians expelled by the people they saw as European invaders. (Palestine has been wiped off the map since then, of course...)
We took the liberty of visiting one of the camps, and had tea with a family there. Most Christian Palestinians – Christians since the time of the Apostles, presumably – had given up and emigrated. Generally, only Moslems stayed, trusting in God and their corrupt leaders. They’re still there.
The only way out of Palestine for us was north to Syria. The Jordanian authorities would let us cross into Israel but not come back. That meant flying out to Cyprus from Tel Aviv, and we weren’t ready for that. The barbed-wire of the cease-fire line was fifteen feet from our hotel door, and that was as close as we got.
Instead, we took buses up to Damascus and were shown the very window used by St Paul in his famous escape. That was cool, not least the actual scuff-marks from his sandals on the wall, miraculously preserved. They didn’t actually look two thousand years old – although, in that dry air, who knows?
Friday, February 17, 2012
Almost American (the imperial heartland)
Visiting my son in Guatemala just after the second US invasion of Iraq, we met up with a young Canadian couple from Vancouver. The man didn’t sound Canadian (couldn’t pronounce “oat and aboat” properly), so I asked “Where before that?” The couple exchanged a doubtful look, then shrugged. “He’s from Texas”, she admitted. The presence of my obviously hippy son had eased me past the barrier of denial.
Thirty years before, I’d met plenty of pretend-Canadians with American accents – angry, betrayed and embarrassed over the invasion of Vietnam. Life is full of embarrassment for young idealists whose homeland is on a brutal imperial rampage. There is a wall in Washington memorialising the fifty thousand US patriot-invaders who died in Vietnam, but there is no memorial for the two million civilians they slaughtered.
I almost became an American myself, back in 1965. I filled in a form at the US Embassy in London, the clerk gave me a ticket, and I sat down in a crowd and waited to be called for an interview. Half an hour later, the Tannoy called for number 23; my number was 104. Huh. Time for Plan B. Around the corner at the Canadian Embassy I filled in another form, was interviewed immediately, and a month later was living in Toronto – reunited with Linda and learning all about curling and ice-hockey.
We were both on our way back to Australia, as soon as we could afford the tickets or until we got a better offer in someplace warm. In those days, Canadian snowbirds used to fly down to Florida and pay agencies to have their cars driven down. Newly married, we packed one of those cars with everything we owned and headed south to look for jobs in the Bahamas. There in Nassau, we all watched American TV, ate American food and learned about baseball and gridiron football. Our employers fleeced American tourists and helped rich people dodge American taxes. (No of course we didn’t fleece tourists. Just joking!) It was a good life, almost American.
We do the same things today in Cayman, pretty much. Many of our children go to US colleges, and come back only slightly changed. Americans work in our watersports operations, our hotels and restaurants, and our construction industry. Not in our banks, though, for fear of moles. We are an offshore tax-haven, after all. The CIA has its agents here, but MI6 (Britain’s equivalent) keeps them out of the banks. We’re a British colony, as Bahamas was in the ‘60s.
Wives go on shopping trips to Florida, husbands on non-shopping trips to Las Vegas. We all fly through the US to points north, east, south and west. Miami is our favourite transit point, despite the sour welcome extended to foreigners by immigration officials on the way in, and the intimidation by TSA perverts on the way out.
I guess the American Dream is still alive, but it is looking increasingly fuzzy at the moment. Can the imperial heartland really be turning into the Oceania depicted in George Orwell’s “1984”, or into the German Reich of the 1930s, or into someplace equally frightening? The “1984” entry in Wikipedia shows too many similarities for comfort. Perpetual war is being used to justify the Empire’s pretend-paranoia which in turn justifies domestic oppression. In his book, Orwell called that oppression Big Brother, and it is closing in fast on America. History reports that the Germans were caught by surprise, too, when domestic oppression snuck up on them.
In 1965, I preferred America over Canada. With a bit more patience I might have become an American. Now, I am wary of even changing planes in Miami or Newark on our way to and from Europe. I prefer the family to fly via Toronto instead. Oh, the irony!
Thirty years before, I’d met plenty of pretend-Canadians with American accents – angry, betrayed and embarrassed over the invasion of Vietnam. Life is full of embarrassment for young idealists whose homeland is on a brutal imperial rampage. There is a wall in Washington memorialising the fifty thousand US patriot-invaders who died in Vietnam, but there is no memorial for the two million civilians they slaughtered.
I almost became an American myself, back in 1965. I filled in a form at the US Embassy in London, the clerk gave me a ticket, and I sat down in a crowd and waited to be called for an interview. Half an hour later, the Tannoy called for number 23; my number was 104. Huh. Time for Plan B. Around the corner at the Canadian Embassy I filled in another form, was interviewed immediately, and a month later was living in Toronto – reunited with Linda and learning all about curling and ice-hockey.
We were both on our way back to Australia, as soon as we could afford the tickets or until we got a better offer in someplace warm. In those days, Canadian snowbirds used to fly down to Florida and pay agencies to have their cars driven down. Newly married, we packed one of those cars with everything we owned and headed south to look for jobs in the Bahamas. There in Nassau, we all watched American TV, ate American food and learned about baseball and gridiron football. Our employers fleeced American tourists and helped rich people dodge American taxes. (No of course we didn’t fleece tourists. Just joking!) It was a good life, almost American.
We do the same things today in Cayman, pretty much. Many of our children go to US colleges, and come back only slightly changed. Americans work in our watersports operations, our hotels and restaurants, and our construction industry. Not in our banks, though, for fear of moles. We are an offshore tax-haven, after all. The CIA has its agents here, but MI6 (Britain’s equivalent) keeps them out of the banks. We’re a British colony, as Bahamas was in the ‘60s.
Wives go on shopping trips to Florida, husbands on non-shopping trips to Las Vegas. We all fly through the US to points north, east, south and west. Miami is our favourite transit point, despite the sour welcome extended to foreigners by immigration officials on the way in, and the intimidation by TSA perverts on the way out.
I guess the American Dream is still alive, but it is looking increasingly fuzzy at the moment. Can the imperial heartland really be turning into the Oceania depicted in George Orwell’s “1984”, or into the German Reich of the 1930s, or into someplace equally frightening? The “1984” entry in Wikipedia shows too many similarities for comfort. Perpetual war is being used to justify the Empire’s pretend-paranoia which in turn justifies domestic oppression. In his book, Orwell called that oppression Big Brother, and it is closing in fast on America. History reports that the Germans were caught by surprise, too, when domestic oppression snuck up on them.
In 1965, I preferred America over Canada. With a bit more patience I might have become an American. Now, I am wary of even changing planes in Miami or Newark on our way to and from Europe. I prefer the family to fly via Toronto instead. Oh, the irony!
Sunday, February 12, 2012
Introducing Erica (expat websites)
Sharp-eyed visitors to this site will have noticed the link (below, right) to “Expatria, Baby”. It’s the blog of a young Canadian woman, Erica Knecht, who lives in Japan with a Swiss husband and baby daughter. She reckons looking after one’s young child is the best job in the world. As a onetime house-husband and parent of first resort, 1981-86, I happily endorse the sentiment. I don’t know why more men don’t do it.
She has been writing entertaining blogs for time enough to have swapped links with several expats in several spots around the world. I’m her first link in Cayman, and she’s my first anywhere. Mine is by far the less sophisticated site of the two. I don’t even know how to partition a site among categories and topics. Maybe it can’t be done at blogspot.com; I’ve no idea.
Most of my items are commentaries on Cayman’s social and political scene, of interest mainly to local residents. New overseas visitors who don’t know who McKeeva and Dart are will have to identify them either from the context or from Caymannewsservice.com, our local news source and forum. Recently I have branched out into personal reminiscences of youthful travels (e.g. Zorba the Greek), and a couple of tentative efforts at revisionist history (e.g. The Children of Israel). At the moment, everything is lumped in together, and it shouldn’t be.
Erica’s site carries links to a couple of dozen other expatriates’ sites. Each writer’s experiences are different, and there is much of relevance to Cayman’s expats. There are hundreds of blogsites indexed at expat-blog.com – something for everybody, in most nations and territories in the world. Among so many expats, I risk being dismissed as an imposter – an immigrant pretending to be an expat. If there were an Expats’ Club, my membership would have long been revoked. Well, maybe, maybe not.
We came to Cayman in 1978 with our little son as transients, intent on charging our batteries and bank balance in this tax-haven (our third) before going back on the road again. Thirty-four years later, we’re still here. We are citizens; we vote; we travel on Caymanian passports; this is our home. Unfortunately, a significant voting bloc of native-born citizens (descendents of European and/or African immigrants, all) doesn’t take kindly to furriners living amongst them. So when they say we’re expats and not “real” Caymanian at all, how can we argue?
My blog-postings, and my weekly newspaper columns, are written for all Cayman’s residents – native Caymanians, long-term immigrants and transient migrants alike. I have a reputation among them all for being a grumpy old coot who wastes his time trying to convert the unconverted to the virtues of human rights and fiscal responsibility and peace and love between the brothers and the sisters. Not a grumpy old coot who can’t wait to leave, but a grumpy old coot who can’t be persuaded to leave.
This is a small island-community of about 15,000 ethnic Caymanians, 15,000 long-term immigrants and 20,000 transient workers. There is plenty of scope for cultural conflict. New readers who bother to trawl back through my blog archives will see what I mean. My October posting titled Freedom of Speech is as good a place as any to begin.
Ah well, I’ve gotten off the track a bit. We’re here to introduce Erica. All together now: “Hello-o-o, Erica!” That’s the spirit. Long may she flourish. With the blog-name she chose, how could she not? Expatria, Baby! What a classic.
She has been writing entertaining blogs for time enough to have swapped links with several expats in several spots around the world. I’m her first link in Cayman, and she’s my first anywhere. Mine is by far the less sophisticated site of the two. I don’t even know how to partition a site among categories and topics. Maybe it can’t be done at blogspot.com; I’ve no idea.
Most of my items are commentaries on Cayman’s social and political scene, of interest mainly to local residents. New overseas visitors who don’t know who McKeeva and Dart are will have to identify them either from the context or from Caymannewsservice.com, our local news source and forum. Recently I have branched out into personal reminiscences of youthful travels (e.g. Zorba the Greek), and a couple of tentative efforts at revisionist history (e.g. The Children of Israel). At the moment, everything is lumped in together, and it shouldn’t be.
Erica’s site carries links to a couple of dozen other expatriates’ sites. Each writer’s experiences are different, and there is much of relevance to Cayman’s expats. There are hundreds of blogsites indexed at expat-blog.com – something for everybody, in most nations and territories in the world. Among so many expats, I risk being dismissed as an imposter – an immigrant pretending to be an expat. If there were an Expats’ Club, my membership would have long been revoked. Well, maybe, maybe not.
We came to Cayman in 1978 with our little son as transients, intent on charging our batteries and bank balance in this tax-haven (our third) before going back on the road again. Thirty-four years later, we’re still here. We are citizens; we vote; we travel on Caymanian passports; this is our home. Unfortunately, a significant voting bloc of native-born citizens (descendents of European and/or African immigrants, all) doesn’t take kindly to furriners living amongst them. So when they say we’re expats and not “real” Caymanian at all, how can we argue?
My blog-postings, and my weekly newspaper columns, are written for all Cayman’s residents – native Caymanians, long-term immigrants and transient migrants alike. I have a reputation among them all for being a grumpy old coot who wastes his time trying to convert the unconverted to the virtues of human rights and fiscal responsibility and peace and love between the brothers and the sisters. Not a grumpy old coot who can’t wait to leave, but a grumpy old coot who can’t be persuaded to leave.
This is a small island-community of about 15,000 ethnic Caymanians, 15,000 long-term immigrants and 20,000 transient workers. There is plenty of scope for cultural conflict. New readers who bother to trawl back through my blog archives will see what I mean. My October posting titled Freedom of Speech is as good a place as any to begin.
Ah well, I’ve gotten off the track a bit. We’re here to introduce Erica. All together now: “Hello-o-o, Erica!” That’s the spirit. Long may she flourish. With the blog-name she chose, how could she not? Expatria, Baby! What a classic.
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