A Small Place by Jamaica Kincaid Read Free Book Online

import the commodity that the business sells; great effort goes into concealing who the owners of these businesses are. People close to the Prime Minister openly run one of the largest houses of prostitution in Antigua. Some offshore banks are fronts for bad people hiding money acquired through dealings in drugs, or the other bad ways there are to acquire money, though it seems to be true that in Antigua all the ways there are to acquire large sums of money are bad ways. It is not a secret that a minister is involved in drug trafficking. That minister and another minister in government benefit from the offshore banks, with their ill-gotten deposits. (These offshore banks are popular in the West Indies. Only tourism itself is more important. Every government wants to have these banks, which are modelled on the banks in Switzerland. I have a friend who just came back from Switzerland. What a wonderful time she had. She had never seen cleaner streets anywhere, or more wonderful people anywhere. She was in such a rhapsodic state about the Swiss, and the superior life they lead, that it was hard for me not to bring up how they must pay for this superior life they lead. For almost not a day goes by that I don’t hear about some dictator, some tyrant from somewhere in the world, who has robbed his country’s treasury, stolen the aid from foreign governments, and placed it in his own personal and secret Swiss bank account; not a day goes by that I don’t hear of some criminal kingpin, some investor, who has a secret Swiss bank account. But maybe there is no connection between the wonderful life that the Swiss lead and the ill-gotten money that is resting in Swiss bank vaults; maybe it’s just a coincidence. The Swiss are famous for their banking system and for making superior timepieces. Switzerland is a neutral country, money is a neutral commodity, and time is neutral, too, being neither here nor there, one thing or another.) Some gambling casinos in the hotels are controlled by mobsters from the United States. They pay somebody in government who allows them to operate. If they benefit from the operation of these casinos, they—people in Antigua—cannot see in what way, except for the seasonal employment it offers a few people, for, after all, all government services are bad. (Gambling, linked here completely to tourism, is another popular industry in the West Indies. Every government in the West Indies seems to want hotels with gambling casinos. It would appear that nobody wants to go to the West Indies without being able to spend time in a gambling casino. I once heard a semiliterate-sounding man on Radio Montserrat berating people, mostly clergymen, who were opposed to the opening of gambling casinos on the island of Montserrat. He said that when the people of Montserrat were hungry, they didn’t look to the church for food, or to those other people who opposed the casinos, they looked to the government, and so he had to find a way to feed them. It’s possible that if someone had told him that the operation of gambling casinos in hotels in the West Indies seems to feed, in a very big way, everybody connected with them, except for the people he had in mind, it might have given him pause. I do not know. At the end of the program the announcer identified this man as the head of government of Montserrat.) The government of Antigua allowed some special ammunition to be tested in Antigua—ammunition that the government knew very well was to be shipped to the government of South Africa. The government allowed meat known to be contaminated by radiation to be distributed in Antigua. A food importer, a man from an old Antiguan family, regularly lends the government money. How does a food importer on a small island have enough money to lend to a government? Syrian and Lebanese nationals regularly lend the government money. Syrian and Lebanese nationals own large amounts of land in Antigua, and on the land