Jamaican Leader Manley Dies At 72 Was Visionary Socialist For Three Terms, Then Embraced Capitalism

Michael Manley, the visionary socialist leader who served three terms as Jamaican prime minister and ushered the small Caribbean nation to the forefront of Third World politics, is dead at 72, the official Jamaican news service said Friday.

The cause of death was not disclosed, but Manley was diagnosed with prostate cancer in 1990.

He resigned as prime minister in 1992 for health reasons.

Manley was born to wealth and privilege but made his mark as an advocate for the impoverished and underprivileged, in Jamaica and throughout the developing world.

“Gross maldistribution of the world’s wealth and food is no longer a moral offense only,” Manley wrote in an article for The New York Times in 1975. “It now represents the greatest practical threat to peace and to any desirable development of mankind.”

He served in the Canadian Air Force during World War II, studied at the London School of Economics and spent a year as a free-lance reporter for the British Broadcasting Corp.

As prime minister, he established close ties with Cuban leader Fidel Castro.

He expanded the health and education systems, organized job training programs for the young and the unemployed, fostered racial pride and tried to encourage agricultural self-sufficiency through state farms.

Manley became one of the most outspoken advocates of what he called a new international economic order for developing nations.

“The point is that now some two-thirds of mankind have been reduced to a peripheral status in political, economic and even social terms,” he wrote. The solution, he argued, was a redistribution of the world’s wealth, with the poor countries that “own the resources and provide the essential infrastructure and the labor force” getting a larger share.

To do that, he argued, capitalism should be demolished “brick by brick.”

But many felt Manley had surged too far ahead of Jamaica’s fundamentally cautious electorate. Besides, his hope for an economic miracle in Jamaica was not realized and the country headed toward bankruptcy. When he ran for a third term in 1980, Manley lost to conservative Edward Seaga, an ally of then-U.S. President Reagan.

Nine years later, Manley returned to the political wars.

During his absence from public office, Manley said, he had concluded that private investment and capitalism were essential to Jamaica’s future.

Manley asked voters for another chance, ran against Seaga in 1989 and vanquished his old adversary.

Manley knew his move toward capitalism likely confused some supporters and angered others. But he made no apologies.

In a 1992 interview with the Toronto Star, Manley said, “I find no contradiction in my life and political career because I want the same thing now as I always wanted - I want poor people to stop being poor.”