Published: 2 October 2009 | Jamaica Homes News
Key Takeaways
- Bolt Runs 9.58 and 19.19 to Rewrite Athletics History
- IAAF Berlin: Jamaica’s Greatest-Ever World Championships Haul
- Swine Flu Pandemic Still Spreading Through Diaspora Communities
- Michael Jackson Tributes Still Resonating Three Months On
- Jamaica Economy Contracts as Global Recession Bites Hard
- US Healthcare Reform Debate Sharpens Diaspora Political Attention
Introduction: Bolt Rewrites Human Possibility
Q3 2009 will be remembered by Jamaica’s diaspora above all for what happened in Berlin’s Olympiastadion between 16 and 20 August: Usain Bolt ran the 100 metres in 9.58 seconds and the 200 metres in 19.19 seconds, destroying both world records and establishing new boundaries of what the human body can achieve on a sprint track. This update draws on Jamaica Gleaner, Jamaica Observer, IAAF, Bank of Jamaica, PIOJ, and Caribbean diaspora media through 30 September 2009.
Berlin 2009: Bolt and Jamaica’s Defining Athletic Moment
The 12th IAAF World Championships in Athletics, held in Berlin from 15 to 23 August 2009, was Jamaica’s greatest single national performance in the history of track and field. Usain Bolt’s 9.58-second run in the 100m final on 16 August — improving his own world record by 0.11 seconds, the largest single improvement to the 100m mark since electronic timing was introduced — was witnessed in stadiums, community centres, sports bars, and homes across the diaspora with a collective awe that has no recent parallel. The time itself — 9.58 — seemed to belong to a different era of athletic possibility, a number that had seemed unreachable even weeks earlier.
Four days later, Bolt ran the 200m final in 19.19 seconds, breaking Michael Johnson’s 1996 world record of 19.32 — a mark that had stood for thirteen years and had been widely regarded as the 200m’s absolute physiological limit. Bolt’s margin of victory, and the ease with which he appeared to run the final straight — the sense, watching the race, that he was not yet fully extended — generated open speculation among athletics scientists about how much faster a human being could conceivably run 200 metres.
Jamaica’s wider performance at Berlin matched the individual brilliance at the top. Shelly-Ann Fraser won the women’s 100m gold. The women’s 4x100m relay team won gold. The men’s 4x100m relay team, anchored by Bolt, won gold and set a new world record. Jamaica’s total championship medal haul was the largest any Caribbean nation had achieved at a single World Championships. In the Caribbean diaspora communities of New York, London, Toronto, and the US Southeast, the Berlin championships produced street parties, spontaneous celebrations, and an outpouring of national pride that community leaders described as unlike anything since independence.
For diaspora communities that had spent the preceding year managing the economic anxiety of the global financial crisis — job losses, foreclosures, reduced remittances, and the daily weight of financial insecurity — Bolt’s Berlin performances provided something rarer and more valuable than entertainment: a reminder that Jamaican excellence was real, transcendent, and visible to the entire world. In a year of economic diminishment, Jamaica had produced the fastest human beings in the history of measured time.
Michael Jackson: The Diaspora’s Continuing Tribute
Michael Jackson had died on 25 June 2009, at the close of Q2, but the diaspora community’s processing of his death extended deep into Q3. Jackson’s significance to Caribbean diaspora communities — communities whose musical culture had been formed in the overlapping spaces of reggae, R&B, soul, and the African-American popular music tradition that Jackson had come to embody — was difficult to overstate. He had been the dominant pop cultural figure of a generation that had come of age in the 1970s and 1980s, and his music had been the soundtrack of Caribbean community dances, community centre events, and family gatherings across three decades.
The tributes that Caribbean community organisations organised through July and August — the dance events, the radio programmes, the community screenings of his concert films and documentaries — reflected something deeper than celebrity mourning. They were acts of collective memory for communities that had used Jackson’s music as part of the cultural framework of diasporic life. Jamaican dancehall’s long engagement with Jackson’s catalogue — the samples, the covers, the synchronicities between his performance aesthetic and reggae’s own physical performance tradition — gave Jamaican-heritage communities a particular connection to his work.
H1N1 Swine Flu: The Pandemic’s Community Impact
The H1N1 influenza pandemic, which the WHO had declared on 11 June 2009 and which was continuing to spread through Q3, had a measurable impact on Caribbean diaspora communities. The communities in which Jamaican-heritage populations were concentrated — the dense urban neighbourhoods of New York, London, and Toronto; the care homes and hospitals where Caribbean workers were heavily employed — were among the higher-exposure environments for influenza transmission. Caribbean healthcare workers, concentrated in the nursing and personal care sectors that were at the front line of pandemic response, were simultaneously among the most exposed and among the communities’ most valued resources for health information and guidance.
In Jamaica, the H1N1 virus had arrived by July and was spreading through a healthcare system that was already under fiscal stress from the broader economic crisis. The Ministry of Health’s pandemic response — school closures, public health campaigns, the management of limited antiviral supplies — was being followed by diaspora community members whose family networks in Jamaica kept them informed of conditions on the ground. Remittances in Q3 carried an additional dimension: diaspora households were sending funds specifically for the purchase of antivirals, masks, and health supplies that were intermittently unavailable or unaffordable through Jamaica’s public health system.
Jamaica’s Economic Contraction: The Recession’s Local Face
PIOJ data confirmed that Jamaica’s economy had contracted for the second consecutive quarter in Q2 2009, with the pattern continuing into Q3. The bauxite and alumina sector — which had historically accounted for approximately 50 per cent of Jamaica’s export earnings — was operating at sharply reduced capacity as global aluminium prices collapsed and multinational mining companies scaled back Jamaican operations. Windalco, the bauxite company, had suspended operations at its Ewarton and Kirkvine plants, leaving hundreds of workers unemployed in St Catherine and Manchester respectively.
Tourism, the other pillar of Jamaica’s economy, was experiencing its sharpest visitor number decline in years as US and UK travellers curtailed discretionary international travel. Hotel occupancy rates were down significantly year-on-year. The cascading effects — reduced employment in resorts and ancillary businesses, lower taxi and transport revenues, reduced retail spending in tourist areas — were spreading economic stress beyond the bauxite-affected parishes. For diaspora members with investment interests in Jamaica, the contraction raised questions about rental property returns, business viability, and the macroeconomic environment for return-migration planning.
US Healthcare Reform: The Diaspora’s Policy Watch
Obama’s healthcare reform proposal — which had been moving through Senate and House committees through the summer and was the subject of August’s town hall meetings and the fierce ‘death panels’ controversy orchestrated by reform opponents — was being followed with intense attention in Caribbean-American communities where health insurance gaps were acute. The Caribbean-American community’s employment profile — significant concentrations in home care, nursing support, domestic service, food service, and other sectors where employer health insurance was rare — meant that the uninsured and underinsured proportion of the community was substantially above the national average.
Community organisations in New York and Florida had been running healthcare navigation workshops, helping community members understand their existing eligibility for Medicaid, the Children’s Health Insurance Program, and community health centre services. The reform debate’s outcome — still unresolved as Q3 ends — would determine whether the coverage gaps that left significant numbers of Caribbean-American workers without healthcare access were addressed. We report next from 2 January 2010.
This Quarterly Jamaica Diaspora and Returnee Update is researched and published by Jamaica Homes News. Sources include Jamaica Gleaner, Jamaica Observer, IAAF, Bank of Jamaica, PIOJ, MFAFT, and PICA. All figures and developments are accurate as of the publication date, 2 October 2009.
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