Standing before Parliament at the worst economic moment in a generation, Prime Minister Bruce Golding did something that surprised almost everyone who thought they understood Jamaica’s politics. He presented a plan for 2030. Not a rescue plan. Not a recovery plan. A transformational blueprint for an entirely different kind of country — one that would take twenty-one years to build, outlast at least four governments, and require a quality of national discipline that Jamaica had never previously sustained.

Three of Jamaica’s four alumina refineries suspended operations within months of each other. Remittances tumbled. Tourism faltered. A government carrying debt worth more than its entire national economy faced a reckoning it could no longer defer. And in Kingston offices, the people charged with imagining Jamaica’s future were putting the final touches on a plan that, if it worked, might change everything.