Sangster International Airport, gateway to Jamaica, it a mere hundred dollars return from the garish opulence of Miami Beach, USA The echoes of the empty terminal, which once processed hundreds of thousands of tourists annually, are a stark reminder that this small Caribbean island has been victimized by an international slander campaign since it elected a democratic socialist government in 1972.

Outside, visitors are almost immediately struck with Jamaica's typical Third World schizophrenia. Montego Bay grafts the incredibly wealthy, ultra-contemporary in architecture, leisure amenities and jet-set lifestyle with the poverty, almost elemental, trival and, until recently, rural reality of indigenous Jamaicans.

A stroll down Gloucester Avenue's tacky tourist strip, past the spanking new Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce, through the Market centre, end on to the abject poverty of Railway Lane is a graphic testimonial to the economic and social facts of multinational penetration of Jamaica. Prosperity and power for the few, [unclear: dleness] and exploitation for the vast majority of the island's two million people.

It is in Railway Lane, Trenchtown, Concrete Jungle and the other urban ghettos and shanty towns of neo-colonialism, jammed with uprooted ceasants and farmworkers, that reggae music and the present sound of Jamaican rebellion got its start and found its bast. It was in this environment that the militant mystical-anarchist creed of the Rastafarians took hold in the mid-sixties. By 1970, when the repressive regime of the Jamaican Labour Party (JLP) was in full swing, the noted Marxist historian Dr. Walter Rodney would identify the "numerically powerful" (30,000 to 50,0001 Rastafari as the "most profound dilemma faced by the regime". The present Prime Minister Michael Manley of People's National Party (PNP) admits to thinking "that the only Jamaican who truly knows who he is has to be the Rastaman They're very beautiful and remarkable people."

Today, reggae music and the Rastatarian ambience which surrounds it are at the forefront of a "cultural revolution" which is transforming Jamaican society. Throughout the island, ill-produced but topical 45-rpm records are the primary form of political communication. From Montego Bay to Negril, Kingston, and the Blue Mountains, the people talk about the music the words and their political meaning. Record stores, like the one run by the Burning Spear group in Oche Rios, proclaim revolution and are the centres of much social activity. On an island where forty per cent of the population is illiterate, reggae music has become the popular propaganda of a profoundly anti-authoritarian resistance culture.

Bob Marley and the other well-known Rasta-reggae artists, are only the most visible manifestations of a cultural phenomenon which is playing a consciously progressive role in Jamaica and, incidently, producing the most explicity revolutionary music available on the mass scale in English. In response to rock'n'roll journalists who would dismiss the politics of reggae, Marley says, "Me hafta laugh sometime when dem scribes seh me like Mick Jagger or some superstar thing like dat. Dem hafta listen closeh to the music, 'cause de message not de same . . . Nooo, mon, de reggae not de Twist, mon!" (Quotes in Jamaica's English patois are transcribed phonetically.)