Perry Henzell, ContributorTHERE IS a widely-held idea that China is going to be the next 'superpower'.
It will not be. The most influential nation in the world for the 21st century is going to be Brazil.
China will not be the next superpower because:
The superpower thing is over. As a Jamaican I feel at no disadvantage to a citizen of the United States or E.U. rather the reverse)
China has yet to achieve freedom
No mono-culture can be a dominant influence in the melting pot world.
Brazil is leading us into the future, because it is at the centre of the 'Tropical Plan'.
'TROPICAL PLAN'
What is the 'Tropical Plan'? Look South not North to find it.
Brazil is leading the whole of South America into cooperation and prosperity. The poor will soon have lower-middle class earnings. The middle-class will grow, not only in Brazil, but also in Argentina where it is already huge, and in Chile, Venezuela, Colombia, Central America and the Andean countries where the indigenous Indian population are taking control for the first time in six hundred years.
The Mexicans should finally be shamed by images of shackled illegal immigrants being shipped home from the U.S. into making things better at home, so Mexicans don't have to beg for a living in somebody else's country.
With this surge in prosperity and investment, South America will boom like South East Asia in the 80s.
MERCOSUR will jump the Atlantic to add South Africa's industrial powerhouse to the ones in Argentina and Brazil ready to exploit abundant land and resources.
At this point, the 'Tropical Plan' would be self-sufficient, calling in what it needs from outside on its terms and leaving the old war-racked, still-hating, religiously-retrograde, ideologically-strangled Cold World frozen in the past.
REGION TO BENEFIT
The brightest people will be attracted to the tropics because of its climate, its beauty, and its relative freedom from paranoia, national arrogance and institu-tionalised hatred.
The Caribbean, in general, and the West Indies, in particular, are incredibly well placed to benefit from all this.
We are in the middle of it with the added advantage of being small so we don't have to free ourselves from some vast continental trend not of our liking. We can be the Switzerland of the situation.
When we appeal to the best and the brightest to come here we can promise them broadband, we can promise them complete freedom of thought, expression, communi-cation, research, unlimited by ideology or religion or the rule of a bully government.
CREATING LINKS
Our links with the south have already started. Brazil is showing us how to run our cars on sugar cane. We are being wired with fibre and the banking system seems to be weaning itself from usury at last.
What could go wrong?
Criminality and bureaucracy are the biggest threats. But even here there is hope. We have a free press, with which we can force the bureaucracy to function; we have the screen to glamorise the alternatives to criminality if those alternatives are real.
Right now, Kingston is one hot little town in the best sense. I would not want to miss out on it in the next 10 years.
