Honduran Garifuna and Bay Islander Sailors—Problems of Old Age and Death

Honduran Garifuna and Bay Islander Sailors—Problems of Old Age and Death

By Wendy Griffin

(Part 4 of 4)

Honduran sailors who are residents in the United States and that are not citizens, often do not recive Social Security for their work as a sailor. This might be because the company who they are working for, even though they leave fromUS ports, the company is not American. For example, the company of the ships of the United Fruit Company (now Chiquita) was the Empresa Hondureña de Vapores (Honduran Steamship company), a Honduran company, and in that way they could pay less taxes and maybe lower salaries. Most ships in the World are registered under flags of convenience like Panama,instead of the ports they ship out of.

Maybe the problem is also that the sailors themselves are not Americans, and sometimes are just working with sailor visa instead of permanant residency. Many ships where Afro-Hondurans currently work leave from European ports,and thus of course, they would not be eligible for an American pension. It also affects them if they change companies they work for every year, as Dorn Ebanks’ father did.

Sometimes they also don’t receive pensions from the shipping company which owns the ships, even if the company like United Fruit is American. Previously it was impossible to obtain dual citizenship so some sailors chose to keep their Honduran citizenship so they could retire and return home without problems, like my Garifuna friend Sebastian Marin, even though he had the prerequisites to become a US citizen. So they suffered from lack of income in their old age after having worked 30 or 35 years on ships outside of Honduras, and they depend on their children to help them out.

Sailors who became US citizens sometimes have rights to Social Security when they retire, but it still depends on the nationality of the company they work for. Before double citizenship was made legal in the administration of Ricardo Maduro, US citizen Garifunas had to leave the Honduras even six months, as Don Vilo a Garifuna sailor of Trujillo whose son now lives in Atlanta, also a sailor.

For the question of taking care of grandchildren of their daughters who are working, sometimes the wife of an old sailor will stay in the US after his retirement, and so he remains alone if he retires back to Honduras, without someone to take care of him if he becomes sick or keep  him company in his old age, after so many years of helping economically to raise children and take care of his wife, as happened to my friend Sebastian Marin.

If a Honduran Sailor Dies with his Family in Honduras

One of the first organizations Afro-Latin Americans organize are associations which arrange to bury a worker, if death surprises him while working outside of his home town or home country.  Many sailors were unaware that even if they are US citizens and have 29 years working on ships out of the United States, as was the case of Rosalina Garcia of Trujillo, their family and their minor children recieve nothing from Social Security, if the wife and children have not lived with him in the US for at least 10 years, legally married.

The sailor husband of Rosalina Garcia who left 4 children in Honduras when he died alone in a room in Houston, Texas, suddenly after working as a sailor and living  legally in the US for 29 years. Their youngest daughter was 4 years old. According to letters, pamphlets, and the Social Security Internet site, they received nothing in Social Security because there is no treaty about Social Security with the countries of Latin America in the case that one of their citizens who was working legally in the US, but died leaving family in their country of origin.    These Social Security benefits are called Survivor Benefits and are to help the family raise any children under 18 years old.

What is suspicious about these Social Security treaties is that they exist for the majority of the countries of Western Europe, but there are no Social Security treaties with the countries of Latin America, Asia, the Caribbean or Africa, where the majority of sailors come from.

This problem that the wife receives nothing in Social Security if she has never lived in the US, and then her US citizen husband dies, as happens often when US retirees marry Latin American women on the North Coast of Honduras. The Latina wives of these retirees sometimes pass into tremendous poverty when their late in life husband dies.

 

 

 

 

Closing Doors to Poor Afro-Hondurans who want to be Merchant Marines

Closing Doors to Poor Afro-Hondurans who want to be Merchant Marines

By Wendy Griffin

(Part 3 of 4)

Previously it was easy to get work as a merchant marine for Honduran Garifunas and Bay Islanders.  Some began because through a family member or a friend,they got a letter offering themwork as a merchant marine. For example,the uncle of Herman Alvarez of San  Juan, Tela got a letter offering work for Herman’s brother more than 30 agos, and this brother until now is still a merchant marine. Garifunas often work for indirect contractors like ship chandler’s companies. In recent years a woman in New York asks for payment to get or send these offers of work.

Others like Sabas Whittaker would go down to the port and present himself to the capitán and the capitán often accepted to take him aboard as a sailor. Even though originally most of the people who were sailors were Black English speakers and Garifunas, later many Honduran mestixos who spoke some English also applied and became sailors. Some eventually learned several languages, knew countries all over the world,and some were excellent cooks.  In Santa Fe, Honduras in Restaurante Caballero, an older Garifuna Pedro Caballero, previously a cook on a cruise boat, has his restaurant, and international tourists fromthe US, Canada, and Europe go to Santa Fe just to eat his food.

If one had a good record with the banana company on their ships, they helped the merchant marine immigrate to the US with his whole family reported Sebastian Marin, a Garifuna in Trujillo who worked 35 years for United Fruit’s Worldwide Shipping. According to the book on Afro-Central Americans in New York by Dr. Sarah England, almost all the families now resident in New York City started arriving there with a family member who was a merchant marine. According to Dorn Ebanks,currently the Mayor of Roatan in the Honduran Bay Islands, almost an entire generation of Bay Islander men were away working internationally as merchant marines like his father during decades.

The father of Dorn Ebanks returned to the Bay Islands, but other Bay Islanders and English speaking Blacks from the North Coast remained in the US, for example in Brooklyn or in New Orleans before Katrina. In the past the Bay Islander sailors built their homes they planned to retire to and to return home to on vacations in the Bay Islands,but with the high cost of real estate in the Bay Islands due to the invasion of the tourist industry and foreign residents there, many merchant marines no longer are able to build their own home on the Bay Islands.

Over the last 20 years there have arisen many obstacles to young Afro-Honduran men becoming merchant marines. For example, they are now required to pass a one week course in Omoa, Honduras. This costs almost $1,000 between bus fare, food, lodging, and the registration fee.  The young people are required to get an identity card and a passport, the last one they must pay for.  They have to travel to Tegucigalpa with all of those costs to get a Seaman’s Book, which is supposed to be free, but frequently government officials require a bribe to do it. The sailor also requires an American visa, which costs $130 just for the interview to get the visa, and visas for Hondurans are now extended in the US El Salvadoran Embassy.

Now the owners of ships require that merchant marines have finished high school and speak English and even sometimes European languages like Italian. Hondurans are now competing against Eastern Europeans to get a job.  There are no high schools which offer grades 10-12 in most Garifuna and Bay Islander communities, and also there were not courses on how to read, write, and speak English. The Honduran government has dealt with this problem by beginning to offer online English courses this year. Also the US Congress has passed laws that certain kinds of ships must use US citizen employees.   

The lack of the possibility to immigrate legally as a sailor has meant that illegal immigration of younger Garifunas has increased. In an article for HondurasWeekly.com Canadian sociologist estimated 50%  of the Garifunas between 13 and 21 years old had immigrated to the US. Since the boys can not get a good job like a merchant marine, they are not forming stablefamilies and maintaining their girl friends and their children. The actions of the Honduran government like trying toforce the Garifunas of various communities off their land also increases the likelihood of immigration to the US. Many of those who are immigrating have family members in the US, but after the 9/11 attacks on the twin towers in New York in 2001,processing of family reunification visas has almost ground to a halt.

Previously  Merchant Marines who learned English had the option of taking the GED exam for high school equivalency in the US. There were correspondence courses to prepare for this exam. In this way they could qualify to study in US colleges. This is what Sabas Whittaker did, eventually completing a Master’s degree. Now the US government does not permit people who are not Americans to take the GED, closing another door to young Afro-Hondurans.

Also now after 9/11there are more difficulties to get the visa which is only given for one year. There have been recent cases of Garifunas who were working as sailors, they were working well, the company wanted them to continue working,  but in the middle of the sea voyage the US did not renew their sailor’s visa and they had to return home to Honduras where there are complaints of serious unemployment.

  

 

 

 

 

Many Afro-Honduran Immigrants Originally Merchant Marine Sailors and their Problems Part I and II

Many Afro-Honduran Immigrants Originally Merchant Marine Sailors  

(Part 1 of 4)

By Wendy Griffin

“Before, the Garifuna sailors were the best sailors in the world,” begins the video on the Internet about the life of Honduran Garifuna singer Aurelio Martinez, “La Aventura Garifuna” (The Garifuna Adventure). Honduras has the second number in the world of registered merchant seamen, after the Philippines. Previously most of the sailors were from two of Honduras’s afro-Honduran groups—the Garifunas and the Black English speakers. This is almost incredible when you realize that there are only 8 million people in all of Honduras, or about the size of New York City.

The Garifunas are descendants of Carib and Arawak Indians from the Island of St.Vincent, who formed families with Africans who arrived on the Island in different manners, including shipwrekcs, escaping by sea from slave owning islands nearby like Barbados, and according to oral traditions pre-Columbian Blacks. After losing two wars with the British, the Garifunas were exiled to Honduras in 1797. Many of their traditional communities are near the traditional ports of the Banana Companies of Honduras—Puerto Cortes, Tela, La Ceiba, and Trujillo. Many Garifuna men lived by fishing prior to incorporating themselves in the work of the banana companies, first on the docks, then on the ships.

The English speaking Blacks of Honduras arrived in Honduras from different islands like Gran Cayman and Jamaica, or neighboring countries like Belize and Nicaragua. Most arrived after slavery was abolished in the British Empire. They also increased immigration to Honduras during the Banana Boom in the early 20^th century. They also settled in the ports and in the Bay Islands located off of Honduras’s North Coast. They also were famous as seaman navigating between Belize and the Bay Islands in their skiffs and dories. Currently these two Afro-Honduran ethnic groups make up 3% of the Honduran population, but there are still dozens of communities in Honduras where these ethnic groups make up the majority. Both groups are heavily affected by immigration to the US.

Garifunas in the Second World War

Before the beginning of the building of railroads for the banana companies in Honduras, the Garifunas and the English speaking Blacks, were active in the planting, harvesting, and sale of bananas. Also recruiters looking for workers to build the Panama Canal arrived at the doors of their homes looking for people to help build this massive work of infrastructure. The Canal was finished in the same year the banana companies arrived to build railway beds, ports, and worker barracks and plant bananas on new concessions of land. The Banana companies built the ports at La Ceiba, Tela, and Puerto Castilla/Trujillo and used the government built port at Puerto Cortes. The Garifunas and Black English speakers formed an important part of the labor available to the banana companies on the North Coast and many Garifunas became trilingual (English-Spanish-Garifuna).

United Fruit, the owner of the Truxillo Railroad in Northeastern Honduras, began to shut down most of its operations and was barely functioning in 1942 when Puerto Castilla was taken over for a US Navy Base against German U boats who might try to enter the Western Caribbean. Given the lack of work on the mainland in bananas, the Garifuna men accepted to become merchant marines during WWII.  The ships of United Fruit (now Chiquita), and Standard Fruit (now owned by Dole), acted as logistics support to the war effort in WWII, and the Afro-Honduran merchant marines manned them. There was a scarcity of white American sailors at the time due to the large number of men involved in fighting the Second World War, and this opened a doorway of opportunity for Afro-Hondurans to get hired as merchant marines.

My Garifuna friend and former sailor for United Fruit’s Worldwide Shipping Sebastian Marin was in the Pacific during World War II, including in Pearl Harbor.In spite of the name “The Great White Fleet”, sometimes it was necessary to paint the boats grey color to be able to pass unobserved by the Japonese or German U boats, observed Sabas Whittaker, an Afro-Honduran, who formerly worked as a merchant marine.

Since the Black English speakers spoke English, many Bay Islanders after 1950 were accepted to work in cruise boats with tourists, reaching good positions like purser or head of security. Many Garifunas worked in cooking, as it was the custom of Garifuna mothers to teach their sons to cook, in case their wife was sick or away, but sometimes they also worked as saloonman, in security, or in cleaning.

These Garifuna sailors have the right to be included in the list of veterans of the Second World War at this Memorial in Washington, DC. Other Garifunas of Honduras and Belize worked in the Canal Zone in Panama during the Second World War.  Belizean Garifunas also fought as part of Allied forces with the British during the War. “It is time to recognize these Afro-Honduran sailors who helped with logistics in the Second World War. It was the only way to get things and people to these theaters of war at the time,” said Sabas Whittaker, author of Africans in the Americas, who now resides in Hartford, Conneticut.

The practice of using Afro-Hispanic merchant marines continues until today. During the War between England and Argentina over the Falkland Islands, the British used a ship of the Cunard Lines for logistics, where Sabas’s brother worked. Ships carrying arms and soldiers to Iraq carry Afro-Honduran civilian chefs like Rigoberto Calix’s brother, based out of Houston. These Afro-Honduran merchant marines are civilians, not military, and belong to a sailor’s union. Sailors with a good record until recently were allowed to immigrate to the US with all their family members, which is the origin of the large Garifuna communities in the US like in New York City.In addition to military transport ships, they also work on civilian cargo ships, like petroleum frieghters, like Balbina Chimilio’s son and son-in-law in Atlanta.

Special  Problems Face Families of Afro-Honduran Merchant Marines

(Part 2 of 4)

By Wendy Griffin

If the husband of a Garifuna woman is a sailor, this implies many difficulties for him, her, and their family, since the man is away from his family 4-6 months at a time, and previously they only gave vacation once a year, according to older sailors. For example, the mother of Garifuna painter Herman Alvarez was very strict with him, but he believes it was because she was under a lot of stress having to play the roles of mother and father with him, while his father worked as a sailor for United Fruit. At that time the men only returned home once a year, instead of twice a year as is currently the norm.

Also the work of sailor is hard, with 70 hours of work a week minimal, and frequent overtime. Salaries are currently relatively low, because the ships take out for room and board and there are no benefits for many sailors. A Garifuna friend was recently  offered a contracto of $440/a month after taking out room and board, for a 70 hour work week, and the possibility of overtime at $2.40 an hour. According to his ex-wife after a time, he earned $1,000 a month.  Salaries before were reported at $1,500 to $2,000 a month, reported former Bay Islander sailors. When the old Garifuna sailors started working, the salaries were extremely low, as little as $1 a day.

It   also seems to be dangerous work, since several of the Garifunas and Bay Islanders I have known who were sailors, have died from on board accidents or were injured, such as an eye problem. These mostly seem to have been cases where little or no compensation was paid to the sailor if he lived, or to his family if he died.

Many of the Honduran sailors were exposed to asbestos on ships, but their legal cases were put on an inactive docket, and their cases not heard. Cancers can develop from asbestos exposure. Currently the way asbestos litigation is handled has changed, maybe they would be eligible.

Maybe the courts were not hearing their cases, because the workers were not American, and often the ships have flags of registration that they are not American, so maybe these sailors were not considered “American employees”, and were outside of the jurisdiction of US courts. Even though the economy of the US depends a great deal on imports, no one thinks of the working conditions of the sailors who bring us these products.

Honduran Arts and Artists Suffer in these Difficult Economic times

Honduran Arts and Artists Suffer in these Difficult Economic times

By Wendy Griffin

If US organizations have 501 (c) 3 status from the IRS in the US as non-profits, US people can donate to them and take a deduction on their income taxes. This encourages people and companies who have money in the US to donate to the arts, and other cultural and social service organizations, which is a big reason why these exist in the US. In Honduras, this type of incentive does not exist, and partly for this reason, it is not common for Honduran businesses or well to do individuals to financially support cultural or social service institutions in Honduras.  The recent crisis of the San Pedro Museum of Anthropology and History, run by a private organization, which almost closed due to insufficient funds for operating costs and is still facing financial hard times, is an example of these types of crisis.

The general income level of Honduras, with most people having incomes significantly below the L100,000 a year  income bracket which is required to pay income taxes in Honduras, also affects the fact that little private  or tax based Honduran money is available for the arts and social services sectors.  Newspapers in San Pedro said Honduran parents in San Pedro often reacted negatively to initiatives of the schools to take the students to Museums as they have to pay a small entrance fee.

This confirms my experience in Trujillo. When David Flores has taken Tegucigalpa high school students to Trujillo, they have sometimes refused to get off the bus to go into the Rufino Galan Museum, which he tells them is not be missed as one of the best museums of the history of the North Coast and which they drived 12 hours to see, because they did not want to pay a L20 (1 dollar) entrance fee.

Many Honduran artists, musicians, authors, folkdance groups, etc. look to the Honduran Ministry of Culture, Arts and Sports (SCAD) for help, but as former Vice Minister of Culture Salvador Suazo used to say, 80% of the budget of SCAD goes to support sports, particularly the “Selección Nacional”, the national team that competes in Soccer World Cup eliminations and, if lucky, the World Cup finals.

 After the Ministry pays for sports, a full time marimba band which plays Honduran folkdance music of the Ladinos, a permanant folkdance group for Ladino folkdances, folkdance festivals of Ladino folkdances, libraries and the National Archive, it has no money left, and especially no money for minority ethnic groups who are not represented or funded at all by the office of Popular Culture of the Ministry. The National Garifuna Folklore Ballet, previously part of SCAD and its  office of Folklore, the predecessor of the Popular Culture office, is now administratively an autonomous organization part of Casa Garinagu (Garifuna House), located near Central Park.

In a recent La Prensa article, that national paper reported that the National Art Galley, run by the Ministry of Culture (SCAD), had closed its doors in Tegucigalpa, because it did not have money for salaries and utilities and in fact owed months of back pay to its employees.  

 It is also a mystery why  the Honduran Ministry of Culture has an attitude of not commercially using its marimba group, folkdance group, printing company, etc., to make money.  Prior to Hurricane Mitch, they even had a recording studio. There are no commercially available CD’s of Honduran folkdance music for sale, no commercially available video of Honduran folkdances, and it is very difficult to find out what books the Ministry has published and where they are sold. With all the assets it has, why it sells or promotes nothing, not even its own programs, and thus has no money for more arts and cultural programs in Honduras, is a mystery to people who work in the Arts in Honduras. The Secretaria de Cultura, Artes y Deportes does have a website if people are interested in knowing what the Honduran government makes known about Honduran culture.   

The Honduran Minister of Culture Dr. Tulio Mariano Gonzales offered to do a book presentation of Antonieta Maximo’s new book of poetry, “Duda”, but it has not happened yet. Although the only costs of a book presentation are invitations and maybe some soft drinks afterwards,  the current economic crisis of the Honduran government apparently makes it difficult for Honduran government cultural organizations like SCAD and the Honduran Institute of History and Anthropology (IHAH) to find even these minor resources to help support poets and historians who write books published in Honduras.

When I offered to do a book presentation of the new book “Gold Mining, Black Slaves and Interethnic Relations in the XVI century” written by Pastor Gomez and published by IHAH, during African Heritage Month (April) in Trujillo this year to help make known this excellent book which explains who were the non-Garifuna blacks in Honduras in this period and has one of the best descriptions of slavery and how it arose and developed to come to the New World that I have seen in any language, the person from IHAH in charge in Trujillo said, “No”, because they would have to send out invitations. My attempts to have them make available for sale in Trujillo this book have failed, although they do have a small bookshop here in the fort.

 Dr. Tulio Mariano Gonzales, a Garifuna from Trujillo who had previously been a Congressman in the Central American Parliament for 6 years,  became Minister of Culture after  a scandal caused by the previous Minister of Culture having spent the whole year’s budget in 6 months, so he started with a serious deficit to begin with, so the fact that they have done anything, like publish Miskito Indian  Scott Wood’s book La Mosquitia Desde Adentro (The Mosquitia from the Inside) in May 2013, or helped support  a seminar on editing Wikipedia pages for the Network of Local Historians in Siguatepeque in August 2013 , donated books published by the Ministry to the reading program in Pinalejo, Santa Barbara and gone to unprecedented Council of Minister meetings in expensive places like Puerto Lempira in the Mosquitia is to be commended.

Honduras has two specialized high schools for the Arts, la Escuela de Bellas Artes (Fine Arts High School) in Tegucigalpa which emphasizes the plastic arts like painting, sculpting, drawing, etc. and Victoriano Lopez Music School in San Pedro Sula, which combines playing classical western musical instruments with a regular high school curriculum. These were both founded decades before it was popular to have fine arts high schools in the US.

 Students from the Fine Arts High School often go on to become high school art teachers, like David Flores who teaches in Teguicgalpa and Maxima Tomas, a Garifuna painter who used to teach in Tela, and many also sell paintings commercially as Napoleon Villalta Crespo and Maxima Tomas did previously in Tela. The students who graduate from the Victoriano often receive scholarships to study internationally and many end up playing in orchestras outside of Honduras, reported Fernando Aparicio, a San Pedro Sula businessman whose son attends there.

 Both survive based on multiple funding streams, including from the Honduran Ministry of Education, the Ministry of Culture, reduced tuition paid by parents, and in the case of the Victoriano help from the San Pedro Sula city government. All of these funding streams have been cut or eliminated.  Particularly with the School of Fine Arts it is not clear if it will continue to exist as a high school, or if it will become annexed to the university’s art program because of lack of funds to keep it open and reorganization within the Ministry of Education, reported a retired high school arts teacher from there. 

The topic of the lack of government funding for art, literature, books, plays, etc. and the decision to invest principally in agriculture, most of the projects of which did not give good results,  is a reoccurring theme in Cesar Indiano’s very interesting and beautifully written book, Los Hijos del Infortunio (The Sons of Misfortune).  His comments on the decision to invest in agriculture  which led to developing people who have unfulfillable thirst and hunger for food and full bellies, instead of culture which might have inspired them and led to them creating works of beauty and  work for people who create beauty are intriguing and not as implausible as it might sound.

My city of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania has indeed invested in art, such as donating buildings for artists and art projects in the inner city, as a way to stabilize some neighborhoods. Where Antonieta Maximo lives in New York is in a building for artists which was built as a way to stabilize the Times Square area which it did. Even the creation of the UNAH’s Center for Art and Culture (UNAH.CAC) on Parque La Libertad in Comayagüela, Tegucigalpa’s twin city, was to stabilize a neighborhood that was going downhill right in front of the Fine Arts High School and the Immaculate Conception Church, originally built to serve the Indians of Comayagüela in the colonial period. This made the Fine Arts students afraid to take the bus there.

 According to a former student of the Fine Arts High School, Abner Flores, the creation of this UNAH Art Center was effective in controlling the spiraling downhill slide of that neighborhood and in fact he had no problems taking the bus during three years there. When we visited the park and the UNAH-CAC for the Central American Linguist’s Conference in August 2013, the park seemed safe and clean, even better kept that La Merced Park in front of the Museum of Art in central Tegucigalpa. So it seems investing in arts does help control crime and inspire beauty even in a time of financial crisis.

The fact that Honduras’s small cities have kept alive dance-theater presentations like Guancascos in Gracias and Mejicapa or Moors and Christians in Ojojona and in Trujillo and in Ocotepeque, or that Danza del Diablito in Comayagua is part of the 1578 play of the Martyrdom of San Sebastian which has been presented most years since it was brought to Honduras before the Pilgrims even thought of going to the US, shows that in spite of the poverty for which these areas are famous, many Honduran people value art and keep it alive at great personal sacrifice of time and money.   New York Broadway plays count success in months or years of playing on Broadway, in Honduras some of these shows have been playing for centuries.

Given the current economic crisis both within Honduras and among the countries who have traditionally been donors and tourists, this is a hard time to depend on art, and especially on national funding of art and culture, in Honduras. Yet there are independent Garifunas artists like Cruz Bermudez in Tela of Galería El Aura down the street a little from Villas Telamar, Herman Alvarez of San Juan outside of Tela  and Lino Leiva in Trujillo who sells in the beach restaurants at lunchtime that keep their families fed and in school  with what they make selling paintings. Lino says, “Thank God that I have this gift, this talent that I can paint and with this I maintain fed my family.” Cruz Bermudez in particular would like to teach other young people along the Coast to paint, but has not found support to do so yet.

 

US artist who has lived in Honduras for many years Guillermo Yuscaran also reports that tourist buying of his books and paintings has gone down as tourism in Honduras has gone down due to reports of crime. I am interested in trying to bring up Honduran paintings for painting exhibitions, maybe through a National Endowment of the Arts grants.