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.