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I have cried for Jamaica at least six times—not because I despised her, but because I loved her enough to recognise what she might have become.

These were not always public tears. Some came in the solitude of a bedroom thousands of miles from home. Others erupted first as anger, then settled into grief. One came at the funeral of a brilliant colleague whose life’s work embodied a Jamaican future that our country repeatedly approached, applauded—and then abandoned.

The latest tears were provoked by an article and a song sent by my perceptive daughter Melissa, who understood, perhaps more deeply than I had realised, why an old Caribbean federation still lives inside her father.

The First Time: The Morning After Federation

The first occasion was the morning after Jamaica voted on whether to remain in the West Indies Federation.

The referendum was held on 19 September 1961. The official question was simple: should Jamaica remain in the Federation of the West Indies? A majority voted no. Jamaica subsequently withdrew, and the Federation—established in 1958 as a political union of ten Caribbean territories—was dissolved in 1962.

I was young, but not too young at Kingston College H S to understand that something larger than an election had been lost.

We had chosen the emotional satisfaction of standing alone over the difficult discipline of building together. We had allowed insular suspicion, partisan advantage and the seductions of separate flags to overcome the strategic logic of Caribbean scale.

A federation would certainly have been troublesome. All serious political arrangements are. There would have been disputes over taxation, representation, location, migration and leadership. Yet difficulties are not proof that a project is mistaken. They are often proof that it is consequential.

That morning, I cried because I sensed that Jamaica had not merely rejected an administrative arrangement. We had diminished the geographical size of our political imagination.

The Second Time: A Cold Night in Hangzhou

The second time came decades later, in a hotel room in Hangzhou, China.

Earlier that day, I had spent part of the morning with approximately ten peasant technicians responsible for a small village hydroelectric plant. Their little 70-kilowatt station operated continuously, supplying power through a single Pelton-wheel turbine belt-coupled to an alternator.

The technicians manually monitored and adjusted the alternating-current frequency. Their work was patient, repetitive and essential. In the darkness and bitter cold, wearing de rigueur Mao caps and greasy overalls, they worked in flimsy flip-flops to keep the village powered.

We did not share much language. I therefore relied upon diagrams, gestures, facial expressions and a considerable amount of enthusiastic amateur sign-language. I explained that their task could be simplified by adapting an inexpensive Sharp programmable calculator—costing, as I remember it, about five Hong Kong dollars—to help determine and manage the appropriate governor settings.

The principle was not grand. Measure the relevant variables. Calculate the correction. Adjust the water-flow governing mechanism. Maintain the required electrical frequency with less guesswork and less continual human intervention.

They watched with extraordinary concentration. There was no pretence that the proposal was beneath them because it was inexpensive. There was no committee demanding a glamorous imported solution. There was no official insisting that only a costly machine bearing a celebrated international brand could possibly possess intelligence.

Following further technical consultation with my big blond Norwegian associate, they decided to implement the idea.

That night, alone in my hotel room, I wept.

I cried because those rural Chinese technicians had immediately recognised useful logic when it was placed before them. They were prepared to combine disciplined labour, local responsibility and a cheap programmable device to improve their village’s electricity supply.

And I thought of Jamaica.

How difficult would it be, I wondered, to persuade my own kin that an uncomplicated, inexpensive improvement could be technically respectable? How many officials would reject it because it lacked grandeur? How many consultants would enlarge it into an unaffordable project? How many influential people would ask, not whether it worked, but who stood to earn from it?

The Chinese technicians possessed comparatively little formal status. Yet they displayed something that wealthier institutions frequently lack: intellectual humility.

The Third Time: Legazpi and the Tyranny of Non-Essentials

The third occasion came while I was on an assignment in Legazpi in the Philippines.

I confided in a Filipino colleague at PHILEC that two technically sensible practices would face fierce opposition in Jamaica.

The first was the use of straightforward penstock water-hammer in liners for high-head mini-hydroelectric installations. The second was accepting electricity poles that might not be cosmetically perfect or ruler-straight, but were structurally strong, safe and entirely capable of doing their intended work.

In rural development, function matters. A penstock must deliver water at the required head and flow. A pole must carry electrical conductors safely. Neither must win a beauty competition.

Yet I knew the Jamaican reaction too well. Somebody would object that the pipe arrangement looked insufficiently impressive. Someone else would ridicule the natural irregularity of a durable wooden pole. The conversation would wander from performance and affordability into appearances, procurement rituals, status and imported notions of modernity.

My acting secretary, provided through the United Nations Industrial Development Organization, came to my room and witnessed my torment. I was not grieving over crooked poles. I was grieving over the national habit of allowing non-essentials to crowd out solutions.

This was shortly after Jamaica’s bitterly fought 1980 general election—an event whose images and consequences were being reported even on television in distant parts of Asia.

There I was, on the other side of the world, watching and helping countries with fewer pretensions examine practical ways of extending electricity and productive capacity, while knowing that Jamaica could spend years debating the appearance of the instrument rather than the value of the outcome.

We too often confuse sophistication with expense, engineering with ornament and development with the ceremonial purchase of impressive equipment.

The Fourth Time: “What About Nuclear?”

The fourth cry began not as tears but as an explosion.

I heard the Speaker of the House of Representatives, Mrs Juliet Holness, ask a parliamentary committee chairman, with evident confidence: “What about nuclear?”

My daughters heard me exclaim: “What the hell does that accountant know about energy generation?”

The language was impolite. The underlying alarm was not.

I was not arguing that accountants, lawyers or parliamentarians must remain silent about energy. Democratic government requires non-specialists to ask questions and make decisions. Nor do engineers possess a monopoly upon wisdom.

The danger arises when a casual question becomes a substitute for disciplined inquiry, and when political enthusiasm runs far ahead of technical understanding.

Nuclear generation is not a fashionable accessory to be added to a national development catalogue. For Jamaica, it raises immense questions concerning grid size, system reserves, financing, cooling, seismic conditions, emergency planning, regulation, radioactive waste, insurance, foreign dependence and long-term institutional competence.

“What about nuclear?” is therefore not, by itself, an energy policy.

I grieved because decisions of gargantuan consequence can be entertained in Jamaica upon the flimsiest foundations of knowledge. Those who have not studied the system may nevertheless acquire the authority to commit generations of Jamaicans to its costs and risks.

The frustration is familiar to every trained person who has watched expertise treated as an inconvenience while confidence, connection and office are mistaken for competence.

The Fifth Time: Cynthia Lewis and the Future Jamaica Mislaid

The fifth occasion came at the funeral of Dr Cynthia Lewis, which I attended by Zoom.

Cynthia was no ordinary colleague. She was an awesome biochemist and one of the indispensable critical thinkers of the ENERPLAN team. Together, we pioneered and patented the fermentation of Leucaena leucocephala foliage—not merely to produce one useful commodity, but to establish an integrated biological system yielding several valuable products.

The process generated fuel gases, including methane, hydrogen and ethane, alongside carbon dioxide and hydrogen sulphide. It also produced liquid organic fertiliser, solid organic fertiliser and an excellent ration for broiler chickens.

This was not a laboratory curiosity. It was an attempt to demonstrate how Jamaica could convert a vigorous tropical plant into energy, agricultural inputs, animal nutrition, rural employment, import substitution and scientific capability.

The work attracted attention and encouragement during the 1980s. Jamaica took notice. So did CARICOM, the Philippines and the Organization of American States. Caribbean Broilers and East Caribbean Flour Mills recognised its promise. Prime Minister Edward Seaga and several of his ministers rejoiced with us at the breakthrough.

For a moment, it seemed possible that Jamaican science would be trusted to build something Jamaican—something rooted in our soils, climate, agricultural needs and intellectual resources.

But Jamaica has a tragic habit of applauding an achievement without constructing the institutions required to carry it forward.

We celebrate the announcement. We admire the prototype. We congratulate the inventors. Then priorities change, administrations turn, files are misplaced, institutional memories fade and those who did the difficult thinking are left to watch the country purchase inferior fragments of what they had already developed as an integrated whole.

Cynthia never lost her capacity for hope.

Only days before her death, she had lit up at the prospect that our Leucaena 4F Project might at last receive funding in Jamaica. The four Fs—fuel, fertiliser, feed and the further productive possibilities flowing from them—represented unfinished national business.

Then, on 31 December 2022, Cynthia departed this life: one day before the year in which we expected that funding and revival might finally come.

At her funeral, I did not wail. My sorrow was quieter and, perhaps, more severe.

I grieved for Cynthia, certainly—for her brilliance, companionship, scientific courage and faithfulness to the work. But my greatest grief was for the fickleness of modern Jamaica.

What kind of country allows its serious thinkers to spend decades proving what can be done, only to require them to grow old waiting for official attention to mature into action?

What kind of nation rejoices at a breakthrough, forgets it, then later announces the need for foreign solutions to the very problems its own people had already addressed?

Cynthia’s death was a personal bereavement. Yet it also felt like the burial of one more possible Jamaica: scientifically confident, agriculturally intelligent, energetically resourceful and unafraid to trust its own minds.

On that day, I cried for a colleague.

I also cried for the country that had not fully understood what it possessed while she was still here to help us build it.

The Sixth Time: Melissa Understood

The sixth occasion came only recently.

I completed an article titled “Of Course, I Still Believe in Federation” and saw it published in Our Today. Writing it required me to revisit the first of these tears—the grief of September 1961—and to ask whether the Caribbean’s present fragmentation has vindicated our ancestors’ retreat from political union.

Then Melissa, my sensitive and wise daughter, sent me Julian Rogers’s Caribbean Bridges article, “If Only We Did Federate…”, together with its accompanying song. The piece revisited the collapse of the West Indies Federation and the immense Caribbean possibilities buried with it.

Melissa’s message told me more than the article alone could say.

My daughter understood.

She understood that Federation was not merely an old constitutional arrangement about which her father remained nostalgically obsessed. It represented a road not taken: a Caribbean with greater economic weight, deeper pools of expertise, more credible regional institutions and a wider sense of belonging.

Perhaps I cried because hope had travelled between generations.

My first tears were shed over a Caribbean broken apart. My sixth came because my daughter recognised that the pieces might still remember the shape they were meant to form.

Why These Tears Matter

Each occasion concerned something apparently different: Federation, Chinese mini-hydro, Philippine rural electrification, Jamaican nuclear imaginings, the funeral of a pioneering biochemist and a daughter’s message.

Yet they were really the same occasion.

Each concerned Jamaica’s troubled relationship with practical knowledge, institutional memory and collective possibility.

We resist regional union because sovereignty flatters us. We resist simple technologies because expense impresses us. We reject sturdy solutions because appearances distract us. We entertain gigantic technological commitments because authority too often outruns understanding. We praise our scientists, then starve their work of continuity until either the project or the pioneer passes away.

This is how a country loses not merely inventions, but futures.

The ENERPLAN story belongs beside the village hydro plant in China and the rural electrification lessons of the Philippines because all three ask the same question: can ordinary materials, disciplined minds and locally appropriate technologies be trusted to improve human life?

Elsewhere, people frequently answer by trying.

In Jamaica, we too often answer by convening, postponing, politicising, forgetting and eventually importing.

But tears are not necessarily surrender.

I have cried because I have seen what disciplined people can accomplish with modest resources. I have seen technicians learn across languages. I have seen villages treat electricity as a shared responsibility. I have worked beside Jamaican scientists capable of converting biological abundance into fuel, fertiliser, feed and national possibility. I have seen societies accept that a solution need not be glamorous to be transformative.

And I still believe Jamaica can learn.

I still believe that our people can distinguish treasure from glitter, engineering from salesmanship and leadership from performance. I still believe we can recover the work of Cynthia Lewis and the ENERPLAN team, not as a museum exhibit, but as a foundation upon which new researchers, farmers, engineers and entrepreneurs can build.

I still believe the Caribbean can move beyond the psychology of ten tiny territories defending ten tiny administrative kingdoms.

Most of all, I believe that when a daughter sends her father a song about Federation, history has not finished speaking.

Six times I have cried for thee, Jamaica.

The seventh time, God willing, may be for joy.