Saturday Night magazine  |  May 27, 2000

ROSIE THE RED TAKES POWER

How Canada’s “national-security risk” became prime minister of a Caribbean island

By Eric Siblin

Rosie Douglas, the Prime Minister of Dominica, is sitting in the most comfortable spot in his modest home, a three-room crash pad adorned with little more than a television set, a refrigerator, assorted rummage-sale furniture, and a balcony overlooking one of the few paved streets in the town of Portsmouth. He's nestled on the couch in his underwear, a phone cradled between ear and shoulder.      It's early Sunday morning after a late Saturday night officiating at the annual calypso competition, and Douglas is expounding - eloquently - on tax credits and preferential-trade agreements. The mingled sounds of roosters, parrots, dogs, soca tunes, and church bells breeze through an open window. CNN drones on. A cab driver bangs on the door and shouts “Rooosie” - the name everyone knows him by on the island, a microstate in the eastern Caribbean.      Douglas pulls on red track pants and a soccer shirt, roused by the delivery of some luxuries requested from Canada: the latest edition of The Hockey News and several Cherry Blossom chocolate bars. They're rare commodities on a tropical island, and Douglas - though he has a lot on his mind these days - gives them his full attention. He tears open a chocolate wrapper, takes a bite, and pores over the statistical fine print.      “I know more about hockey - even today - than do most Canadians,” he says in his languorous West Indian baritone.      Twenty-four NHL seasons have come and gone since Rosie Douglas, leader of Canada's most destructive student riot, was deemed a “national security risk” and deported in leg irons and handcuffs. Twenty-four seasons during which the one-time protege of John Diefenbaker has followed his revolutionary compass from Cuba to Zimbabwe (via Libya and Grenada), befriending Fidel and Mu'ammer and Stokely and becoming a familiar fixture on the smash-the-state end of the political spectrum. While his old cohorts in Canada were settling down, selling out, and buying in - in one case, even being named to the Senate - Douglas, for the better part of a decade, was based in Tripoli, where he received a Libyan paycheque to aid and advise revolutionary movements across Africa.      Now, Douglas is back home, at fifty-eight the elected prime minister of Dominica, governing one of the more impoverished and obscure islands of the Caribbean and its 75,000 citizens. It's not an easy task; putting the revolution into practice never is. But it hasn't stopped him from looking north to a place he considers his second home, Canada, and hoping that relations can be repaired, bridges rebuilt with a country where, had events taken a different turn, he could well have been debating motions on Parliament Hill.      Douglas came to Canada displaying more chutzpah than dogma. As a seventeen-year-old working on his father's coconut plantation near Portsmouth, he had applied to study agriculture in Ontario but was frustrated by difficulties in obtaining a visa. One day he cranked up the old-time telephone and asked the operator for Canada. “I said I wanted to speak to the prime minister,” Douglas recalls. “I didn't know who that was.” He managed to get through to John Diefenbaker's office and leave a message.      About a month later, while he was working on a coconut tree, a call came from the prime minister. “I told him what my problem was,” Douglas says. “Within a week I got my visa and went to Canada.”      Once here, Douglas spent seven months milking cows on an Ontario farm before enrolling in agriculture at the University of Guelph. It was a course of study set by Rosie's father, the indomitable Robert B. Douglas, a self-made businessman who knew what he wanted for his sixteen children (not counting at least eight born out of wedlock), most of whom received good political names (Rosie is short for Roosevelt) and something their father never did: a formal education. It was decided that Rosie, the second eldest, would gain an expertise studying agriculture that he could bring home and apply to the plantation. For his first three years in Canada, Rosie proved a loyal son.      Once the degree was in his pocket, however, he defied his father's wishes by heading to Sir George Williams University (now part of Concordia University) in Montreal to enrol in a B.A. program in political science. It was a move that became known in the family as his “defection.” By then Douglas had firmed up his friendship with Diefenbaker — he'd visited him in Ottawa and met his wife, Olive — and he attempted to assuage his father by having the Chief write a letter lauding him. The connection to Diefenbaker also meant Douglas gravitated towards the Tories. Within a few years, Douglas says, Diefenbaker would try to persuade him to run as a Conservative candidate in a Halifax riding, enticing him with the prospect of becoming the country's first black Member of Parliament. Papers in the Diefenbaker archives include an exchange of letters between the two men as late as January, 1969, in which Douglas was seeking Diefenbaker's help in the case of a woman slated for deportation. At that point, the sixties were in full subversive swing and Douglas's sympathies were more in sync with Malcolm X than with John D. “It was really the intensification of the civil-rights movement by the late sixties,” he says, “that led Diefenbaker and myself to drift apart.”      Douglas, twenty-seven, had solid leadership credentials by 1969. As well as his Tory party activities, he'd been president of the Association of British West Indian Students, and was serving as vice-president of the Verdun Cricket Club. So when several hundred students began a sit-in at Sir George's downtown Hall Building on January 29, 1969, to protest a biology lecturer's alleged racism, Douglas emerged as a media-savvy leader. The occupation lasted two weeks, during which the students and the university bargained. The administration walked on eggshells; the students walked on air. The mood was festive — passes were even granted to permit students to go home for showers before returning to the Happening. Sir George had been added to the list of universities mobilized by peace, love, and understanding.      Some protesters were keen to smash the university's mainframe computer, Douglas remembers, but his cooler head prevailed. “I really played the role of senior student activist,” he says. Then, on February 11, fearing that they were about to be double-crossed in dealings with the administration, students beefed up their barricades. The Montreal police riot squad moved in. Someone lit a fire. The protest was suddenly transformed from peaceful sit-in to pandemonium.      “The thing just blew up very quickly,” recalls Claude-Armand Sheppard, a Montreal lawyer who had been retained by the university. “Acrid, black smoke was generated, which nobody had anticipated. The lights went out, and the police ended up, like all of us, crawling on their knees making a chain to save the students. I personally don't believe that the students, when they set the fire, were aware of the fact that if the police had moved out, there would have been ninety dead from smoke inhalation.”      Douglas has a less charitable interpretation of the intervention, saying a deal was in place to form a committee to arbitrate the conflict when the police suddenly attacked. “We were totally betrayed,” he says. “It was bedlam... In panic the students threw out the computer [data] cards and some small typewriters from the ninth floor. Other students started to demonstrate outside, some in solidarity, some saying, 'Burn the niggers.' “ As for the arson that caused $2 million in damage, Douglas says that someone other than the students - an RCMP agent provocateur or policeman - was responsible. Another theory suggests that the Black Panthers, seeking a cause célèbre north of the border, had orchestrated the conflict.      Whatever the case, Douglas was convicted of mischief for his part in what became known as the “Computer Riot” in April, 1971, and received the stiffest sentence of any demonstrator, two years in jail and a $5,000 fine. Also convicted was Anne Cools, who has since become a Liberal senator. Both Cools and Douglas appealed their convictions unsuccessfully.      Until 1973, when the appeal-court decision was handed down, Douglas was out on bail, during which time he became the subject of Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) surveillance. The Mounties hired Warren Hart, a former undercover FBI agent who had penetrated the Black Panthers, to spy on the Dominican black-power activist. He duly befriended Douglas and became his bodyguard and chauffeur.      Hart, who testified at the McDonald Commission into RCMP wrongdoing in the 1970s, alleged that Douglas was behind an assassination plot that targeted Sir George officials and was meant to coincide with an armed revolt in Dominica in 1971. Douglas dismisses this as an absurd idea that originated with Hart and went no further. He says Hart, who drove him around in a Lincoln Continental outfitted with a hidden recording device, was forever trying to draw him into violent schemes, such as planting dynamite at Sir George. “His role was to entice me to use violence... and he failed... We were not about any violence. We were about the demands of the black community in terms of their human rights, their civil rights, and their full equality.” (Hart would later also admit to the McDonald Commission that he'd offered to train British Columbia and Ontario native groups in the use of explosives.)      In November, 1974, Douglas was paroled after serving sixteen months of his sentence. His freedom was to be short-lived; Ottawa obtained a deportation order against him. Douglas fought the order, but on May 1, 1976, the man whom Diefenbaker had helped get into the country was declared a “national security risk,” and expelled.      Dominica is not standard-issue Caribbean paradise. It lacks the luxurious expanses of white beaches that have made so many other islands magnets for mass tourism; it boasts no international airport, no golf course. But, at forty-five kilometres long by twenty-five wide, Dominica is an unspoiled eco-gem - a rugged place veined with rushing streams and dotted with dormant volcanoes, crater lakes, glittering waterfalls, hot springs, and sharp gorges. It is the most mountainous island in the Caribbean, and the terrain has conspired against the development of large estates and limited the profitability of traditional West Indian crops such as sugar and coffee. Rain forests, coconuts, bananas, coral reefs, and rare parrots abound. In the capital, Roseau, the only town of any consequence in the country, the tallest building stands five storeys high. There is one traffic light in the entire country, but it stopped functioning a while back and has never been fixed.      Upon his deportation, Douglas was reluctant to return to Dominica, where the government of Prime Minister Patrick John was cracking down on reputed dissidents. Still a British colony, the country was autonomous in most respects but not nearly independent enough for people like Rosie Douglas. He spent six months in Jamaica, staying with friends, before going to Cuba, where his radicalism received a warm welcome. After several weeks there he returned home.      For Robert B. Douglas, Rosie's homecoming was not particularly sweet. RBD, as the senior Douglas was known, had a pragmatic view of social justice and was less than impressed by Rosie's black-power politics. In the 1930s RBD had availed himself of what was perhaps the only money-making opportunity for a poor Dominican man; he went to work in the oil refineries of nearby Curaçao. He was adept at saving money, and when he returned to Dominica a decade later the anglophile plantocracy was divesting itself of unprofitable concerns. RBD purchased a large abandoned plantation, cleaned it up, and planted fields of coconut palms. He later diversified his assets, opening the first cinema, supermarket, and guesthouse in Portsmouth. He also won a seat in the legislature and championed the rural interests of the Portsmouth area against the élite of Roseau.      At home, he was a harsh taskmaster and disciplinarian. Every day began at 4:30 a.m., when all the children were awakened and brought into their parents' bedroom to kneel for the reciting of the rosary. The kids then trooped off to Mass. When they returned home for a breakfast of soft-boiled eggs, they were expected to run through mathematical tables.      Rosie's younger brother Macintyre, who now runs the family plantation, guesthouse, and cinema, recalls that when they ran afoul of their father they would be forced to undress while RBD, a rope in his hand, tossed his grey felt hat on the floor and ordered the misbehaving child to pick it up. Then a dozen lashes would rain down hard. “If Rosie had stayed behind instead of going to Canada,” says Macintyre, “it would have been bend or break for him with RBD.”      When Rosie returned home from Canada a Marxist, the break finally came. One of his first activities was to help unionize the island's agricultural workers, including the several hundred on his father's estate. RBD responded by expelling Rosie from the family home — formally notifying his wayward son by registered letter. “Rosie has never done an honest day's work in his life,” the elder Douglas told a reporter at the time. “He ought to be ashamed of himself.”      In those days, Dominica was caught up in a political maelstrom that involved Rastafarians, colonials, independence-seekers, new leftists, and black-power advocates. Added to the mix was now Rosie Douglas, who within weeks of his return helped organize supporters of independence to inundate the House of Assembly's visitors' gallery. The legislature soon backed the idea; independence from Britain was formally achieved on November 3, 1978.      Yet the political situation remained unstable. Prime Minister Patrick John went through a string of titles — including Colonel, Comrade, and Doctor of Metaphysics — and one scandal led to another. Ultimately, 10,000 people — more than 15 percent of the population — massed outside the House in a demonstration met by bullets and tear gas. The violence triggered a constitutional coup that removed John's government from power. A coalition of politicians, business people, and church and labour leaders took charge. Members of the coalition included Rosie and his older brother, Michael.      Two months later, in August, 1979, Hurricane David turned the island upside down. Thirty-seven people were killed, 5,000 were injured, and three-quarters of the population were left homeless. Douglas's appointed seat in government was to fall victim as well. Following the disaster, U.S. and Canadian aid money poured into the country, and geopolitical concerns came with the cash. That year had already seen the Cold War balance of power in the Caribbean basin altered with the victories of the revolutionary New Jewel Movement in Grenada and the Sandinistas in Nicaragua. Elsewhere, the Iran hostage-taking and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan would soon set off alarm bells in Washington. Rosie Douglas — said to have solicited Cuban help in rebuilding the country — was dismissed from his appointed Senate seat. It was a weeding out of leftists, he says, that was “engineered by the U.S.” in return for aid money.      So Douglas turned his attention to revolutionary activities further afield. For the next seven years he was largely based in Libya as an executive member of the Centre to Resist Imperialism, Racism, Backwardness, and Fascism — an umbrella group for the Libyan government's revolutionary activities both at home and abroad. Douglas is less than specific about exactly what he was up to: “Overseeing and assisting the activity of liberation movements throughout the world,” he says. In what sense? “In all senses.” During the 1970s and 1980s, Libya was flush with oil money and was throwing it around to promote the philosophy of Mu'ammer Gaddafi. While hundreds of foreigners were recruited by the Libyan government, experts say none of them - Douglas included - were entrusted with key responsibilities. Their role was essentially propagandistic. “The Gaddafi government, for all its stupidity at times, has always been very careful to make sure that it never involved foreigners directly in any terrorist group,” says Dirk Vandewalle, author of a book on Gaddafi's Libya. “It was more rhetorical involvement.”      In Douglas's view, there was nothing extremist about his activities, centred as they were on defeating retrograde despots and freeing Nelson Mandela, who was steadfastly supported by the Gaddafi regime. “All Dominicans supported the freedom of Mandela,” he says. “And the freedom of Mandela wasn't a cakewalk on a Sunday morning - it was a revolutionary struggle in which people fought, died, and killed.”      During these years, Libya was picking up Douglas's tab as he divided his time between Africa and Dominica. He ran in the elections of 1980 - losing, he says, because his rivals kept harping on about the Computer Riot - and again in 1985 when he won a seat in the Dominican Parliament. Libyan funding enabled him to win that time, he happily admits.      In the 1990 election, gerrymandering left Douglas without a seat. His older brother, Michael, however, had become leader of the Labour Party and formed the official opposition. Although RBD considered Michael to be an extremist (and went so far as to print and distribute pamphlets in the 1985 election denouncing both his sons as untrustworthy communists), the older son was, in fact, a more traditional politician than his younger brother. When Michael announced in 1992 that he was terminally ill with cancer he passed the torch to Rosie. “Michael said he wanted me to come back and play a more prominent role in the Caribbean,” says Douglas. After Michael died, Rosie won a by-election for the vacant seat and was elected leader of the Labour Party.      His work was just beginning. Persuading Dominicans to overcome their skepticism of him and his past activities took several years. Political power was finally ripe for the picking in this year's January 31 election. Douglas's efforts “bore fruit in the 2000 election,” says Lennox Honychurch, a local historian and former MP. “But it has been a long-term, dogged, determined thing.”      Ruling Dominica is not easy. Bananas, its economic lifeblood, are grown on hilly slopes by individual freehold farmers and — in the free-trade world — they are unable to compete with the flatland, corporate-owned and operated plantations of Central America. Hard up for foreign exchange, the previous government had taken to selling Dominican citizenship for $50,000 (U.S.) a head. This brought in cash, but also produced hundreds of Russian gangsters and Chinese money men who globe-trotted with passports that enabled them to get into countries like Canada without visas. Such “economic citizens” never set foot in Dominica and the phenomenon soured relations between Dominica and the U.S. and Canada. During the election campaign, Douglas's Labour Party did not mince its words, deriding the government as a “corrupt regime of modern-day pirates that masquerade[s] as government. They have made greed, cronyism, and lies commonplace.” Douglas, as usual, was accused by his opponents of never having held down a real job, of spending too much time doing God-knows-what outside Dominica, and, for good measure, of being a Moonie sympathetic to homosexuals.      The baiting had limited results. Even a leading businessman like Phillip Nassief, who remembers Douglas when he was “way out there - a red-hot communist,” has kind words for the new prime minister. “He's a visionary,” he says.      Douglas jumps into the official prime-ministerial vehicle, a Nissan Pathfinder. His nephew chauffeurs him to a Portsmouth basketball court framed by palm trees, cloud-shrouded peaks, and verdant hills that stretch out like sleeping dinosaurs. Douglas is ignored — the kids are used to seeing him here — but he eventually draws a couple of nine-year-olds into play. He banters with them in the island's French-based Creole. A man signals his attention from across the field and proceeds to bend the prime minister's ear. Douglas digs into his pocket and hands the man some cash. “Roosie,” says a toothless old woman with an umbrella, “I had a dream about you last night.” A burnt-out young man approaches, seeking money. “You see this guy here? He used to be a top cricketer, top,” says Douglas. “Now he's a vegetable. Drugs did it.”      Early the next morning, Carnival officially begins with a 4 a.m. parade through the streets of Roseau. Douglas tricks his security detail into thinking he's asleep, disappears through a back door, and makes an unscheduled appearance in Roseau, engaging in “jump up,” abandoning protocol for high-density Dionysian abandon. Over the course of the next two days, Dominicans gyrate behind trucks carrying calypso bands, fuelled by ample amounts of Kubuli beer (“Y2Kubuli- Because one is never enough,” said the ad campaign.)      There are several reports of Douglas being spotted in the mobile mosh pit, both in Roseau and in various hamlets up the coastal road that connects the capital with Portsmouth. People were on the lookout for Douglas in his “sensay” costume, a traditional Carnival outfit made of dried banana leaves and a mask with cow horns. But even if nobody positively identified him to win the $500 E.C. (about $300 Canadian) prize he'd offered, Dominicans took notice. No one could remember the last time a prime minister had been seen jumping up, and it was put forth as further proof that Douglas is a politician unlike the others.      “In the past our leadership has been too restricted by trying to behave like former British administrators with all of the little trappings,” says the historian Honychurch. “Rosie is freeing himself up from all of this... . It's that sort of thing that has really enamoured him to people, that they can see him at any time.”      This is certainly the case in Portsmouth, where favour-seekers, friends, relatives, and miscellaneous opinion-holders routinely wander in and out of his modest home. But some Dominicans wonder whether Douglas's man-of-the-people routine will mesh with th requirements of government. On a Wednesday morning, I arrive at the prime minister's office for a 10 a.m. appointment. A clock ticks, the ceiling fan whirrs, office clerks go about their business, people wait for the prime minister, grow impatient, and leave. Five hours later, sharply turned out in an olive suit and polished shoes, Douglas strides jauntily into his office. He doesn't apologize - he's largely oblivious to social niceties - but he extends to others the same patience he requires of them.      Still, he has a brittle edge, especially when he speaks of his core belief — dignity for black people — and his words are discharged in mechanical speechification. His emotional range swings from gregarious knee-slapper to dour ideologue, but always with a certain ascetic quality. Douglas doesn't smoke or drink, and scoffs at the idea of “paying fifty dollars for lunch — spare me!” He prefers a couple of “bakes” (fried bread, available with smoked herring) and a ginger beer - fare for the masses.      In this way, Douglas has not strayed far from the example of his father, who made his children pray every morning for “detachment from temple goods.” RBD “did not go styling off with fancy motor cars, grand clothes, huge houses, and whatever,” says Honychurch. “He continued to live basically as he had always done.” RBD died in 1988, hard at work with a machete in one of his fields.      Unlike his father, Douglas has not been much of a family man, with four children from three different partners. His son Robert, who grew up in Dominica, has followed closely in his political footsteps, despite the fact that he did not meet him until he was eleven years old. Robert became the first black student-council leader at Concordia University, converted to Islam, and Africanized his name to Tiyani Behanzin. “I never really developed a father-son relationship with Rosie,” says Behanzin from England, where he is completing a doctorate in law. “It has been essentially a political relationship.” Behanzin recalls visiting his father in Libya and rubbing shoulders with the likes of Gaddafi, Sandinista leader Daniel Ortega, Liberia's Charles Taylor, and Black Panther Stokely Carmichael. Confidence in Douglas was such that his eldest child, Debbie, now a lawyer in the U.S., is said to have acted as an informal messenger between Gaddafi and Fidel Castro. “I'm sure she did,” says her brother Behanzin. “Because we were in that circle.”      Calypso music in dominica serves the function of both superego and id — a severe moral critic with a sense of rhythm. More than the newspaper editorials, more than the official opposition, it is the calypsonians who pass judgment on government misdeeds. The current calypso king, for example, has a rollicking rant in which he rakes the previous government over the calypso coals for, among other things, a rumoured sex-for-tax-breaks scandal. A widely held theory of why the former government called the snap January election is that it wanted to avoid being castigated by calypso artists during February's Carnival, a time when the songsmiths get major play and custom has it that the laws against libel and slander are suspended.      As it turned out, Douglas had been prime minister for barely a month when Carnival got going, not enough time for the calypsonians to sink their lyrical teeth into him. At the calypso contest that precedes Carnival, Douglas attended the massive concert and even donated $1,000 E.C. out of his own pocket as a prize to the winner. (As prime minister, his monthly take-home pay is $4,500 E.C., about $2,700 Cdn.) He was well aware that he got off easy during a period “when the critics are out and their knives are sharp. We had an unusual honeymoon. They didn't have enough time to sniff out a whiff of corruption,” he says. “They issued warnings and admonitions: 'You're under the microscope because of your controversial background. So be careful.' “      Douglas is under a good deal of scrutiny now that he's gone from revolutionary to ruler. A recent article in the Los Angeles Times warned that the new head of Dominica is an unreconstructed leftist bent on setting up a beachhead for anti-Americanism. Douglas dismisses the notion, saying he is banking on “close and harmonious relations” with the U.S. Yet he is adamant that Dominica - like many other small, developing countries - requires economic assistance and cannot be forgotten simply because the Cold War is history and there's no longer a compelling geopolitical reason for the U.S. to invest in its neighbours. In Douglas's view, Dominica needs a genuine economic lifeline if it is to avoid dubious get-rich-quick schemes that do the international community no good — quick fixes like selling citizenship to Russian mobsters (which he's suspended), providing a haven for Internet gambling and questionable offshore banking, or giving a helping hand to the transshipment of South American cocaine — all of which have taken root in Dominica, all of which Douglas wants to end.      “We inherited a country with an empty treasury,” he says, “with sixty-percent unemployment among youth, with banana production - our main export - having dropped from seventy thousand tons a year to twenty-five thousand tons, income that has dropped from one hundred and twenty million dollars a year to twenty million dollars a year, so there is a social problem... . We're not asking for skyscrapers, we're just asking for basic humanity.”      Douglas would like to see this humanity - in the form of aid or investment - come from those countries, like Canada and the U.S., who can most afford it. To this end, he is seeking special status for trade and investment from the European Union, arguing that Dominica, floating as it is between the French départements of Guadeloupe and Martinique, should also be considered part of Europe. “But if they don't co-operate then ultimately we will have to look elsewhere,” he adds, hinting that he might turn to his old friends, among them Libya and Cuba. But his network extends further to include European Labour parties and influential black Americans. At a ceremony marking the opening of Parliament last month, politicians from around the world showed up. So did more surprising guests, such as Martin Luther King III and rap legends Public Enemy.      Then there's Canada. Douglas is not bitter about the deportation ordered by Ottawa at a time in his life when he felt more Canadian than Dominican. But he's insistent that the national-security-risk label was nonsense, an RCMP frame-up. The times were paranoid, says Douglas, and certain Canadian authorities were jittery about black power. After he got out of jail, Douglas had a meeting with Warren Allmand, then solicitor general, whom he first met when the Liberal cabinet minister was touring a Quebec prison and Douglas banged on the bars to get his attention. In December, 1974, he met with Allmand and presented him with a lengthy essay he'd written about prison reform. Douglas says the federal cabinet minister hinted that he might have a job for him. The conversation, taped by Hart, got back to the RCMP, who preferred Douglas as a deportee rather than an employee in the solicitor general's office, says Douglas. (According to Allmand, the RCMP bugged his conversation with Douglas based on the notion that “I was a communist son-of-a-bitch.”)      Although Russian gangsters who've purchased Dominican citizenship have no trouble getting into Canada these days, Douglas does. He can't visit this country because of his national-security-risk status without obtaining a minister's permit from the Immigration Department or a pardon from the solicitor general, which he is seeking with the help of Toronto lawyer Clayton Ruby. (Anne Cools sought and received such a pardon.)      Douglas is hoping Ottawa will turn the page and recognize that if the ninth-floor computer centre of the Hall Building went up in flames, well, it was 1969 after all, and the only thing Rosie Douglas ever wanted to torch was racism. “Whether you like me or not, I have contributed towards Canada being a more enlightened country in terms of human rights and ethnic respect,” he says. “I would like to see the Canadian government be man enough, woman enough, brave enough, to say, 'Okay, you have been in the country, you have been incarcerated in our country. You might say that it wasn't justified, we might say that it was justified, whatever the case we're not going to argue that now.'“      It's late afternoon and the cabinet support staff has called it a day. From the prime minister's office, rain-soaked Roseau appears grey and impoverished. Outside Douglas's door is a sobbing man who has been anxiously waiting since early morning to discuss a job problem. Inside, Douglas sits, relaxed, in his carpeted, air-conditioned office. A bookshelf is lined with titles like Business Guide to the Uruguay Round and 200 Seasons of Australian Cricket. There is a Dominican flag, with the green Sisserou parrot, and the coat of arms, declaring the national motto in Creole: Apres Bondie C'est La Ter. (After God, it is the Land.)      A cabinet minister wants to brief Douglas before a news conference planned for the next day; the prime minister seems less than interested and teases the minister about his romantic situation. (“Since he was elected his woman complains that he no longer thinks they're compatible,” he laughs. “They were compatible for many years, then all of a sudden the election - and they're no longer compatible!”) The phone rings repeatedly. “Hello?” says Douglas. “Wha'hap'nin?” The concerns are many: banana prices; small-business subsidies; E.U. markets; honouring Martin Luther King Day; an unpaid bill owed by the government; a trip to Canada he's trying to arrange.      A radio reporter enters the compact office for a quick interview about Douglas's plans for a voyage to Guadeloupe, where he will meet French President Jacques Chirac. Two young women who've won scholarships plunk themselves on the floor of the office, giggling while Douglas tries to convince them Cuba is a perfectly good place to get educated. His secretary dumps a dozen clipboards with files marked “For Necessary Action,” on a desk that is rapidly coming to resemble the terrain of the country. “Yes, I'll be here,” he says at about 6:30 p.m. “I'm working late.” Cabinet ministers come and go, the sky darkens, there is a discussion about illicit passport-holders, and Douglas, for once, looks weary, as if his patience and energy have finally hit a brick wall. His eyes close. Then the phone rings, and he comes to. Dogs, parrots, and roosters are making a racket outside; it's not going to be easy for Rosie Douglas, but he's beginning to look prime ministerial.