LAST weekend I managed to go and see the new movie Bob Marley: One Love.

As a child of Jamaican-born African descendants who remembers the era talked of in the film all too clearly, it brought back many memories of my parents being concerned about the wellbeing of our family having to live through the gang violence that wreaked havoc on the beautiful island.

No — this is not a review of what I think is a very good film. Rather, the movie evoked so many memories of the power of Marley’s music and the pride that it gave those of us of Jamaican descent at a time when in Britain we were faced with constant racism at school or work and the threat of attack from racists in the street or our homes.

No spoilers but the movie covers a period of intense gang violence from supporters of the country’s two main political parties, the People’s National Party, led by Michael Manley, and the Jamaican Labour Party, led by Edward Seaga, in the mid-to-late 1970s.

The core of the movie is the rise to international prominence of Marley and his efforts to bring unity to the island through a peace concert.

I first visited Jamaica in 1974 with my mom, brother and sister, as an 11-year-old.

We spent most of our time out in the country in Westmoreland, the westernmost parish of the island, where my mom was born. But we also visited my grandmother, my dad’s mom, who at the time ran a shop in Trench Town in the capital Kingston.

That was the last time I ever saw my grandmother.

During the following years, I began to hear more stories of this fabled area, Marley sang of it and Trench Town featured prominently in the movie as a violence hotspot.

What I remembered most from that visit was the deep levels of poverty in Jamaica and the undeniable fact that no matter how much most people I met were full of love, people were struggling to survive.

This was a lesson brought to this country as many made the trip to help rebuild Britain after World War II but, of course, meaning that the people needed to build the economy of Jamaica in the aftermath of enslavement and the last years of colonialism had left for the cold and grey shores of another island.

Since independence in 1962, Jamaica, an island of around 2.8 million people, has spent most of its time under the strictures of one International Monetary Fund programme or another.

On independence from the British colonial ruler, the country inherited a dependence on exporting cash crops such as sugar, coffee and cocoa.

This was an unsustainable situation for the economy as was the later over-dependence on tourism as the main source of wealth for the country.

Jamaica was forced to run to the IMF for “support.”

IMF programmes are, of course, far from being some benign helping hand to struggling economies. They are ruthless means of imposing neoliberal policies at the expense of the working and peasant classes.

One IMF programme in 2010 saw Jamaica borrowing $850 million from 2010 to 2012.

One of the IMF’s conditions was wage freezes for public-sector workers in 2010 and 2011, which given inflation, amounted to a 20 per cent real-terms cut.

Jamaica now owes agencies such as the IMF and World Bank as well as foreign governments something in the region of $60 billion (£48 billion).

Jamaica will never be able to pay this money back and will be on a permanent treadmill of making money to repay debt as the poor get poorer.

If there is a genuine interest in tackling the serious issues faced by Jamaica, such as the deeply ingrained poverty, health emergencies such as the Covid-19 pandemic or climate change, then the debt should simply be cancelled.

Last year Jamaican authorities announced that poverty levels were around 17 per cent — a rise of 5.7 per cent of the survey reported two years earlier.

Rural areas suffered the highest rates of poverty at around 22.1 per cent with urban areas hitting 15.5 per cent. Poverty rates in the capital Kingston are around 10.5 per cent.

Poverty levels have been made worse by the Covid-19 pandemic which, in common with many places across the globe, impacted severely on people’s ability to go out and make a living.

Around 60 per cent of Jamaica’s employment is informal. Living hand to mouth and knowing that if you don’t work then you don’t eat is a way of life for most of the population.

The Jamaica of the Marley movie was on the verge of civil war. Now people of this beautiful island learn to live with the violence and decide which areas they can safely travel through.

I am not sure that my grandmother would have been able to run a small shop now in Trench Town as she did back in the day. It is also not certain that I would even be able to safely visit her.

The Jamaica of the 2020s has a murder rate of more than 40 per 100,000 — making it one of the most violent places on the planet — with gang violence accounting for 70 per cent of killings.

But Jamaica has volunteered to send an armed police force to its near neighbour Haiti, presumably to pass on its (lack of) expertise in how to fight the disorder that has left much of that Caribbean nation in the grip of violent gangs.

Just two years ago Prime Minister Andrew Holness, of the JLP, was forced to declare a state of emergency for parts of Kingston and some central and western parishes, including Montego Bay, because of soaring gang violence. The move gave the notoriously gun-happy police powers to carry out arrests without warrants.

Things do not appear to have radically changed since the era depicted in the Marley movie.

Much like during the 1970s gangs are still fighting over the scant resources available to them as the super-rich funnel the wealth created by the tourism industry out of the country.

I have nothing against free musical gigs that aim to bring people together or even just to feel better. But this will not be enough to improve the lives of the Jamaican working and peasant classes who have simply not shared in the prosperity that the island’s ruling class and their international capitalist partners have achieved.

Hoping to become the next Bob Marley is a great ambition to have. But it will take solidarity to support the growth of the trade union and socialist movement on the island that will really make a difference.

As they sit in their luxurious homes on the hill looking down on the people struggling to survive, the ruling political elite of Jamaica has offered no real strategy for tackling poverty on the island and the gang violence that it has spawned.