Earlier he had spent nearly ten years in Panama (probably between 19) working as a traffic inspector. Most of this time was spent in Cuba, where he eventually gained employment in the security police of Presidents Alfredo Zayas and Gerardo Machado in the 1920s. Have led him to succeed his father as an overseer of the Jamaican landed interests.īetween 19 Bustamante lived outside of Jamaica, returning to his homeland for only brief visits. Although intelligent, he had little formal education beyond the elementary level in Jamaica and resisted the apprenticeship which would He was restless, extremely extroverted and gregarious. Those few who recall his youth remember him as a fine horseman, who even as a teenager owned his personal horse and raced regularly with his numerous male cousins and others. He attended elementary school in rural Hanover, once even in his mother's native village of Dalmally.
Of Bustamante's early life little is known. However, Bustamante did not leave Jamaica until 1905, when he was 21 years old-and he left as part of the early Jamaican migration to Cuba, where employment opportunities were expanding in the sugar industry. Bustamante's own apochryphal explanation of the name is that it derives from the Spanish mariner who adopted him at the age of five, taking him to Spain where he was sent to school and where he saw active military service. His mother, Mary Wilson, descended from the sturdy, independent Black peasantry of rural Hanover.īustamante is the surname which he formally adopted in September 1944, although he had been using that name regularly since the 1920s.
By virtue of the second marriage of Elsie Hunter, his paternal grandmother, to Alexander Shearer, he became distantly related to both Norman Washington Manley and Michael Manley, as well as to Hugh Shearer- all of whom were to be chief ministers or prime ministers of Jamaica.
His father, Robert Constantine Clarke, a member of the declining white plantocracy, was the overseer of a small, mixed-crop plantation called Blenheim, in the parish of Hanover on the then-isolated northwestern coast of the island. William Alexander Bustamante, perhaps Jamaica's most flamboyant and charismatic politician, was born William Alexander Clarke on February 24, 1884.
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