Volume No. 2 Issue No. 19 - Monday October 29, 2007
Caribbean Premier fit to be hung by two West Villagers
 By Peter Ross - New York; [email protected]
Paul Muranyi of the Fashion Institute of Technology and Warren Allen Smith (right) admires the portrait of E. O Leblanc.
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Premier Edward O. LeBlanc of the Windward Islands country of Dominica, the individual mainly responsible for its becoming independent of the United Kingdom on November 3rd, 1978, has now had his image appropriately hung on November 3rd, 2007, thanks to two New York City West Villagers.
Greenwich Villagers hanged Dominica�s head of state in effigy?
�No, no,� explained Jane Street resident Warren Allen Smith. �I commissioned Professor Karen Santry of the Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT) to paint Dominica�s equivalent of George Washington, the individual who fought Britain for his nation�s independence.
Prof. Santry completed two oil paintings of the premier that were presented on October 26th to Ambassador Crispin S. Gregoire, Dominica�s Permanent Representative of the Commonwealth to the United Nations.
A Columbia University graduate like Smith, the ambassador arranged for them to be shipped in time to be shown in Dominica on Independence Day, November 3rd.�
Smith, a retired English teacher, quipped that it�s better for the late Premier LeBlanc to be hung than hanged.
The two had become friends in the late 1970s when Smith wrote a column, �Manhattan Scene,� for the pro-LeBlanc newspaper that was syndicated and published weekly in at least one of every English-speaking country in the Caribbean, even including the Bay Islands and Barbuda as well as in Belize, Bermuda, and Guyana.
�Edward Oliver LeBlanc and the Struggle to Transform Dominica,� a 2005 biography by Canadian Judge Irving W. Andr�, has a foreword written by Smith, who has maintained a three-decades friendship with the LeBlanc family.
Portarit of E. O Leblanc painted by Prof. Karen Santry.
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LeBlanc, Franklin Roosevelt, Kemal Ataturk, and Al Gore, says 86-year-old Smith, are the only politicians who have ever truly inspired him.
It�s his view that LeBlanc was the most progressive of all Caribbean leaders.
FIT Professor Santry, who lives at Westbeth in the West Village, took two years to research the island and paint LeBlanc as a young political leader known for wearing shirt jacks, not suits and ties.
When called to London to sign his island�s independence papers, he was told he would need to dress formally, suit and tie.
�Tell Her Majesty,� Mr. LeBlanc said, �Britain has made my people dress like monkeys for years� but that he had no intention of doing so.
And he strode into the room to receive from Queen Elizabeth the papers that granted the Commonwealth of Dominica independence.
Prof. Santry painted a second and larger work depicting the premier in his mountainous, volcanic, English-speaking island with tropical rainforest cover.
Dominica, mail for which often went to the Dominican Republic before zipcodes were established, began as a British colony in 1805.
Its fewer than 75,000 citizens, according to the U.S. State Department, include over a thousand Carib Indians.
It is a parliamentary democracy with a unicameral legislature. In 2004 the island was chosen for the film, �Pirates of the Caribbean,� and CBS filmed its first pirates-related TV show called �Pirate Master� there.
Previously, Smith donated Greenwich Village sculptor Anita Weschler�s full-size plexiglass statue, �The Humanist,� to the Institute of Humanist Studies in Albany.
Also, he designed and donated the Arthur C. Clarke plaque that is attached at the entrance to the Hotel Chelsea on 23rd Street, documenting that Sir Arthur had written �2001� there.
Smith and Santry have been invited to Dominica for a symbolic handing over of the two paintings at some later date.
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