A few years ago I wrote, "This is a wonderful song, but unfortunately Von Schmidt got the facts of Ebenezer Joshua's trip quite wrong. A few years ago I came across a webpage in which the author wrote that his father, who was an official with the U.S. State Dept. at the time, had personally arranged for Joshua to travel to a regional economic planning conference on Barbados. The trip was planned long before the strike, and the people on the island were in desperate need of some source of income other than sugar cane, so portraying Joshua's trip as a cowardly betrayal of the people is a gross mischaracterization. Unfortunately I can no longer find where I saved that post or the URL where I originally saw it."

I've now found the source. See https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topicsearchin/soc.genealogy.west-indies/after$3A2004$2F12$2F01$20before$3A2004$2F12$2F31/soc.genealogy.west-indies/WV4vfriG5RA. It includes the following posting from 12/9/2004 by Richard Bond:

"I don't know when the sugar strike in the song took place. My father
paid for Prime Minister Ebenezer Joshua to go to Barbados for the
founding meeting of The Caribbean Food Crop Society in October 1964. Dad
was involved in technology transfer for the US Department of
Agriculture. It did take place at one of Barbados better hotels but was
just a week long. It is true that organizing the sugar workers was
Joshua's initial poitical base but his responsibility was wider once
elected.

"I know for a fact that sugar was marginal in the Windwards in the 1960s
and the British and the island governments there were actively trying to
discourage it. Bananas were felt to be a better alternative. Also a lot
of the sugar lands were being broken up and sold to smallholders to be
put into food crops. A lot of the food consumed in the islands is
imported. The land area in cash crops competes with area which can be
placed in food production and the two need to balance. If the sugar strike
took place in October 1964 Joshua was trying to find out how to give better
support to food growers.

"The Georgetown sugar mill was losing money and they closed it down in
1972. It was always possible for the largest consumer the distillery to
purchase their molasses base from Trinidad, Guyana or Barbados all of
which had lower cost of production. The Georgetown sugar mill has since
reopened but with better equipment and at a smaller size scaled down to
the distillery demand. Much less land and workers are in sugar. Tourism
also pays better than farming.