Here is the Eric Von Schmidt take on the lyrics:

Sing Out!:
"Joshua is his last name. He was swept into office in 1960 when England's move to dump some of her poor small islands coincided with the wave of Caribbean nationalism following Castro's move in Cuba. Like Castro's followers, Joshua's supporters also grew beards, meager tufts, scanty sideburns, trimmed with all the self-consciousness of Jaycees at a Frontier Day cookout. But Joshua, slightly poor and very black, had his followers in his pocket. He became Prime Minister of St. Vincent.

In the year following his inauguration land taxes rose astronomically. These new levies merely reduced the comfortable profits of the plantation owners but were ruinous to the poor whose property was seized daily. The revenue was used for such projects as sending Joshua and his ministers (they prudently exempted themselves from all taxes) on jolly world-wide Goodwill junkets. If to the outsider there was a comic opera quality to the island ("Porgy And Bess" as revised by Gilbert and Sullivan), to the poorer Vincentians it was a cruelly serious matter.

Joshua's biggest campaign pitch had been to back a strike by the island's biggest labor and voting force -- the miserably paid cane cutters. When the showdown came, in the spring of 1962, he simply got out on his yacht, and split for Barbados. His time in high office had given him new insights into the Problems of Sugar Mill Owners, the Complexities of Free Enterprise, the Realities of Diminishing British Aid. He was tired. He was chicken. So the government did nothing.

Strikebreakers were recruited in the tough Sion Hill section above Kingston and brought up to Georgetown in wooden-sided buses with funny names. The new men began work. Fights broke out, sometimes brother against brother or son against father. Police were brought in to protect the strikebreakers, who could cut only in guarded fields. Every man carried his razor-sharp machette (called a cutless on the islands), and many on both sides were drunk. Sonny Childs, the head overseer and a very unpopular white man with more courage than brains, walked into one of the unprotected fields and came out feet first. The leaders of the strike were quickly arrested, the others dispersed, and word came from the hospital that Sonny had sworn to shoot the men who had beaten him. Their strike failed.

I had been away from St. Vincent for a few weeks and returned just at the end of it. The song is based on the events as told me by Norma Duncan of Calliqua [sic.] No one was killed in the uprising, but at that time rumor was rampant and Norma thought that two strikers and a policeman had been killed in a gunfight in Georgetown. Norma is a fine singer and a wonderful person. I would like to dedicate this song to her."

http://www.charliegillett.com/bb/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=3863