In every era of history, the Caribbean (like everywhere else) always had its fair share of political and academic pontificators who sit in their Towers of Babble and spit wrath into the sky when the world doesn’t turn how they dreamed it should.
It was that way with the hope for a Federal West Indies in the middle of the 19th Century and the First Quarter of the 21st Century was no different.
And now, the Second Quarter of Century 21 starts with continuity of the dominating effect of today’s global and multinational Towers of Babel facilitating both Good and Bad, providing platforms for knowledge-sharing in a new age.
Just like the theoreticians and ideologues of Left and Right from Way Back When argued across borders and oceans through books and articles in newspapers and journals, so too today’s pontificators ride the online and IT platforms and — like children with new Christmas toys – criticize noisily, but without offering solutions.
However, while the Bards of Yore dug deep for the facts to back their arguments on What’s Wrong, What’s to be Done and Where to Begin, today’s online savants merely out-race each other to be ‘first’ — but not necessarily accurate.
Take the current situation facing the Eastern Caribbean since President Donald Trump took office on January 20, 2025.
In one year, he’s not only turned the world upside down, but his administration’s Caribbean policy has been spelt out since during his first 100 days.
As far back as April 2025, it was clear the US, with Marco Rubio as both Secretary of State and National Security Advisor, Washington was out to force Caribbean Community (CARICOM) nations to break health and medical cooperation ties with Cuba.
Rubio visited Jamaica and Trinidad & Tobago and offered the region’s leaders the unbelievable claim that the Cuban doctors and nurses assisting in the Caribbean for the past 40 years are victims of ‘Human Trafficking’ and ‘Forced Labour’.
When that argument didn’t sufficiently convince CARICOM leaders, Rubio started waving Entry Visa Restriction warnings and joining the European Union (EU) to target Citizenship by Investment (CBI) programs in the smaller Organization of Eastern Caribbean States (OECS) islands Washington and Brussels somehow see as competing with their respective (European and US) ‘Golden Visa’ programs aimed at the world’s Super Rich.
By the end of 2025, Washington was no longer waving red flags, but reading Riot Acts to CARICOM leaders, temporarily halting Caribbean citizens’ applications for US Green Cards and shifting goalposts on US entry visa requirements.
And as if to show just-how-serious it is about keeping immigrants out of a land built by immigrants, the Trump Administration also piled the pressure by declaring applicants for US asylum from 75 nations (the Caribbean included) as ‘risky’, rejecting their applications and deporting them to ‘third countries’ (the Caribbean also included).
These separate developments are all similar components of the new presidential ‘Donroe Policy’ that’s replaced the 200-year-old Monroe Doctrine, dismissing cooperation with allies, making Uncle Sam the World’s Absolute Ruler – and President Donald Trump the best example of an American King ruling by royal White House and Oval Office decrees.
The pressures of threats demonstrate Washington’s determination to use Venezuela as a sample of what new US invasions and interventions will look like – at least over the next three years, with battleships named after King Donald.
Elected CARICOM Leaders, with much more to lose than their average Caribbean Babel Tower critics, are best aware of what these pressures feel like, if only because it’s they who’re faced with the hard choices.
Unlike the common denominators uniting narrow-visioned perceptions of right-wing clarinets, armchair critics, retired diplomats and revolutionaries stuck in Memory Lane, every crop of CARICOM leaders is different and each face both old and new problems they must navigate, always with their people in mind – and their minds on political survival.
Rubio is forcing CARICOM nations to choose between Bad, Worse and Worst-of-the-Worse, with each component of the current multi-pronged onslaught offering unspecified but surely costly US repercussions.
Against this delicate background and with Cuba next in Washington’s firing line, online Caribbean clairvoyants are spitting fire and brimstone, blindly accusing current CARICOM leaders of somehow betraying the legacies of predecessors of the Federation and the post-colonial independence era — as if they were ever the same.
Listening to and watching the wannabe super-analysts compete to hawk and vend their wares and vent their spleen on today’s Social Media platforms, it’s not difficult to conclude that none has been faced with making decisions that will change people’s lives for the better.
Unable to distinguish between a MOU and an Agreement and behaving like cleaning-up today’s Caribbean mess is like simply washing dishes in a kitchen sink, they accuse CARICOM leaders who dare to describe the difficulties they face as having given-up ‘leverage’ they never had.
Saint Lucia’s Prime Minister Philip J. Pierre has called a spade a spade and urged regional colleagues to come together to discuss how to address their common problems – his appeal so-far falling on deaf ears.
But the permanent and retired naysayers, riding their high horses on the information super-highway, claim the Saint Lucia leader ‘has agreed’ to bow to US pressure to end the island’s health assistance program with Havana, to stop hosting Cuban health professionals and stop sending students on scholarships to the University of Havana.
Of course, nothing the PM’s said amounts to that, but selective quotes from his statements have been used to come to desired conclusions not anywhere close to reality.
Interestingly, however, when the US Embassy in Barbados responded, the propaganda overload was sufficient to shock the same usual critics into recognizing that they were wrong – that instead of bowing to Washington’s pressure, the Saint Lucia leader had simply called-out Washington and urged the region to be realistic and proactive and for CARICOM leaders to discuss alternatives as of now – should Washington eventually get its way.
And now, the babble has changed