Chronicles of a Chromic Caribbean Chronicler
By Earl Bousquet
The quiet strength of Caribbean Diplomacy has been evident since 1972, when the first four British West Indian colonies to become independent nations (Barbados, Guyana, Jamaica and Trinidad & Tobago) united to do something never done before:
The four united as separate units and jointly recognized the Cuban government in Havana, which, after declaring its socialist path in 1962, had been diplomatically blockaded for over a decade by Washington.
That single act by the former British colonies created the crack that broke the US diplomatic blockade against Cuba, with the Fidel Castro-led administration only recognized then by Mexico, from where the 1956 liberation mission originally departed in December 1956 on the ‘Granma’.
Also in 1972, a Non-Aligned Movement Foreign Ministers Conference was held in Georgetown, Guyana (August 8 to 12).
It was a historic meeting that led to the ‘Georgetown Declaration and the Programme for Economic Co-operation’ and the Non-Aligned Monument in Georgetown was erected to commemorate the conference.
The monument, featuring busts of the movement’s founders (Egypt’s Nasser, Ghana’s Nkrumah, India’s Nehru and Yugoslavia’s Tito) was unveiled by Guyana’s first President, Arthur Chung – whose Chinese parents immigrated from the Fujian Province of China.
But the biggest regional feat by the four then-independent Caribbean nations in 1972 was the signing of the Treaty of Chaguaramas, in Trinidad & Tobago, that eventually give birth – a year later — to the Caribbean Community (CARICOM), headquartered in Guyana.
CARICOM’s birth in 1973 amalgamated the four new economically-larger sovereign nations with the greater number of non-independent Caribbean states that belonged to the Caribbean Free Trade Area (CARFTA) and enjoyed the bequeathed constitutional status of Associated States that allowed for very-limited self-government.
The Federal structure attempted in 1958 had crashed by 1962 and the birth of CARICOM eleven years later would have taken into consideration the reasons why the Federation fell flat.
But even back then, Caribbean diplomacy was well-understood by the calypsonians of the day, like The Mighty Sparrow, a Grenadian immigrant in Trinidad & Tobago, who — among others — spelt-out the raw politics in simple ways everyone understood.
The world was taken-aback by the colourful arithmetical painting by T&T’s first Prime Minister (Eric Williams) of Jamaica’s pull-out as ‘One from ten leaves nothing!’
Diplomatic currents have long since changed and the Caribbean has done well to survive all crises.
But the challenges today surely require that governments not only aim to continue keeping CARICOM afloat, but to switch gears to suit the changed and changing times, in an age when Regime Change matters as-much-as Climate Change.
CARICOM must therefore be seen to change with the times, from simply continuing to sail-along in any weather, to engaging new all-weather mechanisms to drive new national and regional drives towards new and renewed approaches to national and regional development.
The Caribbean must complete the change from being seen and treated as mendicant dependent territories still grabbing at the coat-tails and petticoats of former European colonial empires from which they were orphaned through gradual means that lasted centuries, before and after Trans-Atlantic Slavery.
It’s now for Caribbean leaders to show they too have started coming to grips with the changes that have changed the world and are still changing Our Caribbean.
We can no longer still think about returning to the days of selling bananas, rice, sugar and rum to exclusive protected markets in post-colonial societies, or competing to invite Europeans and North Americans to soak in our sun and sip on our sands.
Old friends continue proving unreliable and it’s time to build new friendships and better relationships, more sustainable and shared than ever-dependable, with new friends and allies that share same and similar histories and experiences.
The new relationship being developed between CARICOM and the African Union (AU) is brimming with South-South possibilities and must be developed in directions that reverse the so-called Middle Passage and stand the misnamed Great Triangle on its head.
The Caribbean is represented at the AU level in helping the continent better understand the CARICOM approach to Reparations and the region was also quietly but effectively active in helping in the eventual success of the recent AU resolution at the UN redefining Trans-Atlantic Slavery.
CARICOM must continue to better use its bloc votes in regional and international bodies uniting Latin American and Caribbean nations — including its majority in the ALBA alliance and significant presence in CELAC – and recalibrate its presence in the OAS, now with CARICOM citizen as Secretary General of the hemispheric entity for the first time in its history.
The new CARICOM regional experience also includes significant changes in the region’s experience as an energy supplier, with Trinidad & Tobago replaced by Guyana as region’s the prime energy pump for the future.
Here too are endless possibilities for the region to share in the collective benefits of new arrangements than can better place the region to reduce its continuing dependence on external investments to develop its new energy.
Likewise, CARICOM cannot afford to continue sitting on the unending territorial differences affecting Guyana and Belize in the same old ways, depending on extra-regional factors to solve or dissolve differences within shared lands and waters.
Today, Guyana and Venezuela will need to revisit settlement of their forever neighbourly quarrels with new lenses that will build bridges instead of walls or fences.
The time has come and CARICOM must use the opportunity of its upcoming 51st Meeting of Heads of Government in Saint Lucia (July 5-8) to press the reset buttons to ignite the region’s propulsion into a necessary new era of talking less and doing more, growing closer than ever and breaking down old barriers, to build the new structures needed to guide the Caribbean comfortably into a sustainable future that looks more inward than out, at finding new ways to create the invisible dollars needed for development from our natural Caribbean sense.
The time is now!