Dear CARICOM: What is Necessary in Haiti

Dear Leaders of CARICOM, I greet you in the name of each common ancestor whose bones remain restless at the bottom of the Caribbean and Atlantic Oceans. I hope this brief note finds you in excellent health as it deals with an urgent crisis which requires that we summon superior collective wisdom, intelligence and, above all, courage. As you read this note, in the town of Jeremi (South-West Haiti/ Grandans), corpses are being pulled under collapsed rubble. The region was hit by a 4.9 magnitude quake early this morning. This occurred a few hours after floods had devastated large parts . . .

Dragon or “Pawn” Star?

Trinidad, it too late to post this? We 9-day memory cycle kick een arready? I was thinking we should forget cricket and football and make chess our favourite game like how it is in Russia. For one thing, it go teach we to think several moves ahead, and another thing, we go learn about that chess piece known as the pawn. Cause dais the first thing that came to mind when I heard the news that this country was “granted permission” by the United States to develop the gas deposits in the Dragon field… owned by Venezuela. Well… that thought . . .

CARICOM headquarters

Haiti in the Caribbean

Often, when you mention Haiti in conversation and the anti-imperial struggle that has consistently been waged by the Haitian people against imperialist forces for centuries, you are met with minor acknowledgement and some confusion by the listener. Even in cases where there are those who understand Haiti’s battle against imperialist interventions and incursions – many people are still unclear about: “why Haiti.” This is especially true in the present, where there exists a propagandized belief that there are no broader imperialist aspirations in the Caribbean, insofar as those interests cannot be tied to interests in Latin America, and especially to Cuba.  Persistent myths about Haiti and confusion about the nature of politics in the Caribbean have allowed systematic investigations into (neo) imperial enterprises in the broader region to go largely uninitiated. This is all at the peril of failing to contextualize sustained foreign meddling in the Caribbean region and the consistent need by those forces for sustained violence to maintain their dominant position. . . .

Complicity, Imperialism, & the Summit of the Americas

The U.S. excluded Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela from the recent Summit of the Americas held in Los Angeles. While there was widespread condemnation against the U.S., only six heads of state had the courage to decline the invitation. An opportunity to strike a blow against U.S. imperialism was lost. And so it was that another historical opportunity was missed by the countries of the Caribbean, Central and South America, with the exception of a few who had the courage to take a stand. The majority of leaders from the region, those who Maurice Bishop so aptly called “yard fowls”, and . . .

Sir Ron Sanders, NATO's warmongering voice in the Carribbean

NATO’s Warmongering Voice in The Caribbean

Since the start of the war in Ukraine, Sir Ron Sanders, Antigua and Barbuda’s ambassador to the US and the OAS, has emerged as one of the most strident Caribbean voices in favour of US/NATO warmongering in eastern Europe. He is widely considered to have played a pivotal role in dragging CARICOM countries into their shameful support for the one sided United States/NATO resolution in the United Nations General Assembly on 1 March which pinned all the blame for the war in Ukraine on Russia and painted the US and its NATO followers as completely blameless. The resolution failed to . . .