KINGSTON, Jamaica — As artificial intelligence continues to reshape global labor markets, a senior Jamaican opposition figure is raising urgent alarms over the accelerating risk AI poses to the island nation’s critical business process outsourcing (BPO) industry, a sector that sustains tens of thousands of local jobs. Christopher Brown, the opposition’s spokesperson for Science, Technology and Digital Transformation, delivered a sharp rebuke of the ruling administration during Tuesday’s Sectoral Debate in the country’s House of Representatives, accusing officials of dragging their feet on a coordinated response to the disruption.
分类： politics
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ECJ presents electoral boundary realignment proposal for new Portmore parish
KINGSTON, Jamaica – Nearly four months after Jamaican legislators passed a law turning Portmore into the island nation’s 15th official parish, the country’s independent Electoral Commission (ECJ) has laid out its planned redrawing of electoral district lines across Portmore and the adjacent parish of St Catherine.
The boundary realignment work is not an arbitrary adjustment, ECJ officials clarified in an official statement released this Tuesday. The initiative was ordered by Parliament’s Boundaries Committee, and it aligns directly with a core requirement laid out in Jamaica’s Constitution: no single electoral constituency can cross the borders of two separate parishes. The creation of a new parish thus made the boundary adjustment a mandatory legal step.
The proposed changes will reshape four existing constituencies across the region: St Catherine South Eastern, St Catherine East Central, St Catherine Southern, and St Catherine South Central. All four currently overlap with the territory that now forms the independent parish of Portmore, requiring redrawing to bring the electoral map into line with the new administrative structure.
The formal proposal was presented during a joint gathering of the Parish Boundary Advisory Committee (PBAC) and the Parish Boundary Forum (PBF) for Portmore and St Catherine, held on May 29.
Glasspole Brown, Jamaica’s Director of Elections, framed the presentation as a critical milestone in a deliberate, constitutionally mandated process. “This session marks an important step in a structured and constitutionally guided process,” Brown stated. “At this stage, we are presenting technical proposals developed through GIS analysis and stakeholder input. The feedback received will be carefully considered as we refine our recommendations for submission to the Parliamentary Boundaries Committee for further review and determination.”
Remoski Russell, the ECJ’s Geographic Information Systems (GIS) manager, led the presentation, walking attendees through the details of the proposed boundary changes and explaining the data-backed technical review process that shaped the draft plan.
ECJ officials stressed that the entire process is designed to uphold three core priorities: full compliance with constitutional requirements, fair representation for all voters, and accurate alignment of electoral districts with Jamaica’s new administrative map. Work on the plan will continue through open collaborative discussions with local and national stakeholders, additional GIS-fueled reviews and validation checks, and the drafting of a final set of recommendations that will eventually be sent to Parliament for formal approval.
In closing, the commission reaffirmed its pledge to run a fully transparent, inclusive, and data-led process that will strengthen Jamaica’s electoral administration and ensure every resident of the new Portmore parish and surrounding St Catherine receives fair and effective representation in government.
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Abinader inaugurates new highway to strengthen tourism in the South
In a major step forward for infrastructure development in the Dominican Republic’s southwest, President Luis Abinader has officially opened the 13.5-kilometer Enriquillo–El Higüero highway in Barahona, a transformative project set to lift connectivity and quality of life for over 300,000 residents across the region. Constructed under the oversight of the country’s Ministry of Public Works and Communications (MOPC), the new arterial road connects a string of dispersed communities, including Enriquillo, Cuatro Bocas, Arroyo Dulce, El Naranjal, and El Higüero, unlocking simplified access to critical public services ranging from primary and secondary education to emergency healthcare and inter-regional transportation.
At the inauguration ceremony, Public Works Minister Eduardo Estrella outlined that the completed highway is just one segment of a far more ambitious 52-kilometer integrated road network that will ultimately link four major southwest hubs: Enriquillo, Paraíso, Oviedo, and Pedernales. Once fully interconnected, the full network will function as an alternative travel corridor leading to the regional capital of Barahona and the national capital of Santo Domingo, cutting both commute times for local residents and logistics expenses for agricultural and commercial producers operating in the area.
Estrella went on to highlight the Dominican government’s sustained commitment to upgrading infrastructure across the entire southern region, noting several active and planned projects beyond the newly inaugurated highway. These include the ongoing development of the Barahona-Enriquillo highway, the expansion of the Enriquillo-Oviedo-Cabo Rojo-Pedernales road, and modernization upgrades to Oviedo Airport. He confirmed that the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) has remained a key financial and strategic partner in advancing these high-impact infrastructure initiatives, and made a major announcement: a national-scale bridge construction program will break ground across the country in the coming weeks.
Per MOPC projections, the Enriquillo–El Higüero highway will do more than improve local travel: it will deepen economic and social integration across the southwest, opening up access to opportunity for communities spanning Barahona, Paraíso, Polo, Pedernales, and Bahoruco for years to come.
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Broadcasting Commission raps Flow and Digicel for ‘substandard customer service’ arising from channel changes
KINGSTON, Jamaica — Jamaica’s top broadcast regulator has formally ruled that two of the island’s leading subscription television providers, Flow and Digicel, violated the terms of their operating licences through the unprofessional and inadequate way they handled customer notifications for channel and programming adjustments rolled out in late 2025.
In an official statement published Tuesday, the Broadcasting Commission announced it had wrapped up its full investigation into the controversial programming changes, confirming that both telecommunication giants failed to meet mandatory customer service standards when rolling out updates that directly impacted paying subscribers.
The regulator’s investigation uncovered critical gaps in Flow’s notification strategy: the company relied almost entirely on email alerts to inform customers of upcoming changes, despite internal engagement data that proved most subscribers never opened these communications. Data presented during the review shows 68.5% of distribution emails went unopened in November 2025, followed by 64.1% unopened in December. A portion of emails also failed to reach inboxes entirely, sent to outdated, incorrect, or inactive email addresses on file. Further, Flow posted supplementary change notices on its website, but the commission noted this passive method proved particularly unreliable in the aftermath of a hurricane that disrupted digital access for many Jamaican households. Flow also failed to provide any analytics to confirm that subscribers actually accessed and viewed the online postings.
For its part, Digicel went a step further, offering no advance warning at all to subscribers before removing certain channels from its line-up. The company later admitted to this oversight and issued a public apology to customers after the regulator launched its formal probe.
While both providers added new and reconfigured existing channels to replace the removed content, the commission found that the explanatory materials shared with subscribers lacked enough detail and clear, objective metrics for customers to verify whether replacement channels offered comparable value and maintained the service quality customers paid for.
As a corrective measure, the two operators have been ordered to implement comprehensive, multi-channel communication protocols to guarantee customers receive clear, accessible notice of all future service changes. The commission stressed that all customer notifications must be purposefully designed to actually reach most subscribers, rather than serving as a meaningless box-ticking exercise. This requirement explicitly extends to reaching older customers and Jamaicans with limited or inconsistent digital connectivity, who are often overlooked in all-digital communication strategies.
The regulator also highlighted the long-term implications of this ruling: findings of customer service non-compliance are added to each operator’s permanent compliance record, and will be a core factor considered when the companies apply for licence renewal in the future, including when negotiating the terms and conditions of new operating agreements.
In closing, the commission clarified that it does not challenge the right of television operators to make commercial decisions about their channel line-ups and service packages. “The issue is not the changes themselves, but the manner in which subscribers are treated,” the statement read. “Customers are entitled to clear, timely and effective communication whenever their services are altered. Subscription television operators are accountable for meeting this standard.”
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Foreign companies take flight from US-sanctioned Cuba
As a critical May 24 deadline from the United States forcing foreign firms to cut all business ties with Cuba’s powerful military-owned conglomerate GAESA approaches, international companies have dramatically drawn down their operations on the island by Tuesday, delivering another crippling blow to Cuba’s already collapsing economy. This latest round of sanctions is part of the Trump administration’s sweeping escalation of pressure on Havana, which has included a full energy blockade imposed earlier this year and growing rhetoric about potential US control over the island.
Back in early May, President Donald Trump issued an executive order freezing all of GAESA’s assets held within US jurisdiction and imposing harsh secondary sanctions on any foreign entity that continues doing business with the group. The US Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) has given all affected international companies until this Friday to restructure their operations to comply with the new rules, or face harsh penalties including asset freezes and exclusion from the global financial system. By all indicators, the US pressure campaign has had its intended effect, with a wave of withdrawals and suspended operations unfolding across multiple key sectors of Cuba’s economy in recent weeks.
Cuban economist and independent consultant Daniel Torralbas told AFP that the immediate economic fallout from this exodus is catastrophic, noting that 2026 has already shaped up to be the worst year for Cuba’s economy in seven decades. The damage is being felt acutely across the island’s critical tourism sector, which has long been one of its largest sources of foreign currency. Canada’s Blue Diamond Resorts, one of the biggest international hospitality operators working in Cuba, announced Monday that it was ceasing all operations on the island. While the firm framed the decision as a response to broader challenging tourism conditions, it comes directly in line with the new US sanctions mandate.
Multiple industry sources confirmed to AFP on Tuesday that Spain’s Iberostar Group, another major hotel operator in Cuba, is withdrawing from 12 properties it managed in partnership with entities linked to GAESA. Specifically, the firm is exiting all co-management agreements with Gaviota Tourism Group, which is a core subsidiary of GAESA. The withdrawal went into effect on June 1, according to two separate sources familiar with the decision. The Mallorca-based company declined to publicly comment on the changes when contacted by AFP, but sources added that Iberostar will maintain its co-management agreements for hotels owned directly by Cuba’s Ministry of Tourism, which are not covered by the new sanctions. Two other major international hotel groups — Spain’s Melia and Indonesia’s Archipelago International — are currently evaluating full or partial withdrawals from their Cuban operations, according to industry insiders.
The impact extends far beyond tourism, hitting the island’s logistics and natural resource sectors as well. Two of Europe’s largest shipping companies, France’s CMA CGM and Germany’s Hapag-Lloyd, have already temporarily suspended all new freight bookings to Cuba, explicitly citing Trump’s executive order as the reason for the move. In early May, Canadian mining giant Sherritt International announced it was ending its decades-long presence in Cuba, where it had operated a joint nickel and cobalt mining venture with state-owned General Nickel Company S.A. since the 1990s.
The Trump administration has framed its crackdown on GAESA as a push against Cuban government corruption. US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, a Cuban-American politician and one of the most vocal critics of the Havana government, has repeatedly accused GAESA of operating as a shadow state that accumulates wealth for a small circle of ruling elites at the expense of ordinary Cuban citizens. “It is a ‘state within a state’ that is accountable to no one, hoarding the profits from its businesses for the benefit of a tiny elite,” Rubio said of the conglomerate.
Havana issued a sharp rebuke of these allegations on Tuesday, pushing back against the US claims and defending GAESA’s role in the Cuban economy. Cuban officials explained that the conglomerate was established specifically to counteract the impact of the decades-long US trade embargo that has been in place since 1962. The government called the new US sanctions “the most intense, disproportionate, and dangerous escalation in the recent history of relations between Cuba and the United States.” It also highlighted the public benefits GAESA has delivered to the Cuban people, noting that the group played a central role in keeping the Cuban economy stable during the Covid-19 pandemic and has led construction of more than 10,000 new affordable homes for Cuban citizens. “Its work speaks for itself, and it does so above the state slander concocted in Washington,” the Cuban government’s statement concluded.
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The long voyage home
After 11 months deployed across the Americas, one of the world’s largest nuclear-powered aircraft carriers has made an unprecedented stop at Jamaica’s Kingston Port, a visit that carries deep personal meaning for one Jamaican-born American naval officer and signals the strengthening of bilateral ties between Washington and Kingston.
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“Pact for a Better City” marks new chapter for Santiago’s urban development
Santiago, Dominican Republic – A landmark multi-stakeholder agreement aimed at redefining the future of urban growth in one of the country’s most dynamic cities is set to be signed next year, bringing together public agencies, private enterprises, academic leaders, and community groups around a shared vision of long-term sustainable development.
The “Pact for a Better City” will be officially signed on June 5, 2026, at the Pontifical Catholic University Madre y Maestra (PUCMM) in Santiago. The signing ceremony will also mark the formal launch of the landmark “Santiago Living City 2035” initiative, a 12-year planning project designed to guide intentional, inclusive growth for Santiago and its surrounding metropolitan area.
Organized under the leadership of the Cibao Housing Developers and Builders Association (APROCOVIC), the initiative draws widespread institutional support from key local and national bodies. Backing partners include Santiago City Hall, host university PUCMM, the Santiago Strategic Development Council (CDES), the Vice Ministry of Territorial Planning and Regional Development, and major Dominican financial institutions. This broad coalition of partners reflects a collective recognition that uncoordinated urban growth poses long-term risks to the city’s economic and social vitality, and that cross-sector collaboration is critical to delivering lasting results.
Per details released by the initiative’s organizing committee, the pact will serve as the foundational framework for a comprehensive, city-wide Urban Development Plan that targets high-priority areas for improvement. Key focus areas include expanding and modernizing public and private mobility infrastructure, upgrading core public utilities, advancing environmental protection and climate resilience, managing equitable urban expansion, and raising overall quality of life for all residents of the Santiago metropolitan area.
Beyond infrastructure and planning targets, the initiative also seeks to institutionalize formal long-term planning processes that will outlast changes in political leadership. This institutional commitment is designed to ensure policy continuity and consistent, effective implementation of the plan’s goals through 2035, preventing the disruptions that often derail long-term public projects when administrations change.
The upcoming launch event will feature deep dives into the initiative’s operational structure. Specialists from CAP Consultores & Asesores Profesionales will present the technical planning framework that underpins the comprehensive development plan, while Daritza Nicodemo will detail the mandate and responsibilities of the new Technical Monitoring Unit. This unit will be tasked with ongoing oversight of all commitments outlined in the inter-sector pact, ensuring that all stakeholders hold to their agreed roles and responsibilities.
Organizers confirmed that attendance at the launch will include a broad cross-section of Santiago’s leadership, from sitting municipal officials and leading business executives to academic researchers and grassroots community stakeholders. The event is expected to set the stage for the first phase of planning work, which will begin immediately after the pact is signed.
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Minister Hippolyte elected to OAS women’s commission
In a historic milestone for the small Caribbean nation, Saint Lucia has won its first ever back-to-back seat on the Executive Committee of the Inter-American Commission of Women (CIM), the Organization of American States’ leading body for gender equality and women’s rights across the Americas. The election of Saint Lucia’s cabinet minister Emma Hippolyte took place during the commission’s 40th Assembly of Delegates, held last week in Washington D.C.
Hippolyte, who leads the Ministry for Equity, Social Justice, Gender, Older Persons, Labour, Co-operatives and Consumer Affairs, secured her seat alongside elected representatives from Guyana, Guatemala, Jamaica, and Peru. In additional leadership votes, Uruguay took the presidency of the Executive Committee, while delegates from Grenada, Canada, and Paraguay were elected to serve as vice presidents.
The CIM Executive Committee plays a critical governance role, delivering strategic direction and operational leadership for the commission between full meetings of the Assembly of Delegates. Hippolyte’s election extends Saint Lucia’s continuous leadership presence on the committee, which began in the previous term when former Gender Relations Minister Dr Virginia Albert-Poyotte served as a vice president.
A government statement from Saint Lucia emphasized that the 2025 election result marks a meaningful increase in Caribbean representation at the CIM’s leadership table. In the prior term, only Saint Lucia and Antigua and Barbuda held Executive Committee seats from the Caribbean region. This cycle, four Caribbean nations — Saint Lucia, Guyana, Jamaica, and Grenada — secured leadership positions, expanding the region’s voice in pan-American gender equity work.
During the assembly proceedings, Hippolyte took part in high-level discussions centered on expanding women’s financial inclusion across the region. She used the platform to showcase the range of policy initiatives Saint Lucia has rolled out to remove barriers for women’s economic participation and empowerment. These include the national MSME loan-grant facility, the Youth Economy Agency, targeted digital inclusion programs, expanded access to affordable credit for women entrepreneurs, and sweeping reforms to labor laws and social protection frameworks.
Speaking to fellow delegates, Hippolyte noted that the Saint Lucian government’s deliberate people-centered policy agenda has ensured the nation’s most vulnerable groups are included in national development planning. With women making up a disproportionate share of the country’s vulnerable population, advancing gender-equitable economic policy has become a core priority for the administration. She also emphasized that regional collaboration remains key to making progress across shared priority areas, including expanding financial literacy for women, advancing gender-responsive public financing, and implementing policies that deliver lasting economic empowerment for women across the Americas.
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COMMENTARY: Spanish Should Be Taught, Supported, And Valued – But Not Made An Official Language
A prominent opinion piece from Yves R. Ephraim is calling on the government of Antigua and Barbuda to reverse its recent decision to designate Spanish as the country’s official second language, arguing the move poses existential, long-term risks to the small island nation’s core national identity that far outweigh any claimed benefits. Ephraim stresses that his opposition is not rooted in animosity toward Spanish or disrespect for the large Spanish-speaking Dominican community that has settled in the country; rather, it stems from a deep understanding that granting official language status is far more than a routine education policy adjustment. It is a foundational constitutional, cultural, administrative, and symbolic act that can permanently reshape the national character of a small, already vulnerable society, he says.
Antigua and Barbuda currently recognizes English as its sole official language, while the local Antiguan and Barbudan dialect serves as a cherished, widely embraced vernacular that encapsulates the nation’s shared history, collective humor, unique worldview, calypso tradition, and core collective identity. Already facing sustained demographic, economic, and cultural pressure from outside forces, elevating Spanish to official status without first holding a broad, inclusive national conversation sends a dangerous signal, Ephraim warns: that the language and cultural heritage of the native Antiguan and Barbudan people are no longer the central pillar of the country’s national narrative.
The timing of the policy has also raised questions about underlying political motivations. The Antigua Labour Party (ABLP) just returned to power in a landslide snap election held on April 30, 2026, claiming 15 out of 17 parliamentary seats despite winning the support of just 38% of all registered voters. When such a lopsided parliamentary victory is immediately followed by a major policy that would redefine national identity, Ephraim argues the public has every right to question whether the move is a genuine national development initiative, or a political reward to a strategically critical voting bloc.
Close examination of the Cabinet’s official statement further underscores the need for citizen concern, he adds. The policy does not stop at expanding access to Spanish language education; it explicitly ties official language status to a formal Dominican Republic Integration Programme, targeted support for Dominican nationals residing in Antigua and Barbuda, and the creation of a dedicated Spanish Desk within the Prime Minister’s Office. This package is far more than an effort to teach children a useful foreign language: it represents a state-endorsed reorientation of national identity, public administration, and diplomatic alignment around a single immigrant community and one foreign country. Ephraim points out that other long-established immigrant groups from across the Caribbean, including Guyana, Jamaica, and Dominica, have no comparable institutional support or official recognition for their cultural or linguistic traditions.
At its core, granting Spanish official status is a power shift, Ephraim argues. It sends the message that Spanish-speaking residents have no obligation to learn English or integrate into the established Antiguan and Barbudan way of life. While teaching Spanish in schools equips citizens with a valuable professional and personal skill, official status enshrines the language’s legal and institutional claim to space in courts, government documents, public signage, hiring processes, education policy, and formal public legitimacy. This opens the door to a host of unaddressed practical and governance questions: Will public servants be required to speak Spanish? Must all government forms be translated? Will courts need to provide full Spanish-language accommodations? Will Spanish-speaking applicants receive preferential treatment in government hiring? Will students already struggling with English and math be forced to take on an additional mandatory academic burden? These are not anti-Spanish questions, Ephraim emphasizes—they are basic questions of good governance that the government has failed to answer.
For small nations, the slow creep of cultural displacement is an underrecognized but profound threat, Ephraim notes. Cultural erasure rarely arrives as an overt, announced attack; it is almost always framed as modernization, regional integration, economic opportunity, inclusion, and improved global competitiveness. Each incremental policy change may seem reasonable on its own, but over decades, local language, collective memory, cultural traditions, speech patterns, community priorities, and native artistic expression are gradually pushed to the margins in their own homeland.
history offers two clear cautionary examples to guide Antigua and Barbuda’s decision-makers, Ephraim argues. In Ireland, after the Irish language lost its central place in public life following centuries of political and socioeconomic pressure that pushed English to dominance, reversing that decline and reviving the native tongue has proven extraordinarily difficult, even with sustained government support. In Singapore, the government’s Speak Mandarin Campaign, launched to unify the country’s Chinese Singaporean population, led to an unplanned, sharp decline in the use of regional Chinese dialects in family and community life, a shift that researchers and commentators have widely documented.
These cases demonstrate that granting Spanish official status is no trivial matter, Ephraim says. The true risk is not that Spanish will become more widely spoken—it is that deliberate state policy will unintentionally sideline the older, smaller, more fragile cultural and linguistic traditions that define Antigua and Barbudan identity. The country should not wait decades to discover that a policy marketed today as “integration” will be experienced by future generations as forced cultural displacement, he adds.
Ephraim also notes that the policy is particularly hard to justify at a time when the government has yet to resolve basic, pressing quality-of-life issues that affect citizens every day, including the persistent lack of reliable pipe-borne water across the country. A government that cannot consistently deliver this core essential service should be extremely cautious about adopting a new policy that will create new administrative costs, add burdens to the national school curriculum, impose new mandatory translation requirements on public agencies, and raise unmet public expectations, he argues. True national development must start with meeting the basic needs of citizens: reliable water access, improved education quality, strengthened public health, reduced crime, more affordable housing, upgraded infrastructure, and expanded economic opportunity for native-born residents.
Ephraim sums up his core position clearly: Spanish language proficiency is a valuable skill for Antiguan and Barbudans, but granting Spanish official status is unnecessary and carries dangerous risks for the nation’s future. Every legitimate goal the Cabinet has laid out for the policy can be achieved without changing the country’s official language architecture, he says, and proposes an alternative five-pronged National Multilingual Competency and Cultural Protection Policy that balances language access with protection of national identity.
First, the government should teach Spanish as a compulsory foreign language at appropriate grade levels, with a practical focus on skills for tourism, trade, hospitality, and regional communication. This gives Antiguan and Barbudan children a useful skill without altering the symbolic foundation of the state.
Second, any expansion of Spanish education must be paired with strengthened curriculum focused on protecting and promoting Antiguan and Barbudan identity. This includes expanding education on local history, civics, literature, folklore, the native dialect, local music, national heroes, Barbuda’s unique cultural heritage, and the country’s constitutional identity. Ephraim cites UNESCO’s 2025 guidance on multilingual education, which emphasizes mother-tongue-based learning and meaningful community input in policy design, noting that a policy that expands Spanish while neglecting local cultural transmission is not true multilingual education—it is cultural imbalance.
Third, the government can provide targeted Spanish language access services for public agencies where needed, such as hospitals, immigration offices, police departments, social services, tourism hubs, and emergency communications, without granting Spanish full official status. Many countries provide interpretation services for migrant and minority communities without granting official status to every major immigrant language, he points out, and this practical model works for both newcomers and native citizens.
Fourth, the Dominican Republic Integration Programme should be restructured to be reciprocal and centered on the host nation’s identity. Integration means welcoming newcomers to build lives in Antigua and Barbuda, not redesigning the entire country around the needs of newcomers. Dominican residents should receive structured support to learn English, understand local laws, respect local customs, and participate constructively in national life, while native Antiguan and Barbudans can access Spanish training to support trade, tourism, and diplomacy. Integration must be a two-way process, with the host nation’s identity remaining the central priority.
Fifth, any change to the country’s official language status requires direct national input, either through broad public consultation or a national referendum. A unilateral Cabinet decision is not sufficient for a policy that touches the core of national identity. At a minimum, the government should hold inclusive consultations with educators, historians, faith leaders, trade unions, youth representatives, Barbudan community leaders, cultural workers, immigrant communities, and constitutional experts before moving forward. Any permanent change to the state’s official language structure should be put to a direct vote of the Antiguan and Barbudan people.
Ephraim lays out a revised alternative policy framework that achieves all the government’s stated goals while protecting national identity: “The Government of Antigua and Barbuda shall strengthen Spanish-language education and provide appropriate Spanish-language access services where necessary for public safety, tourism, trade, education, and social inclusion. However, English shall remain the official language of the state, and Antiguan and Barbudan dialect, history, culture, music and civic identity shall be actively protected and promoted as central expressions of the national heritage.”
This approach delivers everything the government claims to want: improved communication, stronger tourism competitiveness, deeper trade ties with Latin America, smoother cooperation with the Dominican Republic, and more inclusive access to public services for Spanish-speaking residents. But it avoids the dangerous step of altering the foundational identity of the state by granting Spanish official status.
The debate is not over whether Antiguan and Barbudans should learn Spanish—Ephraim confirms they absolutely should. The core question is whether a small Caribbean nation should place a global language, tied to a politically significant immigrant community, alongside English as an official language, while the country’s own inherited cultural expressions remain underprotected. Opposing this policy is not xenophobia, Ephraim argues: it is responsible cultural self-defense.
A confident, welcoming nation can host immigrant communities from the Dominican Republic, Guyana, Jamaica, Syria, Lebanon, Europe, China, and across the world without surrendering the core of its own identity, he concludes. Antigua and Barbuda can be hospitable to newcomers without becoming culturally hollow, it can embrace multilingualism without being politically naive, and it can teach Spanish without making Spanish official. Ephraim calls on the government to immediately withdraw or suspend the official language element of its policy, and replace it with a national language competency strategy that expands Spanish education while explicitly protecting the unique identity of Antigua and Barbuda.
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OP-ED: Why CARICOM’s diplomatic nadir lingers
As great power competition re-emerges to reshape the global order, the 15-member Caribbean Community (CARICOM) finds itself grappling with a decades-long question: how can small post-colonial states preserve their sovereign autonomy amid shifting regional and international pressures? This tension took center stage at the recently concluded 29th Meeting of the Council for Foreign and Community Relations (COFCOR), held May 20-21 in Suriname, where CARICOM foreign ministers formally called for unified collective action to navigate an increasingly unpredictable global landscape. The meeting’s communique outlined a two-pronged “dual approach” to protect regional sovereignty: intensifying foreign policy coordination to align bloc positions amid great power rivalry, and accelerating implementation of the CARICOM Single Market and Economy (CSME) to shore up regional food and energy security.
But beneath the official call for unity lies a deep, consequential rift among member states, rooted in clashing approaches to regional foreign policy in the face of a renewed U.S. focus on the Western Hemisphere. At the heart of the divide is the so-called “Trump Corollary” to the 19th-century Monroe Doctrine – a framework that has shifted U.S. hemispheric strategy from a development-focused model of influence to a militarized, deterrence-first approach centered on counter-criminal operations and great power competition. Trinidad and Tobago, one of CARICOM’s founding members, has emerged as the most vocal backer of this new doctrine, aligning its foreign policy closely with Washington’s interventionist posture in the Caribbean. Prime Minister Kamla Persad-Bissessar has explicitly rejected the longstanding regional principle of the Caribbean as a Zone of Peace, justifying the shift by pointing to rising transnational drug trafficking, gang violence and homicides linked to instability in neighboring Venezuela. Port of Spain has since deepened security and economic cooperation with Washington to counter what it frames as malign influence in the region.
Oil-rich Guyana has taken a more nuanced stance, balancing its critical security and energy interests to avoid overt alignment, but the gap between Trinidad and Tobago’s position and that of nearly all other CARICOM member states remains wide. The resulting policy disagreements have not only deepened mistrust across the bloc, but also opened the door to new questions about the future of regional governance: Trinidad and Tobago raised a slate of bloc-level governance reforms at COFCOR, and the country was not represented at the ministerial level at the recent meeting, highlighting the depth of the current diplomatic rift.
To understand the stakes of this current divide, it is necessary to contextualize CARICOM’s long-standing pursuit of strategic autonomy – defined as the ability for small states to act independently to advance their national interests, while adapting to shifting global geopolitics. Most of CARICOM’s sovereign members gained independence between the 1960s and 1980s, following centuries of British colonial rule. When the Pax Britannica collapsed and the Pax Americana took hold, the Caribbean was already framed by Washington as America’s “backyard,” a status formalized by the 19th-century Monroe Doctrine, expanded by the Roosevelt Corollary’s “big stick” assertion of U.S. primacy, and cemented during the Cold War. As the U.S. built out a network of naval and air bases to counter Soviet influence in the region following the Cuban Revolution, the Caribbean became a major Cold War flashpoint, bringing small island states directly into great power rivalry.
It was in this context that the founding leaders of post-independence Caribbean states articulated a core doctrine of strategic autonomy. Errol Barrow, the father of Barbadian independence, famously outlined the “Friends of All, Satellites of None” framework when Barbados joined the United Nations in 1966, a non-aligned approach that rejected ideological alignment with any great power, centered on the diplomacy of peace and prosperity rather than power competition. This principle has remained a foundational touchstone for regional foreign policy, rooted in three core values: respect for sovereign equality of all states, non-interference in internal affairs, and adherence to international law and the UN Charter.
Today, as great powers revive a spheres-of-influence order that erodes the U.S.-led liberal internationalism of the post-Cold War era, Caribbean leaders warn that this strategic autonomy is under unprecedented threat. The rise of geopolitical fragmentation and multipolarity has strained multilateral institutions, including the UN – the primary platform through which small CARICOM states amplify their voices and defend their interests on the global stage. But the most pressing challenge to regional strategic autonomy is not external: it is coming from within the bloc itself.
Trinidad and Tobago’s full-throated endorsement of the Trump Corollary has upended long-standing regional consensus on security. For decades, CARICOM has framed the Caribbean as a Zone of Peace, with a regional approach to security that extends beyond traditional border defense to include human, economic and environmental security, reflected in the 2023 Caribbean Maritime Security Strategy. This framework, aligned with the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), rejects large-scale militarization of the region’s waters, prioritizing peaceful economic development of the blue economy – a core lifeline for small island states dependent on fishing, shipping, tourism and maritime trade. UNCLOS also provides critical legal protection for CARICOM states’ Exclusive Economic Zones, enshrining their sovereign right to develop marine resources and resist interference from larger powers.
By contrast, the U.S. military deployments in the region that Trinidad and Tobago supports target drug trafficking networks but have been documented to disrupt local fishing, shipping and tourism industries – harms that Barbadian Prime Minister Mia Mottley and other regional leaders have publicly decimated. For small, low-lying coastal CARICOM states that rely on open maritime trade routes for survival, these operations pose an existential economic threat. The region’s long-standing commitment to the Zone of Peace principle, backed by UNCLOS, is designed precisely to avoid this outcome, by framing the Caribbean as a space for cooperation rather than great power competition.
The current rift has already played out in high-stakes diplomatic moments. Both Guyana and Trinidad and Tobago refused to endorse a recent COFCOR statement expressing deep concern over intensified U.S. economic, commercial and financial sanctions on Cuba, and reaffirming the Caribbean Zone of Peace principle – a statement issued as the Trump administration ramps up pressure on the Cuban government, including open threats of military action for regime change. More recently, both countries joined an American-orchestrated joint statement condemning China over alleged economic coercion related to detained Panama-flagged vessels, pulling them directly into the middle of escalating Sino-U.S. rivalry. Nine CARICOM states have active development partnerships with China under the Belt and Road Initiative, making U.S. pressure on these ties an added strain on regional unity.
While COFCOR Chair Melvin Bouva’s call for unified action to navigate geopolitical uncertainty has been widely praised across the region, analysts note that growing divergence over what strategic autonomy actually means for member states has blocked progress toward that goal. The upcoming 51st Regular Meeting of the CARICOM Conference of Heads of Government, scheduled for July 5-8, is expected to take up the question of regional unity and strategic autonomy as a core agenda item. Ultimately, regional leaders will need to confront a new reality: the shifting global geopolitical order has already reshaped CARICOM, and competing visions of strategic autonomy among member states will define the bloc’s trajectory for years to come.