CARICOM at 40: The power of colonialism

Jul 28, 2013 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

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The birth of a dream to make the English-speaking West Indian islands and Guyana into an integrated region is forty years old this month. Its current manifestation is the formation named Caricom. One house separates my home from the Caricom Secretariat. My bedroom window overlooks the Secretariat.
My study window also overlooks the Secretariat. Every day and every night, millions of times, my eyes gaze onto the Caricom Secretariat. There is no coruscation from the Caricom structure in the evening because they turn off all the lights to save money.
The ubiquitous illumination comes from the Caricom Secretariat’s neighbour, the Convention Centre. Outside of the Secretariat and the Convention Centre is a huge black hole – there are no lights on the street where the Secretariat and the Centre are sited. It is the juxtaposition of primitiveness and modern thought. It brings into sharp focus the contrast between the birth of the integration dream and the miserable life it lives in the 21st century.
There are times as my eyes look upon the Secretariat, I think of the permanent damage colonialism has done to is subjects – whether in Brazil, the US, Franco-Africa or throughout the former British Empire.
Of course apart from having to look at the Secretariat daily, I must drive past the building several times in each day. The employees cause you to strain your eyes. Men from all parts of the Caribbean can be seen driving in with their sober suits and designer neck-ties with expensive briefcases. The women too are in the same genre. If you see the movie, “The Devil Wears Prada,” then you get an insight into female fashion at the Secretariat.
The Italian label is conspicuous next door from my home. But what do the men who wear Calvin Klein and the women who wear Prada and who drive fancy SUVs with tinted windows do at the Caricom Secretariat?
This is the mystery about Caricom forty years on. Caricom hardly functions and achieves very little when the year is done. Another mystery of Caricom is that its reality should have made it a role model for the world. Unlike the European nations where more than two dozen societies are culturally and linguistically distinct, thirteen of the fifteen Caricom units are uncannily similar in culture and history. Yet the EU is a very tight and close integration movement, while the word “failure” may not be too harsh a word to judge Caricom’s record.
Do the leaders and peoples of the Caricom want integration?
No survey has been done, but a no answer may be right. We can start with Jamaica. This small island is a phenomenon. If you put twenty countries on a piece of paper and ask billions of ordinary people around the world to name those that they know as countries, apart from the big powers and small but internationally known states like Israel and Cuba, Jamaica will be among those they point to.
A poll a few years back revealed that Jamaicans preferred to stay with British rule. Jamaicans will vote to opt out of Caricom if the ballot is put to them. Trinidadians consider themselves a first world territory and look down upon the islands as backward places. Trinis will vote along the lines of Jamaica.
The small islands are burdened with a colonial mentality and will never integrate. They each want to be leader in their own sandcastle. The Bajans jealously guard their stability which they attribute to the preservation of the image and symbol of ‘little England’ and will never agree to expand the CSME. Guyanese attitude to Caricom is no different.
Guyanese feel that Caribbean people never liked them and don’t appreciate them. Once power-sharing comes to Georgetown, they will have little interest in Caricom. In fact, one influential high school in Guyana does not offer CXC examinations, but went back to the British GCE.
To think that Caricom, which has the CXC certificate, could allow that is extremely shocking. But a Freudian preference was at work.
Time to ask the question – what has Caribbean integration achieved in its forty years of life? One answer easily comes from Trinidad. It spends billions of American dollars buying food that can be obtained from within Caricom. It will not stop doing so. It wants to buy foreign foods.
Another answer comes again from Trinidad. It built another university to compete with UWI.
I end with the Herdmanston Accord. It was a Caricom document that the Guyana Government agreed to implement and has stubbornly refused to do so. Caricom has remained silent. Caricom couldn’t be bothered. Caricom couldn’t be bothered with integration at all.
The legacy of colonialism is the explanation.

 

 

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