Knowing that there is still a tendency among some in the region to doubt the utility of close Caricom-Cuba relations, Caricom heads of government will have felt gratified that so soon after the 5th Caricom-Cuba Summit held in Havana, the leader of what used, in the days of the Cold War, to be called the Free World, made bold to announce that the United States and the Government of Cuba had decided there is now, after so many years of estrangement, to be a deliberate progression of increasing US-Cuba interaction.
Our heads, will have sensed the strong insistence by some Latin American leaders at the last Summit of the Americas meeting in Colombia last year, that the time for normalization had come so that there could be a more holistic consideration of hemispheric relations, and therefore the attendance of Cuba at such meetings. And they will by then have concluded that they should under no circumstances be left behind.
We, in our part of the world, are now seeing the initiation of a process of complete normalization of relations in a Caribbean fractured by the Cold War, a process in some measure exacerbated by the American intervention in Grenada. For the People’s Revolutionary Government had placed Cuba at the centre of Caricom relations. And it is well to note that, from a Cold War perspective, that that normalization has proceeded in yet another direction, as an increasing number of countries which had insisted that Taiwan and not the People’s Republic of China represented the country of China, have now reversed their positions.
These developments are important, in spite of temptations on the part of some Caricom governments to pretend that rewards of economic grants and technical assistance are sufficient to justify a pretence that some entities are not what they claim to be, and that divisions among such lines do not affect the status of a Caricom which lays claim to a certain degree of realism about the directions in which global realities are occurring.
President Obama’s declaration on the normalization of relations with Cuba will therefore be a reminder to some of our countries that what can be called the temptation to pursue unilaterally created fictions about the political status of this or that country has now been given up by the country which, as central to the Cold War, has decided that these stratagems no longer have a basis in reality and need to be put aside.
The American intended normalization of relations with Cuba now also presents our Caricom with another reality, this being how, as that country engages, particularly economically, with Cuba, our regional system can come to terms with the inevitability of a more deliberate engagement of Havana in the ongoing process of regional cooperation, and indeed integration. For surely, the real objective of this is to provide the different components of the Caribbean with a wider and more integrated platform for engaging in levels of economic cooperation and integration permitting appropriate economic competitiveness in the globalizing world.
There are already, following President Obama’s announcement, signs in Caricom itself, of a certain nervousness about the future ability of our states, as economies, to compete with the much larger entity Cuba, reference now already being made to the tourism sector. Some believe that the advantage that countries like Jamaica gained as American tourists diverted from Cuba early in the 1960s are now likely to be at risk, given what are believed to be the more productive comparative advantages of that country’s larger, and apparently more culturally and spatially diversified base.
What in effect, however, some now take to be a challenge from a soon to be geopolitically integrated Cuba in the hemisphere, really, in our view, is a challenge to Caricom and other Caribbean states to come to terms with the meaning of regional integration in the wider Caribbean sphere, rather than in terms of the segmented arena that we have looked upon as a kind of privileged Caricom region derived from the perspective that the European countries have had on our development potential.
Guyana, given its geopolitical location, will already have understood this, as there is the need, some even say the inevitability, of certain recognition of the increasing necessity for a level of economic integration with its South American neighbours, even as that the country pursues Caricom integration as a process strengthening the relationships with the island Caribbean deriving from colonial history.
The fact of the matter is, of course, that even as we have celebrated the achievements of Caricom, the increasing intensity, at the diplomatic and cooperation levels, with which Caricom heads have found it necessary to engage within the framework of the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC), and to resist pressure for the continued exclusion of Cuba from the Summit of the Americas, indicates a certain realism about the changing nature of the hemispheric geopolitical environment.
In that connection, what is left to be seen is how intensively, and how practically and systematically Caricom takes its commitments in the context of that wider environment, as against resting on initiatives made from outside the region. And it would now, too, be a shame if the long hostility to Cuba is now replaced by a hostility to a Venezuela which will inevitably settle its present contentions internally, and without any Cold War type intervention.
President Obama’s effort of normalization, in spite of initial resistance at home, must be taken as a new reality that reflects an increasing geopolitical autonomy of countries of the hemisphere. It implies an increasing Caricom, as distinct from a country by country, strategy of realistic engagement with the different parts of the hemisphere.
This is especially so in regard to initiatives that are really beyond Caricom’s autonomous reach, as instanced in the recent Caricom-Cuba Declaration which has placed emphasis, to take one example, on the effective implementation of the “Regional Strategic Agenda…in accordance with the United Nations General Assembly Resolution 46/182, in order to address the serious consequences of climate change in our countries.”
As we approach the next Summit of the Americas in April 2015, at which Cuba is expected to be present, we shall see how effectively Caricom as unit, as distinct from Caribbean countries pursuing national initiatives with particular Latin American countries, are able to gain a basis for recognition of their concerns and initiatives. And how they are able to present these as wider practical hemispheric priorities for the Caribbean sphere, a task which Cuba will undoubtedly wish to advance, in pursuing the implications of the Declaration of Havana of December 8th.
