I was living in Toronto, 44 years ago, playing music full time with the Tradewinds band, when the annual Caribbean festival in Toronto known as Caribana was born. Toronto, along with New York, had become a hub for Caribbean people migrating to North America – we had brought our cuisine, our music, our flamboyance, and our creativity – and it was inevitable that we would also bring our carnival culture. Today there are carnivals in a many cities outside the region, and Caribana was the first to make a major splash; it was a hit from the start.
But there were some early problems. The people behind the birth of it – mostly Trinidadians – were essentially replicating the established Trinidad Carnival and were bent on making Caribana more or less a copy of what worked in Port of Spain. The problem with this formula
