Once I had read and re-read Dr Ralph Gonsalves’s address to the opening of the Twenty Fifth Inter-Sessional Meeting of the Conference of Caribbean Community (CARICOM) Heads of Government it was inevitable that it would be set aside for publication in this issue of the Guyana Review. Frankly, I had been attracted to what I considered to be its surprising bluntness on a delicate issue…ho’s really to blame for some of the critical weaknesses in CARICOM.
Professor Gonsalves is by no means the first West Indian academic to find his way to the pinnacle of his country’s politics. He has, too, been one of those regional academics-turned-politician who has left neither his intellectual acumen nor his innate radicalism behind. On this occasion he brought both to bear to impressive effect.
His speech in St Lucia at the regional Inter-Sessional Forum is not the first occasion on which Dr Gonsalves has leapt ahead of his colleagues with his forthrightness on a particular issue; except that this time around it seemed that he had, without so much as a trace of mischief, poked his finger in the eyes of his colleagues. That, I submit, may have
