Like most folks in the cultural field, I’m invited to various events or preludes to events, but since I’m not the most social of folks, I will generally pass. This week, however, knowing something of the reputation of Dr Keith Nurse, a Trini, from the Cave Hill campus of UWI, who is Senior Fellow at the Sir Arthur Lewis Institute of Social and Economic Studies there, and seeing that the subject was a regional plan for our cultural industries, I took a walk. In a time when such encounters in Guyana can be disappointing, this one, presented by the Ministry of Education (Department of Culture, Youth & Sport) in collaboration with the Caribbean Community Secretariat, was a standout.
Dr Nurse, who was introduced by Caricom’s Dr Hilary Brown, is the lead consultant on this Caricom project to (let me give the full label) Prepare the Regional Strategic Plan for Cultural and Entertainment Services/Cultural Industries in Caricom and Cariforum States. (The Caribbean Forum Group, known as Cariforum, was formed in 1992 as a grouping of 15 small developing countries in a unit to serve a base for economic dialogue with the European Union. It consists of Antigua and Barbuda, Bahamas, Barbados, Belize, Dominica, Dominican Republic, Grenada, Guyana, Haiti, Jamaica, St Kitts and Nevis, St Vincent and the Grenadines, Suriname, and Trinidad and Tobago.)
In the course of a two-hour presentation at the National Racquet Centre meeting room on
