There are palpable fears in some sectors of the 15-nation Caribbean trading bloc that that normalized relations between Cuba and the U.S. could leave the region, which has stuck with the island through its darkest periods, out in the cold.
While these fears are not being expressed with sufficient or sustained vibrancy, a regional panel that examined the issue in the past week has warned governments and the business community to be on guard.
Back in December 1972, the then prime ministers of larger Caricom nations Guyana, Jamaica, Trinidad and Barbados decided to diplomatically recognize the Fidel Castro government in Cuba despite warnings from Washington, D.C., which has maintained a six decades old economic blockade against Cuba.
Back then, Cuba was diplomatically isolated by most of Latin America and the Caribbean except for Mexico, which had not broken off relations at the behest of the U.S.
Successive American administrations have done almost everything in their power to unseat communist control of the island despite urgings to recognize the fact that the Cold War has ended and a new era exists. A mixed panel of politicians, business executives and diplomats that discussed the issue in Barbados last week expressed fears that the region my both lose relevance in a normalized Cuba and might find it hard to compete with products and service companies from the developed world in the coming months.
“Our Caribbean business class as a whole might find themselves again being brushed aside by those who had historically opposed Cuba’s direction,” said Tennyson Joseph, the head of the Department of Sociology and Social Work at the Barbados campus of the University of the West Indies.
He is reported in an edition of Barbados Today as saying that frantic activity is taking place between Cuban and American officials regarding a slew of issues, not the least being compensation for businesses, homes and other assets that were nationalized or appropriated by officials during the socialist revolution around the 1950s.
Adrian Padmore, general manager of Barbados-based food manufacturer WIBISCO, said normalization efforts are moving much faster than is being reported publicly and he urged the region to pay attention to this.
“You go into Cuba, you go to a meeting with the importer, and when you leave that meeting, there are five Americans or Europeans in the lobby with suitcases, with products, waiting to go in after you, and five came out before you. The pace at which the developed countries, the new friends of Cuba, are moving is mind-boggling. We want to understand the market and to find a way to get products into Cuba,” he said.
Continuing his lobby for officials to pay attention to things Cuban, he said that he felt “passionately that we have to use this head start that we have of 43 years of partnership and convert it into tangible trade and investment between Cuba and Caricom. There are partnerships, strong friendship and alliances between Caricom and Cuba that need to be put to work. It can’t be done single-handedly. It can’t be done by the private sector doing it solely.”
Recent editorials in both the Stabroek News newspaper in Guyana and the Jamaica Observer made reference to the current and impending changes and reflected similar anxieties to officials.
The Stabroek said that there is already “a certain nervousness about the future of our states to compete with the much larger entity of Cuba,” while the Observer noted that “Caricom’s survival depends on whether it finally embraces the widening of the grouping more so than the deepening of the single market and economy, which has run up against its natural limitations. Caricom’s survival will also likely be as a political entity and not as an economic integration scheme. If its membership expands to include Cuba and the DR, then it will have a much larger critical political mass (20 million people).”