Originally published on Global Voices

‘Action COP30 Promises’; Photo by UN Climate Change – Kamran Guliyev on Flickr (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0).

The United Nations Climate Change Conference, COP 30, will be held in Belém, Brazil, from November 10 to 21. This event will continue global discussions on the climate crisis. The Caribbean, consisting of small island developing states (SIDS), has been vocal about climate justice, particularly regarding the Loss and Damage agenda. As the conference approaches, the Caribbean is adopting a wait-and-see stance on the discussions.

Meetings of the Conference of the Parties (COP) began taking place annually in response to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), the 1992 international treaty that preceded the 2015 Paris Agreement and its mission “to limit the temperature increase to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels” — or, as it’s referred to in the Caribbean, “1.5 to stay alive.”

Regional nations have become increasingly sceptical about the environmental disruption these COP meetings cause, for seemingly few tangible outcomes. On the heels of continued intense and disproportionate climate impacts being experienced by SIDS — which contribute the least to global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions — and even with COP 28 delivering promises on Loss and Damage, the reality remains that weak frameworks leave sizeable gaps between support pledges and real-life action.

It is a reality that may well have prompted the Jamaican government to take out a USD 150 million catastrophe bond as part of what the World Bank calls the island’s “well-developed disaster risk financing strategy.”

In the wake of Hurricane Melissa, AccuWeather estimates that the region will experience as much as USD 48 to 52 billion in damage. Its formula takes into account much more than insured losses, including long-term losses to the tourism sector, disruptions to business and agriculture, as well as costly infrastructural damage, evacuation, and cleanup expenses.

For island nations like Jamaica, Cuba, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, The Bahamas and Bermuda, all affected by the storm, the trauma is not simply in the moments of waiting for the storm to arrive, not knowing what it will bring. It is not even a matter of riding it out in uncertainty. The lingering damage sets in after the tempest has passed, and you take in the extent of the loss: people killed, homes destroyed, livelihoods reduced to nothing.

According to Theresa Rodriguez-Moodie, CEO of the Jamaica Environment Trust (JET), Jamaica was “reeling” from the intensity of the hurricane, telling Al Jazeera in a television interview, “These storms are becoming the norm, unfortunately, and it is fuelled by the climate crisis.”

When asked how she felt about the organisers of COP30 saying they have no plans to unveil any new measures at the conference in Belém, Rodriguez-Moodie replied, “What we need now is radical change. We need commitments. We need adaptation financing. We need Loss and Damage money […] now is not the time to pause.”

The JET CEO went on to explain that preliminary damage estimates have been coming in at USD 6-7 billion for Jamaica alone. “We cannot afford to continuously pay these kind of big bills year after year,” Rodriguez-Moodie continued, “and have the big polluters go off Scotch-free.”

Many of the large GHG emitters are not even attending the COP30 conference, with the leaders of the United States, China, India and Russia noticeably absent, but Roadriguez-Moodie was not in the least bit phased: “Even when they were at the table, we really didn't have much movement, but the fact is that we cannot have these big emitters claim leadership while they're abandoning their responsibilities, because their profits were built on our pain.”

She argued that the absence of the Big 4 from COP30 “is not neutrality; it really is cowardice.” What SIDS are asking for, she explained, is not charity: “What we're demanding is accountability — and we are not waiting for permission to survive […] we’re asking for these big polluters to pay what they owe [and] dismantle those systems that made them rich and left us vulnerable.”

The region “can’t continue to sit and wait,” she added, “but rather find creative ways to build its resilience and finance its Loss and Damage recovery.”

Originally published on Global Voices

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On Monday October 20, Melissa, then a tropical storm, was ambling across the central Caribbean. Jamaica's meteorological office had put out the requisite news release advising of a severe weather alert. Fishers should expect “deteriorating” sea conditions and residents, “periods of heavy rainfall and strong, gusty winds.” Just over a week later, as Hurricane Melissa approaches the Caribbean island, it is impossible to access the met office's website: “Too Many Requests,” the message says. “The user has sent too many requests in a given amount of time.”

Yet, I know what's happening on the ground in Jamaica thanks to the messaging service of choice in the Caribbean, WhatsApp. Ever since that initial press release, I have been regularly staying in touch with family and friends, two of whom — Emma Lewis and Candice Stewart — are cherished Global Voices contributors. Ordinarily, the messaging app is a quick and convenient means of staying in touch. Under threat of a natural disaster, it's a lifeline.

Waiting for the arrival of Melissa. Photos by Emma Lewis, used with permission.

By Tuesday October 21, we could see where things were heading. Even as Emma shared photos of an “extraordinary sunrise” against “dark clouds on the horizon,” making sure to tell us she used no filters, just her iPhone, Jamaica's parliament was in an uproar, with the opposition marching out of the sitting following a heated debate over hurricane readiness. The government subsequently had press conferences to address the national disaster preparedness roll-out plan.

Meanwhile, in sharing a colourful screenshot from WeatherNerds.org on our chat, Emma quipped, “I guess all these scribbles mean…HELP!!” By Friday, she had deemed the latest forecast from the National Hurricane Center in Florida “horrible.” Prime Minister Andrew Holness soon declared Jamaica a “threatened area,” followed by the issuing of a trade order to prevent price gouging. The order prohibits retailers from increasing the price of essential goods like food, water, medical supplies, personal care items, building materials, and emergency equipment.

On Friday October 24, with Melissa expected to “rapidly intensify,” Jamaica’s met office put the country under a hurricane warning. “Yup!” Emma mused. “Nervous now.” To which Candice replied, “I'm trying not to feed into nerves or anxiety because it'll be a wrap if I get there.”

From last year's experience with Hurricane Beryl, it was obvious that even though Emma and Candice live in the same country, their experiences of the same storm were very different. Emma lives in the capital, Kingston, which is much more urban with well established infrastructure, while Candice is further inland, in the parish of St. Catherine. After the passage of Beryl, Candice lost access to pipe-borne water for an extended period of time. In the early hours of Tuesday October 28, Candice posted, “That's it for water in the pipes.” The storm had not yet made landfall.

As with Beryl, Candice was prepared to change location quickly if needed. As Emma cautioned, “Some areas are likely to flood. Plus storm surge…” Candice reminded her, “I'm inland […] away from storm surges, but I fear that if [Melissa] stays the path of what I currently see on the Zoom Earth storm tracker, I'll be close to her centre when she passes through.” Beryl, she remembered, more or less “skirted” Jamaica. “This one….bwoooooyyy!” Of concern with Melissa is not just the size and path of the storm, but the fact that it is very slow-moving. “You might have landslides, Candice,” Emma said, concerned. “Trying not to sit on that possibility too much,” she replied. “The stress alone…”

As part of the hurricane prep, Jamaica was welcoming teams of linesmen from the United States, Canada and St. Vincent and the Grenadines to assist the Jamaica Public Service (JPS), the sole electricity provider on the island, with restoration of power in the wake of the storm. After Hurricane Beryl, certain communities — in Jamaica as well as the wider region — were left without power for months.

Saturday October 25: Melissa is upgraded to hurricane status, prompting Candice to share in the wee hours of Sunday morning, “Struggling to stay asleep. Usually when this happens, I'd hear birds outside brooding, or some insect chirping or whatever noise they make. You know, something to blend as white noise in my head…it's dead silent. I'm scared.”

Emma replied, “Our frogs are still tweeting but apart from that it’s been strangely quiet all day, not a breath of wind. But my friend Carla tells me it’s very rough, windy weather in eastern Portland.” Within an hour of that conversation, Melissa had been upgraded to a Cat 3 storm. “It’s nerve-wracking,” Emma continued. “This morning is calm in Kingston but nonstop rain since last night. Eastern parishes are getting stormy conditions.”

“Been drizzling on my side since around 6 a.m.,” Candice replied. “Not much breeze. Dark skies. Haven't slept since my last check-in. Mostly anxiety. ” Emma admitted she had “slept really badly too”: “Raining nonstop here but no breeze yet. It’s also getting darker.” The irony, as Candice noted, was that “outside just looks like one of those rainy days. The type that I live for, esp. when I'm home. However, knowing what's behind [it] all is the real pressure raiser.”

Over the next couple of days, they would share links of how the country's zookeepers were prepping the facilities to keep the animals safe, marvel at entrepreneurial Jamaicans who were using WhatsApp to offer their services for last-minute roof patching jobs, and remember the passage of Hurricane Gilbert in 1988: “It was chaotic,” Emma recalls. “People weren’t used to hurricanes then (they are now!!) I recall lining up outside the Ice Factory downtown to get a block of ice. No power or water for quite a while. We pulled through though…”

In true Caribbean style, humour also came into play — or as Jamaicans put it, “Tek serious ting mek laugh” — even as evacuation orders were being issued for certain high-risk communities. By Monday October 27, Candice informed us, “Winds have picked up significantly. It's literally howling. I suspect the power will be out soon. I'm good. Fed, cosy but alert, and also much more rested.”

“Windy down here,” Emma replied, “but we’re not howling yet. I hardly slept (again). It’s a Category Five.” Flooding soon began to besiege certain communities, with “quite a few crocodile sightings in flood waters.” Candice added, “And there's a chance that other endemic species and just animals all round will get dislocated and be all over. I don't have to be concerned about crocs, but I wouldn't be surprised if I see snakes. I [remember] post-Ivan, crabs were all over the verandah.”

Mostly, though, the messaging filled the spaces in between the waiting as Candice mused, “’51 storm Charlie – Cat 3; ’88 storm Gilbert – hit us as a Cat 3; ”25 storm Melissa – maybe Cat 5, maybe Cat 4. All 37 years apart and all had some significant impact. Once a generation . It feels kind of personal […] Two years in a row our breadbasket parish is gonna get a lashing.”

According to Emma, the country's Office of Disaster Preparedness and Emergency Management has been doing a stellar job, including regularly communicating the met office's updates on its social media channels.

In the prelude to the storm, Jamaica has already had three deaths — two caused by falling tress, and one by an electrocution incident — and 13 injuries, mostly from people falling off ladders or rooftops. All health centres have been closed, but all major hospitals on the island remain open. Additionally, out of over 800 shelters scattered across the country, about 130 have been made operational, with Candice expecting that number to increase very soon. Psychosocial support is also being provided to citizens via the country's health ministry and, as should be expected in the age of AI, fake disaster videos have been proliferating on social media as the storm bears down on the island.

By Tuesday October 28, the predicted date of landfall, Candice updated the chat: “Outside a blow weh and tumble down. The howling […] Gusts getting stronger.” Emma added, “Wind is now quite fierce in Kingston and I'm hearing a lot of strange noises outside. Have not slept at all. Now getting very heavy rain.” As at the time of publishing, Emma, who relies on solar, still had power; Candice's electricity went at 9:47 a.m. local time. “Physically I'm okay,” she reported. “Safe [but] emotionally wrecked. This wind is haunting.”

An early morning bulletin advised that conditions would “continue to deteriorate ahead of landfall,” which is expected to be sometime this afternoon. As several WhatsApp messages circulated around the region asking for prayers, Candice said, “Idk how we'll overcome. I know we will, I just don't know how.” 

Originally published on Global Voices

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October 19 marked the 42nd anniversary of the assassination of Maurice Bishop, who became the prime minister of Grenada in a popular revolution that ousted Eric Gairy’s government in 1979. Along with seven others, Bishop was executed by firing squad in an act of usurpation orchestrated by his close political ally Bernard Coard, which triggered the United States-led invasion of the island.

The Washington Post’s investigative podcast series “The Empty Grave of Comrade Bishop,” released two years ago on the 40th anniversary of the killings, is a compelling listen, as it offers historical context — including Bishop’s rise to power, lingering Cold War tensions, and U.S. involvement via Operation Urgent Fury — and explores the long-unresolved question of “Where are the bodies?”

It is a question that has plagued the country for decades, and there is an evidential basis to the argument that the United States knows more about the whereabouts of the bodies than it is letting on. Whether or not this turns out to be the case, as many believe it will, critics view it as a manifestation of neo-colonialism that underscores the U.S. military operation’s encroachment on the rights of a small but sovereign nation.

Fast-forward to 2025: Caribbean waters have become a strategic corridor for U.S. military assaults on suspected narcotics traffickers from Latin America in general, and Venezuela in particular. Since its initial drone strike on a vessel that killed 11 people on September 2, 27 people have now been killed during ongoing attacks in regional waters. U.S. President Donald Trump maintains that all affected vessels have been associated with “drug trafficking cartels and narcoterrorists.”

In its dealings with Venezuela, which in recent years have required the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) to take positions on challenges to Maduro’s presidency and a border dispute with Guyana, it has made a point of respecting international law and upholding the region as a “zone of peace.”

The genesis of the term can be traced back to the ideology of Grenada’s Bishop. In an address to the United Nations General Assembly not long after he took power in 1979, Bishop said, “We join with our sister Caribbean nations in re-emphasising our determination to preserve the Caribbean as a zone of peace, free from military intimidation. We demand the right to build our own processes in our own way, free from outside interference, free from bullying and free from the use or threat of force.”

His speech went on to note that while the country desired “normal friendly relations with the Government of the United States […] it must be manifestly clear that our relations must be based on the fundamental principles of mutual respect for sovereignty, equality and noninterference in each other’s internal affairs, a position which in fact applies to all other states.”

In 2014, the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC), a group that promotes self-definition outside of the influence of Washington, formally declared the Caribbean region a zone of peace.

Against this backdrop, CARICOM — except for Trinidad and Tobago, which “reserved its position” — in an October 18 release, stated that the regional bloc remained resolute on the zone of peace principle, and emphasised the importance of dialogue in conflict resolution. Even as it affirmed its “continued commitment to fighting narcotrafficking and the illegal trade in small arms and light weapons which adversely affect the region,” the members asserted that “efforts to overcome these challenges should be through ongoing international cooperation and within international law.”

The statement ended with a declaration of CARICOM’s “unequivocal support” for the sovereignty, territorial integrity of regional states and the safety and livelihoods of their citizens. While several regional civil society organisations have endorsed the concept of the region as a zone of peace, at least one regional national found the CARICOM release to be “the most neutral statement in the history of neutral statements.”

Expressing his views on the Trinidad and Tobago government’s support of the U.S. on the Venezuela issue, academic Richard Drayton remembered how regional leaders, led by the twin-island republic, once resisted the access of U.S. armed forces to the region: “Trinidad indeed led that block of Caribbean nations which — unlike Barbados, Jamaica, and Dominica — opposed the US invasion of Grenada in 1983, seeking to find an internal regional solution to the crisis. There once was a time when the Caribbean nations were united in the defence of the sovereignty of Venezuela, and universally rebuked the attempt by the US, UK and others to force us to support the Guiado putsch.”

“[I]t is still true,” he continued, “that most Caribbean leaders, with Ralph Gonsalves of St Vincent and the Grenadines, and Mia Mottley of Barbados, continue to call for a de-escalation of the US threat of intervention in Venezuela, and the defence of the Caribbean as a zone of peace. Prime Minister Kamla Persad-Bissessar of Trinidad’s stance is not merely pro-US, or anti-Maduro, it is also let us be clear, defiantly, even rudely, anti-Caricom.”

Meanwhile, the United States has asked Grenada for permission to install a temporary radar system and personnel at the Maurice Bishop International Airport. As at the time of publishing, the government had not yet provided an official response, but commentators suggest that its decision may well constitute “one of the most consequential sovereignty decisions of modern times.”

Given the fraught history surrounding the assassination of Bishop and his colleagues, public sentiment on the issue has been decidedly opposed to the arrangement. One op-ed by Donovan Martin of TDS News suggested that hidden beneath the “diplomatic phrasing” of the request “lies an uncomfortable truth about power, sovereignty, and misplaced faith in American protection.”

Partnerships between the US and smaller nations, he went on to explain, “rarely begin with conflict, but they almost always end with control.” He also noted that the US invasion of the island “remains a defining moment in Grenada’s modern history — one that exposed how quickly foreign powers can override a small nation’s sovereignty when it suits their interests.” Grenada agreeing to the placement of military equipment belonging to its former invader, Martin argued — at the airport named after Bishop, no less — would effectively cheapen Bishop’s legacy: “It would say, in effect, that the lessons of 1983 have been forgotten.”

President Trump has already confirmed the presence of the CIA in Venezuela, and on October 18, the U.S. embassy issued a security alert in which it warned American citizens to “refrain from visiting all U.S. Government facilities in Trinidad and Tobago through the holiday weekend.” The island nation has a long weekend because of the observance of Divali. Trinidad and Tobago’s acting police commissioner, Junior Benjamin, citing the sensitivity of intelligence information, did not confirm whether the embassy advisory was connected to mounting tensions surrounding Venezuela.

NOW Grenada, in referring to a Maurice Bishop speech entitled, “In Nobody's Backyard,” a response to Theodore Roosevelt’s designation of the Caribbean and Latin America as the United States’ “backyard” — and echoed by Ronald Reagan, under whose tenure the U.S. invaded Grenada — summed up the situation by suggesting, “As Grenada and the Caricom region mark the anniversary of his tragic death and the end of the 1979 Grenada Revolution, it’s a poignant reminder that the struggle for regional integration and unity as a bulwark to neo-imperialist impositions and aggressions is still ongoing today in 2025.”

Originally published on Global Voices

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Much of the world has its attention focused on the 2025 World Athletics Championships, which began in Tokyo, Japan, on September 13. As is often the case, athletes from the Caribbean performed admirably, inspiring an outpouring of Caribbean pride.

An unforgettable farewell

It began with a full-circle moment on September 14, the second day of the games, as Jamaica’s beloved Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce ran the last individual race of her career — the Women’s 100 Metre final. Eighteen years before, at the 2007 World Championships held in Osaka, Japan, Fraser-Pryce swept her way into people’s hearts when — as a reserve on the Jamaica women’s Relay team — she copped a silver medal with a performance that signalled she was someone to watch.

According to a photo essay published on the site of her footwear sponsor, Nike, this year’s final, in which the 38-year-old sprinter placed sixth, signalled Fraser-Pryce bowing out of the athletics arena on her own terms, as the most decorated 100m sprinter in history. “The next handful of seconds,” the introduction to the essay began, “were to honor everything that had brought her to this moment”:

Green, yellow, and black hair whipping behind her — a self-proclaimed ‘daughter of the soil,’ who chose to wear the colors of her nation’s flag for her final finish — [Fraser-Pryce] exploded off the blocks, [ending her 100m career] in the same way she began racing 18 years ago in Japan — with fierce speed, strength, and composure. It was a bold tribute to Jamaica, the nation whose unyielding support has carried her through two decades at the top of the sport. […] What athletes everywhere, and especially young girls, can take from Shelly-Ann’s lead: The courage to run your own race.

On his Instagram page, fellow Jamaican track and field icon Usain Bolt paid tribute to Fraser-Pryce's “incredible legacy,” calling her “a real legend,” and welcoming her to “the retirement club.”

A long-awaited comeback

On September 18, Trinidad and Tobago’s Keshorn Walcott, who won Olympic gold in the Men’s Javelin Throw when he was just 19, finally copped the World Championships gold medal 13 years later with an impressive throw of 88.16 metres, bettering his 2012 Olympic throw by 3.58m.

When asked about his extended absence from the winner’s circle, Walcott replied, “Where have I been? I’ve been trying. […] It's been a long 13 years. And tonight is finally my night once again.”

He added that he was “grateful to be able to deliver” the World Championships gold medal to his country. Walcott also spoke of the value of persistence, and of having the right people there to support you — “Keep trying, keep going!” — and thanked his coach for trusting him. “We made some good changes,” he explained, “and you can see it paid off.”

For regional sports fans, the fact that the two-time world champion Anderson Peters, who hails from the island of Grenada, secured the silver in the same event, heightened the joy of the moment.

A silver-streaked finish

Meanwhile, sprinter Jereem Richards from Trinidad and Tobago claimed the silver in the Men's 400 Metres in a time of 43.72, sandwiched between the winner Busang Collen Kebinatshipi (in a world-leading time of 43.53) and bronze medallist Bayapo Ndori (44.20), both from Botswana.

A peer of Keshorn Walcott, albeit just a year younger, Richards’ performance also succeeded in breaking the Trinidad and Tobago national record in the event.

Caribbean women shine

In the Women's Triple Jump event, Cuba’s Leyanis Perez Hernandez, a four-time world champion, copped gold in a world-leading jump of 14.94 metres.

Finishing right behind her to claim the silver in a season’s best of 14.89 metres was Dominica’s Thea LaFond, who brought home her country’s first-ever Olympic medal in 2024.

In the Women’s 400 Metres, meanwhile, Marileidy Paulino clinched the silver medal for the Dominican Republic.

In the Women’s 100 Metres, Jamaican Tia Clayton and St. Lucian Julien Alfred placed second and third, while in the 200-Metre event, Jamaica’s Shericka Jackson secured the bronze. The Caribbean also managed a podium showing in the Discus, with Cuba’s Silinda Moráles taking third place.

Other stellar performances

Jamaican male sprinters enjoyed their fair share of time on the podium. In the Men’s 100 Metres, Oblique Seville and Kishane Thompson won gold and silver, respectively, outpacing the USA’s Noah Lyles, who came in third.

It was the first time a Jamaican man had won gold in an international 100m event since Usain Bolt’s stunning run at the 2016 Rio Olympics, putting an end to what The Jamaica Observer dubbed a “near decade-long global men’s 100m gold drought.”

In the Men’s 200 Metres, Bryan Levell, also from Jamaica, placed third. The Men’s 110-Metre Hurdles saw the Jamaican duo of Orlando Bennett and Tyler Mason cop silver and bronze, while their compatriot Tajay Gayle placed second in the Long Jump. Finally, in the Triple Jump, Cuba’s Lázaro Martínez came in third place.

The 2025 World Athletics Championships will come to a close on September 21. The latest results can be found here.

Originally published on Global Voices

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“Earlier this morning, on my Orders, U.S. Military Forces conducted a kinetic strike against positively identified Tren de Aragua [TDA] Narcoterrorists in the SOUTHCOM area of responsibility,” tweeted U.S. President Donald Trump on September 2. The strike, which was carried out somewhere in the southern Caribbean Sea, was ostensibly done to target the “designated Foreign Terrorist Organization, operating under the control of Nicolas Maduro, responsible for mass murder, drug trafficking, sex trafficking, and acts of violence and terror across the United States and Western Hemisphere.”

The 11 people on board the vessel were killed instantly. Trump maintains that the boat was “transporting illegal narcotics, heading to the United States,” and that the military action should serve as a warning to anyone “even thinking about” bringing drugs into the U.S. The president’s tweet garnered more than 1,000 comments, including a message of gratitude from at least one Venezuelan netizen, scepticism about both the credibility of the story and the motivation for the strike, and even hope that drug trafficking between South and North America “will collapse.”

International news outlets published op-eds suggesting that the action — stemming from a directive to the Pentagon to use military force to deal with certain South American drug cartels considered to be terrorist organisations — amounted to an “illegal use of war powers to address what should have been a situation of law enforcement.” It was a position echoed by many social media users, at least one of whom likened the whole situation to a form of recolonisation.

However, Global Voices’ publishing partner Caracas Chronicles noted that the area from which the vessel left Venezuela is an established drug smuggling route, with strong ties to gangs. It also suggested that although there are still many unanswered questions surrounding the strike, the incident could set a precedent for more serious action.

Historically stable relations turn tenuous

The vessel in question departed from Venezuela’s state of Sucre, heading northwest. At its closest point, there are only 14 kilometres (8.7 miles) between the South American nation and Trinidad and Tobago, located at the base of the Caribbean archipelago. Despite challenges — many revolving around Venezuela’s humanitarian crisis — the two countries have historically enjoyed a cordial relationship, even against the backdrop of the Caribbean Community division over Venezuela’s political situation, and siding with CARICOM member Guyana in an ongoing border dispute.

Trinidad and Tobago Prime Minister Kamla Persad-Bissessar said that she was happy about the success of the strike: “The pain and suffering the cartels have inflicted on our nation is immense. I have no sympathy for traffickers; the U.S. military should kill them all violently.” Her minister of defence, Wayne Sturge, also posited that if the U.S. succeeds in its military approach, it could result in a dramatic drop in Trinidad and Tobago’s murder rate, since “a significant percentage of our murders are gang related and stem from issues directly related to drug trafficking.”

While some agreed with the state’s stance, in a Letter to the Editor of Wired868, Osei Benn called the prime minister’s statement “troubling,” explaining, “To champion what essentially boils down to murder — even in the face of repugnant crimes — is to open a perilous path.” Advocating for “proper interdiction, fair trials, transparency, and regional cooperation,” he also felt that “what has begun as a ‘counter‑narcotics’ mission risks turning into a wider geopolitical conflict.”

In that vein, Trinidadian columnist Gabrielle Hosein suggested that “to justify US air and naval forces in and around the Southern Caribbean, US propaganda is pendulum-swinging [between] the threat of Venezuelan drug cartels to the US and, on the other, Venezuela’s threat to Guyana.”

For her, the issue comes back full circle to the border dispute. Hosein recalled U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio saying at a press conference on August 14 that the Maduro regime, far from being a “legitimate government,” is “a criminal enterprise that has “taken control of national territory of a country and who, by the way, are also threatening US oil companies that are operating lawfully in Guyana.”

Noting that Guyana’s President Irfaan Ali “drummed up support for an aggressive U.S. engagement with the region” in a discussion with the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in July 2022, this “by the way,” Hosein believes, is the real story. “I believe in a strong stance against all militarism and U.S. military penetration of the Caribbean, and that the Yankees should go home,” she explained, “but the realpolitik is that even as we speak out — as we must — both the U.S. and ExxonMobil are Goliaths whose agendas trump our own.”

Connections with China and Russia

Yet, the official story kept changing. At first, the boat — nothing more substantial than a small fishing vessel — was deemed to be heading directly for the States. Rubio later claimed that “these particular drugs were probably headed to Trinidad or some other country in the Caribbean.” The shift prompted local criminologist Darius Figuera to wonder if the Trinidad and Tobago prime minister had been “misled” in endorsing a strike that “had nothing to do with drug trafficking” and instead was “connected to events happening in China over the past week.”

On September 3, China unveiled new weapons at a Victory Day military parade commemorating the 80th anniversary of Japan’s surrender in World War II. In attendance were the leaders of China, Russia, and North Korea. Maduro’s government also staged a commemoration of the day in Caracas, hailing China as “the first military power on planet Earth.”

A few months before, on May 12, China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi met with his Venezuelan counterpart Yván Gil, where, in reiterating his country’s intention to enhance bilateral cooperation, he referred to a meeting between the Chinese and Venezuelan presidents in Moscow on May 9. All this followed the signing of a strategic partnership between Russia and Venezuela just days prior, which reportedly involves cooperation via OPEC+ and other energy-based organisations. Meanwhile, China has been active in supporting Latin America, strengthening the China-CELAC Forum.

In this context, Figuera expressed concern about the geopolitical implications for Trinidad and Tobago, explaining, “China has embraced both Cuba and Venezuela. China has armed Venezuela. It has drawn a line in the sand.” By siding with the United States in this broader America-China tug of war in which Venezuela is being used as a pawn, the criminologist suggested that Persad-Bissessar had “dragged TT into a geopolitical stand-off.”

Safe to go back in the water?

Even as criticism of the Trinidad and Tobago prime minister’s statement continued, she defended her position, saying that she had a duty to protect law-abiding citizens.

President Maduro, meanwhile, referring to the U.S.’ modus operandi as “regime change through military threat,” said that Venezuela was willing to engage in dialogue. Trump has nevertheless sent 10 stealth fighter jets to Puerto Rico, with the aim of carrying out continued operations against drug cartels.

Some people wondered whether — as Venezuela’s communications minister, Freddy Ñáñez, claimed — footage of the strike was generated by artificial intelligence, relatives of the deceased disproved this narrative.

At the same time, Venezuela’s Minister of Interior, Justice and Peace Diosdado Cabello intimated that the standoff was “just starting.” By supporting the U.S.’ attack, he said, the Trinidad and Tobago government was “condemning their people to be executed at sea.”

Trinidadian politician Mickela Panday noted, “For the residents and fishermen of Cedros and Icacos [along Trinidad's southwestern tip], this is especially frightening as they depend on the sea for their livelihoods. We cannot allow our citizens to feel caught in the crossfire.”

Yet, some believe they already are. On September 5, the Pentagon said that two Venezuelan military aircraft flew near a U.S. Navy vessel, in a “highly provocative move” they are interpreting as a show of force in the wake of the speedboat strike, aimed at interfering with America's war on drug trafficking.

Originally published on Global Voices

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Each year, the Caribbean awaits the official start of the Atlantic hurricane season with a deep sense of unease. While hurricanes have been affecting the region for centuries — with many storms over the last few decades causing major losses in affected territories — research suggests that while the climate crisis has not necessarily increased the number of storms in a typical season, it is making them more intense.

This is concerning news for the small island developing states (SIDS) of the Caribbean archipelago, the citizens of which have long been calling for the climate crisis to be addressed in ways that recognise and respect the resilience of the region’s people.

While the region continues to advocate for itself, however, the storms keep forming. The first hurricane of the 2025 season is Hurricane Erin, which the United States-based National Hurricane Center has categorised as a Category 5 system. This highest level is generally associated with damage that could include major damage to buildings and the isolation of residential communities due to felled trees and electricity infrastructure; at-risk areas may, therefore, need to be evacuated to try and avoid loss of life.

As of August 16, Erin was located just over a hundred miles (about 170 kilometres) north of Anguilla, bringing with it maximum sustained winds of close to 160 miles per hour (255 km/h) with the potential to affect parts of the northern Leeward Islands, the British and U.S. Virgin Islands, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, and the Turks and Caicos. Heavy rains are expected throughout the weekend; by Monday, the storm is expected to veer north, likely with reduced intensity as it potentially takes in more dry air on account of wind shear.

As with 2024’s Hurricane Beryl, forecasters have commented on Erin’s speedy acceleration from tropical storm to hurricane, which studies are linking to climate change.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s outlook for the current season, which began on June 1, suggests that there may be 13 to 18 named storms, with five to nine becoming hurricanes, and two to five reaching a Category 2 level or higher.

Countries in Hurricane Erin’s path are being advised that sea swells and heavy rains could trigger flash flooding and landslides, though its residents are hoping the storm does not make landfall.

Originally published on Global Voices

Image of the title wall of the art exhibition ‘The Botanical Afterlife of Indenture: Imaginative Archives,’ which took place at the Art Society of Trinidad and Tobago in Port of Spain from June 10-21. Photo by Abigail Hadeed, used with permission.

Editor’s Note: While the majority of indentured labourers who came to the Caribbean between 1834 and 1920, after the end of slavery, were of Indian origin, people from other regions were also conscripted into the indentureship scheme, including Chinese, Europeans, and Africans.

If you wanted to explore the ways in which the history of indentureship lingers and influences identity, how would you do it? If you were Gabrielle Hosein, senior lecturer at the Institute for Gender and Development Studies at the University of the West Indies’ St. Augustine Campus in Trinidad, you might begin by going through the visual archives, looking for … something.

“I’m interested in what it means to be living a post-indenture, feminist life,” she tells me on the third day of her collaborative exhibition with photographer Abigail Hadeed entitled “The Botanical Afterlife of Indenture: Imaginative Archives.” The exhibition took place at the Art Society of Trinidad and Tobago in Port of Spain from June 10 to 21, shortly after the 180th anniversary of “Indian Arrival” on May 30. “I’ve been influenced by artists and scholars who have been looking at the history of indenture and how it has been represented, particularly the histories of women’s labour.”

The woman in the dhoti

Shot of the archival photo that got academic Gabrielle Hosein thinking about indentureship and the legacy it wields in contemporary life. Image by Janine Mendes-Franco, used with permission.

The photo that inspired her to conceptualise the exhibit, which was two years in the making, was of an Indian woman working on a coconut plantation in Jamaica, dressed in a dhoti; part of the Michael Goldberg West Indiana collection. Hosein became “obsessed” with the image some a number of years ago and began to think about why it was so important. Going by the description accompanying the photograph at the exhibition, it was because “labour queers gender […] the androgyny of her appearance makes this image strikingly different from other colonial-era photographs and overturns myths about Indian dress in the past. Citation of this clothing that could be masculine or feminine appears [as] a labouring woman in dhoti and dupatta [yet] wearing a traditional, silver hasuli [necklace] as a feminine form of savings and beauty.”

Hosein herself explains it this way: “When you spend a lot of time combing the visual archives, you see that all of the images of women are of them wrapped up in skirts — and those are truthful images in many ways — but as a feminist, you’re going to look for the women who history doesn’t want to remember, who history has forgotten, who don’t fit the mould.” It’s the only archival image she has come across in which a woman is dressed in a way that could be read as “against the grain,” and it inspired a series of contemporary dhoti images for the exhibit — visual archives that draw on the narratives of the past, telling “particular stories that may have [otherwise] been forgotten.”

The work, she says, is coming out of a community of people who are engaging in the afterlife of indenture, a phrase popularised by Professor Andil Gosine. Hosein says she has also been thinking about, in different ways, “our relationship to the legacies of indenture.”

It is a relationship, Hosein says, that can be enacted in Carnival, in everyday home rituals and, of course, in art. “I really want[ed] to create work that was historically grounded and educational, but also extremely contemporary and feminist and political.” She was invested in work that was beautiful, too, “because when African and Indian women were brought to the plantation as labourers, they came into a work camp that did not value them as human beings. And for women, beauty is incredibly humanising, so to create beauty out of conditions that were so exploitative and violent is to look for inheritances that we might carry with us into our futures.”

The beauty of botanicals

Photographer Abigail Hadeed. Photo courtesy Gabrielle Hosein, used with permission.

Key in helping her delve into these inheritances is Abigail Hadeed, whose approach has always been photojournalistic, peering deep inside her subjects, respectfully witnessing their journey. “Part of this work fit into stuff that I was already doing. I’m always photographing objects … still lifes to lives. As a photographer, I think in a classical way.”

While Hosein’s jumping off point was the archival image, Hadeed was captivated by the botanicals: “[T]hink of indentureship and you think of sugar cane [as well as] their jahajin bandals [sacks in which they carried] seeds [of] all these plants — tamarind and moringa — all of these things came with them and became part of their backyard gardens, their sustenance; they brought all that stuff to Trinidad and the Caribbean.”

The ‘Botanicals’ section of the exhibition. Photo by Abigail Hadeed, used with permission.

It is an aspect of the exhibit that pays homage to the work and memory of Professor Emeritus Brinsley Samaroo, who did a lot of research around indentureship and said of the cleverly made cloth parcels in which they carried their belongings, “The list [of] flora which were fitted into this jahaji bandal is long and impressive” — mango, guava, pomegranate, sapodilla, rice, string beans, turmeric, ginger, cumin, bitter gourd, cinnamon, mustard, black pepper, onion, ashoka, neem, cucumber, lotus.

A shot of some of the photographs in the ‘Botanicals’ section of the exhibit, in which you can see the ghosting and movement Hadeed describes. Photo by Abigail Hadeed, used with permission.

There is so much there that, in Hadeed's mind, the botanicals “aren't quite resolved,” but they are visually mesmerising. The rice, for instance, has a lot of movement: “I love that [it] hasn’t quite gotten to the stage where it’s ready to harvest. The botanicals are exposing the continuities and transformations of life, in which plants are the subject of their own histories. Incorporating the movement into the imagery serves as a metaphor for the passage of time and the ethereal nature of memory. The blurred or ghosted visuals represent the past — moments that are intangible and elusive — while the static elements anchor the viewer in the present. This interplay invites contemplation on how history lingers in the contemporary, influencing identity.”

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While movement has always been a part of Hadeed's work, she says there is even more now, because in thinking about past, present and memory, she realises, “So many things are blurring now. The world is just moving so fast, so I feel movement is very important to show.”

The square strips of printed cloth that form the base of the ‘jahajin bandals,’ which were made by Lina Vincent and a team of designers from India: Setika Singh, Gaurav Maurya and Dhanya Kolathur. Image courtesy Gabrielle Hosein, used with permission.

The article in which Samaroo wrote about the contents of the jahajin bandals was “a pivotal moment” for Hosein: “I began to think about the ways that I could create imaginative archives, ways of recording and memorialising this history of Indian indenture and legacies that are popular in the sense of being able to move in the landscape of daily life, and that are themselves so visually articulate that they convey what they're meant to memorialise.

“If we start with the story of jahajin bandals,” she continues, “they're designed as a square in which the ends, then tied to [themselves] become an archive, and they’re printed with the plants that they brought, so when these [move] outside of the gallery, they’re intended for people to take the art with them to embody it, to carry these legacies that are meaningful to them. [It’s] already telling its story visually, and that’s something that we wanted.”

Challenging stereotypes

The ‘Tools of the Trade’ segment of the exhibit. Photo by Abigail Hadeed, used with permission.

The exhibit then meandered, quite purposefully, towards the lives of Indian women. The writings of academics like Rhoda Reddock and Patricia Mohammed have helped Hosein question the passive and domesticated stereotype: “I’ve been telling students for decades, ‘The Indian women that you want to follow are the indentured women who were earning their own wages, leaving partners they didn't want, protesting labor conditions. This stereotype of the subordinate Indian housewife was one that was manufactured by colonial authorities in response to this very woman and, of course, the violence that she was facing as a result of that kind of politics of self-determination.”

This part of the exhibit creatively imagines Indo-Caribbean histories in the context of feminine practices of beauty, inviting contemplation about indenture histories that go beyond “a Euro-creole history of landscape painting” to the depiction of botanicals in “embodied art forms” such as mehndi, godnas and even the wearing of jewellery, which challenge colonial portraiture of Indian women and instead, visualise their resistance.

A visitor looks at the series that explores indenture legacies through mehndi. Photo by Abigail Hadeed, used with permission.

In these iterations, Hadeed says, they wanted to change the visual landscape to a Caribbean context, so they brainstormed the process with other collaborators — mehndi artist Risa Raghunanan-Mohammed, tattoo designer Portia Subran, jeweller Frank Mitchum Weaver, and curator and graphic designer Melanie Archer, among others. Never before had these art forms used common agricultural plants and other aspects of indenture and placed them into a visual application like this: “The simplicity of it is astounding,” Hosein says, “because you would think it had been thought of before. I don’t think there’s ever been a cutlass-wielding woman done in mehndi.”

The handmade sterling silver bajuband, made by jeweller Frank Mitchum Weaver. Photo courtesy Gabrielle Hosein, used with permission.

Suddenly, henna transcends body adornment and becomes a feminist, botanical archive. Godnas, a Hindu tradition whereby women had to get tattoos upon marriage that Hosein finds “very patriarchal,” are pulled out of that context and become something else in their memorialisation of the plants that helped create economic freedom for indentured Indian women. The journeys indentured labourers made in the 19th century, to places like Guyana, Trinidad, Jamaica, and Suriname, as they came off of the pagal samundar (the mad sea), sparkle in scenes of resistance and liberation, etched into a thick, silver bajuband [armlet].

Academic Joy Mahabir describes jewellery as symbolic of women’s labour, labour resistance, and liberation. Everything in this multimedia exhibition (there is also a film) is rooted in research, then reinterpreted into a modern work that is fundamentally imaginative and political in relation to the original visual archive.

Gabrielle Hosein as subject. Photos by Abigail Hadeed, used with permission.

Hosein had no desire to appear in the photographs in a way that was authentic to the past. Rather, she wanted to challenge everything that people thought about indenture, recalling that Gaiutra Bahadur, who authored “Coolie Woman, the Odyssey of Indenture,” wrote a piece in which she says images of the Coolie Bell were being produced at the same time that women were protesting outside on plantations — “a juncture between the colonial propaganda and what was actually happening.”

Inverting the gaze

‘The Gaze’ section of the exhibit, where the perspective is shifted. Photo by Abigail Hadeed, used with permission.

In that vein, one series in the exhibit considers what happens when Indian women intentionally hold a camera in their hands, “looking through the camera lens at colonial portraiture.” It’s a thought that anticipates the family album, which only came about in the 1940s, Hosein says.

Hadeed adds, “It was about the agency of giving them their own way of representing themselves, like, ‘I'm looking at you, you’re looking at me, looking back at you.’ It’s almost like you’re seeing what she’s seeing.”

In another series, Hadeed’s contemporary images include something Hosein could not find in any of the archival images: books. There were lots of images of Indian women mothering, but none of them reading, and because her own grandmother had gone to school and was able to read in Urdu, English, and Arabic — “because she had to be able to read the Quran” — it was imperative to her that reading was part of the narrative.

It was important to Hosein that books and education were represented as part of the legacies of indenture. Photo by Abigail Hadeed, used with permission.

The Quran from which she is reading to her daughter, was given to Hosein by her uncle. “We were really interested,” she reiterates, in challenging the hegemony of what was visualised about Indo-Caribbean histories.”

Back to botanicals

Gabrielle Hosein adjusts some of the rice grains that form the rangoli design. Photo courtesy Hosein, used with permission.

The final aspect of the exhibition comes around full circle. Rather than looking at the art on the walls, or the film on the screen, however, you must look down. On the floor is a design by rangoli artist Richard Rampersad that represents the botanicals in yet another form.

“So this is mango, pan, and people,” Hosein explains. “For me, this is very, very important because it represents the folk art tradition. You can have a very sophisticated art exhibit, but it’s ultimately coming out of a tradition of folk art.”

Rangoli art by Richard Rampersad at the exhibition. Photo by Abigail Hadeed, used with permission.

While Hosein describes Hadeed’s photographs as “major, major work,” she also holds that the pieces — the bandals, the tattoos, the jewellery — are connected parts of an overall vision to create “imaginative archives that can accompany us on our journeys as we think about our relationship to the past.”

For Hosein, the exhibition is not so much about Indian identity as it is about indenture history, with a starting point of post-indenture feminist politics. “The multi-ethnic importance of this exhibit,” she says, “is that while these plants were brought in jahajin bandals with indentured workers, they have made such an impact on the landscape and are so familiar to everyone in the Caribbean, that this is really a legacy of indenture that has been inherited by us all, across ethnicity, class, geography, disability, sexuality. That familiarity says that the legacies of post-indenture are a basis for us to find commonalities. This really is something that is collectively ours.”

Originally published on Global Voices

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As part of the government of Trinidad and Tobago’s plan to raise the minimum alcohol consumption age from 18 to 21, and the legal age for marijuana use and gambling from 18 to 25, Homeland Security Minister Roger Alexander noted that it will soon be mandatory for citizens to carry a form of identification with them at all times.

Speaking at a July 10 post-cabinet press conference at the Red House in Port of Spain — the seat of the country’s parliament — Alexander suggested the move would make it easier to “ascertain your age and your address” in order to assist in the fight against crime. The government also plans to boost the Trinidad and Tobago Police Service’s (TTPS) technological capabilities.

Alexander’s rationale, however, did not go over well in some quarters. Facebook user Kurt Seucharan-Fuentes asked:

What problem would be solved by raising the age of drinking to age 21? Do we have a problem with alcoholism between the ages of 18 to 21? […] If we do have a problem with alcoholism, does making it illegal for a particular age group solve the problem? What pressing issues did we have that caused us to vote against the previous government and vote this one in? Wasn’t crime one of them? Are you going to tell me with a straight face that this is going to solve our crime problems? […] Do you even have a plan to tackle the issues you were voted in to solve?

Tongue firmly in cheek, journalist Paolo Kernahan quipped, “Now you have to wait to the ripe old age of 21 to go out and not get carded anywhere so you could ketch the power.” The Facebook thread that followed his comment gave rise to many opinions, with some social media users saying the measure was “a good start” and others sardonically suggesting, “This was one of the most pressing issues on the mind of the citizenry for decades. Not crime, not healthcare, not the economy. No. It was the legal age of rum consumption. Thank you. Now all is well with the world.”

Facebook user Antonio Decklan Ross felt that the move was counterintuitive, since “at 18, you are responsible enough to vote, drive, get married, work (join the army or police service and carry a gun) and enter into a contract but […] not old enough to consume alcohol.”

Former finance minister and current opposition member of parliament (MP) Colm Imbert tweeted:

So, now, if I decide to jog around the Queen's Park Savannah for exercise, or go to beach, or go hiking, I must have ID on me? And if I don't, I commit a criminal offence? This UNC Government is one of the most draconian and oppressive administrations in the Western Hemisphere

— Colm Imbert (@ImbertColm) July 13, 2025

The UNC refers to the United National Congress, which won the country’s last general election earlier this year by a landslide.

On a forum thread at CaribbeanCricket.com, one user who goes by the moniker “Sarge” was quick to offer context: “Choosing a government policy, tweeting about it, and hoping for public outrage is practically a rite of passage for politicians who are leaving office,” he began. “But is this just another instance of selective outrage, or is this the authoritarian overreach he claims?”

While he agreed that “a police state is not a place anyone wants to live,” Sarge also suggested that the issue deserved “a critical examination, particularly in light of global standards.” In many Global North nations, he continued, “carrying some form of ID is a legal requirement.” Certain American states also have stop-and-identify statutes.

“The purpose of these laws [is] to combat crime, expedite law enforcement, and stop underage drinking and gambling,” Sarge wrote, arguing that Trinidad and Tobago's escalating crime situation requires “more accountability and enforcement measures”: “Is it truly ‘oppressive’ to demand that you provide identification as proof of age in order to buy alcohol or gamble? Or is it a logical step to enforce the law and safeguard youth?”

That said, implementation of the law matters, and police discretion would have to come into play: “Implementation, checks and balances, and safeguarding individual rights and public safety should be the main topics of discussion.”

On X, Trini Fietser countered:

I carry NOTHING with me when I walk the streets of the capital city of Trinidad and Tobago! Why? Because of crime!#LeadershipMatters https://t.co/e93PkyFICY

— Trini Fietser (@TT_Fietser) July 15, 2025

In a letter to the editor of the Daily Express, Pastor Courtney Francois suggested that while citizens want to feel safe, the idea of having to carry ID at all times raises “deep concerns — not only about policy, but about principle.” Making the point that “laws should protect the innocent, not punish them,” he argued that “to place the burden of suspicion on every law-abiding citizen, while claiming to target a criminal minority, is to invert the very justice system we claim to uphold.”

Some of the potential negatives that Francois flagged include erosion of civil liberties; increased risk of discrimination, abuse, and presumption of guilt; suppression of movement; state surveillance and data misuse; and the criminalisation of poverty. “Imagine a child going to the parlour, the playground, or a neighbour’s home, only to face police action for not having an ID,” he posited. “Even citizens having to attend places of worship. Are we really willing to create a society where forgetfulness becomes criminal?”

A Trinidad and Tobago Newsday editorial also weighed in. Referencing an altercation that took place between a family from a disenfranchised area and plainclothes police officers on July 10, the editorial explained, “This incident captures why we believe the government’s mandatory ID card proposal is a poor fit with our country’s norms. If police do not present ID when confronting citizens, why should citizens carry theirs?”

Noting the lack of public trust in the police service — a mere eight percent — the op-ed felt that “until trust and confidence in the service [is] restored, police killings addressed and body cameras worn, we believe this measure an ill-timed expansion of police authority.” It also believed that keeping track of legal age limits could just as easily be achieved “through discrete co-operation with businesses” rather than requiring “widespread civil liberty incursions.”

“Assuming cops will be able to detain someone who cannot produce a card,” the editorial further argued, “then this measure would amount to an astonishing shifting of the burden of proof from the state onto the citizen. […] That is no small thing.”

The situation becomes even more complicated when biometric databases get into the mix, noting that the US-based Electronic Frontier Foundation finds “little evidence to support the argument that national IDs reduce crime. Instead, these systems create incentives for identity theft [and] create extreme risks to data security.”

One writer, speaking with Global Voices via WhatsApp on condition of anonymity, said that the proposed mandatory ID laws “bring to mind the ‘pass laws’ of South Africa, and the casual brutality of the police towards Black kids in the UK while carrying out what became known as ‘sus laws.’”

The discriminatory legislation enacted during the apartheid era restricted the movement of Black South Africans, controlling where they could live, work, and travel within the country. The United Kingdom also had similar legislation, the roots of which can be traced back to its 1824 Vagrancy Act, Section 4 of which essentially allowed the police to stop, search, and even arrest anyone they suspected of intending to commit an offence.

In the 1970s and ’80s, the law was used by law enforcement to disproportionately target Black and other ethnic minorities in the UK, of which diaspora Caribbean communities comprised a significant part. The sus law was repealed in 1981, but there were attempts to revive it in 2007. The Gloucestershire City Council says that “the method is still used today by police.”

In the case of Trinidad and Tobago, the writer continued, “We need to ask the question: which communities will bear the brunt of these stop-and-search laws?”

Originally published on Global Voices

Screenshot of Vincentian/Canadian writer and winner of the 2025 Commonwealth Short Story Prize taken from the Commonwealth Foundation Creatives YouTube video ‘2025 Commonwealth Short Story Prize: Award Ceremony.’ Fair use.

On June 25, the Commonwealth Short Story Prize hosted its annual online reveal of its overall winner, from among the five regional winners: from Uganda, Joshua Lubwama’s “Mothers Not Appearing In Search” representing Africa; from Bangladesh, Faria Basher’s “An Eye and a Leg” emerging as the Asia winner; Chanel Sutherland's “Descend” representing the Commonwealth regions of Canada and Europe; Guyana's Subraj Singh flying the flag for the Caribbean with “Margot’s Run”; and Australia's Kathleen Ridgwell repping the Pacific region with her story “Crab Sticks and Lobster Rolls.”

The 2025 prize attracted a record-breaking 7,920 entrants from all parts of the Commonwealth, from which 201 were longlisted and 25 made the shortlist. Chair of the judges, award-winning writer and filmmaker, Vilsoni Hereniko, acknowledged how the stories from each of the regional winners “illuminate many aspects of human nature and demonstrate true mastery of the short story form.” Explaining that fiction is “inseparable from the local culture and history from which they have sprung,” he also noted that “geography matters in storytelling.”

As a cultural initiative of the Commonwealth Foundation, the Commonwealth Short Story Prize has helped jump-start the literary careers of many writers, elevating their voices so that their ideas and work can have a broader impact. More often than not, the creativity expressed in the submissions stirs debate on pressing social issues and helps others to better understand them from another perspective.

Opening the live event with a stirring preamble that recognised storytelling as “the foundation of every other art form,” Rwandan presenter Malaika Uwamahoro noted that “while we’re all familiar with consuming it effortlessly, crafting stories with clarity, emotional power, reaching and relating to audiences worldwide, that’s actually one of the most difficult things to do.”

Caribbean literature lovers were undoubtedly hoping that Singh’s story about a new mother “venturing into the night to protect her child from a bloodthirsty creature” would bring home the overall prize, but as it turned out, the winner was Chanel Sutherland, for her powerful tale of what happens as a slave ship sinks. The Caribbean was still represented, however: Sutherland currently resides in Montreal, but is originally from St. Vincent and the Grenadines.

Her winning entry, set in the hold of a slave ship where the kidnapped Africans are wounded, exhausted and in chains, explores how they manage to reclaim their identity by sharing their stories as they figure out how to survive. Hereniko called it an allegorical “masterpiece,” while Director-General of the Commonwealth Foundation Anne T. Gallagher admired how Sutherland “handles the weight of history with precision and imagination. This is exactly the level of craft and originality the Commonwealth Short Story Prize exists to celebrate.”

Growing up in the Caribbean, Sutherland says, imbued her with a love for storytelling. Describing the grandmother who raised her as her “favourite storyteller” because of her ability to spin tales that were both funny and wise, Sutherland wanted to grow up to emulate her. It was only when she moved to Canada as a teen, however, and happened across Harper Lee's “To Kill a Mockingbird,”, that she fell in love with writing: “I realised that there were stories out there that were very similar to my own, and from there, there was just this need to start writing down stories that I had like, in me, since I was six […] seven years old.”

For her, she explained, writing, which she tries to do every day, goes well beyond just putting words down on paper. She plays with structure when drafting her stories, and credits walking in nature with helping her find inspiration. Her best advice to up-and-coming writers? “Write the stories that move you,” she says. “If you don't care about the story, it doesn’t matter what’s trending – you’re not going to enjoy the process of writing.” Without that enjoyment, she adds, there’s no point: “Write the stories that you want to tell [and] the rest will take care of itself.”

Lubwama, the regional winner for Africa, was curious about how Sutherland was able to so vividly capture the experience of an event rooted in a historical time period she wasn’t part of. For Sutherland, the process was a combination of approaching the work with a “deep respect,” understanding that the sacrifices of her ancestors, over generations, have afforded her a position of both “distance and privilege.” She also strives to find the truths she can get close to in a story, which involves painstaking research: “I think it's important to write form a place of humility and to not use that past as a spectacle […] I'm writing to learn; I'm writing to tell a certain truth […] an emotional truth that is rooted in the spirit of those who survived.”

Her response when she was told she won the overall prize for 2025? “No way! I did not expect that!” She added that she was grateful and honoured, saying she didn’t think she had it in her “to tell a story that was deserving of this prize […] it’s such a validation.”

She later reflected, “[‘Descend’ is] about the illuminating power of memory. How the telling and listening of stories can remind us of our humanity amidst violence and trauma”:

The characters in my story had their histories and stories forcibly erased. Creating a space for readers to reflect on this was important to me.

I believe writers and storytellers have a responsibility to throw light on the universal truths that unite us — and that stories are the ultimate way of acknowledging the humanity of others.

Sutherland’s debut short story collection will be published in 2026. Submissions for the 2026 Commonwealth Short Story Prize open in September.

Originally published on Global Voices

Feature image created using Canva Pro elements.

Shortly before Pride Month, on the occasion of the International Day Against Homophobia, Transphobia and Biphobia (IDAHOBIT) on May 17 — a day that commemorates the World Health Organization’s 1990 decision to declassify homosexuality as a mental disorder — the Trinidad and Tobago-based civil society organisation CAISO shared the findings from its 2024 Insights from Wholeness and Justice Report.

The NGO compiles this report annually based on the services it renders to members of the local LGBTQ+ community. After four years of similar issues coming to the fore, CAISO believes that “wider sustained interventions” are needed to address what it calls “state-sponsored discrimination,” which makes LGBTQ+ people “disproportionately susceptible to social displacement.” Its report also found that “violent social systems” contribute to the deterioration of community members’ psychological well-being:

For the meaningful and reparative inclusion and protection of LGBTQI+ people in Trinidad and Tobago, attention must be paid to different aspects of their lives that impact community members’ ability to live fully and equally. This includes physical, mental, social and emotional wellbeing, as well as livelihood opportunities. The State is responsible for ensuring the rights of all citizens. Measures need to be taken to ensure LGBTQI+ people can enjoy their rights and freedoms, as with other social groups.

Problems being faced

The most common issues that people who used CAISO's services in 2024 reported experiencing were domestic violence (44 percent; both family and intimate partner violence), harassment and assault (25 percent), and issues relating to employment (nine percent).

The instances of domestic violence took various forms, including harassment, displacement, physical, verbal and financial abuse, and other forms of aggression. Unlike previous years, those who complained of workplace discrimination did not seek legal redress, regardless of the legitimacy of their claims, 50 percent of which involved unfair termination and 75 percent of which had to do with workplace harassment. Their decisions in this regard were either related to anxiety around meeting their basic needs, or concerns about their migration status, which the report said “points to a systemic gap in the delivery of justice of Trinidad and Tobago and perpetuates the economic exploitation of already marginalised people.”

Just as concerningly, 14 percent of people had experienced intimate partner violence, either in a current or past relationship, and 25 percent reported they had experienced harassment and/or physical and sexual assault outside of domestic relationships. Of the victims who reported sexual or physical assault, 43 percent decided not to pursue any legal action. In examining the data, CAISO found that “a lack of confidence in protective systems plays a key role in how people decide whether (and how) to take action, when they experience violations.”

Naturally, some people faced multiple overlapping problems, which increased their vulnerability. Food and financial insecurity accounted for 39 percent; housing instability, 36 percent. As many as 57 percent sought mental health support.

Analysis of the findings

CAISO’s Programme and Research Officer Kellog Nkemakolam explained that the 2024 Insights Report continues to illustrate the pervasive nature of state neglect and its failure to “acknowledge the realities of sexual diversity and gender expansiveness, as well as the distinct community experiences arising from these realities.”

He added that the state’s “unwillingness to confront its direct role and complacency in the violence faced by the community,” as well as the absence of “decisive steps to rectify this through legislative amendments and procedural reform,” makes the day to day reality of the most vulnerable members of the local LGBTQ+ community that much more untenable.

When it comes to domestic violence, Community Lawyer Donielle Jones noted that while the country's 2020 Domestic Violence (Amendment) Act provides avenues for legal recourse via Protection Order applications, most people were reluctant to follow through:

[P]eople dependent on those perpetrating violence are vulnerable to increased insecurities if they were to disrupt these relationships by instituting legal action. This was especially the case with young people and working-class people in domestic [relationships] where financial responsibilities were significantly intertwined, or where there was substantial imbalance in income and/or access to resources.

Complicating these challenges is the fact that they are often deeply intertwined. LGBTQ+ people who are victims of violence or employment discrimination, for instance, also tend to be more susceptible to food insecurity, financial hardship, and housing instability. Community caseworker, Rae Alibey, explained that such structural discrimination contributes to the prejudicial attitudes many people face, based on their real, or even perceived, sexual orientation and gender identity.

Power of communities

In the context of the 2025 IDAHOBIT theme “The Power of Communities,” CAISO Director Angelique V. Nixon made the point that, in working for equality and justice, “our differences matter and must be accounted for in the struggle for freedom.”

In this regard, the NGO would like to see amendments made to Trinidad and Tobago’s Equal Opportunity Act that address the exclusion of sexual orientation and include the the LGBTQ+ community under its protections, saying it is “one significant and meaningful change that the government can initiate to begin addressing the numerous silences and gaps in legislation and procedures.”

In addition to this type of legislative change, the 2024 Insights Report also advocated for inclusive and expanded social services, as well as education and training guardrails that would help protect the rights of LGBTQ+ people, and provide mechanisms for redress should violence or discrimination occur.

Originally published on Global Voices

Screenshot of Joshua Regrello during his Guinness World Record attempt in December 2024, taken from Wack 90.1 FM‘s YouTube video of the event. Fair use.

Imagine, as a kid, receiving the Guinness Book of World Records every year for Christmas — and then growing up to actually be in it. That's exactly what happened to Trinbagonian steel pan musician Joshua Regrello, whom Guinness recently confirmed as the world record holder for the longest steelpan-playing marathon.

Regrello's performance began at 6:00 a.m. AST (UTC-4) on December 27, 2024, and concluded at 1:00 p.m. the following day for a mind-boggling total of 31 hours, an hour longer than he had originally intended to play for, but the encouragement he got from supporters at the WACK radio station in south Trinidad kept him going.

The steelpan is the national instrument of Trinidad and Tobago. For every hour that Regrello played, he was allowed a five-minute break, which he could have accumulated over the duration of the performance. Following Guinness World Record standards, each song he played had to be two minutes or more, and a song could not be repeated within a four-hour period. As such, Regrello’s set list consisted of about 200 songs.

In keeping with its “rigorous verification process,” it took five months for Guinness to do its requisite checks and advise on the acceptance of his attempt; once it came, though, Trinidad and Tobago's Minister of Culture and Community Development Michelle Benjamin said it “was a win for us all”:

It shows what is possible when talent, hard work, and love for culture unify. He played his heart out for Trinidad and Tobago, and the whole world watched on with awe and excitement. The steelpan started right here, and today, thanks to Joshua’s amazing feat, it continues to make history. The ministry is proud to stand with him and all our creatives who are pushing boundaries and representing us with purpose and pride.

Pan Trinbago, the governing body for the steelpan, also congratulated Regrello on his achievement, saying, “This historic milestone is a win for Joshua, a win for the steelpan, and a win for Trinidad and Tobago — the mecca of steelpan.”

The country's president, Christine Kangaloo, thanked Regrello for “shining a global spotlight on our beloved national instrument,” calling it “a proud moment not only for him and his family, but also for the entire nation”:

It is the result of over two decades of hard work, sacrifice and dedication. As a mentor at The President’s Pan Camp 2024, Joshua demonstrated and championed the very qualities — passion, discipline and commitment to one’s craft — that have brought him to this moment of well-deserved global recognition. His success stands as a shining example and as a source of inspiration for young people across Trinidad and Tobago and the world.

Carla Parris, the intellectual property lawyer who Regrello said “liaised with the Guinness World Records offices in Miami [and] London to ensure that we met the very high standards required in order [for him] to be named an Official Record Holder,” praised his tenacity:

Not only did you demonstrate the sheer grit [and] artistic excellence to play the steelpan for 31 hours, but you stayed the course through the lengthy [and] copious legal process required to land you the Guinness World Record Title […] This feat wasn’t achieved through luck, it was a mindset of commitment to excellence!

Regrello himself was ecstatic over the news. On his Facebook page, he wrote, “IT’S OFFICIAL! I am now a GUINNESS WORLD RECORDS Title Holder for the Longest Marathon Playing Steelpan / Steel Drums ”:

Months ago, we came together with one mission: to make history through the power of Steelpan and unity. Today, that dream is a global record.

The journey to official recognition was detailed. Every requirement was carefully met and every standard upheld. But one thing mattered most to us, that the word ‘Steelpan,’ our national instrument and our pride, was included in the official record title. That representation means everything, and we have accomplished it.

He thanked all his supporters for their faith in him, “from the early planning to the final note”:

This is more than a personal milestone […]
This is by all of us, for all of us

Originally published on Global Voices

Feature image created using a photo by Janine Mendes-Franco (used with permission) and Canva Pro elements.

Following the March 25 overturning on appeal of a landmark 2018 High Court decision in Trinidad and Tobago that deemed the criminalisation of anal sex between consenting adults “unconstitutional,” respondent Jason Jones will take his case to the UK's Judicial Committee of the Privy Council, which still remains the twin island republic's highest court of appeal.

Given that two out of three appeal court judges overturned the 2018 ruling on the grounds that the clauses in question are part of “savings law” – colonial era legislation that was carried over post-independence, the irony of having to go before British law lords to resolve the case was not lost on Jones, who called it “an enormous anomaly and mockery of our Independence that a British Court will make the final decision in this matter.” On Facebook, Trinidadian actor/director Rhoma Akosua Spencer agreed, calling it “a travesty.” Still, Jones admitted he “always knew the case would end up there.”

Key points in the appeal judgement included the finding that the “savings clause” protects colonial-era laws from being invalidated, regardless of whether they infringe upon modern-day constitutional rights. “As unpalatable as that may be,” Justice Bereaux explained, “that is the effect of Section 6(2) of the Constitution.”

To Jones, however, the “effect” has been much more tangible. He called the ensuing 48 hours after the overturning of the judgement “deeply traumatic,” and accused the judges of “unleash[ing] a wave of homophobic hatred” in which he was “singled out for a particularly vile amount of online harassment and bullying.”

While the judges reduced the penalty for buggery from 25 years’ imprisonment to five, criminalisation of the act remains on the books. To this point, the judges laid the responsibility of changing these laws on the country’s parliament.

Jones, however, maintains that the two appeal court judges “went out of their way” to overturn the 2018 judgement, which he said “has so far been cited in [five] other cases, including the world’s largest democracy India and led to decriminalisation there of over 80 MILLION LGBTQ+ people!” He added that the rationale of “overturning this landmark judgment [by] reverting our Republican Constitution back to 1925 BRITISH COLONIAL LAW” was “an absolute MOCKERY of our Constitution and our Republic!”

Yet, as one jurist told Global Voices, laws can only be changed via the legislative process. Against this reality, the Law Association of Trinidad and Tobago (LATT) issued a statement on the appeal court ruling in the high-profile case, noting that “the Court ruled unanimously that sections 13 and 16 of the Sexual Offences Act which criminalise buggery and gross indecency did not pursue a legitimate aim, disproportionately interfered with freedom of thought and expression and were not reasonably justifiable. They were accordingly inconsistent with the fundamental rights provisions of the Constitution. The Court also noted that the sections were rarely enforced.”

While Jones was pleased to see LATT “supporting important Constitutional reforms and protections for the LGBTQ+ community,” he also addressed the perception surrounding the enforcement of the law:

Thankfully, I no longer get idiotic questions asking me WHY as an activist I focus my energy and resources on fighting to remove these discriminatory laws. […] The comments regarding the recent homophobic ruling REVERSING the 2018 decriminalisation victory reveals how deeply entrenched homophobia is in our society and how threatening and violent citizens can be towards our marginalised communities citing these laws as needed to protect THEIR rights to be homophobic!

The LATT statement continued, “The Court noted the broad scope of the savings law clause, which applies even when a later act repeals and replaces an existing law with modifications, as occurred in this case. The dissenting judge disagreed with this latter conclusion.” The fact that the buggery law remains on the country’s statue books, the law association concluded, “highlights the need for urgent constitutional reform to remove the savings law clause.”

Citing its its own recommendations to the National Advisory Committee on Constitutional Reform, LATT data showed that as much as 54 percent of its membership agrees that the savings law clause should be abolished, while “65 percent believe that Section 4 of the Constitution should be amended to include protection from discrimination based on gender and sexual orientation.”

Noting that “the savings law clause has attracted sustained criticism, including from preeminent Caribbean constitutional scholars,” and that removing the immunity of “colonial laws and punishments from being declared unconstitutional” will be far from catastrophic, LATT explained that there has been regional precedent: “Such clauses only applied for a short period in Belize, and they are read to conform with the Constitution in Barbados, Dominica, Guyana and St. Lucia.”

As if to emphasise the absurdity of the savings law, LATT observed that in Trinidad and Tobago, it applied to everything from loitering and sedition to “singing a profane ballad, being an incorrigible rogue and trundling a hoop,” all of which “have questionable place in any modern democracy [but which] remain fossilised in our statute books.”

In closing, the association said it hoped “that urgent legislative action will be taken to correct this state of affairs,” since the Constitution, as the “supreme law, “sets out the rights and freedoms of all individuals, and celebrates the dignity of us all. It should no longer preserve legislation that clearly violates human rights and fundamental freedoms.”

It is a position that has been echoed by Jones himself, as well as in local newspaper articles and by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, which spoke out against the re-criminalisation of the buggery law. On Facebook, Liam Rezende added that “laws that criminalise same-sex intimacy legitimise discrimination and harassment, fuel violence and fear, create barriers to healthcare, and deny LGBTQ+ people the dignity, safety, and equality we deserve”:

Beyond the grave human rights implications, LGBTQ+ discrimination also carries significant business and economic costs.

It stifles talent, discourages investment, limits innovation, and makes it harder for companies to attract and retain diverse, high-performing teams. In today’s global economy, inclusion isn’t just a moral imperative — it’s a business one. Countries that fail to protect LGBTQ+ rights risk being left behind.

This news is deeply disappointing — a stark reminder that progress is not linear, and hard-won rights can never be taken for granted.

As for Jones, the fight continues. Part of his argument before the Privy Council may involve the fact that Trinidad and Tobago, under its new Republican Constitution, created a new law within the Sexual Offences Act dubbed “Serious indecency,”which Jones contends makes it “no longer colonial-era law.” He also believes that “the fight for queer rights in the Global North has a direct impact on us in the Global South […] We as a community need to come together and make sure that we're not leaving people behind.”

Originally published on Global Voices

Fireball image via Canva Pro.

Each year, the Commonwealth Short Story Prize awardees attract great interest in the Caribbean, and it's not just because Caribbean people relish a well-told story. Many regional and overall winners of the prize have gone on to have flourishing writing careers, including Diana McCaulay, Kevin Jared Hosein, Barbara Jenkins, Sharon Millar, Ingrid Persaud, and perhaps most notably, Earl Lovelace, the “literary giant” who was recently honoured at the opening of the Bocas Lit Fest 2025, the same year as his 90th birthday.

The Commonwealth Short Story Prize, which seeks out the best pieces of unpublished fiction writing, generally attracts anywhere between 6,000 and 7,000 entries, but the 2025 edition saw a “record-breaking” 7,920 entries from almost all of the eligible 56 countries of The Commonwealth, highlighting the growing enthusiasm for this prestigious literary award that remains one of the most promising avenues through which emerging Caribean writers can gain international recognition.

The shortlist was announced on April 15 and included writers of all ages from 18 Commonwealth countries, including, for the first time ever, Antigua and Barbuda and Saint Lucia. With one exception, none of this year's writers had been shortlisted before.

The regional winners — one from each of the five regions of the Commonwealth — were revealed on May 14, with Guyana's Subraj Singh topping the Caribbean region with “Margot's Run,” a story about a new mother “venturing into the night to protect her child from a bloodthirsty creature.”

One of the judges for the Caribbean region's entries, author Lisa Allen-Agostini, described the winning regional submission as “the story of a mother’s breathless dash through the Guyana landscape in an effort to outwit an Ol’ Higue which has been attacking her infant son.”

Ol’ Higue, as the folklore character is called in Guyana, is known as the blood-sucking soucouyant in other parts of the Caribbean. The character even inspired an eponymous poem by Guyanese writer Mark McWatt that remains on the regional secondary school literature curriculum.

In Singh's story, the desperate new mother Margot seeks to best the creature by exploiting its vulnerabilities, reclaiming her own power in the process. She chooses the night of Guyana’s first Independence Day to take on the Ol’ Higue, just as the country's white colonists are leaving, after generations of extraction and exploitation.

Compellingly, as if to make the narrative echo the determined advancement of Margot's mission, “the majority of the story is written in a single sentence, which burns as bright as the light of the Ol’ Higue’s fireball.” Allen-Agostini describes the work as “brilliant,” “evocative,” and “action-packed” as it “lays bare the vampiric nature of the colonial system.”

Singh himself, in describing the piece as “authentically Caribbean,” says it is essentially “a story about family — whether biological family or found — and its role in creating spaces of safety and sustenance in times of great adversity.”

According to Kritika Pandey, who was the overall winner in 2020, the Commonwealth Short Story Prize is a must for “writers who challenge the continued dominance of Eurocentric literature and consider their works to be as global as they are local.”

This year's judging panel is chaired by Vilsoni Hereniko, a writer and filmmaker from Fiji, who noted, “A great story moves us, causes us to think, and sometimes changes us. This shortlist of relevant, vibrant, and essential reading is made up of the best 25 stories from a pool of almost 8,000 entries. Together, they demonstrate why the short story form must continue to be supported and promoted.”

Find Singh's entry here. The overall winner of this year's competition will be announced on June 25 at the Commonwealth Short Story Prize Award Ceremony.

Originally published on Global Voices

Brain coral photo via Canva Pro.

From hotter temperatures that contribute to ocean acidification and coral degradation to instances of coral bleaching caused by a combination of warmer oceans, overfishing and pollution, Caribbean reefs have been facing some serious challenges. Now, Trinidad and Tobago's Institute of Marine Affairs (IMA) has warned of another threat — Stony Coral Tissue Loss Disease (SCTLD), which it says is “wreaking havoc on coral reefs in the Caribbean.”

Since it was first noticed in Florida in 2014, SCTLD has spread to several other regional territories, including The Bahamas, The Cayman Islands, Jamaica, the Dutch Caribbean, and even islands in the Lesser and Greater Antilles. This is because the SCTLD pathogen is both highly transmissible and easily spread through direct contact with infected coral, water currents, and ballast water, making ports a common “early site of infection.”

Infected corals have lesions in spots where there is dead tissue. These areas get bigger as the disease advances — and it's a fast mover, killing coral within weeks to months. The cause of the disease may be wholly bacterial, or perhaps a combination of bacteria and a virus. In an effort to save regional reefs, infected corals are being treated with antibiotics, with some even being moved to land-based facilities in the short term for a better chance of survival.

Of the 45 stony coral species found in the Caribbean, the IMA reports that SCTLD has infected over 20 of them, including the maze, mountainous and brain corals that are abundant in tourism-focused Tobago, long known as a dive location. According to the IMA, “even the world-renowned, giant brain coral found in Speyside is a species that is highly susceptible to the disease.”

Should there be an outbreak of the disease in Tobago's coral populations, it could be devastating for the island. In a June 2008 research paper titled “Coastal Capital – Economic Valuation of Coral Reefs in Tobago and St. Lucia by Lauretta Burke, Suzie Greenhalgh, Daniel Prager and Emily Cooper, the annual value of Tobago’s coral reefs was cited as anywhere between USD 120–160 million.

While SCTLD does not appear to have yet reached Tobago, affected reefs in other areas have been dying quickly, which has been raising local concerns. Citing a study conducted by William Precht on coral reef sites in southeast Florida, the IMA blog post noted that some heavily impacted species were reduced to less than three percent of their initial population; others, like the brain coral so dominant in Tobago, to less than 25 percent. SCTLD has already been confirmed in neighbouring Grenada and some Dutch Caribbean islands, however, leading the IMA to predict that it will be “only a matter of time until it arrives.”

How, then, to be prepared? “Survival is most probable when there is action from authorities, education of the public, and built capacity to strengthen defences against the threat,” the post continued. From the IMA perspective, a grant it received in 2024 from the Specially Protected Areas and Wildlife Regional Activity Centre (SPAW RAC) for a one-year project focused on building preparedness and resilience against coral disease, will prove valuable.

In January of this year, IMA coral reef ecologists received training in January 2025 from the Perry Institute of Marine Science (PIMS) in San Andres, Colombia, to assess coral disease, identify SCTLD, and prepare and apply the antibiotic treatment to infected corals. By strengthening their capacity, the IMA is now better equipped to raise SCTLD awareness, as well as implement strategies to monitor coral reefs and spare them from the vagaries of the disease.

The organisation is educating local sea-goers as to what to look for to spot SCTLD in coral, which they can report by using the IMA's seaiTT app. It has also urged snorkellers and divers not to touch corals — good advice even with healthy reefs — but if there is an infection, touching corals hastens the potential spread. In the same vein, divers should make sure to sanitise their gear, just in case they have come into contact with infected coral; bilge water in boats should also be routinely disinfected — small steps that can make a big difference when it comes to controlling spread.

“We must […] work together to be guardians for our coral reefs,” said the IMA. Charged with “the duty to preserve the ecological and economic services of our reefs,” it sees only one way to minimise the potential devastation SCTLD can bring: to be proactive in responding to the threat.

Originally published on Global Voices

Feature image created using Canva Pro elements.

World Press Freedom Day, annually observed on May 3, is a poignant reminder of the need for press freedom, an occasion to remember the sacrifices made in pursuit of that freedom, and an opportunity for journalists and media practitioners to consider any issues that may be of concern to the fourth estate.

This year, the concern being explored in the World Press Freedom Day signature event is the impact of artificial intelligence (AI) on the media. Discussions will centre around how to ensure that AI enhances, rather than undermines, press freedom and democratic values.

AI tools, while transformative in terms of efficiency, multilingualism and data analysis, among other processes, also raise unique ethical questions. AI-generated misinformation and disinformation, deepfake technology, biased content moderation, and surveillance threats to journalists represent just some of the risks, not to mention their potential effects on the industry's business model and what it may mean for the media's long-term viability.

Understanding the pressing nature of these issues, Global Voices recently shared its own policy on the use of AI in the newsroom. The Media Institute of the Caribbean (MIC), meanwhile, issued a press release in which it underscored the “urgent” need to address the transformative impact of AI on journalism within the context of the region’s unique challenges of “media viability, misinformation, and natural disasters.”

The natural disasters angle also fed into the theme of the 2025 World Press Freedom Day, which dealt with journalism in the face of the global environmental crisis. To this point, the Media Association of Trinidad and Tobago (MATT) noted that “the press is not only a defender of democracy, but also a guardian of our collective future.”

That future must undoubtedly include the use of AI, but the question remains how to manage it ethically and responsibly. According to MIC, regional collaboration is critical to “harness AI’s potential while safeguarding democratic discourse”:

AI is reshaping journalism globally, but its implications are acute in the Caribbean, where media ecosystems face structural vulnerabilities. While AI tools offer opportunities for automated reporting, data analysis, and audience engagement, they also risk deepening existing inequities. Caribbean newsrooms are already strained by shrinking advertising revenues. (It is noteworthy that between 15 and 25% of such revenues are diverted to platforms like Meta and Google Ads). There also exist fragile economies to which we now add the need to grapple with AI-driven content saturation.

Algorithmic curation on social media platforms poses a further threat, “as free, AI-generated content competes with costly, human-produced news.” Will Caribbean newsrooms, with their smaller markets operating within vulnerable island economies, be able to withstand the pressure? President of the MIC Kiran Maharaj suggested, “AI could democratise information access, but without guardrails, it may erode the financial sustainability of Caribbean media. We must advocate for equitable AI governance that prioritises public interest journalism.”

The MIC statement went on to note that “the Caribbean is not immune to AI-fuelled misinformation, which exacerbates social divisions and undermines trust in institutions.”

In 2023, the organisation, in conjunction with the Association for Caribbean Media Workers (ACM), conducted a study about the ways in which disinformation targeted regional elections and public health campaigns. MIC Vice President and ACM Co-Founder Wesley Gibbings suggested that “Caribbean media must adopt AI-driven verification tools and invest in digital literacy programs,” adding, “Our survival depends on retaining public trust through accuracy and transparency.”

Such challenges have been further exacerbated by the region's susceptibility to natural disasters, whereby hurricanes, floods, earthquakes, and other climate-related events disrupt media operations but put a strain on financial resources. Case in point: the particularly arduous hurricane seasons the Caribbean faced between 2017 and 2024, which the MIC said laid bare “the fragility of media infrastructures and the urgent need for disaster preparedness and resilience planning.”

Whereas “blending traditional knowledge with AI-enhanced forecasting and real-time alerts can be pivotal in disaster response,” misuse of AI via misinformation, etc., can also make such situations worse. The solutions the MIC proposed include policies aimed at taxing tech giants and reinvesting the proceeds into journalism, exploring AI-driven revenue models, and, as per UNESCO’s AI Road Map Policy, establishing a regional AI Ethics Task Force. Such a body, it proposes, would “audit algorithms for bias and promote content verification standards [to] provide needed insight for key regulatory and policy making decisions.”

As far as disaster preparedness goes — a pressing issue for small island developing states (SIDS) like the Caribbean that are at the frontline of the climate crisis — the MIC suggested integrating AI tools into national emergency protocols, including media as first responders, and expanding community media networks by offering training and support.

As the MIC looked towards a future in which AI could be turned “into an ally for press freedom and democratic resilience,” however, MATT placed its focus on the here and now, thanking the media personnel who covered Trinidad and Tobago's recent general elections “with professionalism, courage, dedication, resilience, and a commitment to truth,” and flagging issues that “threaten journalistic independence and integrity, including political pressures, harassment of media workers, and barriers to accessing public information.”

Current challenges include “the rapid spread of misinformation and disinformation on social media, which undermines public trust and complicates the work of professional journalists.” While the association seeks to advocate for high ethical standards, and foster trust between the media and its audiences, MATT cited an “urgent need to strengthen protections for journalists, ensure transparency in governance, and support open dialogue between media practitioners, policymakers, and the public.”