Excerpt from Dominicantoday.com
Today a younger generation of Caribbean women and men have begun to challenge many of the assumptions that exist in and beyond the region. They are in government, business, academia, the social sector, and the media. They are becoming more assertive, independent of the outside world, seeking change in the region’s largely inherited post-independence establishment structures.
Unfortunately, the political process and the creaking machinery of most governments is unable to move at the speed and global connectivity of the open world that they inhabit.
Worse, intra-regional disputes, and as the region’s history with the Trump Administration has shown, it has become easy to exploit the endemic weaknesses, and economic problems most Caribbean nations suffer from, delaying delivery, and more recently dividing the region on ideological grounds.
As this column has previously suggested, by virtue of its location, smallness, and need for development, the Caribbean will continue to struggle to be the mistress of its own destiny unless it can achieve unity of purpose, new thinking, a clear vision, and real time execution.
My objective now, after working with and writing about the Caribbean in multiple incarnations since the 1970s, is to take a long view, ask questions about future alignments, and suggest the issues and themes that may determine the trajectory of the Caribbean in the rest of the twenty first century.
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