Foreword

• Author: Sir Shridath Ramphal
• Pages: 13-16

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- FOREWORD -

Fifteen years ago, in June 1993, I spoke at the Caribbean Hotel

Industry Conference in Ocho Rios, Jamaica to the theme of 'A

Commonwealth of the Caribbean for the Twenty-First Century'. Among

the things I said were these:

I plead the cause of a wider vision, not just the vision of

integration of the English-speaking countries of the

Caribbean; but the vision of a Commonwealth of the entire

Caribbean. I speak of the need for us to take steps now to

make 'the Caribbean' more than a geographical description

of a scattered archipelago – to make it a functional

description of a community of Caribbean peoples

harmonizing [their] identities and working together as an

extended family. I plead for a process by which the

Caribbean itself ceases to be the dividing sea it has been

for centuries and becomes instead a uniting lake … In

that Caribbean Commonwealth, let me say immediately

and without reservation, that I would see all the islands,

including those not yet independent, playing a substantive

part.

Most of the 'non-independent' Caribbean islands are 'originals'

from the earliest times of European involvement in the region. They

are Caribbean in ancestral terms. They are encompassed within all

that 'a Caribbean civilisation' connotes. They are simply the parts that

decolonisation did not reach – for many different reasons.

But the oneness that is implied is misleading. Perhaps only in

tourism and off-shore banking does the Caribbean brand embrace the

non-independent islands. And the most obvious factor of differentiation

- apart from the sea itself which divides the entire archipelago – is

governance. This, therefore, is a long-overdue – and timely – compilation

of scholarship. It is long overdue because most of the work published

FOREWORD

SIR SHRIDATH RAMPHAL