For Gabriel García Márquez, Nobel laureate in literature, the Caribbean is the gravitational center of the incredible, that “truly wondrous” that characterizes a region that “extends actually (from the north) to the south of the United States United States and south to Brazil.” It’s not just a delusion of expansion, he clarified: “The Caribbean isn’t just a geographical area, as geographers naturally believe, but a very homogeneous cultural area.”
Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel Bermúdez along with Prime Minister Ralph Gonsalves of Saint Vincent and the Grenadines on a tour of the Medical and Diagnostic Center, a modern healthcare facility built in Georgetown and the result of collaboration and friendship. In it, Cuban health workers work alongside colleagues from San Vicentino. Photo: Taken from @DiazCanelB
Another scholar, Costa Rican writer Quince Duncan, defines the Caribbean as “more than a sea”; while Puerto Rican expert Antonio Gaztambide assures Geige that the Caribbean as a concept is a 20th-century invention.
Norman Girvan, prominent intellectual and first President of the Association of Caribbean States (ACS), reports that “The notion of the Caribbean has been and continues to be redefined and interpreted based on an interest in offering responses to external and internal processes.
For many of the authors cited, “movement, exodus, diaspora, detachment, and the subtlest identity, forged, lived, intrinsic, cooked under the scorching Caribbean sun, like this dense broth of civilization” are common in this space. as Fernando Ortiz said – in the Caribbean oven”.
The common features are the result of a culture of resistance to the vicissitudes of history and also of nature. The latter seems to have been ruthless in splintering the region into small islands or bits of surfaced land, when in fact it granted it a powerful, willful, and warm sea, which is its main asset.
Integration is then presented as a longing and need for intensive and long-term cooperation in economic, political, cultural and social relationships. But this process has been bumpy, with endogenous and exogenous difficulties.
Some difficulties stem from the structure of the organizations created, others from the inability of leaders to weave networks that solve fundamental problems in the region, such as: B. Human resource training; transport, connectivity and mobility; and, among other things, building a robust response system to climate change and disaster risk reduction.
Also of considerable importance were the obstacles set by powers that have ruled the region for several centuries (US and former European metropolises), whose interests are rooted in the region and who agree with the idea of a atomized Caribbean.
Among the integration projects implemented, the Organization of Eastern Caribbean States (OECS), the Association of Caribbean States (ACS), the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC) and the Caribbean Community (Caricom) stand out.
Cuba maintains excellent relations with all of them, and the latter has a special affection, so that Caricom-Cuba Day features in its calendar of celebrations, a date (December 8) that commemorates this authentic Barbadian cry of independence. , Trinidad and Tobago, Guyana and Jamaica in 1972 when they decided to establish diplomatic relations with the Greater Antilles, despite the United States’ insistence on isolating them from the world and particularly from their geographical and cultural environment.
A recent tweet from Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel Bermúdez reminds us: “Remember when the United States and the Organization of American States (OAS) forced all of Latin America to break with Cuba and all we were left with was Mexico? Fifty years ago, four newly independent Caribbean nations changed that history. To celebrate, we will be in Barbados this 12/6/22,” he wrote on the social network, confirming his presence at the VIII Caricom-Cuba Summit scheduled for tomorrow.
Despite several setbacks, Caricom has managed to forge a consensus that strengthens its Caribbean identity, strengthens its bargaining power and consolidates that of collective action. Often the 14 member states vote en bloc in international fora, representing, for example, 7.25% of the nations that make up the UN, 40% of the Organization of American States and 14% of the Pan American Organization.
Adding to the Caribbean culture of resistance is the certainty that, as Díaz-Canel said in 2018, “we are small nations facing colossal challenges.”