Editorial | CARICOM and Cuba

Shamed by the regional press and ordinary citizens over the lethargy with which it has responded to the worsening humanitarian crisis in Cuba, the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) this week announced that it is about to do something specific.

The community might well have kept quiet.

For the statement issued by the CARICOM Secretariat on Monday – that the region is putting together a relief package for Cuba – hardly advances beyond what CARICOM’s chairman, the St Kitts and Nevis Prime Minister, Dr Terrance Drew, announced at the close of the Heads of Government Conference in his country on February 27.

At the time, Dr Drew said that CARICOM would have clarity on what it would offer Cuba – and, presumably, the mechanisms for delivering that aid – “within a month”. So Dr Drew might say that the region has kept to its promised timeline, although the announcement is spare on details.

To be fair to CARICOM, there is one bit of new information. While the region knew, from post-summit remarks by Dominica’s Prime Minister Roosevelt Skerrit, that the community intended to “coordinate” with Mexico on the issue, the specifics of that arrangement were not disclosed.

It is now known that CARICOM will provide “items such as powdered milk, including baby formula; non-perishables such as beans, wheat flour, rice, and canned goods; basic medical supplies, solar panels, batteries, and water tanks”, and that these goods, apparently, will be purchased in Mexico.

Said the statement: “CARICOM’s initiative is supported by the Government of Mexico, which has identified suppliers in Mexico able to deliver the items to the port of departure, and which will provide free shipment from Mexico to Cuba.”

DISPLAY OF SOLIDARITY

Attention to these details is not meant to quibble. Indeed, joint action between CARICOM and Mexico can be read as a display of solidarity with the Cuban people and an embrace and expression of a common humanity. We hope that is the message.

However, how CARICOM has managed this issue might also be seen as the region outsourcing – or surrendering – its agency, and as emblematic of how CARICOM has responded to recent events in Cuba, as well as to broader geopolitical issues that have impacted the Caribbean over the past 13 months.

Indeed, if CARICOM cannot cobble together, on its own and independently, a non-threatening, ideologically neutral humanitarian response for the citizens of a neighbouring country that has been good to and supportive of the community, and with which CARICOM has partnership agreements, it is not unreasonable to ask what should be expected if and when more consequential, and potentially existential, matters arise.

In the meantime, as regional policymakers contemplate such questions and what they may mean for the future framing of CARICOM, the economist Keynes’s aphorism about “the long run”, of which this newspaper reminded CARICOM a week ago with respect to the Cuban crisis, remains relevant.

“In the long run we are all dead,” Keynes said a century ago.

As The Gleaner observed after the Basseterre summit when Dr Drew gave CARICOM’s timeframe for pulling together its humanitarian initiative, a month for Cuban citizens facing the crisis was a “long run”, especially for people who have already been through many “long runs”. The scale of this crisis, however, is different.

INTERNAL DYNAMICS

Cuba is a one-party state, led for 67 years by a communist party. Since the victory of Fidel Castro’s revolution in 1959, Cuba has been the subject of an economic embargo by its close neighbour and the world’s most powerful country, the United States. There are reasonable debates about the efficacy of Cuba’s system and the inadequacy of Havana’s efforts at reform, especially in the post-Cold War period following the collapse of its major patron, the Soviet Union. However, there is little doubt that America’s economic and political sanctions over nearly seven decades have contributed to Cuba’s economic crisis.

US pressure has tightened further since Donald Trump’s return as America’s president in 2025. The Trump administration has cut direct financial flows to Cuba. Earlier this year, after Washington deposed and renditioned Venezuela’s president Nicolás Maduro, the administration placed an oil embargo on Cuba, crippling domestic economic and social life.

The squeeze has also been international. The Americans have pressured countries in Africa and the Caribbean to abandon a programme through which Cuba sends medical professionals to work abroad. Washington claims the scheme amounts to human trafficking of Cuban doctors, nurses, and medical technicians – a fact it says it discovered after nearly five decades. The programme ends in Jamaica this month.

The Cuban crisis has opened – and placed on display – significant fissures within CARICOM. The clear fault line is between members who want the community to evolve as a loose alliance of sovereign countries focused primarily on trade and investment, with greater fluidity in other policy areas; and others who hew closely to the letter and spirit of the CARICOM Treaty’s call for the creation of a regional single market and economy, and for close coordination of foreign policy.

Implicit in the orientation of the latter group is deeper integration and a foreign policy more deeply engaged with the Global South, and one that more readily challenges traditional centres of international power. They are less risk-averse.

CARICOM’s response to Cuba, in that sense, is merely a reflection of the community’s internal dynamics.