By Isaac Saney on December 26, 2025
Trinidad and Tobago’s new Prime Minister Kamla Persad-Bissessar’s receiving Marco Rubio’s support.
Trinidad and Tobago’s Prime Minister Kamla Persad-Bissessar’s declaration that Caricom is no longer a reliable partner, coupled with her insistence that her country must now “choose our path”, marks a potentially historic rupture in the long and fragile project of Caribbean unity.
Coming at a moment of intensifying global instability, renewed US imperial assertiveness, and deepening ecological crisis, it raises a stark question: are we witnessing the death blow to the dream of a unified Caribbean, or a moment that forces a long-overdue renewal and radical re-imagining of that vision?
At one level, Persad-Bissessar’s position reflects real and undeniable pressures. Caribbean states operate under immense economic, political and diplomatic coercion. Debt, trade dependency, energy insecurity, climate vulnerability and the ever-present threat of sanctions create a narrow policy space. These realities cannot be dismissed. Yet it is one thing to acknowledge pressure; it is another to capitulate to it, and quite another to align enthusiastically with an imperial project that openly seeks domination.
The danger of Trinidad and Tobago “going its own way” is not simply the weakening of Caricom as an institution. It is the broader signal such a move sends: that Caribbean sovereignty is no longer a meaningful goal, that regional unity is expendable, and that the future lies in deeper subordination to Washington. In this sense, the declaration risks functioning as an ideological surrender—an implicit acceptance that the Caribbean is, once again, a “US lake”.
This surrender must be read in the context of the Trump administration’s national security strategy, which is explicit and menacing in its intentions, which prioritises the reassertion of US domination over the Western Hemisphere through the “Trump Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine. In short, the United States will “reassert and enforce the Monroe Doctrine” and “deny non-hemispheric competitors” control over strategic assets in the region.
This is not diplomacy; it is a declaration of imperial entitlement. Any Caribbean government that orients its foreign policy to align seamlessly with this strategy is not merely being pragmatic—it is participating in an imperial crusade, abandoning even the pretense of sovereignty in exchange for short-term relief or political favor, while entrenching the power of comprador elites whose interests diverge sharply from those of the Caribbean masses, and who confuse proximity to power as power itself.
A turn away from Caricom strikes at the heart of several regional lifelines. Consider reparations. Caricom’s reparations initiative has always been constrained by a cautious, state-centric approach, yet it nonetheless represented a collective assertion that indigenous genocide, the Transatlantic Slave Trade, enslavement, and colonialism demand repair. It provided a regional platform—however limited—for advancing reparatory justice. If Caricom fragments, does this struggle dissolve into isolated national appeals, easily ignored or crushed by the very powers responsible for the crimes of slavery, indentureship and imperial exploitation?
And what about climate change—the most existential threat facing the region, a reality underscored by the devastation of Hurricane Melissa? Entire communities face displacement, economies are repeatedly shattered, and “recovery” entrenches cycles of debt. Yet the United States—the power Caribbean leaders are urged to subordinate themselves to—continues to deny and sabotage meaningful global climate action.
Venezuela’s PetroCaribe further illustrates what is at stake. It was never simply an energy arrangement, but an expression of regional solidarity that gave many Caricom states fiscal breathing room to fund social programs. Although US sanctions against Venezuela have gravely weakened PetroCaribe, its partial survival depended on regional coherence and resistance. Open alignment with Washington’s imperial strategy would bury even limited alternatives like this, locking Caribbean states into volatile global markets and deepening energy dependency in which energy access is contingent on political obedience.
Nowhere are the dangers of regional disintegration more catastrophic than in Haiti. Caricom, despite its failures, has been one of the few spaces where Haiti is treated—at least nominally—as a sovereign Caribbean nation rather than solely as a security problem. A weakened Caricom leaves Haiti even more exposed to US, Canadian and international intervention, framed as “stability” and “governance”, but historically amounting to occupation by another name.
Tourism, often presented as the region’s economic lifeline, is another fault line. A divided Caribbean competing internally weakens its bargaining power with multinational hotel chains, cruise corporations, and airlines that extract enormous value while leaving behind ecological damage and precarity. Moreover, US securitization of the region threatens to recast the Caribbean less as a leisure destination and more as a militarized frontier. Without regional coordination, tourism becomes a race to the bottom.
China’s investments raise similar concerns. China’s growing presence through infrastructure and trade has been a central target of US anxiety. A fragmented Caricom weakens the region’s ability to negotiate collectively with either China or the United States. Instead of coordinated engagement that could leverage investment for development while avoiding debt traps, individual states face bilateral negotiations under intense US pressure—resulting not in sovereignty, but enforced exclusion and foreclosed development options.
This is not an uncritical defense of Caricom as it exists. Caricom has often been slow, elitist, and disconnected from popular struggles. But the solution to these failures is not abandonment—it is democratisation, radicalisation, and renewal from below.
Thus, the Caribbean is at a crossroads. One path leads toward deeper integration into US imperial strategy, permanent subordination, and elite consolidation. The other—far more difficult but far more necessary—demands recommitting to Caribbean unity as a living, emancipatory project rooted in popular sovereignty, reparatory justice, and ecological survival.
Professor Isaac Saney, foto: Bill Hackwell
Will the Caribbean accept fragmentation as its fate, or will this rupture provoke a renewed Pan-Caribbean struggle for a future beyond empire? The dream of One Caribbean has always been fragile and contested. Will it be buried—or reborn in a form capable of meeting the intersecting crises of our time?
Isaac Saney is a Black Studies and Cuba scholar at Dalhousie University, Nova Scotia, Canada.
Source: Trinidad Express