Caribbean Diaspora

For too long we have spent time fighting other people's battles after our liberation was won. It is about time we focus on our own economic development. Slavery ended over 200 yrs ago. The days of being pre-occupied with events in other localities must take the back seat. The situation in Haiti and the regional disparities will only lead to poverty and economic imbalances in member States such as Haiti, which will impact the entire region. Lets move towards Caribbean development to focus on our own problems from a Caribbean perspective.

The Caribbean is the most developed and politically stable black region on earth. The people of Caribbean ancestry had made enormous contributions to world history, civil rights, literature, sports, politics, science, academia and law. The Caribbean diaspora had played a central role in the world in liberation of blacks of American and African ethnicity. Many of our most accomplished writers today, such as Claude McKay, Cyril Valentine Briggs, Richard Benjamin Moore, Hubert Harrison, Wilfred Domingo among others who were born and educated in the Caribbean and made their careers in the Caribbean which influenced their cultural and historic identity and their work, are mistakenly being referred to as 'American' or 'African-American' writers.

Longed before these Caribbean writers many Caribbean writers such as James Williams in 1834 were writing and publishing, while many blacks of non-Caribbean ethnicity could only dream of liberation. Other key political writers of a later period includes Ansell Richard Hart, H. D. Carberry, Nobel Laureate Derek Walcott among many others. Before there was a Barack Obama, the highest ever ranked black American in the American government was Colin Powell who is of Jamaican descent. Marcus Garvey, Ivan Van Sertima and Dr Yosef Ben-Jochannan among others, are widely quoted and revered by blacks of non-Caribbean ethnicity seeking to either discover or formulate an identity for themselves.