REINTERPRETING THE CARIBBEAN

- Norman Girvan –

To be published in New Caribbean Thought
Folke Lindahl and Brian Meeks, eds.,
Forthcoming, UWI Press, 2001

Definition

What constitutes the Caribbean? The answer is often a matter of perspective and of context. Anglophones in the region usually speak and think of the Caribbean as meaning the English-speaking islands, or the member states of the Caribbean Community (Caricom). Sometimes the phrase “the wider Caribbean” is employed to refer to what is, in effect, “the others”. In the Hispanic literature El Caribe refers either to the Spanish-speaking islands only, or to Las Antillas—the entire islands chain. More recently a distinction is being made between El Caribe insular—the islands—and El Gran Caribe—the Greater Caribbean, or entire basin. Among scholars, “the Caribbean” is a socio-historical category, commonly referring to a cultural zone characterised by the legacy of slavery and the plantation system. It embraces the islands and parts of the adjoining mainland—and may be extended to include the Caribbean Diaspora overseas. As one scholar observes, there are many Caribbeans[1].

This is reflected at the level of regional organisations. Caricom is primarily an Anglophone grouping, recently expanded to include Suriname and in principle Haiti. Cariforum, which groups the Caribbean signatories to the Lome Convention, includes Caricom, Haiti and the Dominican Republic. The Association of Caribbean States (ACS) embraces the entire basin. The majority of the dependent territories in the Caribbean do not belong to Caricom, Cariforum or the ACS; but most are members of the Caribbean Development and Co-operation Committee (CDCC) of ECLAC. The CDCC excludes the majority of the basin states; its membership corresponds roughly to that of the insular Caribbean.

In short the definition of the Caribbean might be based on language and identity, geography, history and culture, geopolitics, geoeconomics, or organisation. The term itself has an interesting history. It originated with the desire of the Spanish invaders to demonise those groups of the earlier inhabitants that chose to resist them. Los Caribes were allegedly the man-eaters (after the Spanish carne, for meat), and therefore deserving of no mercy. Gaztambide-Geigel (1996: 76, 83) has shown that the derivative name only began to be applied to the entire region towards the end of the 19^th century, in the context of US expansion of its “southern frontier”. Later expressions of this were the Anglo-American Caribbean Commission (later simply the Caribbean Commission) of 1942 and Reagan’s Caribbean Basin Initiative of the 1980s. Both the name itself and its later application to a geographical zone were inventions of imperial powers.

Table 1. Many Caribbeans

Name	Scope	Characterisation	Institutions
Caribbean Basin (US)	Mainland & islands	Geo-political/hegemonic	CBI
Greater Caribbean 1 (“El Gran Caribe”)	Mainland & islands	Geo-economic/co-operative	ACS
Greater Caribbean 2 (“El Gran Caribe”)	Mainland & islands	Geo-social/counter-hegemonic	CRIES, Civil Forum
Plantation Caribbean or “African Central America”	Islands, the three Guianas, and “Caribbean” /black communities on the mainland	Ethno-historic/counter-hegemonic	CSA
Insular or Island Caribbean	Islands, the three Guianas and Belize	Ethno-historic	CDCC, ACE, CPDC
Caribbean of CARICOM	Anglophone states, Suriname, Monsterrat	Economic co-operative, strong cultural & linguistic ties	CARICOM
Caribbean of ACP	CARICOM, Dominican Republic, Haiti	Neo-colonial/negotiation, in transition	CARIFORUM

Notes.

ACE Association of Caribbean Economists

ACP African, Caribbean and Pacific Group of countries signatories to the Lome Convention with the European Union (EU).

CARICOM Caribbean Community. Members are 13 Anglophone states, Suriname, and Montserrat, a British dependent territory. Haiti has been admitted in principle but the formalities have not yet been completed.

CARIFORUM Caribbean members of the ACP Group. Members are CARICOM, the Dominican Republic and Haiti

ACS Association of Caribbean States. Members are all states of the Greater Caribbean plus three French dependencies (non-ratified associate members).

CBI Caribbean Basin Initiative

CDCC Caribbean Development and Co-operation Committee of ECLAC, the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean. Members are all states of the insular Caribbean only, plus the Dutch and US dependent territories and three British dependent territories.

Civil Forum Forum of Civil Society of the Greater Caribbean

CPDC Caribbean Policy Development Centre, an umbrella grouping of NGOs of the insular Caribbean

CRIES Regional Coordination of Economic and Social Research, a network of research centres linked with NGOs

CSA Caribbean Studies Association

What is significant is the subsequent re-invention of the concept of Caribbean by native scholars as expressions of intellectual and political resistance. This was especially notable in the case of the New World Group, which emerged in the Anglophone Caribbean in the 1960s. Drawing on the insights of the American anthropologist Charles Wagley and building on the earlier work of the radical nationalists C.L.R. James (1938)[2] and Eric Williams (1944, 1970)[3], the group articulated a vision of the Caribbean as an integral part of “Plantation America”. Similarities of history and culture were held to outweigh differences in language or colonial power. In the words of Best

Certainly (the Caribbean) includes the Antilles—Greater and Lesser—and the Guianas…… But many times the Caribbean also includes the littoral that surrounds our sea…..what we are trying to encompass within our scheme is the cultural, social, political and economic foundation of the “sugar plantation” variant of the colonial mind (Best 1971: 7)[4] .

For Best, this definition was the foundational step in establishing the link between intellectual thought and Caribbean freedom. Striking parallels exist in the positions taken by the Haitian anthropologist Jean Casimir (1991:75-77) and the Puerto Rican historian Gaztambide-Geigel (1996: 90-92). The latter regards the Caribbean as constituting Afro-America Central (“Central Afro-America”); and calls this as the ethno-historic conception of the region.

Yet the counter-hegemonic concept of Caribbean is not limited to the ethno-historic perspective. The “basin” perspective of the hegemonic power has been inverted by some as a sphere of resistance. This vision, which Gaztambide-Geigel characterises as Tercermundista ( “Thirdworldist”) dates back at least to the 1940s and has been articulated by elites in Mexico, Colombia and Venezuela, the so-called “G3” countries. In contemporary times it finds expression in the ACS and in the Civil Society Forum of the Greater Caribbean, an NGO grouping. However these organisations emphasise co-operation in furtherance of common interests as their objective; any counter-hegemonic aspirations, if they are present, are muted rather than explicit.

Hence the notion of Caribbean has been, and is being, continuously re-defined and re-interpreted in response to external influences and to internal currents. A plausible position is that there is no one “correct” definition: content depends on context, but it should be clearly specified whenever used for descriptive or analytical purposes (see for instance Table 1). Conceptually, we find it useful to distinguish just the two variants of the insular Caribbean (a socio-historical rather than geographic category since includes the islands, the three Guianas and Belize); and the Greater Caribbean (the entire basin). Organisationally, it is necessary to distinguish the Caribbean of Caricom, of Cariforum, and of the ACS. Culturally, the growing importance of the Diaspora of the insular Caribbean in North America and Europe has to be recognised. The Caribbean is not only multilingual, it has also become transnational.

Identity

A parallel ambiguity arises regarding the existence of a common Caribbean “identity”. Certainly the inhabitants of the region have been ambivalent about accepting a definition that was originally imposed from without and is still today very much an intellectual or political creation. Central Americans have always preferred to identify themselves as belonging to “the Isthmus” and to call their Eastern Coast “the Atlantic”. In the Hispanic islands, the nationalist current identified itself with Latin America on cultural, linguistic and historical grounds. Self-definition as “Caribbean” was problematic insofar as it connoted a denial of their Hispanic identity historically associated with US expansionism. It also meant being grouped with islands that were non-Hispanic, still under colonial rule and overwhelmingly black. As recently as 1987 a leading Puerto Rican writer was asserting:

“For us Puerto Ricans the term antillean has clear significance, but not the terms Caribbean or Caribbeanness. The former makes us part of the historical and cultural experience of the Greater Antilles, the latter….imposes on us a suprahistorical category, an invented object of a sociological, anthropological and ethnological character that is anglophone in origin, and that functions against the colonized person, as Fanon pointed out”. (Rodriguez Julio 1988).

Fidel Castro must have been acutely aware of the divisiveness and implicitly ethnic orientation of this current when he declared in 1976 that Cuba is a “Latin African” rather than Latin American nation, and more recently when he asserted that “the Caribbean people of African origin are a part of Our America” (Castro 1999).

An analogous ambivalence is evident among the non-Hispanics. Up to the middle of the 20^th century the majority of these islands remained simply “The West Indies” or “The Antilles”—British, French, and Dutch—and their inhabitants were known as West Indians or Antilleans. Haiti, which had been isolated since its Independence a century earlier, was African, Francophone, and uniquely Haitian. It was not until the 1940s that “the Caribbean” began to acquire some currency in the European West Indian colonies. This was originally as a result of the activities of the (Anglo-American) Caribbean Commission and subsequently that of the work of regional historians and social scientists.

For Anglophones, the terminological transition was signaled when the ill-fated West Indies Federation of the 1950s was replaced by the Caribbean Free Trade Association (CARIFTA) of the 1960s and the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) and the Caribbean Development Bank of the 1970s. The first two were, however, founded as exclusively Anglophone clubs. Anglophones still display a certain discomfort with the expansive definition of the region: they guard their “West Indian” identity jealously and appear to fear domination by the more populous Hispanic counties. This was reflected in the name, and the Report, of the Independent West Indian Commission, set up by the Caricom Heads of Government of 1992. The Commission recommended that Caricom’s integration efforts should be deepened rather than widened; the objective of widening regional co-operation would be pursued through the formation of the ACS, a looser form of association n(WICOM 1992).

It might be said that Hispanics tend to see themselves as Caribbean and Latin American, Anglophones as Caribbean and West Indian. “West Indian” might also incorporate elements of pan-Africanism or pan-Hinduism that are either weak or non-existent in the Hispanic societies. Identity may overlap in name but may be in contradiction in content. The process of forming a common Caribbean psycho-cultural identity that transcends barriers of language and ethnicity is at best slow and uneven.

For their part the Dutch islands still call themselves “Antilles” although they have joined several Caribbean regional organisations . The French territories have the status of Overseas Departments of the French Republic and their inhabitants are French citizens. Here, self-definition as “Caribbean” is still relatively rare and when used, might connote an assertion of distinct cultural identity and perhaps a demand for greater autonomy.

In what follows we examine the principal socio-economic characateristics of the Greater Caribbean and the insular Caribbean.

Socio-economic characteristics

Within the countries of the Greater Caribbean there are wide disparities in size, population, and per capita income, (see Annex Table 1 for detailed data). The grouping is dominated by the G3 countries, which together account for between two-thirds and three-quarters of the total population, GDP and land area (Table 2). Mexico alone with 90 million people has a greater population than all the other countries combined and 46 percent of the aggregate GDP. Colombia’s population is about equal to that of entire insular Caribbean with a GDP that exceeds that of the 16 independent states. Venezuela has over three times the population and four times the GDP of the whole of Caricom. Per capita income in the G3 is also higher than that of Central America and the non-Caricom insular states and slightly below that of Caricom. Given the wide disparities in size between the G3 and the rest, it is understandable that they should be regarded as “Latin American powers in the Caribbean” with the potential to be significant economic and political players in the region.

Table 2. Greater Caribbean: major country groups

	Per Capita GDP US$	Share in;-Population	GDP	Land Area
G3	2,713	68	73	77
Isthmus	1,447	15	8	9
Insular Caribbean	2,759	17	18	14

Note: Insular Caribbean includes Belize, Guyana, Suriname, and French Guiana. GDP per capita are averages weighted by population.

Source Based on Annex Table 1

The balance of the regional population is divided fairly evenly between the Isthmus states and the insular Caribbean. As a group, the Isthmus states are the poorest in the region, with an average per capita income is only about half that of the G3 and of Caricom. There are wide income disparities among countries, Costa Rica and Panama having income levels 4-5 times the level in Nicaragua and Honduras. The last two are among the poorest countries in the hemisphere.

The insular Caribbean has a higher per capita income than that of the Greater Caribbean as a whole. Within this group, there are wide income disparities between the non-Caricom and the Caricom states, among Caricom states, and between the independent states and the dependent territories. These income differentials are associated with size, location and political status. The next section discusses these and other socio-economic characteristics of the insular Caribbean in greater detail.

The insular Caribbean

The insular Caribbean is an extremely fragmented and heterogeneous sub-region. With just 37 million people it contains 28 distinct political entities and these vary widely with respect to size, political status, income and language. 22 have populations of under 1 million and these include 11 independent states. 14 of the 16 independent states attained sovereignty only in the past 40 years[5], some as recently as the 1980s. Their political systems vary from multi-party parliamentary democracies in most of the Anglophone countries to Executive Presidential systems in several and the one-party popular democracy of Cuba.

The dependent territories belong to four metropolitan powers. Constitutional arrangements range from virtually full internal autonomy, as in Puerto Rico and the Netherlands Antilles; to the sharing of responsibility between locally elected administrations and the metropolitan authorities, as in the British and French dependencies. There are at least 6 official languages[6] and several local Creoles are also spoken. Here there is a paradox: although the majority of Caribbean entities are English speaking, the majority of the population is Spanish speaking; with French being second in importance. The chart below shows the distribution of population by language.

(CHART 1 GOES ABOUT HERE)

In analysing socio-economic characteristics, we have found it useful to distinguish four subgroups that combine the attributes of political status, size, and location, while ignoring distinctions of language, political system and regional association. The subgroups are:

(i) Larger Island States: four states in the Greater Antilles containing three-quarters of the population, with an average population of nearly 7 million. These are Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, and Jamaica;

(ii) Smaller island states: nine states, mostly in the eastern and southern Caribbean with populations under 1.5 million each and an average population size of 260,000 . These are Trinidad and Tobago, Barbados, the Bahamas and the six members of the Organisation of Eastern Caribbean States;

(iii) Mainland states: Suriname, Guyana, and Belize; and

(iv) Dependent territories, which number 12 in all.

Summary information on the subgroups are provided in table 3, with additional details on human development and poverty in table 4.

Larger island states.

The group of four island states with 75 percent of the sub-region’s population has relatively low per capita incomes and modest levels of human development. It includes Haiti, one of the poorest countries in the world with very low human development[7]. Cuba, the Dominican Republic and Jamaica are all in the $1,000-2,000 range of per capita income. Cuba has done best in terms of level of human development compared to level of per capita income[8], followed by Jamaica. The incidence of poverty is very high in Haiti, where two-thirds of the population live below the poverty line; and significant in Jamaica and the Dominican Republic where one-third and one-fifth of the population respectively are estimated to be in absolute poverty. In Cuba one-sixth of the urban population is estimated to be at risk of being unable access their basic needs requirements.

Table 3. Insular Caribbean: GDP, Population and Land Area

	Per Capita GDP 1995 (1)	Percent total
		GDP	Population	Land Area
Larger Island States	1,101	30.3	75.9	27.6
Smaller Island States	5,215	12.0	6.4	3.0
Mainland	1,174	1.6	3.8	55.0
Dependent territories	11,099	56.1	13.9	14.4
Total	2,759	100.0	100.0	100.0
Memo note: Caricom	2,923	18.0	17.0	59.6
Non-Caricom states	1,036	25.0	69.1	26.0

(1) Weighted averages

Table 4. Insular Caribbean: Human Development, Growth and Poverty

	GDP Per Capita 1995 US$		Human Development Category	HDI Change, 1991-1998 (7)	Growth (2)		Poverty (3)
	Current	Real PPP$(1)			1965-80	1980-95
Larger Island States
Cuba	1,113	3,100	Medium	-23	0.6	..	15(5)
Dominican Republic	1,663	3,923	Medium	-8	3.8	1.1	21
Haiti	285	917	Low	-34	0.9	-4	65(4)
Jamaica	1,762	3,801	Medium	-25	-0.1	1.4	32
Smaller Island States
Antigua and Barbuda	6,640	9,131	High	17	-1.4	5.2(6)	12
Bahamas	12,258	15,738	High	-4