[dropcap]Y[/dropcap]ou just can’t beat experience. And trust St. Vincent & the Grenadines prime minister Ralph Gonsalves to drive the point forcefully home at, of all places, the latest OECS shindig held here on Monday evening. Speaking of which, wouldn’t it be far less expensive to mark our regional anniversaries via Skype or something like it? Certainly we’d save a ton on expensive hotel banquets, to say nothing of lubricants for diplomatic intercourse, which, evidently Gonsalves did not need. Unless of course he came down well lubed from his Harbor Club suite to the dignitary-packed auditorium.
He was preceded in turn at the lectern by Saint Lucia’s prime minister Allen Chastanet and the region’s current most talked about leader of government, and not only because her party had turned the most recent Bajan general elections into a 30-0 cakewalk. There’s her name, for one thing. Say it at the wrong rpm, or with a stutter, and it comes out embarrassingly, some might say presumptuously, as My Love in Spanish. Then there’s that open space between her front teeth that won’t be denied, to which the Mighty Sparrow had attributed magic so potent as to be capable of bringing strong men and priests to their knees. One can only speculate about the impact on her famously libidinous colleagues, untouchable as it seems they are even in the era of #MeToo.
But we were talking about the Vincie prime minister’s contribution to Monday evening’s OECS show. Clearly he had carefully calculated his approach to the issue of Venezuela’s expulsion from the OAS. Allen Chastanet was among those who had openly acknowledged the plight of the Venezuelan people, the incarceration of opposition members, and other human rights abuses commonplace under Maduro. The experienced Vincentian leader could’ve chosen to express privately to his OECS colleagues his distaste for American highhandedness and hypocrisy. That he chose instead to advertise his socialist spleen in the presence of several diplomats from countries including the United States and Venezuela (the latter with its own on-island embassy) was hardly accidental.
With several video cameras in attendance he had the perfect opportunity to not only cement relationships recently established but also to embarrass his host the Saint Lucian prime minister—whom he was about to replace as chairman of the OECS—his fellow small-island evictors, and, importantly, the big Republican elephant in the room.
Of course Gonsalves was sufficiently well schooled to avoid actually naming Donald Trump, neither the United States. Why bother when everyone who heard him would know he was referring to the great giant of the north, to whom he was admittedly “so grateful for its protection of our borders.” But undeniably important as that was, and as thankful as the Vincie prime minister claimed to be, it did not mean the OECS had to bow to the giant’s every demand. Sometimes beggars can choose whom they beg from. I should acknowledge that Ralph Gonsalves spoke nothing but the truth that can set us free, if only to starve. It is also true that general elections are around the corner in St. Vincent and Gonsalves knows only too well there’s nothing we Caribbean people love better than what sounds in our Lilliputian ears like a challenge to Gulliver!
As for his open promotion of Maduro, it is my own personal conviction that when leaders of democracies speak in favor of dictators they betray the dictator in their own souls. It is as disturbing to me actually to see Donald Trump massaging Kim Jong-un’s back while waxing dithyrambic about the Korean dictator’s love for his starving people as it is to witness an OECS leader shilling for the current master of the Venezuelan people—regardless of how many bridges too far he may have financed in the particular shill’s backwater. Did the region learn no lessons from the Grenada debacle?
To judge by their televised demeanor, it seemed to me many in his Harbor Club audience were rendered ill at ease, bewildered, even, by the calculated show-time radicalism of Ralph Gonsalves. It’s almost guaranteed he will have the last laugh, however, whether or not at further expense to abused thousands who heard not a word of what he said at the Harbor Club. Then again it made sense when Gonsalves advised that fellow OECS leaders devote more of their time and energy to pursuing goals that are possible in the short term than the other way around.
Referencing the issue of free travel throughout the region, he declared futile the notion of persuading Jamaica with its over 200,000 unemployed citizens to open up its doors to its Caribbean brothers and sisters. It made more sense, Gonsalves suggested, to request that “Mia” direct the Barbadian immigration authorities to be more accommodating of visitors from the region. As if already Ms Mottley were not sufficiently burdened.
None of the representatives at the OECS function had a word to say about the high cost of governance, the root cause of most of the region’s problems. At one point during his lengthy delivery, as if by magic, a $50 note materialized in the right hand of Ralph Gonsalves. Dramatically, he held it aloft. “You see this?” he said, “this is proof of our strength and our resilience. Ours is the third strongest currency in the world, behind only the United States and Europe.” He might’ve added that for most of the Caribbean people, Venezuela especially, a $50 bill is becoming as much a rarity as a politician saying what he actually believes!
BTW: Back in the late 1970s Dominica’s prime minister suggested to her CARICOM colleagues that the time had come to choose between business as usual and shutting down the organization altogether. She said she’d had it with attending conferences without agendas or with agendas known only to some of the heads of government. It is today more than obvious how the majority voted!
