THIS day in the calendar in 2023 marks 50 years of the formalized Caribbean integration structure among the English-speaking former colonies of the British West Indies. The present title is CARICOM; changed after the original name, CARIFTA.

This is a long time for an integration movement to exist, and CARICOM has persisted despite severe internal quarrels of which the most dangerous was the split over the American invasion of Grenada.

In case you are too young to remember, it happened in May, 1983. I was working on the island as a government adviser and saw the action right in front my eyes around the apartment I lived in, with the guest in my home being the brother of Walter Rodney, Donald. The Grenada Revolution was one of the golden opportunities the CARICOM region witnessed in a pursuit to decolonize the political economy of the Third World.

The story of CARICOM is oxymoronic. It is a beautiful effort of integration among a group of small island-states and its large South American neighbour, Guyana, to come closer and integrate their respective territories because culturally, politically and in terms of plantation economy, they look like one piece of land. And indeed, they are.

Guyana has an Indian majority and Trinidad’s Indian population is about half the population. But this Indian presence with its retention of its Hindu and Muslim religions and cultures has not diminished the West Indianess of the Caribbean East Indians. They are as Caribbean as any Creole West Indian. But while the life of CARICOM has been exemplary, it is still oxymoronic because after 50 years, there is so much that is wrong about it that those flaws in themselves constitute a denial of the integration movement.

This irony comes to your face with illuminating pyrotechnics when you do the comparison with the European Union. Twenty eight countries in Europe (the UK recently pulled out) have done away with visa restrictions, adopted a common currency and accepted a common final appeal court of legal jurisprudence. CARICOM is nowhere near that reality.

It is simply a manifestation of psychological numbness that a majority of CARICOM lands have not accepted the Caribbean Court of Justice (CCJ) as their final court. Those still outside of it accept the learning and capacity of British judges over Third World legal minds. Why the choice of British jurists remains a mystery because there is nothing in the 21st century legal system of the UK that informs us is that judicial integrity in that nation is of a higher quality than in the CCJ.

The numerous rulings in the British system against Julian Assange should convince anyone that British judges are not immune from political interference. In Canada, the judiciary exposed itself for the world to see when its courts carried the daughter of the CEO of the giant Chinese company, Huawei through a trial for more than a year in which the glaring facts were that this case was bound up with superpower rivalry and had nothing to do with the committal of a criminal offence.

No one in this entire world, if a poll is taken today around the world, would accept that the federal Supreme Court in the US is a court freed from race and political bias. Revelations surrounding the relations between wealthy men and two Supreme Court jurists has deeply damaged the image of that court. If any CARICOM leader could stand up and say that the US Supreme Court can be more trusted than the CCJ jurists, then he should be permanently banished to a lunatic asylum.

It boggles the mind that in Trinidad where the court sits, and also in Jamaica, the governments of these two countries prefer British judges to their own CARICOM nationals. VS Naipaul, CLR James, and Franz Fanon clung tenaciously to their theory about something they found in the psyche of the middle-class leaders of West Indian society. That something has seriously damaged the success of the Caribbean integration movement.

The world is now going in the direction of strong economic unions (a poll taken last month showed that the UK people want to rejoin the EU), and after 50 years of attempts at meaningful integration, CARICOM has to reach for greater oneness. All the analyses done by experts close to the government have declared that Guyana now and in the near future will need more than 300, 000 foreign employees.

Our CARICOM colleagues must be given preference. I recommend to President Jagdeo that Guyana become the first CARICOM nation to completely abolish visa requirements for CARICOM nations as it is in the EU, so they don’t have to renew it every three months.