CARICOM: 25 YEARS OF A UNITED CARIBBEAN VOICE.

• Author: Luxner, Larry

When the Caribbean Free Trade Association (Carifta) was established in 1968 by Barbados, Guyana, Jamaica, and Trinidad and Tobago, few islands enjoyed direct air service from Miami. No one had touch-tone phones, and much of the English-speaking Caribbean was still calculating prices in shillings and pence.

On July 4, 1973, the Treaty of Chaguaramas transformed Carifta into the Caribbean Community, or Caricom, and now--twenty-five years later--the dollar is the region's currency of choice, tourism is a booming industry, and schoolchildren from the Bahamas to Barbados regularly correspond via e-mail.

Some things, however, haven't changed over the past quarter-century: bananas are still the economic mainstay for many poorer eastern Caribbean islands, and Fidel Castro--still the president of Cuba--continues to be a thorn in the side of U.S. foreign policy.

Through it all, Caricom has tried to bring together its culturally and geographically diverse member states. Although the organization is headquartered in the Bank of Guyana building in Georgetown, only two of Caricom's fifteen member nations--Guyana and Suriname--are located in South America. Except for Dutch-speaking Suriname and French-speaking Haiti, all the rest are English-speaking Caribbean islands with a common heritage and similar problems.

"For us, the twenty-fifth anniversary of Caricom is an occasion of outstanding significance, not just for the governments but also the people of the region," says Caricom secretary general Edwin Carrington. "What it signifies is that we have been able to sustain for a quarter of a century a process of intense cooperation across a broad sweep of national and regional interests. Our strengthening process is reflected in the widening of the Community to Suriname, which has joined Caricom as the first non-English-speaking member, and Haiti, which was accepted last year but hasn't yet completed the terms and conditions of entry."

Asked to name Caricom's single biggest challenge, Carrington--a sixty-year-old Trinidadian diplomat who's been active in Caricom from its early days--says it is "deepening the integration process" among its fifteen members.

"Our goal is free movement, not only of goods, but of services, capital, and skilled people across the entire Caribbean Community--something close to what the European Union has done," he says. "AS small individual units, we are not viable politically or economically. We are much more viable as a group."

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