Above: Roseau, Dominica (CJ Photo)

By the Caribbean Journal staff

Dominica Prime Minister Roosevelt Skerrit is heading to Paris this week to meet with representatives of the Agence Française de Développement for talks on Dominica’s geothermal project.

Skerritt will lead a delegation including Energy Minister Rayburn Blackmoore, Vince Henderson, Edward Lambert, chairman of the Technical Committee on Geothermal Energy Development and Permanent Secretary in the Energy Ministry Lucienne Blackmoore.

The visit comes about two months after Eletricite de France, the French company that is the world’s largest electric utility, announced it would be withdrawing from Dominica’s geothermal project. The company had originally planned to partner with Dominica on the project and export geothermal energy to neighbouring Martinique and Guadeloupe, both of which were partners on the enterprise.

At the time of the withdrawal, Skerritt vowed to forge ahead with the project.

Dominica said AFD had been a “strong supporter” of the government’s efforts to develop geothermal energy.

The talks will cover the country’s overall strategy for geothermal development and “outline plans for establishing a small power plant to supply electricity to the domestic market,” according to a government statement.

The government said the visit would also focus on setting up a meeting of donors to “invite the country’s development partners to continue their collaboration with the government in developing the island’s geothermal resource.”

Above: UN peacekeepers in Haiti (UN Photo/Logan Abassi)

By the Caribbean Journal staff

A deployment of Canadian Armed Forces will be joining the United Nations peacekeeping mission in Haiti, Canada’s government announced Wednesday.

A 34-member CAF platoon from Quebec will be joining the Brazilian peacekeeping battalion in Haiti until December. The team departs on Friday after having trained in Brazil.

Canadians have been part of MINUSTAH since its inception in 2004 and their ongoing efforts will continue to benefit Haitians and improve Canada’s relations with our partners in the Western Hemisphere,”” said Minister MacKay. ““As part of this mission, our Canadian Armed Forces members will work alongside Brazilian troops to maintain a secure and stable environment in Haiti.”

Until now, Canada has had five military staff officers deployed on MINUSTAH’s Operation Hamlet, which is the name for Canada’s participation in MINUSTAH. Operation Hamlet has been ongoing in Haiti since May 2004.

Another 90 Canadian police officers have been serving with the UN in the country.

“Our increased contribution to the United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti serves to highlight Canada’s on-going commitment to the region, as well as our commitment to supporting international peace and security,” said General Tom Lawson, Chief of the Defence Staff. “This deployment will also further develop our relationship and enhance our military-military cooperation with Brazil. I have every confidence that our personnel will serve with honour and distinction in Haiti; facts in which all Canadians can take great pride.”

By Celucien L Joseph, PhD
Op-Ed Contributor

IN HAITI’S intellectual history, Toussaint Louverture is not only a man of deep commitment to his people but also the great Haitian antiracist and public intellectual, radical social activist and anticolonial prophet of Black Freedom and Human rights in the eighteenth-century.

Haiti has also given the world a man of great mind, Joseph Antenor Firmin. He is the most rigorous Haitian intellectual, antiracist writer, and the first black anthropologist who countered with force, clarity, and intellectual breadth Western racism and epistemic apartheid in the nineteenth century.

In the footsteps of Toussaint and Firmin, Jacques Roumain and Jean Price-Mars continued the intellectual legacy in the twentieth-century.

If Roumain is the most important Marxist writer and novelist the country has produced in the twentieth-century, Price-Mars is the intellectual par excellence who had interrogated the supremacy of Western cultural hegemony and values in the world.

Both Firmin and Price-Mars had sought to create an alternative modernity in Black Atlantic Thought and culture, based on the achievements of the African people and their ancestry in the African Diaspora in the modern world.

Price-Mars was the single Haitian public intellectual and writer who had shaken the intellectual foundation of Haiti when he reevaluated the retentions and merits of African cultural traditions and values in Haiti and in the Black Diaspora, with his epoch-making book, Ainsi parla l’Oncle (1928) (Thus Spoke the Uncle).

If Toussaint had defended human rights and championed universal emancipation and equality for all, Firmin, Roumain, and Price-Mars had influenced several generations of black intellectuals and writers across the Black Atlantic, as well as freedom and cultural movements in the Black Diaspora.

In my new book, From Toussaint to Price-Mars: Rhetoric, Race, and Religion in Haitian Thought, I engage Haiti’s intellectual history by focusing on the ideas and writings of Haiti’s four most important thinkers and writers: Toussaint Louverture, Joseph Antenor Firmin, Jacques Roumain, and Jean Price-Mars—from the eighteenth century to the twentieth-century.

The basic argument I articulate is that Haiti has produced a strong intellectual tradition from the revolutionary era to the postcolonial present, and that Haitian thought has not been homogeneous or unevolved—whether the subject might be history, religion, race, literature, or culture. Hence, the book explores the rich diversity of Haitian intellectual history with regard to its cross-disciplinary and intersectional content.

Correspondingly, From Toussaint to Price-Mars is a work on history of ideas and an attempt to grasp the intersections of rhetoric, religious ideas, the race question, and secular humanism in Haiti’s intellectual history, as well as the various ways they crisscross each other.

As a scholar and interpreter of the human experience, I seek to analyze the thought of Haitian writers and intellectuals in their regional, international, and cosmopolitan context, and with all their complexity and paradoxes.

This sequel is an expansion of what I have formerly called in my first book—Race, Religion, and the Haitian Revolution: Essays on Faith, Freedom, and Decolonization—“Haitian modernity.”

By carefully examining the ideas of Toussaint, Firmin, Roumain, and Price-Mars, I contend that the general interweaving themes of rhetoric, the race concept, race vindication, universal emancipation, religious unorthodoxy, secular humanism, the particular and the universal, and cosmopolitanism are representative of Haiti’s intellectual tradition, Haitian intellectuals and writers.

Like my first book, this present text addresses the general interweaving themes of rhetoric, freedom, the race concept, religion, race vindication, and cosmopolitanism, which I believe are representative of Haiti’s intellectual tradition.

Haitian intellectuals and writers have almost never separated these prevalent motifs from each other and in their work.

Arguably, with the rise of Haitian indigenism, and the noirisme as a cultural nationalism movement in the twentieth-century, Haitian writers began to accentuate Marxism, socialist communism, and peasantry as complementary literary themes in their tradition.

We should remember that Haitian writers and intellectuals have appealed to these theoretical notions and critical theory as tools of analysis to address the fragility of human existence, to make sense of the human experience, and to struggle against Western imperialism, racism, and systemic oppression of all kinds that continue to oppress the people of African ancestry and those living in the margins of modernity in this postcolonial era..

They (i.e. Firmin and Price-Mars) also engaged the concept of race and the science of racial hierarchy and racial difference.

Celucien L. Joseph (Ph.D., University of Texas at Dallas) is an adjunct Professor of English at Palm Beach State College. He specializes in African American Studies and Haitian Studies. He is also the author of Race, Religion, and the Haitian Revolution: Essays on Faith, Freedom, and Decolonization (2012).

Above: Dominica (CJ Photo)

By the Caribbean Journal staff

It’s a romantic notion of Caribbean travel — arrive in one destination, then travel to another two or three islands by sea or small plane.

And the OECS regional subgrouping wants to make island-hopping easier for travelers in the Caribbean.

The OECS, whose integration efforts have been finding praise within the wider region, is looking to develop a common tourism policy, and that means in part creating a regional identity for OECS tourism, according to Rodinald Soomer, head of the economic development policy unit at the OECS.

The plan is to collaborate with the region’s immigration outfits to help facilitate both interregional tourism — that is, travel between the islands by OECS nationals, and island-hopping for international tourists.

The plan for the latter in particular is to eliminate multiple border checkpoints for “seamless travel.”

It’s about grouping the islands together and encouraging island hopping — come to the OECS, and see Antigua, St Kitts and Montserrat, for example.

So can the OECS develop its own tourism identity within the larger Caribbean?

“Ultimately what we would like to see is for an OECS brand to be developed, “ Soomer said this week. “The ministers have gone through that idea, but it was at a time when everyone was buying into the wider Caribbean brand. A decision was taken that this was not the right time for us to go for an OECS brand. we needed to build a reputation in the marketplace of presenting ourselves as a unit.”

The aim, he said, is to end the idea of tourism competition in the region, and “recognize the rivalry as being out of the Caribbean.”

Above: a rendering of the new TCI terminal (Photo: TCIAA)

By the Caribbean Journal staff

Construction has begun on the new terminal at Providenciales International Airport in the Turks and Caicos Islands, the territory’s Airports Authority announced Wednesday.

The work follows the launch of construction of the airport’s new traffic circulation system and a new parking lot.

The aim is to finish the new terminal facility by the end of 2014, according to Lavern Reynolds, terminal and marketing manager at the Turks and Caicos Islands Airports Authority.

The Turks and Caicos announced the airport redevelopment project last summer. It will nearly double the size of the existing terminal to about 92,321 square feet.

Around 500,000 passengers pass through the airport each year.

Above: an irrigation channel (IDB Photo/Paul Constance)

By the Caribbean Journal staff

Haiti is set to receive a $15 million grant from the Inter-American Development Bank to support reforms in the country’s agricultural sector.

Farming currently accounts for around half of Haiti’s jobs, and almost 25 percent of the country’s national income.

The grant will go toward policy, legal and institutional reforms; it is the second in a series of operations supporting Haiti’s government as it seeks to address the agriculture sector.

The IDB is financing more than $200 million in investment projects in Haiti’s agriculture, including irrigation, rural value chains, watershed management and land tenure clarification.

The latter was the target of a similar $15 million grant last year from the IDB, which was complemented with $7 million from the Haiti Reconstruction Fund.

Around 60 percent of Haiti’s population lives in rural areas, according to the IDB.

Above: Incoming Governor Helen Kilpatrick (Photo: FCO)

By the Caribbean Journal staff

Helen Kilpatrick has been named the new Governor of the Cayman Islands, the UK’s Foreign and Commonwealth Office announced Wednesday morning.

Kilpatrick, who has served in the UK’s Home Office since April 2005, succeeds Governor Duncan Taylor.

She will take up her appointment in September, transferring from the Home Office to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office for the appointment.

“I am honoured and delighted to be appointed Governor of the Cayman Islands,” she said in a statement. “I look forward to working in a constructive partnership with the newly elected government to ensure a safe, successful and sustainable future for the Cayman Islands.”

The Cayman Islands recently saw a change of government, led by new Premier Alden McLaughlin.

Above: Veronica Campbell-Brown

By the Caribbean Journal staff

The Jamaica Athletics Administrative Association confirmed Tuesday that a case is “currently ongoing” Olympic sprinter Veronica Campbell-Brown following reports that she had tested positive for a banned substance.

The suspension of Campbell-Brown, a three-time Olympic gold medalist, awaits the outcome of a disciplinary panel the association said would hear the case.

“We also wish to point out that Mrs Veronica Campbell-Brown voluntarily withdrew herself from competition and accepted the provisional suspension,” JAAA President Dr Warren Blake said in a statement. “Further statements by us will await the outcome of this case.”

The test reportedly came during the Jamaica Invitational in Kingston in early May.

Above: Haiti Prime Minister Laurent Lamothe (Photo: OPM Haiti)

By the Caribbean Journal staff

Haiti Prime Minister Laurent Lamothe met Monday with UN Acting Special Representative Nigel Fisher and UNDP senior director Sophie De Caen to discuss the logistics of holding the country’s planned legislative elections.

After months of political disagreements, long-delayed elections finally received the go-ahead following the formation of the transitional college of the Permanent Electoral Council in early April.

In a statement, Lamothe said he “intends to work with all partners involved in the process” to help organize the next round of elections, which will include senate and municipal offices.

The meeting with Fisher and De Caen also discussed ways to strengthen the institutional capacity of the transitional college, which the government said was facing “enormous structural and financial problems.”

The group said it agreed to “make every effort to allow the CTCEP to complete all the steps necessary for the holding of fair elections in the country.”

Lamothe called the meeting “very positive.”

The date for elections has not yet been announced. In an interview with Caribbean Journal in April, Lamothe said that decision would be made by the transitional college itself.

Above: China President Xi Xinping

By the Caribbean Journal staff

Miguel Diaz-Canel, the first vice president of Cuba’s Councils of State and Ministers, continued his China trip Tuesday with a meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping.

The meeting followed talks Monday between Diaz-Canel and China’s Vice President, Li Yuanchao.

Xi visited the Caribbean at the beginning of June, pledging nearly $3 billion in loans to the region.

Diaz-Canel began an official visit to China on June 17. His Asian tour includes stops in Vietnam and Laos, leading a delegation including Leonardo Andollo, member of the Central Committee of Cuba’s Community Party and Deputy Foreign Minister Rogelio Sierra, according to a government statement.

Diaz-Canel, a former Minister of Higher Education, was elected as First Vice President in February.

He is seen by many as a potential successor to current Cuban leader Raul Castro, who has announced plans to leave office at the expiration of his term in 2018.