Dear Editor,
With Venezuela subjugated, Iran bombed, and Cuba now locked in his crosshairs, Donald Trump has crowned himself sheriff of the Western Hemisphere. The question CARICOM can no longer dodge rings louder than ever: who pinned that badge on his chest? It’s a swagger etched in a single, chilling refrain Trump invokes time and again—because I can. From the military abduction of a sitting Venezuelan president, dragged in chains to a New York courtroom, to the slow strangulation of Cuba into submission, his logic is raw, unadorned power.
And last Saturday, at the signing of the Doral Charter—unfurled amid the glitz of the “Shield of the Americas” summit in Florida—he has forged that bravado into ironclad policy, commanding small states to gut their sovereignty: dismantle security autonomy for U.S.-orchestrated anti-narco machines, slam visa gates on “high-risk” foes, slash anti-China ties, chain trade to the dollar alone—burying the petro-yuan alive—and rip out digital lifelines like Huawei 5G grids in Guyana and Trinidad and Tobago, where China-forged bridges, hospitals, ports, and power plants now teeter under loan recalls and replace-or-ruin edicts.
Pause here, let the rhythm of the empire sink in. This is no hasty tweak to old maps; it’s the grand recalibration of American hegemony into an ultimate Empire of the Americas. Trump’s self-named “Donroe Doctrine” doesn’t whisper Monroe’s 19th-century warning to Europe—it roars it back to life, militarized, monetized, masked as law-and-order. Picture it: U.S. prosecutors in Florida’s Southern District, the very engine grinding Biden-era “enemies,” now priming indictments for Cuban officials over deeds on Cuban soil, answerable to Cuban voters, not Congress or the UN.
American law stretches like a shadow over every dollar-touched corner of the globe, enforced not by gunboats alone but by the greenback’s unyielding grip—transactions hooked, economies choked, resistance recast as narco-terror or Beijing betrayal.
This is the hemisphere Caribbean souls now breathe in—a far cry from the post-colonial dawn their founding fathers bled for at Chaguaramas in 1973, birthing CARICOM amid dreams of unity unbroken, or the 1986 Contadora pledge for a Zone of Peace, scorning foreign bases, proxy wars, destabilizing shadows. Trump tramples small states with impunity, fueled by Florida’s electoral cheers, grabs for oil veins and sea-lane chokepoints, and the dollar’s throne, where any brush with U.S. finance invites extraterritorial fangs.
Sovereignty? It withers to a fragile lease—renewable only in Washington’s ledger.
But oh, the sting sharpens when we turn to those leaders who sowed these thorns. Nations that bowed with unquestioned allegiance to this hegemonic tide, not in bold defense of smaller neighbors, but in craven subjugation—ripping out their own roots for a pat on the head from the Empire’s hand. Their unconditional surrender mocks the fire of Cheddi Jagan, whose West on Trial thundered prophecies now painfully prescient: “Imperialism is on trial before the bar of history,” he wrote, exposing the West’s “monopoly of power” as a “cancer eating into the vitals of mankind.” Jagan’s steadfast pushback against that creeping beast—unyielding, visionary—stands in stark rebuke to today’s capitulation.
Even Forbes Burnham’s legacy, forged in the Non-Aligned Movement’s crucible where he and Jagan battled shoulder-to-shoulder for a world beyond blocs, weeps at this betrayal. They fought tirelessly for sovereignty’s flame, not to douse it in dollar deference; their heirs, by contrast, trade it wholesale, planting seeds of subjugation that bloom now as Trump’s bitter harvest.
Yet small states need not kneel in this war without bullets. Mitigation flows from cunning asymmetry, a rhythmic dance of defiance: collective firewalls through CARICOM and CELAC, spurning Charter chains with unified UN and OAS salvos that resurrect the Zone of Peace; economic pivots to CBDC pulses, BRICS swaps, gold hoards, and bridges to India, UAE, EU for tech and treasure—restructuring China debts before the recalls claw; legal lances at ICJ and WTO, sovereign firewalls against extraterritorial teeth, local oil-gas mandates fueling self-reliance.
Guyana’s CRCC spans, Trinidad’s Dragon Gas debts—these wounds demand velocity: lobby exemptions as in CBI’s sly ships, pool CARICOM gold for regional grids and nearshore havens.
Tally the ledger in prose’s steady beat—dollar locks and recalls countered by CBDCs, BRICS breaths for trade’s unbroken pulse; U.S. security yokes shattered by mutual CARICOM shields, UN norms reborn; China-tech bans met with India-EU weaves, intra-hemisphere builds; indictments’ reach blunted by ICJ precedents, immunity’s iron laws. Full alignment auctions the soul; lone defiance courts the noose. Trump’s badge? Self-pinned, fattened by faint hearts—CARICOM’s hour strikes to flip the script, transmuting the Empire’s hubris into its lonely cage. Jagan’s trial convicts; Burnham’s non-aligned torch endures. The West stands sentenced by its supreme leader’s own hand—the verdict? Execution denied by leaders bold enough to seize the rhythm of true freedom.