AN UNEQUIVOCAL AND UNADULTERATED FIASCO

"Where there is no vision, the people perish." Prov 29:18

Up to a few weeks ago, I was a passionate and enthusiastic proponent of the concept of the annual Caribbean Diaspora conference. I promoted it as an idea "whose time had come." However, after attending the Diaspora conference at the Brooklyn Marriott a week ago, I have come to the sad and reluctant conclusion that the last conference was an unequivocal and unadulterated fiasco. After listening to the tired and pedestrian rhetoric of the Caribbean Heads of State, I am convinced that these individuals are not yet ready for prime time. They are still stuck in the old colonial paradigm.

The format of the conference clearly reflected the outdated colonial mentality of the conference planners. Fully ten of the seventeen events or two-third of the conference events were designated as "closed-door" sessions. How can you, in good faith, have a Diaspora conference, when two-thirds of the events are closed to members of the Diaspora family? It is like having a family reunion which excludes family members from participating in two-thirds of the family events. The significant stakeholders in the Diaspora family are the Caribbean Heads of State, Caricom, the New York Consular Corps, the Caribbean hometown associations, the Caribbean press and the Caribbean public. What the conference organizers did during the recent conference was to dismember the Caribbean family by separating the Heads of State, Caricom, and the consular corps from the other significant members of the Caribbean family, such as, the hometown associations, the Caribbean press and the Caribbean public.

A "closed-door" session is appropriate when the two principal parties are about to sign a contract or a memorandum of understanding. At this stage of the proceedings, confidentiality is important and the session should be closed to the principals -- the party of the first part, and the party of the second part. However, when the negotiations are still in the preliminary stage, the sessions should be open to the public, so as to solicit a wide cross-section of opinion and perspectives and to arrive at the best possible policy formulation. When the Caribbean Heads of State met with the Empire State Development Corporation, Goldman Sachs and The New York Stock Exchange, they were not about to execute a contract or a memorandum of understanding with these corporate agencies. These were preliminary negotiations and discussions, and the Caribbean Heads of State should have made these sessions open to the Caribbean Diaspora so as to solicit a wide cross-section of opinions and perspectives about the best policy formulations for the Caribbean. They should not cling to the old colonial assumptions that the Heads of State, like the absolute monarchs of the British Empire, are the sole repositories of divine knowledge, and have an exclusive monopoly on information and policy.

On Friday, June 20, 2008, the Caribbean Heads of State had a "closed-door" session with Goldman Sachs pertaining to the establishment of a regional stock market in the Caribbean. There is absolutely no reason why this session should have been "closed" to the Caribbean Diaspora. There are several Caribbean nationals who hold significant positions in Wall Street brokerage houses who have knowledge of equity investment and stock underwriting. Surely the Caribbean heads should have included these individuals in the discussion as they could have contributed their expertise to the discourse on the establishment of brokerage houses, commercial banks, and regulatory agencies in the Caribbean. When the Caribbean Heads of State met with the corporate brass at the New York Stock Exchange, they should have included these Caribbean technocrats who could have given the Wall Street brass some good insights on how to create financial instruments that could transform the billions of dollars in remittances from the Diaspora from consumption-oriented transfer earnings into investment capital that could be used for economic development in the Caribbean.

Similarly the "closed-door" session between the Caribbean Heads of State and the Empire State Development Corporation should have been open to the Diaspora, since there are several Caribbean technocrats who have had extensive experience with the Empire State Development Corporation, including the former chairman of that agency. These technocrats could have given the Empire State Development Corporation valuable information as to how that agency could be used to engage in commercial exchanges between the financial community in New York and the entrepreneurial community in the Caribbean.

The session at York College could have been better organized. It was touted to be a symposium on investment in the Caribbean. There was no discourse on investment in the Caribbean. It was an open-ended BS session in which politicians were permitted to articulate their political agenda. This was a serious strategic blunder. I would have liked to hear Dr. Ivelaw Griffith, who is an expert on crime in the Caribbean, present a serious paper on the "contributing factors which have led to an upsurge of crime in the Caribbean, and the ways in which the United States government can reduce or mitigate crime in the Caribbean." The Caribbean Heads of State could have been asked to comment on the analysis and policy recommendations in the paper. Instead all we heard was the same old tired rhetoric from our local elected officials and the Caribbean heads of state. During the question and answer period, the Caribbean Heads of State selectively chose to respond to those questions with which they were familiar, and to ignore those questions with which they were uncomfortable. They chose to ignore a question posed by Chuck Mohan and myself about why Caribbean governments chose to disburse millions of dollars to Madison Avenue public relations firms, instead of retaining the services of competent public relations firms from the Diaspora.

The final wrap-up session at the Brooklyn Marriott was inexplicably cancelled. This was the most fatal flaw of the entire conference. It would have given the Caribbean press and the Caribbean public an opportunity to conduct a post mortem on the conference -- to analyze the strengths and weaknesses of the conference and to make recommendations about reforms that could be implemented to strengthen and improve the conference in the upcoming years. This opportunity was squandered. There was no post-mortem of the conference, and there were no proposals to improve or strengthen it.

My fear is that the annual Caribbean Diaspora conference is a great visionary concept that will perish on the vine ad die because of poor planning and poor management. The Caribbean Heads of State, Caricom and the New York counselor corps need to do a serious re-evaluation of this concept. They need to create a Caribbean secretariat or coordinator with the sole and exclusive mission to plan and implement these annual conferences. They need to develop a mission statement, an overarching theme for the conference, a set of relevant topics to be discussed, and a panel of experts with specific expertise on Caribbean affairs. They need to preserve an archive of all the concept papers and presentations made at these sessions, and they ought to organize a wrap-up session to enable the participants to conduct a post-mortem of the conference, and to make recommendations for future conferences. Hopefully, in this way we can save a great idea from almost certain self strangulation, and preserve a great institution that can be used to establish a meaningful bridge between the Caribbean community at home and the Caribbean Diaspora in the United States.

*Colin Moore is editor-in-chief of the Caribbean American Weekly

Email: colin.moore@yahoo.com