By NAN Staff Writer
News Americas, NEW YORK, NY, Tues. Oct. 25, 2016: A former Caribbean head of state recently delivered a scathing exposé of the likely negative impact to the Caribbean under a Donald Trump administration.
Delivering the 18th Annual Eric E. Williams Memorial Lecture to a crowd of about 140 in Florida recently, former President of Guyana, Bharrat Jagdeo, said Trump’s woeful unpreparedness to effectively function in the international arena would be anathema to the most basic of Caribbean interests.
Speaking on the topic “The Caribbean and American Presidential Power: A Donald Trump Ascendancy,” Jagdeo said Trump would also be a danger to climate change in the Caribbean because of Trump’s promise to renege on the Paris Agreement. This he said would upend the entire debate as well as the special fund that has been established to assist developing countries in combating this particular global concern.
Still the former President controversially feels that Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and his threat to deport some 11 million US undocumented immigrants may work well for the Caribbean and give a boost to the job vacuum which has created a brain drain region.
However, given the high unemployment rates across the region, the argument seems woeful.
Meanwhile, Jagdeo concluded that a Hillary Clinton presidency would ultimately keep the status quo with respect to Caribbean affairs but the former head of state suggested that if Caribbean leaders need to make “structural adjustments” so that the region can finally speak, mightily, as one, instead of as disparate entities with little voice and even less power to affect international imperatives.
Established in 1999, FIU’s annual Eric Williams Lecture honors Eric Williams, the distinguished late Trinidad-born Prime Minister, consummate academic, internationally renowned historian, and author of several other books.
