What does it mean to be Caribbean?

[BallOil]

Do people in Antigua feel they have anything in common with people in St Vincent? Do Jamaicans talk about the same things as Bajans?

Is there a common Caribbean identity - which means something more than just geography?

More than 20 years ago the Trinidadian Calypsonian David Rudder produced a massive hit called "Rally round the West Indies", which was ostensibly about the region's slow decline from being the world's number 1 cricket nation - but was more about a call for Caribbean countries to get together and support each other.

David once opined that music and cricket were the only times that the West Indies stood together.

Link

[mapoui]

Ben Sutherland is the latest in a line of jackasses that report on all subjects and all regions for a skunt propaganda and deliberately ignorant publication called the BBC...period and inslusive..not only in its caribbean braodcasts.

deliberately ignorant because Sutherland would know when you speak of caribbean unity you do not lump the french and spanish with the english. and if he does not kow that he is skunt so great he yawns and can take trucks and trains so cavernous is he.

and Sthreland really is a skunt for there were many westindian institutions initiated by the colonial system in the region to faciltate the exploitation of the region by the british. there could not help but to have been. and these evolved into the attempt at federation, ultimately caricom.

people do not just get up and plan to have a federation for no reason at all. there had to have been reason for it and it was there, in the colonial structure that linked the english-speaking islands together

there was and is a lot more that link the islands together in what is a regional culture. there are region-wide associalions of all kinds from professional to labour unions. and much more too. the fact that the islands are not closer together is due to deliberate sabotage and maintaing of obstacles between the peopels to kepp them apart.

custums and excise problems, passparts for travel, intensification of parochialisms, insularity, from the top down...never from the bottom up.

[mapoui]

for Sutherland as british himself, not to know all this and so start a decent debate..not the piece of touristy bullshit I see in that link... is typical BBC skuntery and racism.

thats the way BBC treats countries of people of colour.

its a waset fo time to pay attention to that shit Bally. bring on a higher kind of discussion willya, soemthing that really stimulates the levl on the Fan