Dear Editor,
If given a choice between capitalism and communism, the answer is clear. Capitalism offers freedom – freedom to choose what to eat, where to live, what to wear, where to study, and how to earn a living. That freedom matters.
But supporting capitalism does not mean ignoring its excesses. There is a version of capitalism that goes too far. A version that no longer creates opportunity, but instead concentrates wealth, pushes people aside, and strips away dignity. That is what can only be described as unchecked or “wild” capitalism – and its effects are increasingly visible in Curaçao.
Our island carries a heavy historical burden. Centuries of slavery, colonialism, discrimination, and social inequality have left deep structural scars. These conditions create fertile ground for a system where economic power can easily become unbalanced, where those with resources gain more, and those without are left behind.
Today, many Curaçaoans feel that reality. Wages remain low, while the cost of living continues to rise sharply. Basic goods in supermarkets have become expensive to the point where many families struggle to keep up. At the same time, prime land and beaches are increasingly oriented toward tourism development, often leaving locals feeling like outsiders in their own country.
Tourism is important. Investment is necessary. But when economic growth primarily benefits a select few, while the majority faces growing financial pressure, something is out of balance. This imbalance is not just economic – it is social.
When people feel excluded from opportunity, when they see their cost of living rise while their income stagnates, frustration grows. When public resources and national assets appear to serve external interests more than local communities, trust erodes. And where oversight is weak, corruption finds space to grow.
Even well-intentioned citizens – those who volunteer, who contribute, who try to build something for their country – can find themselves exploited in such an environment.
The situation becomes even more concerning when external pressures are added. Global instability, such as ongoing conflict in the Middle East, continues to drive up energy and transport cost. For a small, import-dependent island like Curaçao, these shocks are not abstract – they translate directly into higher prices at the pump, at the supermarket, and on monthly utility bills. And it is the average citizen who feels it the most.
This is not a call to abandon capitalism. It is a call to correct it. Curaçao does not need less economic activity – it needs better balance. A system where growth is matched with protection. Where investment is accompanied by safeguards for local communities. Where wages reflect the real cost of living. Where essential goods remain accessible. Where development includes – not excludes – the people of this island.
Capitalism should create opportunity, not inequality. If left unchecked, however, it risks becoming exactly what many now fear: a system that benefits a few, while the majority pays the price.
Curaçao still has a choice. The question is whether it will act in time.
Edrin Raphaela
Dear Editor,
In the paper of March 26th on the front page, I read the article PM submits advisory on governor's constitutional role, and my first reaction was "Even up there?" But later I said to myself what can one expect when the Constitution does not exact that leaders of government should have an education.
I have repeated several times that Civics of the country should be taught from the fifth grade in order that the youth of the land could grow up with a sense of belonging and would be well versed in the Constitution of the land and eventually become a well polished politician and or statement.
This would also avoid the embarrassment of who having to tell who to pull up whose sock. Now this. Over the years that I have written to you I have not written anything discriminatory against homosexuals, but if I understand the autonomy of man and woman I believe that promoting homosexuality is also promoting and contributing to the extinction of human beings. You cannot get turnip out of spinach.
I will be the last person to promote prostitution but if I have to choose out of two evils I will choose the lesser evil. I remember in a conversation with a group of people who literally were against homosexuality, the question of reproduction came up. The consensus was "not reproduction, you mean extinction".
"Because they take the Bible out the schools, they think they going bring in homosexuality. They lie! If two men or two women can't make children where will the homosexuals be coming from?
They going import them? Or maybe they going clone them? Or maybe they going pay normal couples to make children for them. Being on the job I know that jealousy among homosexual couples is much more prevalent and intense than among heterosexual couples. Animal yes, but peaceful I don't know.
Russell A SIMMONS
Dear Editor,
There is a rhetorical technique as old as power itself. You begin with something no reasonable person can deny, then use that reasonableness as a bridge to something no reasonable person should accept. The current moment in global politics, and in the domestic and foreign policy of the United States in particular, is saturated with this manoeuvre. It deserves a name, let us call it the seasoning of reasonableness. A sprinkling of legitimate concern designed not to solve a problem but to make the disproportionate, the coercive, and the authoritarian palatable.
The pattern is remarkably consistent where a genuine issue is identified, one that resonates with ordinary people because it touches their real anxieties. The range of issues is broad, border security, drug trafficking, the cost of higher education, the risks of artificial intelligence, trade imbalances, democracy in Cuba, Iran and Venezuela, the rights of Cuban doctors working overseas and so on. These are not invented problems, they exist, they matter, and they deserve serious policy attention but in the hands of the current American administration, the legitimate concern is never the destination, it is the on ramp.
The Architecture of the Manoeuvre – The technique follows a three-beat rhythm. First, articulate a concern that most people share. Second, escalate the response far beyond what the concern warrants. Third, when challenged on the escalation, retreat to the original concern and accuse critics of dismissing it. The reasonable premise becomes both the launching pad and the shield.
Consider the case of border security. Sovereign nations have every right, indeed, a responsibility, to manage their borders, to know who is entering, and to enforce immigration law with consistency and fairness. That is the reasonable kernel, however, the response has been militarized ICE raids in churches and courthouses, the deportation of legal residents and veterans, the separation of families as deliberate policy, and the erosion of due process protections that took decades to build. When civil liberties organizations object, the response is swift and predictable, “So you’re for open borders?” The seasoning of reasonableness does its work; the critic is forced to relitigate the premise rather than challenge the excess.
Or consider trade! No serious economist would argue that trade relationships should never be revisited, that supply chain vulnerabilities do not matter, or that trade deficits are irrelevant to domestic industry. These are legitimate subjects of policy debate, but random unilateral tariffs, tariffs of 145 percent on Chinese goods are not trade policy, they are economic bludgeoning, designed not to rebalance trade but to assert dominance, punish, and restructure global commerce by fiat. The reasonable concern about manufacturing resilience is the seasoning, the unreasonable reality is a tariff regime that functions as a tax on American consumers while destabilizing the very trading system that underwrites global prosperity.
The pattern recurs with almost algorithmic precision. Diversity, equity, and inclusion programmes deserve thoughtful evaluation, but the administration’s response has been to gut civil rights infrastructure, freeze federal hiring, and mandate the removal of DEI language from government agencies as though the words themselves were contagions. Concerns about government spending are legitimate, but they do not justify an unelected technology entrepreneur being granted authority to dismantle agencies, fire career civil servants by the thousand, and restructure the machinery of government with the subtlety of a wrecking ball. The reasonable concern is the ticket but the destination was always somewhere else.
The Caribbean Feels the Pattern – For those of us in the Caribbean, this technique is not merely an American domestic curiosity as it arrives on our shores with material consequences. Drug trafficking and organized crime are genuine scourges in our region. They corrode institutions, claim lives, and undermine the governance capacity of states that are already stretched thin. No Caribbean leader, no Caribbean citizen, disputes this, but when the United States invokes drug trafficking as the justification for behaviour that looks less like partnership and more like coercion, the seasoning of reasonableness is doing its work. The crime is real, the question is whether the response serves the stated purpose or some other, less acknowledged one.
We have watched as the administration has used the language of security to exert pressure on Caribbean governments, pressure that extends well beyond any plausible counter-narcotics objective. The recent deportation flights, the characterization of entire populations as vectors of criminality, the implicit and sometimes explicit threats to sovereignty, these are not the actions of a partner combating a shared threat. They are the actions of a power using a legitimate concern as cover for something else, the reassertion of a hemispheric dominance that treats small states as instruments of American domestic politics.
The trap is exquisitely constructed. Caribbean leaders who push back against overreach risk being painted as soft on crime, as enablers of the very trafficking networks that torment their own people. The reasonable premise, drugs are a problem, becomes the cage. One cannot challenge the disproportionate response without appearing to deny the underlying reality. I am sure you can see the pattern in Cuba, Venezuela and in the new visa applications requirements.
An Old Playbook – Those of us from formerly colonized societies recognize this technique in our bones. The civilizing mission was the original seasoning of reasonableness. Colonial powers did not announce that they were extracting wealth and subjugating peoples, they announced that they were bringing order, education, Christianity, and the rule of law to societies that lacked these things. The premise contained just enough truth, there were societies without formal legal systems as Europeans understood them, to make the entire enterprise appear not merely defensible but noble. The unreasonable superstructure of exploitation was built on a foundation of selectively reasonable observation.
The structural logic has not changed. What has changed is the vocabulary, “Civilization” has become “security,” “Order” has become “compliance,” “The white man’s burden” has become “the rules-based international order,” invoked selectively, applied asymmetrically, and abandoned the moment it constrains the powerful. The seasoning changes with the era but the dish remains the same.
The Deeper Problem – The most corrosive effect of this technique is not the immediate harm of any single policy, though that harm is real and often devastating. The deeper damage is epistemological, when reasonable concerns are systematically instrumentalized, reasonableness itself becomes suspect. Citizens learn to distrust legitimate policy arguments because they have seen too many of them function as Trojan horses. The boy cries wolf, and eventually the village stops listening even when there are actual wolves.
This is profoundly dangerous for democratic governance. Democracy depends on the possibility of good-faith disagreement, on the assumption that when someone raises a concern, they are actually concerned about the thing they claim to be concerned about. When that assumption collapses, politics ceases to be a contest of ideas and becomes purely a contest of power. We are further along that road than many wish to acknowledge.
For small states, for the Caribbean, for Small Island Developing States, for all those nations that navigate global politics with limited leverage, the stakes are particularly acute. We cannot match power with power. Our instrument has always been argument, the moral force of principled positions, the insistence that rules apply equally, the appeal to shared norms. When the seasoning of reasonableness poisons the well of genuine argument, it is our instrument that is most damaged.
What Is to Be Done – Naming the technique is itself a form of resistance. When we can see the pattern, the reasonable premise, the disproportionate response, the retreat to the premise when challenged, we are better equipped to engage with it. We can say, Yes, border security matters, and no, that does not justify what you are doing. Yes, drug trafficking is a plague, and no, that does not give you the right to treat sovereign nations as subordinates. Yes, there are legitimate concerns about human rights in Cuba and the success of the economic model, and no, it is wrong to starve a population to force regime change.
The task is to refuse the false binary. The technique works precisely because it presents only two positions, accept the entire package, reasonable premise and unreasonable action together, or be cast as someone who denies the problem exists. The intellectually honest position, the position that serves both truth and justice, is the one that holds both ideas simultaneously, the problem is real and what you are doing about it is wrong.
That is not a comfortable position, it satisfies neither the wielders of power nor their most absolute opponents but it is the position of reason, actual reason, not the decorative, instrumental kind. In a political moment defined by the abuse of reasonableness, the most radical act may be to insist on the genuine article.
By Professor C. Justin Robinson
Pro Vice-Chancellor and Principal,
The UWI Five Islands Campus
Dear Editor,
There are moments in human history when a region stops reacting to the world and begins defining it. The Caribbean may be approaching such a moment.
For centuries, these islands were laboratories of empire – sites of extraction, rivalry, forced migration, and contest. Our sea carried sugar, slaves, soldiers, and warships long before it carried cruise liners and container ships. The Caribbean did not choose its early history. It endured it.
But history does not end with endurance. It evolves. What if the Caribbean is not merely a geography – but an emerging anthropology? Call it Homo Caribbeanus.
Not a new species in the biological sense, but a new orientation of the human animal. A peaceful animal. An adaptive one. A being shaped not by domination of space, but by navigation through it.
The Caribbean condition is unique. Small territories. Vast waters. Multiple languages. Interwoven cultures. High exposure to climate volatility. Deep memory of colonization. Continuous migration. In such an environment, aggression is inefficient. Isolation is impossible. Arrogance is punished by hurricanes.
Survival here requires something different. It requires cooperation across differences. Negotiation is necessary before any escalation. It requires resilience without rigidity. In evolutionary terms, Homo Caribbeanus is not the conqueror. He is the navigator of the future.
While civilisations on continents constructed walls, those on islands developed boats. Where empires were centralised, were archipelagos networked. Where others accumulated territory, the Caribbean accumulated relationships. And in the 21st century, those traits begin to look less like adaptations to constraint and more like blueprints for the future.
The global human system is under stress. Climate volatility intensifies. Technology accelerates beyond ethical consensus. Geopolitical rivalry returns with sharper edges. The dominant model of the past – growth through competition, security through superiority, order through hierarchy – shows visible strain.
A different model for human evolution is needed. The Caribbean offers one. Not because it is powerful in the traditional sense. But because Homo Caribbeanus has had to learn to balance. Between cultures. Between economies. Between languages. Between land and sea. Between vulnerability and dignity.
The Zone of Peace doctrine is one expression of this orientation. The Sea of Tranquility idea is another. The proposal for a Republic of the Caribbean reflects structural maturation. But beneath policy lies something more profound: a shift in how the human animal defines strength.
For most of recorded history, strength meant expansion. Homo Caribbeanus suggests that strength may instead mean equilibrium. The peaceful animal is not passive. It is disciplined. It understands that escalation is easy; sustainability is difficult. It recognises that in a closed planetary system, domination destabilises the very environment it seeks to control.
Small island states understand planetary limits instinctively. There is no “away” to send waste. No inland to retreat to. No buffer between storm and society. The feedback loops are immediate. That immediacy fosters mindful awareness.
In evolutionary biology, species survive not because they are strongest, but because they are adaptable. The Caribbean has been adapting for five hundred years – politically, culturally, ecologically. It has absorbed trauma and produced creativity. It has faced storms and built music. It has endured fragmentation and generated a community. That is not accidental. That is evolutionary pressure producing social intelligence.
Homo Caribbeanus may represent an early prototype of what humanity must become: cooperative without uniformity, sovereign without aggression, resilient without militarisation, plural without fragmentation.
In this model, peace is not a slogan. It is infrastructure. Neutrality is not avoidance. It is calibration. Unity is not erasure. It is amplification.
The Caribbean Sea itself teaches this lesson daily. This is not stagnant water. It moves constantly. Currents cross. Ecosystems interlock. Yet balance is maintained through dynamic adjustment. Disturb the equilibrium too severely, and the system degrades.
Human civilisation is now operating at a planetary scale. It, too, requires dynamic equilibrium. The Caribbean, long underestimated, may be quietly modelling it.
The ascent of Homo Caribbeanus does not imply superiority. It implies maturation. It suggests that after centuries defined by extraction and rivalry, a region once exploited may offer the template for renewal. Peaceful does not mean weakness. It means evolved.
The Caribbean has known conflict. It has known colonisation. It has a known vulnerability. If from that experience Homo Caribbeanus chooses law over force, cooperation over confrontation, and neutrality over entanglement, it is not retreating from history.
It is advancing beyond it. The peaceful animal is not naive about danger. It simply understands that survival on a shared planet depends less on dominance and more on design.
The Sea of Tranquility was once a place where humanity stepped onto the Moon when it first left Earth. The Caribbean Sea is where Homo Caribbeanus will learn how humanity remains, survives, and thrives here on Earth in harmony with nature and all mankind. The ascent has already begun. Quietly. Like the tide.
PJ Fameli,
Beacon Hill
Dear Editor,
On several occasions I have read the comments coming from the Police Union and I ask myself, don't these people know the impact that good policing has on a country? Where did it go wrong? So questions have to be “What is the purpose of a police force? Who are the police protecting? Who is the police serving?”
That last question might sound ticklish but I believe that those of us who did this since in the seventies do not recognise policing nowadays. And for those of you who are thinking that was then, I say look at the statistics. Go back in the books and see how often there were police strikes or police threatening to strike. No, we contained the strikes and threatening strikes. I cannot recall the police force ever having a public dispute with the Minister of Justice.
Our present Prime Minister who had the choice of two mature police officers and a lawyer who literally campaigned against the then sitting Minister of Justice got the mandate from the people to nominate one of the three as Minister of Justice. But instead of following up he negotiated the Ministry of Justice away for a minister who had very little to no experience in that field.
So what can be done. The books are still there, and it is even easier nowadays. because everything can go on the phone. So even if they can't remember everything, the theoretical part is a fingertip away. With a few experienced instructors and mentors it should not be that strenuous.
I might sound boastful, but when it relates to the police and keeping order in the country, it is the government who makes the laws but the police and other extraordinary police officers who make sure that these laws are carried out.
This is the reason I expect the police to be exemplary because basically they run things. I had already ended this letter when I heard of another fatal accident including a motorcycle.
I do not know what level of pride I would have, being the governor, the prime minister, the prosecutor, the chief of police and possibly even the ombudsman of a piece of land 16 square miles with approximately 50,000 inhabitants and cannot find a solution for the irresponsible manner in which drivers conduct themselves, continuously causing fatal traffic accidents.
Russell A SIMMONS
