CARICOM | Guyana and Trinidad Break Caribbean Ranks as CARICOM Stands Firm on Cuba

A powerful COFCOR declaration condemning Cuba’s economic strangulation and the threat of military aggression was undermined by a two-line footnote that signals a troubling realignment of Caribbean loyalties.

MONTEGO BAY, Jamaica, May 27, 2026 - When the CARICOM Council for Foreign and Community Relations (COFCOR) issued its statement on the situation in Cuba, it carried all the moral weight the region could muster. Strong language. Principled positions. The kind of declaration that reminds the world why small states with long memories speak with uncommon clarity on questions of sovereignty. Then came the footnote — and two nations effectively walked away from the table.

The Cooperative Republic of Guyana and the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago have chosen to reserve their positions on the COFCOR statement. In the polished grammar of diplomacy, those three words constitute a public dissent — a refusal to stand with the region’s overwhelming consensus on one of the Caribbean’s most enduring solidarity commitments.

What COFCOR Actually Said

The statement is unambiguous. COFCOR condemned the obstruction of energy supplies to Cuba, calling it a precipitant of a “grave humanitarian crisis.” It affirmed Cuba’s sovereign right to import and receive fuel. It reaffirmed the Caribbean’s foundational Zone of Peace doctrine and sounded the alarm on recent statements — widely understood to originate from Washington — suggesting the possibility of military aggression against Havana.

The body declared, in alignment with the overwhelming majority of United Nations member states, that Cuba poses no threat to any nation and that the decades-long embargo constitutes “an unjustifiable violation of human rights.”

This is not radical language. It is the settled, repeatedly reaffirmed position of CARICOM — rooted in the historic 1972 decision, championed by Jamaica’s Michael Manley, when Caribbean nations collectively defied Washington to recognize the Cuban government. That act of sovereign defiance became a cornerstone of Caribbean identity. It said, in essence: we are not Washington’s backyard, and we decide who our neighbours are.

The Guyana Calculation

Guyana’s reservation is the least surprising, and yet the most consequential in terms of regional optics. Under President Irfaan Ali, Georgetown has become the fastest-growing economy in the Western Hemisphere on the strength of its deepwater oil boom — a boom managed almost exclusively through ExxonMobil and its American partners.

Washington is Guyana’s most important economic patron. To sign onto a statement condemning US-led coercive measures against Cuba — even one grounded in international law — would create friction Georgetown can ill afford and has evidently decided it will not court.

That is a strategically coherent, if ideologically dissonant, calculation. But it comes at a price: it repositions Guyana as a nation whose foreign policy is increasingly tethered to Washington’s preferences, even on matters of regional consensus where CARICOM has historically spoken as one.

“What was once an unshakeable Caribbean consensus has now sprouted a crack — and two of the region’s largest economies are standing on the other side of it.”

Trinidad’s New Direction

Trinidad and Tobago’s reservation carries a different set of implications. The return of Prime Minister Kamla Persad-Bissessar and the United National Congress to power following the April 28 general election has already reshaped Port of Spain’s regional posture in ways that are only beginning to become visible.

While her predecessor Dr. Keith Rowley maintained CARICOM’s traditional solidarity line, the new administration’s first significant multilateral signal is one of studied ambiguity.

Trinidad and Tobago has long cultivated a pragmatic foreign policy rooted in its energy export interests and its geographic proximity to Venezuela and the broader hemispheric axis. To break with the Cuba solidarity consensus, however, is something qualitatively different — a signal not just of pragmatism but of reorientation.

It invites uncomfortable questions: whose preferences is Port of Spain now consulting before it signs its name to regional declarations?

What the Zone of Peace Demands

The Treaty of Tlatelolco and the Caribbean’s self-declared Zone of Peace are not decorative instruments. They are legal and political commitments that bind the region to collective resistance against external military threats and coercive power politics.

When COFCOR warns of “recent statements suggesting the possibility of military aggression against Cuba,” it is not speaking in hypotheticals. The Caribbean’s security architecture is being stress-tested in real time.

CARICOM nations — most of them small, many of them dependent on external partners — do not survive in the long run by accommodating the great powers on questions of principle. They survive by speaking collectively, presenting an undivided front, and leveraging moral authority in lieu of military muscle. Every reservation, every hedged position, every footnote exemption erodes that authority by degrees.

The majority of CARICOM members got this right. They signed their names to a statement that upholds international law, affirms Cuban sovereignty, and draws a red line against the threat of military aggression in the region’s waters and skies. That deserves to be acknowledged. So does its corollary: what was once an unshakeable Caribbean consensus has now sprouted a crack — and two of the region’s largest economies are standing on the other side of it.

The Cuban people — and the CARICOM nationals studying and living among them — are watching. So is Washington. And so should we.

— 30 —