Caribbean Covid-19 cases rising -- PAHO (Oct. 15, 2021)

 Although the numbers of Covid cases in much of Latin America and the Caribbean are declining, several islands in the Caribbean are seeing increases. Many Caribbean countries are grappling with unequal distribution of doses and vaccine hesitancy, World Health Organization officials warned yesterday. (New York Times)

Dr Carissa Etienne, PAHO director, said that in the past week more than 1.1 million cases and more than 24,000 deaths from covid19 were registered in the Americas. The Caribbean is where the greatest incidences are especially in Barbados, she said, adding it is in that country where the highest number of cases and deaths has been registered with the Dominican Republic and Haiti following closely. (Newsday)

While many Caribbean island countries had community protection in 2020 due to public health measures and travel restrictions, the situation changed this year, with the majority of countries reporting increases in cases and deaths in 2021. This is exacerbated by low vaccination rates in some nations. Etienne highlighted that while the overall vaccination rate in Latin America and the Caribbean currently stands at 39%, “in far too many places, coverage is much lower.”  In six countries, including Jamaica, Haiti, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, vaccination rates do not exceed 20 percent of the population per country. (PAHO) 

An “important challenge that the Caribbean is facing — English-speaking countries and French- speaking countries and territories — is vaccine hesitancy,” said Dr. Sylvain Aldighieri, the Covid-19 incident manager at the Pan American Health Organization. 

"“To be effective, vaccine campaigns must also be designed around the unique needs of the population,” said Etienne. She cited examples from Belize, which has promoted COVID vaccines in public spaces, such as bus terminals and markets.

The ongoing pandemic impact has relevant implications for tourism -- the U.S. CDC recommends against visiting many Caribbean countries currently -- which many islands need economically, but which poses epidemiological challenges, notes the Washington Post.

Debt, Finance and Economics

• The World Bank and International Monetary Fund are holding their annual meetings this week -- Covid-19 vaccine financing and debt relief for middle income countries are two topics development advocates are watching out for, reports Devex.
  
  
• Jamaica should join the call for debt reform, argues the Jamaica Gleaner editorial board, noting that Jamaica, like other Caribbean countries, "is locked out of most debt initiatives, such as the recent G-20’s payment moratorium for the world’s poorest nations. Most of the region’s countries are also ineligible for some categories of loans soft from multilateral financial institutions, although the Caribbean is the world’s most indebted region."

Migration

• Close to 170 Haitian children arrived in Port-au-Prince this week after being deported from Cuba and the U.S., according to UNICEF.
  

Public Security

• An ongoing surge in kidnappings has compounded Haiti's multiple political, social and economic crisis, reports the Washington Post. Recorded kidnappings so far this year have spiked sixfold over the same period last year -- affecting everybody from doctors, clergy and even police officers. Port-au-Prince is posting more kidnappings in absolute terms than vastly larger Bogotá, Mexico City and São Paulo combined, according to the consulting firm Control Risks.
• Haiti's political crisis -- which is fueling part of the migration surge impacting the U.S. government -- is in large part due to international interference. Gangs currently control more than half of the territory of Haiti, according to Haiti's National Human Rights Defense Network (RNDDH). If the U.S. and other countries cut off the ruling party, the Haitian Tèt Kale Party, or PHTK, the gangs would lose considerable power, writes organization director Pierre Espérance in Newsweek.
  

Regional Relations

• A massive new discovery of oil deposits in offshore Guyana announced by ExxonMobil last week adds urgency to a border dispute between Guyana and Venezuela, reports the Miami Herald. (Venezuela's claim to Guyana's oil-rich Essequibo region is, in fact, one of the few points the country's government and opposition both agree on, see Sept. 9's Just Caribbean Updates)
  

Climate Justice and Energy

• The United Nations’ Human Rights Council adopted a resolution recognizing the human right to a safe, clean, healthy and sustainable environment. The U.S. is among a handful of countries that oppose the motion, reports Inside Climate News.
  
  
• The Big Ideas Into Action Podcast focuses on the climate action perspectives of vulnerable countries going into COP26, looking at issues including finance, ambition, rules, loss and damage, adaptation and more.
  
• Local knowledge can demonstrate climate change impacts -- as is the case with declining fish harvests off Guyana. (Stabroek News)
  
  
• Journalist Bianca Graulau is documenting Puerto Rico's disappearing beaches on TikTok and YouTube, and in the process helps her audience make sense of the impact of colonization, history and climate change on Puerto Rico, reports the Huffington Post.
  
  
• Out of a total of 33 endangered species recorded in Trinidad and Tobago, over half of them live in the ocean, and many of them are at risk of extinction due to overfishing. (Loop News)
  
  
• Trinidad and Tobago's government announced plans to remove customs duties and VAT on the importation of battery-powered electric vehicles, reversing a previous policy. (Loop News) But some experts criticize the initiative, and note that such cars will still be more costly than their traditional counterparts, and difficult to obtain.

Human Rights

• Disparities in multidimensional poverty among ethnic groups in Guyana are consistently high but a UNDP report found that across the four hinterland regions there is a greater representation in the Indigenous community, reports Stabroek News.
  
  
• Guyana's Rastafarian community fears that the momentum to legalize marijuana has been lost, reports Vice News.

Democratic Governance

• Cuba's government denied opponents permission to protest in demand for civil liberties on Nov. 15. In a letter, officials told organizers that the march forms part of efforts to overthrow the government, reports Reuters. Protests in Cuba generally have been forbidden on grounds the United States was behind them, but the country’s three-year-old constitution opened a new space for “legitimate” protest.
• "As the dialogue about Puerto Rico’s status comes and goes in mainstream U.S. media, Puerto Ricans face further invisibility in discussions that impact our immediate reality. ... The collective confusion about our present comes from a failure to reckon with our past," writes Alexandra-Marie Figuera Miranda in Teen Vogue.
  

Histories

• Eric Williams, Trinidad and Tobago's first prime minister, upended the historiographical consensus on slavery and abolition in his book Capitalism and Slavery, where he asserted the primacy of the enslaved themselves in breaking the chains that bound them, putting their experiences at the center of his research." Controversially, he also placed slavery at the heart of the rise of capitalism and the British Empire, which carried profound implications for its successor, the United States," writes Gerald Horne in The Nation.
  
  
• The encounter between Europe and what came to be called the Americas, marked on Oct. 12, is an event to be lamented, not celebrated said Sir Ronald Sanders in an address to the Organization of American States. "The native peoples of these lands were not in need of discovery; they already had a civilisation, a rich culture, and knowledge that suited the sustainability of their environment. All that was either destroyed or desecrated by the arrival of Columbus and his crew who stumbled upon these lands in the mistaken belief that they had navigated a new route to the Indies."
  
  
• Christopher Columbus statues have been targeted by anti-colonial activists on the anniversary of the explorer's "discovery" of the Americas. In the Bahamas a man who referred to himself as “Michael the Archangel” was arrested after he allegedly used a sledgehammer to damage the right leg of the Columbus statue, reports EyeWitness News and more here. (See Wednesday's Latin America Daily Briefing for more on Columbus statues.)
  
  
• Andrew Watson, a Black descendent of Guyana enslaved people and slave owners, had a profound influence on the development of soccer, though his contributions from a century ago are largely forgotten, reports the BBC.
  

Culture

• In Jacqueline Couti’s Sex, Sea, and Self: Sexuality and Nationalism in French Caribbean Discourse, 1924-1948 the author analyzes work by authors from Martinique and Guadeloupe to examine the place of French Caribbean literature in current postcolonial thought and visions of the Black Atlantic -- Repeating Islands.
  

Events and Opportunities

• 19 Oct 5:00 pm (EC)-- Caribono Presents -- Reclaiming Indigenous Life: An Attempt to Repurpose the Law -- the contours of the law as an avenue for securing indigenous peoples' survival and prosperity in postcolonial societies through the experience of the Maya people of Southern Belize.
  
  
• 28-30 October -- 39th Annual West Indian Literature Conference, “Contemporary Currents in Caribbean Literature” -- University of the West Indies-Cave Hill, October 28-30, 2021
  
  
• COP26 Coalition Support: Form to know the needs and activities that the organizations will carry out around the Global Day of Action for Climate Justice on November 6.
  

We welcome comments and critiques on the Just Caribbean Updates. You can see the Updates on our website, as well as receive it directly through the mailing list. Thank you for reading.