After CARICOM: The Case for a Caribbean Development Doctrine

 

Sunday Essay  ·  Caribbean Political Economy

Why coordination is no longer enough — and what the region must build instead

By Terrence Richard Blackman, Ph.D.  ·  March 21, 2026

In 1972, sixteen Caribbean nations came together to create the Caribbean Examinations Council. They were building something modest but serious: a shared standard, a common credential, a regional answer to the question of how small states could prepare their children to compete in a world not designed with them in mind. Fifty years later, CXC still serves those sixteen countries and their combined population of approximately 6.5 million — a number comparable to Singapore or Finland, nations that have turned educational investment into engines of sovereign prosperity.

The gap between what those comparators have achieved and what the Caribbean has built is not merely economic; it is institutional. Singapore’s GDP per capita reached $90,674 in 2024, and Finland’s stood at approximately $53,000 — figures that dwarf the Caribbean average of roughly $9,500 for CARICOM states excluding Guyana and represent the compounded returns of decades of deliberate investment in human capital, governance, and strategic industries.^{[1] [2]}

Consider what happened in Basseterre, St. Kitts and Nevis, last month. Secretary of State Marco Rubio arrived at the fiftieth summit of CARICOM heads of government to deliver a message that was equal parts charm and warning. He spoke about Venezuela, counternarcotics, and energy. He did not speak publicly about Cuba, the island nation whose people CARICOM had just committed, in the vaguest possible terms, to assist with humanitarian aid, without a timeline, without a mechanism, without a plan. Trump had by then already declared a national emergency over Cuba, issued Executive Order 14380 on January 29, 2026, threatening tariffs on any nation that supplied Havana with fuel,^[3] and cut off its Venezuelan oil supply following the January abduction of Nicolás Maduro. The Caribbean, whose healthcare systems depend on Cuban doctors, whose history is bound up with Cuban solidarity, whose geography makes Cuban instability a regional crisis, sat in the room with Rubio and produced a communiqué. The Jamaica Gleaner, in an editorial published this week, rendered the verdict with unusual directness: CARICOM dithered. What makes that dithering so instructive — and so damning — is not the outcome but the reason. CARICOM had no doctrine to stand on. It had no principled, enforceable, collectively owned answer to the question Rubio’s presence in that room implicitly asked: what does the Caribbean actually stand for, and what will it collectively defend? Trump, characteristically, had already named his own answer. He calls it the “Donroe Doctrine.”^[4] The Caribbean has not yet named its own.

The comparison is instructive not because the Caribbean has failed — it has not, entirely — but because it reveals the distance between what the region has built and what it needs. Singapore and Finland did not merely coordinate. They doctrinated. They answered, with institutional force, the question that CARICOM has never quite answered: development toward what? For whom? On whose terms?

Fifty years after CXC and more than half a century after the Treaty of Chaguaramas, it is time to name what is missing. The Caribbean does not need more integration. It needs a doctrine.

The Limits of Integration

CARICOM is, at its core, a coordination mechanism. It tells member states how to relate to one another — through trade preferences, functional cooperation, the movement of skilled nationals — but it does not tell them what they are collectively building. The Caribbean Single Market and Economy, launched with considerable fanfare in 2006, remains largely aspirational. The regional institutions — the Caribbean Court of Justice, the Caribbean Development Bank, the Caribbean Public Health Agency — are real but undercapitalized and underempowered. CARICOM produces communiqués. It has not produced a vision.

This is not a failure of will so much as a failure of architecture. Integration theory, as it developed in the postwar period, assumed that the removal of barriers between states would, over time, generate the conditions for deeper union. The European project was the model. But the Caribbean is not Europe. Its states are not recovering from war; they are recovering from plantation. They do not share a continent; they share a sea. And the asymmetries among them — in size, in resources, in geopolitical exposure — are not merely economic. They are historical, psychological, and structural.

The numbers make the architectural failure plain. CARICOM’s fifteen member states share a combined GDP of approximately $90 billion and a population of 18.5 million,^[5] yet intra-regional trade amounts to just $7.2 billion — a mere 12 percent of total member state trade.^[5] By contrast, ASEAN achieves 23 percent intra-regional trade integration, and the European Union exceeds 64 percent.^{[5] [6]} The CARICOM Secretariat has catalogued over 80 active non-tariff barriers that continue to impede regional commerce, and compliance mechanisms remain weak. The CSME, in short, has produced a framework without a purpose.

Regional Bloc	Members	Combined GDP	Intra-Regional Trade
CARICOM	15	~$90 billion	12%
ASEAN	10	~$3.8 trillion	23%
NAFTA / USMCA	3	~$29 trillion	40%
European Union	27	~$19 trillion	64%

What integration theory cannot provide is a focal point — a shared answer to the coordination game that defines collective action. The Nobel economist Thomas Schelling taught us that in games where actors must coordinate without perfect communication, they converge not on the optimal solution but on the salient one: the answer that feels obvious, that everyone expects everyone else to choose. CARICOM has never provided that focal point. There is no Caribbean answer to the question: what are we all building together? A doctrine would provide it.

What a Doctrine Is

The Monroe Doctrine, proclaimed in 1823, was not a treaty. It was not legislation. It was a statement of principle — an assertion that the Western Hemisphere was closed to further European colonization, and that the United States would treat any such attempt as a threat to its own security. Its power derived not from its moral content, which was frankly imperial, but from its credibility as a commitment device. Everyone knew what it meant. Everyone knew what would trigger a response. The doctrine created a focal point for the entire hemisphere.

Two centuries later, the Trump administration has resurrected that logic under a new name. The “Donroe Doctrine” — named with characteristic braggadocio for both Monroe and Trump — reasserts American hemispheric primacy in the starkest possible terms: regime change in Cuba, the abduction of a sitting Venezuelan head of state, tariff threats against any nation that defies Washington’s energy blockade.^[4] The White House’s December 2025 National Security Strategy explicitly proclaimed a “Trump corollary to the Monroe Doctrine.”^[7] The message to the Caribbean is unmistakable. Someone is writing the doctrine for this hemisphere. The only question is whether the Caribbean will be its object or its author.

“The Caribbean Development Doctrine is not a foreign policy statement. It is a development strategy. It says: we know what we are building, we know why we are building it, and we have the institutional architecture to build it together.”

A Caribbean Development Doctrine would differ from the Monroe Doctrine in one decisive respect: it would be written by the people it governs, for their own benefit, on their own terms. It would not assert dominance over others; it would assert agency over themselves. It would say: we know what we are building, we know why we are building it, and we have the institutional architecture to build it together. That is a different kind of doctrine — not hegemonic but constitutive. Not a warning to others but a commitment to ourselves.

The First Pillar: Human Capital at Scale

The Caribbean’s most acute development failure is not a shortage of resources. It is a shortage of retained talent. The region produces graduates — CXC, UWI, and a network of tertiary institutions have seen to that — but it does not retain them. Brain drain rates across CARICOM states are among the highest in the world: in Jamaica, an estimated 85 percent of tertiary-educated workers have emigrated; in Guyana, the figure has historically exceeded 89 percent; across the Eastern Caribbean, the pattern is consistent.^[11] The Caribbean is, in effect, subsidising the human capital of richer nations.

The solution is not to prevent emigration — that is neither possible nor desirable. The solution is to build a regional talent ecosystem robust enough to generate returns even from the diaspora. Singapore did this through deliberate investment in research institutions, competitive salaries in the public sector, and a culture of meritocratic advancement that made staying — or returning — rational. Finland did it through a public education system so strong that its graduates became globally competitive without needing to leave to prove it. The Caribbean has the raw material. What it lacks is the architecture.

A Caribbean Human Capital Fund — capitalised initially by Guyana’s Natural Resource Fund and structured as a regional endowment — could finance the architecture. It could fund a network of Caribbean research universities, competitive fellowships for doctoral study and return, and a regional professional mobility framework that treats the Caribbean as a single labour market for high-skilled workers. CXC is the proof of concept. The question is whether the region has the will to scale it.

The Second Pillar: Resource Sovereignty

Guyana’s oil moment is, by any measure, extraordinary. The Stabroek Block — operated by ExxonMobil, Hess, and CNOOC — reached 900,000 barrels per day in November 2025,^[8] making Guyana one of the fastest-growing oil producers in the world. GDP growth reached 43.6 percent in 2024.^[10] GDP per capita, which stood at approximately $5,200 in 2019, had risen to an estimated $29,675 by 2024 — a nearly sixfold increase in five years.^{[11] [12]} The Natural Resource Fund, established to steward oil revenues, held a balance of US$3.25 billion at the end of 2025.^[17]

The question is not whether Guyana has wealth. It does. The question is whether that wealth will be governed as a national windfall or as a regional instrument. The history of oil states is not encouraging. The resource curse — the paradox by which natural resource abundance produces institutional decay rather than development — has claimed more promising moments than this one. The antidote, as economists from Sachs and Warner to Collier have argued, is institutional: transparent governance, diversified investment, and a long time horizon. The NRF is a start. But a fund without a doctrine is just a savings account.

A Caribbean Energy Transition Compact — anchored by Guyana’s oil revenues but structured as a regional instrument — could finance the Caribbean’s transition to renewable energy while simultaneously building the infrastructure for regional energy independence. The Rocky Mountain Institute has found that a unified Caribbean grid powered by 100 percent renewables is not only technically feasible but financially advantageous, with the potential to reduce energy costs by up to 40 percent across the region.^[18] The irony is precise: Guyana’s oil wealth could fund the Caribbean’s exit from oil dependency.

The Third Pillar: The Cuba Question

Cuba is the test case. The island’s crisis — accelerated by the Trump administration’s January 2026 executive order cutting off Venezuelan oil and threatening tariffs on any nation supplying Havana with fuel^[3] — is simultaneously a humanitarian emergency, a geopolitical confrontation, and a Caribbean institutional failure. CARICOM’s response has been, by its own standards, unusually direct: the Basseterre communiqué expressed concern, called for humanitarian access, and reaffirmed the principle of non-interference. But it offered no mechanism, no timeline, and no consequence.

The stakes are concrete. Cuba has deployed more than 24,000 medical personnel across 56 countries, with an estimated 387 health workers serving in Jamaica alone as of early 2025.^{[13] [14]} A March 2026 Politico report revealed that the Trump administration had issued a classified memo directing US embassies to pressure host governments to expel Cuban medical missions — a direct assault on a public health infrastructure that the Caribbean cannot yet replace.^[15] Jamaica and Guyana have already ended their formal Cuban doctor agreements under this pressure.^[14] The gap left by departing Cuban doctors is not theoretical. It is a ward in a public hospital with no physician.

A Caribbean Development Doctrine would have an answer to this. It would not be an answer that defies Washington — the Caribbean is not in a position to do that, and pretending otherwise is not strategy, it is theatre. But it would be an answer that asserts Caribbean interests: a regional health workforce compact, a Caribbean Medical Corps, a shared investment in the training and retention of Caribbean doctors that reduces dependency on any external supplier — Cuban, American, or otherwise. The doctrine does not require choosing sides. It requires building capacity.

The Fourth Pillar: Democratic Governance as a Regional Standard

The Caribbean’s democratic record is, by regional standards, exceptional. With the partial exception of Haiti, every CARICOM member state holds regular elections, maintains an independent judiciary, and protects basic civil liberties. This is not a small achievement in a hemisphere where democratic backsliding has become the norm. But democratic form is not the same as democratic substance, and the Caribbean’s governance institutions — at both the national and regional levels — have not kept pace with the demands of the current moment.

Guyana’s 2020 election is the cautionary tale. A five-month constitutional crisis, in which the incumbent government attempted to certify fraudulent results, was resolved only through sustained international pressure — from CARICOM, from the United States, from the Carter Center.^[19] The institutions held, but barely. And the lesson is not that Guyana’s democracy is fragile — it is that democratic institutions require active maintenance, not passive inheritance. A Caribbean Development Doctrine must include a governance standard: a set of enforceable commitments to transparency, accountability, and institutional independence that CARICOM members make to one another, not merely to the international community.

Guyana’s Moment — and Its Responsibility

For the first time in Caribbean history, there is a plausible regional guarantor: a post-oil Guyana with growing sovereign wealth, increasing geopolitical weight, and — if its leadership chooses — the capacity to capitalise new regional institutions rather than simply participate in them. This is the argument I have been making, in various registers, across several years of writing in these pages. In the CXC essay, I argued it at the sectoral level: Guyana should lead the reform of Caribbean education. In the essays on the Architecture of Exclusion and Access and Excellence, I argued it at the domestic level: Guyana must build institutions that distribute oil wealth equitably rather than concentrating it in patronage networks. The Caribbean Development Doctrine synthesises these arguments at the regional level: Guyana’s oil moment is not merely a national opportunity. It is a Caribbean one.

The question — and it is the decisive question — is whether Guyana’s current leadership understands this. A government that deploys oil wealth primarily to consolidate domestic political advantage cannot be a regional guarantor. A government that treats the Natural Resource Fund as a piggy bank rather than a sovereign trust cannot credibly advocate for resource governance standards elsewhere. Leadership of a Caribbean Development Doctrine requires institutional discipline at home as a precondition for institutional ambition abroad. That discipline is not yet fully evident. But the moment remains open. Oil wealth is not permanent. The window in which Guyana has the fiscal capacity to capitalise a Caribbean Human Capital Fund, anchor a Caribbean Energy Transition Compact, and lead a meaningful institutional guarantee is measured in decades, not generations. What is built in this window will outlast the oil.

A Caribbean Development Doctrine — A Four-Part Framework

The Monroe Doctrine was not written by the people it governed. It was written by a rising hegemon for its own interests and given, retroactively, the name of a principle. The Donroe Doctrine follows the same logic, with less subtlety and more menace. The Caribbean Development Doctrine would be different. It would be built on four interlocking pillars.

In 1972, the Caribbean built CXC — an institution born of necessity, modest in scope but transformative in impact. It demonstrated that small states, acting together, could create standards that endured. But the demands of this moment are of a different order. Oil, digital transformation, climate vulnerability, and geopolitical realignment are not challenges that coordination alone can meet. They require design, discipline, and a willingness to build institutions equal to the scale of the opportunity. The question before the region is no longer whether we can meet and agree, but whether we can build and execute. A Caribbean Development Doctrine is not a luxury of ambition; it is a necessity of survival — and, if pursued with clarity and courage, a pathway to sovereignty in its fullest sense.

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References

1. Trading Economics. Singapore GDP per Capita (2024). tradingeconomics.com
2. Country Economy. Finland vs. Singapore Comparison (2024). countryeconomy.com
3. White House. Executive Order 14380: Addressing Threats by the Government of Cuba (January 29, 2026). whitehouse.gov
4. The New York Times. The ‘Donroe Doctrine’: Trump’s Bid to Control the Western Hemisphere (November 17, 2025). nytimes.com
5. Hope Research Group. CARICOM Trade Data Analysis (February 2026). hoperesearchgroup.com
6. OEC World. CARICOM Exports, Imports, and Trade Partners (2024). oec.world
7. NPR. White House Calls National Security Strategy Trump’s Version of the Monroe Doctrine (December 9, 2025). npr.org
8. ExxonMobil. Daily Oil Production Hits 900,000 Barrels in Guyana’s Stabroek Block (November 12, 2025). corporate.exxonmobil.com
9. Offshore Energy. ExxonMobil to Stay Busy with Guyana’s Deepwater Oil & Gas Development (January 2025). offshore-energy.biz
10. Reuters. Oil Output, Exports Drove Guyana Economy’s Growth of 43.6% in 2024 (January 17, 2025). reuters.com
11. World Bank Data360. Guyana Economy — GDP per Capita (2024). data360.worldbank.org
12. Our World in Data. Guyana’s Oil-Driven Economy Has Had the Largest GDP per Capita Growth in the World in Recent Years (October 2024). ourworldindata.org
13. Al Jazeera. Why Is the US Targeting Cuba’s Global Medical Missions? (February 18, 2026). aljazeera.com
14. Black Agenda Report. The Caribbean People’s Debt to Cuba (February 25, 2026). blackagendareport.com
15. Politico. Memo Lays Out Trump’s Squeeze on Cuban Doctor Program (March 13, 2026). politico.com
16. Bank of Guyana. Natural Resource Fund Audited Financial Statements (2024). bankofguyana.org.gy
17. iNews Guyana. Guyana’s Natural Resource Fund Balance Stood at US$3.25B at End of 2025 (January 26, 2026). inewsguyana.com
18. Rocky Mountain Institute. Powering a Unified Caribbean: Charting the Path to 100% Renewable Energy (November 17, 2025). rmi.org
19. BBC News. Guyana Election: US Concerned Over ‘Electoral Fraud’ (March 6, 2020). bbc.com

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