The New York City date just got a serious upgrade. Keznamdi announced the full lineup for his BLXXD & FYAH Tour, and the Brooklyn Bowl finale is now headlined by Wu-Tang Clan’s GZA which is not the kind of addition you see coming for a reggae and dancehall run.
Bounty Killer doesn’t usually show up on soca records, so when the Warlord himself pops up on a remix, people pay attention.
News Americas, GEORGETOWN, Guyana, Weds. Sept. 2, 2026: China’s embassy in Guyana has sharply rejected criticism from a US State Department official over Chinese-built infrastructure projects in the country, calling the remarks “malicious” and politically motivated, in a diplomatic exchange unfolding as bilateral China-Guyana trade approaches $2.9 billion.
The dispute began after Juan Pablo Segura, Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs, used his personal account on X to criticize Chinese state-owned companies operating across Latin America and the Caribbean, citing “a costly, poorly built, and failing hydroelectric dam in Ecuador,” “abandoned construction projects and corrupt efforts to manipulate bidding processes in Peru,” and an airport project in Guyana he said “was plagued by more than a decade of construction delays and cost overruns.”
“Our region is riddled with projects led by Chinese State-owned companies such as the Sinohydro Corporation and China Railway Group Limited where corners were cut, contracts were broken, governments saddled with debt, and the local environment suffered,” Segura wrote.
The Chinese Embassy responded forcefully. “We have noted that a certain U.S. State Department official recently used his personal social media account to smear and attack projects undertaken by Chinese companies in Guyana,” a spokesperson said. “Such remarks disregard the facts and constitute political manipulation and malicious smears against normal China-Guyana economic and trade cooperation.”
The embassy pointed instead to delays plaguing Guyana’s Gas-to-Energy project, being built by American firm Lindsayca Guyana Inc. The company was awarded a $759 million contract to deliver 300 megawatts of electricity by the end of 2024, but has repeatedly missed its deadlines, with the project now expected to deliver only a fraction of that power by the end of 2026, a delay the embassy said has cost Guyana multiple millions of dollars as the country’s electricity demand continues to grow.
The embassy defended Chinese companies’ contributions to Guyana’s development, citing the Bharrat Jagdeo Demerara River Bridge, the China-Guyana Friendship Joe Vieira Park, and six regional hospitals as examples that have “helped to improve infrastructure, create jobs and support economic and social development, earning broad recognition across Guyanese society.”
The embassy also pushed back on the broader implications of Segura’s remarks, arguing Guyana should be free to choose its own development partners without outside pressure. “A true friend is not someone who stands at a distance and tells you who you should or should not work with,” the spokesperson said. “A certain country might be better served by reflecting on itself rather than pointing fingers at others.”
“Guyana and other countries in Latin America and the Caribbean have every right to choose their own partners and pursue the path of development that works best for them, free from outside interference,” the spokesperson added.
The exchange comes as economic ties between Guyana and China continue to grow quickly. Chinese Ambassador to Guyana Yang Yang said earlier this year that bilateral trade between the two countries surged to nearly $2.9 billion in 2025, more than doubling within a year and cementing China’s position as one of Guyana’s major trading partners.
Yang said the relationship has entered a “fast track” of development under President Irfaan Ali and Chinese President Xi Jinping, pointing to the completion of the Demerara River Bridge, which she called a “Bridge of Friendship and Development,” and the six Chinese-built regional hospitals as flagship symbols of cooperation under Beijing’s “Health Silk Road” initiative. She also noted more than 200 Guyanese professionals traveled to China for training programs in 2025.
“Facts have shown, and will continue to show, that China is a trustworthy friend and partner of Guyana, and that Chinese companies are important participants in and contributors to Guyana’s development,” the embassy spokesperson said.
The response came after US Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs Juan Pablo Segura referred to an airport in Guyana that was affected by “more than a decade of construction delays and cost overruns.” Segura grouped the project with troubled developments in Ecuador and Peru, arguing that some Chinese-backed infrastructure projects in the region have involved broken contracts, increased public debt and poor construction practices.
However, the US official’s social media statement was a political assessment rather than an independent audit of the airport project.
The original contract was signed in November 2011 between Guyana’s then PPP/C government and China Harbour Engineering Company for US$138 million. Guyana was expected to contribute a further US$12 million, bringing the initial project value to approximately US$150 million.
The original plan included a new terminal building, an extended runway and expanded passenger-boarding and apron facilities. Construction was expected to be completed within 32 months. When the APNU+AFC coalition entered office in 2015, the project was already behind schedule. Then Public Infrastructure Minister David Patterson said only about nine per cent of the work had been completed, while the new administration also faced a US$46 million contractual dispute with the Chinese company.
The APNU+AFC government subsequently altered the project’s scope to keep it within the existing financial limit. Plans for an entirely new terminal were replaced with renovations to the existing building and construction of a smaller arrivals terminal. The runway design and other facilities were also revised.
Those decisions later became part of a political dispute over why Guyana received an airport that differed substantially from the one outlined in the original agreement. When the PPP/C returned to office in 2020, it demanded that the Chinese contractor undertake additional work and correct outstanding defects.
China Harbour later agreed to finance approximately US$9 million in additional work at no further cost to Guyana. Major works reached practical completion in June 2022, almost a decade after construction began. Segura’s remarks come amid growing competition between Washington and Beijing for economic influence in Guyana and the wider Caribbean, where Chinese financing and companies have played a major role in infrastructure development.
NewsAmericasNow will continue tracking developments in Guyana’s international partnerships.
News Americas, NEW YORK, NY, Fri. Sept. 3, 2026: Jamaican author Marlon James has released what he calls his most personal novel yet, “The Disappearers,” a 600-page epic drawing on his own closeted youth in Kingston – and it has already earned him a second Man Booker Prize nomination.
The 600-plus-page novel, out on Sept. 1st from Riverhead, centers on a brutal attack on a group of gay men rehearsing a play in 1980s Kingston, and follows the survivors as they begin to disappear in the years after. James told the New York Times the book was inspired by a rumor he heard in his youth about an attack on a queer safe space that was never officially confirmed, the kind of violence against marginalized people that often goes unspoken out of fear.
James, 55, grew up gay and closeted in Kingston through the 1970s, 80s and 90s, a period when Jamaica broadly rejected homosexuality. He told the Times he began writing partly to navigate school bullying, eventually studying literature at the University of the West Indies before working years in advertising and design. He published his first novel, “John Crow’s Devil,” in 2005, following it with “The Book of Night Women” in 2009 and his breakout, Booker Prize-winning “A Brief History of Seven Killings,” in 2015. James currently lives in Brooklyn, NY.
According to the Times, James said the idea for “The Disappearers” came after he had already come out publicly and settled into life in the U.S., giving him the freedom to revisit the Jamaica he’d left behind out of fear. He described the novel as confronting “the story I was not allowed to live.”
To research the book, James interviewed nearly 20 people across Kingston about gay Jamaican life, past and present, telling the Times he expected to hear only horror stories but instead found comedy and defiance. He also conducted archival research at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in New York and traveled to London to research a chapter set in the city’s secret gay bars of the 1940s.
James finished the manuscript in December 2025 after working on it for months with his editor at Riverhead, according to the Times. The book was formally completed in July 2026 and was nominated for the 2026 Booker Prize shortly after, a moment James described to the paper as confirmation that the novel’s vulnerable characters “mean something to other people.”
Booker Prize judges called it “among Marlon James’s most ambitious and history-making works, a novel that examines territory Caribbean literature has rarely dared to occupy.”
“Beginning in late 1980s Kingston, it follows eight male actors rehearsing what is billed as Jamaica’s first openly gay play. When the men become victims of brutal homophobic violence, the novel shifts register: in the years that follow, one survivor sets out to investigate the fates of the others, and what begins as a theatrical story becomes something closer to a reckoning, he judges added. “James is a singular literary talent. His dialogue is sharp and propulsive, his phrasing is poetic, visceral and capable of moving from the painful to the darkly hilarious within a single exchange. The Disappearers could be read as a long overdue, clear-eyed confrontation with Jamaican homophobia: unflinching in its honesty, but written with the full complexity and love of someone who knows the place and its contradictions from the inside.”
The Times Dwight Garner writes: “It’s also an AIDS novel, a book about dying alone. (The disappearing acts of gay men are one of the title’s many meanings.) We follow one urbane Jamaican man named Havelock Titus back in time to Oxford University, where he studied and became a sexual chew toy for a set of patrician cads. He speaks of “malice” in old dining halls. He was at the doomed rehearsal and is ashamed that he ran away. He was an early AIDS patient. He recalls the days when a man could get hacked to death for wearing eye shadow.”
NewsAmericasNow will continue covering major literary milestones from the Caribbean diaspora.
News Americas, NEW YORK, NY, Weds. Sept. 2, 2026: A 20-year-old Haitian honors student who had just begun his first semester at Wright State University has died by suicide, his family says, after classmates taunted him over an ICE ankle monitor he was required to wear following the Supreme Court’s decision to end Temporary Protected Status for Haitians.
Pierre Damas Bel, an honors graduate of Springfield High School in Ohio and a former JROTC member who emigrated from Haiti in 2024, had planned to study neuroscience, play soccer, and eventually attend medical school, according to reporting by Capital B. He had celebrated the milestone on Instagram before classes began, according to the outlet.
In the weeks before starting college, Bel was fitted with a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement ankle monitor tied to his immigration status. In a July Instagram post cited by Capital B, Bel wrote that he had come to the country to pursue his education, not to commit a crime, and described carrying a feeling of shame and humiliation he never imagined experiencing.
According to Capital B, family members and immigrant-rights advocates say Wright State students taunted Bel about the monitor during his first days on campus. On Monday morning, his father, Pierre Ronal Bel, said in a handwritten statement that his son called home saying he wasn’t feeling okay mentally because of the bullying, and that he told him to come home so they could talk.
Hours later, police arrived at the family’s door to report that Bel had entered westbound traffic on Interstate 70 and was struck by a tractor-trailer. His family says he died by suicide.
Bel’s ankle monitor came after the U.S. Supreme Court cleared the way in June for the Trump administration to end Temporary Protected Status for more than 350,000 Haitians, a status that had allowed recipients to legally live and work in the country while conditions in Haiti remained in crisis. Since June, according to Capital B, the administration has directly called for Haitian immigrants to be equipped with ankle monitors and has resumed deportation flights to Haiti.
Springfield is home to an estimated 12,000 to 15,000 Haitian residents, many of whom fled political violence and economic collapse in Haiti. The city drew national attention in 2024 after false claims that Haitian residents were eating pets spread online and were amplified by then-vice presidential candidate JD Vance, contributing to heightened harassment and suspicion toward the community since.
Guerline Jozef, executive director of the Haitian Bridge Alliance in Ohio, said in a statement reported by Capital B that Bel’s death was among the most tragic outcomes of the administration’s policies toward the Haitian community, and that the administration bears full responsibility for a young man who told his father he could no longer bear the stigma of the monitor.
Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine, a Republican, called Bel’s death a “horrible, horrible tragedy” and described the decision to end TPS for Springfield’s Haitian residents as “misguided and wrong,” according to Capital B.
Community members gathered at the Bel family’s home Monday evening to offer support, and residents across Springfield have mobilized to stand with their Haitian neighbors and call on ICE to halt intensified enforcement actions targeting the community.
Wright State President Sue Wright expressed her condolences in a statement on Tuesday: “We are heartbroken by this devastating loss. Pierre was an active honors student who was passionate about soccer and was already actively engaged in his classes and the campus community. The University mourns the death of Pierre and extends our deepest condolences to his family, friends and loved ones during this unimaginably difficult time.”
The school added in the statement that counseling and support services are available to students, faculty and staff. WSU said later Tuesday that it “has no confirmed information regarding complaints or investigations into bullying related to the student.”
Before attending Wright State, Bel was recruited by Wittenberg University. The Wittenberg University Men’s Soccer Team posted the following statement on Facebook. “It is with deepest sadness that we announce the loss of one of our own, Pierre Damas Bel, a freshman recruit from Springfield, who tragically passed away earlier today in a traffic accident. Tagged with an ankle monitor by ICE just days before preseason training began, Pierre was no longer able to play. So he chose to pursue his academic goals at near by Wright State. May he rest in peace.”
A vigil has been planned to remember Bel for today, Sept. 2nd, at 6 p.m. at Columbus City Hall.
US DHS released this statement: “ICE can confirm that Ohio State Highway Patrol notified the agency on August 31 regarding the death of Pierre Damas Bel, a non-detained illegal alien from Haiti. The circumstances of his death remain under investigation by OSHP. ICE does not comment on the cause of death while that investigation is pending, and we will not speculate about unverified claims regarding other individuals.
“On March 5, 2024, Bel applied for admission into the United States at the Gateway Port of Entry via CBP One appointment, and he was released into the country by the Biden administration. On July 29, 2026, ICE placed him on alternatives to detention program with an ankle monitor while he continued in his immigration proceedings.
“No one is required to stay in the United States illegally and wear a monitor. Illegal aliens have a lawful, voluntary option: they can self-deport through the CBP Home app. Eligible participants receive a government-arranged flight home, a $2,600 exit bonus after departure is confirmed, and forgiveness of civil failure-to-depart fines. Remaining in the country illegally, while fighting removal, is a choice. Leaving with a free flight home and $2,600 is also a choice. ICE will continue to use detention or alternatives to detention as needed those illegal aliens who stay in violation of the law.”
NewsAmericasNow will continue following developments affecting Haitian TPS holders in Springfield and across the country. Reporting from Capital B contributed to this story.
News Americas, NEW YORK, NY, Weds. Sept. 2, 2026: Two US Navy littoral combat ships have arrived at Guantanamo Naval Base in Cuba, the latest sign of escalating US military pressure on the island.
The USS Billings docked first as part of its scheduled Caribbean deployment, followed by the USS Minneapolis-Saint Paul, which departed Naval Base Mayport, Florida on August 27th and arrived at Guantanamo Monday, according to Naval Station Guantanamo Bay’s social media announcements. Both vessels are designed for shallow coastal-water operations; the Navy describes the littoral combat ship class as addressing threats from coastal mines, terrorism, and stealth submarines while maintaining freedom of navigation through continuous maritime presence.
The arrivals follow months of unprecedented diplomatic and military maneuvers between Washington and Havana. In May, CIA Director John Ratcliffe met in Havana with senior Cuban interior ministry officials, delivering a message from the Trump administration that a “window of opportunity” would not remain open indefinitely. Days later, SOUTHCOM commander General Francis L. Donovan met at the Guantanamo base perimeter with Cuban General Roberto Legrá Sotolongo, marking what CiberCuba described as the first such meeting between the two commands in recent times.
In mid-June, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth visited Guantanamo and warned Cuba against acquiring weapons capable of reaching the base or US territory, saying “the future of Cuba is in the hands of its leadership” and that the Pentagon would consider “every possible option” in any contingency.
The military buildup extends beyond Guantanamo. Puerto Rico’s Roosevelt Roads naval base is now operating at full capacity with more than 8,100 troops conducting exercises under SOUTHCOM’s Operation Southern Lance, a deployment with a projected $79 million investment, CiberCuba reported.
The USS Billings LCS 15, a Freedom-variant littoral combat ship (LCS), is the 8th Freedom-variant LCS, integrating new technology and capabilities to support current and future operations from deep water to the littoral. The LCS platform is a highly maneuverable, lethal, and adaptable shipdesigned to support focused missions, including mine countermeasures, anti-submarine warfare, and surface warfare. Naval Station Guantanamo Bay is a vital U.S. military base in Cuba, serving as a key operational and logistics hub for maritime security, humanitarian aid, and joint operations.
The USS Minneapolis-Saint Paul LCS 21 is a Freedom-class littoral combat ship and is the 11th ship in the U.S. Navy’s family of modern vessels that maneuver in shallow coastal waters. The Littoral Combat Ship (LCS) network counters threats of coastal mines, terrorism, and stealth submarines. The ship preserves our nation’s freedom of navigation across the globe through an innovative combination of ship design and construction, crew skills and training, and operational programs that create continuous maritime presence and protection.
Within Cuban exile circles, figures including José Daniel Ferrer and Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara have expressed support for military action against the government, and an independent digital survey in May, with more than 42,000 responses, found 60.9% support for direct US military intervention, with 58% of responses geolocated from the island, according to CiberCuba.
Cuban leader Miguel Díaz-Canel promised in March what he called “impregnable resistance” against any military action, while Foreign Minister Bruno Rodríguez Parrilla has rejected characterizations of Cuba as a threat to US national security.
The USS Minneapolis-Saint Paul is scheduled to next participate in UNITAS 2026, the 67th edition of a multilateral naval exercise involving 24 nations, off the coast of Lima, Peru, beginning September 10.
NewsAmericasNow will continue tracking developments in US-Cuba relations. Reporting from CiberCuba contributed to this story.
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