Black Immigrant Daily News

Cubans headed to the polls on Sunday for parliamentary elections in which the results are a foregone conclusion but with the abstention rate the real issue in play.

As many as eight million eligible voters will select from the 470 candidates on the ballot box vying for the 470 seats in the National Assembly.

What is really in play is the number of Cubans who refuse to vote.

The opposition has called on Cubans to abstain, with one opposition Twitter account calling the vote a “farce.”

Voting is not obligatory and abstention has risen steadily in recent years.

Municipal elections in November attracted a turnout of just 68.5 per cent, down from the 74 per cent who voted two months earlier in a referendum on a new family code, and even further down from the 90 per cent in the 2019 referendum on a new constitution.

Cuba’s communist government does not allow opposition, so most of the parliamentary candidates — made up of 263 women and 207 men — are members of the Cuban Communist Party (PCC).

Dissident Manuel Cuesta Morua, a member of the Council for the Democratic Transition in Cuba, said that “a sociological force is becoming the largest political party in the country: the abstentionist party.”

In reality, candidates still need to receive 50 per cent of votes to be elected.

Voters have two choices on their ballots: they can tick the names of any number of individual candidates, or they can select the “vote for all” option.

“I voted for the unified vote because, despite the needs, the difficulties that this country can have, I could not imagine” abstaining, Carlos Diego Herrera, a 54-year-old blacksmith in Havana, told AFP.

He said abstaining would be like voting “for those that want to crush us, the Yankees.”

The United States has imposed sanctions on the island nation since 1962, three years after the communist revolution that saw Fidel Castro take power after overthrowing the US-backed dictator Fulgencio Batista.

Student Rachel Vega, 19, said she had also voted for all the candidates, considering it “a step forward right now” that would “improve the situation in the country.”

President Miguel Diaz-Canel is among the candidates, as is his predecessor, the 91-year-old Raul Castro.

“With the united vote we defend the unity of the country, the unity of the revolution, our future, our socialist constitution,” said Diaz-Canel, 62, after voting in Santa Clara, a town 175 miles (280 kilometers) southeast of Havana.

More than 23,000 voting offices opened their doors at 7 am (1100 GMT) and will stay open until 6 pm.

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Black Immigrant Daily News

The Blue Justice Caribbean Hub, a regional hub to strengthen cooperation and coordination in the use of innovation and digital technology to fight fisheries crimes, was launched on the occasion of the two-day International Blue Justice Conference 2023, which concluded Friday in UN City, Copenhagen, Denmark.

The establishment of the Blue Justice Caribbean Hub in Jamaica is the latest in a series of advancements by the Caribbean Regional Fisheries Mechanism (CRFM) and its Member States in combating illegal, unreported, and unregulated fishing and transnational organized crime in the fishing industry.

In May 2021, the CRFM Ministerial Council at its 15th Regular Meeting adopted the Resolution Regarding the Copenhagen Declaration on Transnational Organized Crime in the Global Fishing Industry and the Blue Justice Initiative.

In October 2021, 12 CRFM Member States signed the Declaration together. Several of those Ministers participated in the Blue Justice Conference 2023, during which two more CRFM Member States–Barbados and Dominica–became signatories to the international declaration.

“This climate-sensitive sector straddles the kaleidoscope of coloured economies, unfortunately including the black economy–an economy, of course, bedeviled with illegal activities such as drug and human trafficking and unregulated and unreported fishing, which have often posed a significant challenge in the sector worldwide,” said Adrian Forde, Minister of the Environment and National Beautification, Barbados, in signing the declaration.

Minister Adrian Forde – Barbados signed the Declaration remotely Photo: CRFM

Milton Haughton, CRFM Executive Director, said: “The fish stocks in our waters not only provide a significant source of food and nutrition for our people, but also contribute substantially to livelihoods, economic activities, trade, recreation, culture, and the socio-economic stability of many rural communities. However, the pillaging and plundering of our marine resources … undermine the investments and sacrifices of our governments and stakeholders to protect, manage, and use our fisheries resources sustainably, to improve food and nutrition security, eradicate poverty, and promote economic development.”

Chairman of the CRFM Ministerial Council, Parmanand Sewdien, Minister of Agriculture, Animal Husbandry & Fisheries, Suriname said: “We see that the perpetrators are increasingly making use of sophisticated technology, to carry out these nefarious activities in our waters and across our region… The Blue Justice Platform is providing insights into the movement of vessels in the region and creating a basis for greater collaboration and sharing of information.”

“We welcome and support the intention of Jamaica to function as the regional Hub,” Minister Sewdien added.

Delegates from Dominica, Grenada, Montserrat, as well as Saint Kitts and Nevis, added their public endorsement while pledging their full support to the Blue Justice Caribbean Hub during the proceedings.

Pearnel Charles Jr, Minister of Agriculture & Fisheries, Jamaica, then outlined the importance of the Blue Justice Caribbean Hub to food security, national security, and social mobility. He underscored that reducing illegal, unreported, and unregulated fishing will translate to the sustainability of fish stocks and improved livelihoods for fishers.

Minister Charles explained that although Jamaica will host the Hub, it will also identify and appoint at least one superuser on the Blue Justice Community to follow up with other registered Caribbean countries to connect under the Blue Justice Caribbean Hub. National focal points will also be identified.

Dr. Emma Witbooi, Project Manager, United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) – Blue Resilience Project, said: “The Blue Resilience Project is very proud to be supporting the establishment of regional Blue Justice Hubs globally–of which the Caribbean Hub is the first. These Hubs will essentially be nodes for developing and sustaining capacity on interagency cooperation to address fisheries crime both in the host country and between the countries of the region. The Hub will serve the specific needs identified by the countries in the region, and this is exactly what we’ve heard here today.”

Ava Whyte-Anderson – Deputy Resident Representative, UNDP Multi Country Office in Jamaica, commended the CARICOM governments for their demonstrated commitment to ending illegal, unreported, and unregulated fishing and the Caribbean’s “sizeable contribution to the achievement of SDG 14 (Life below water).”

“UNDP along with our partners are committed to providing the requisite resources at the national and regional levels to ensure the Hub reaches its full potential,” said Whyte-Anderson.

Gunnar St?lsvik, Specialist Director, Fisheries Department, Ministry of Trade, Industry and Fisheries – Norway, commended the Caribbean ministers for the passage of the Ministerial Resolution. “It shows that that region is really taking this seriously and has a clear roadmap in the implementation of this… going from words to action,” he added.

Minister Jullan Defoe – Dominica signed in Copenhagen, Denmark. Photo: Blue Justice Secretariat / UNDP

St?lsvik announced the latest signatories to the declaration: the Ivory Coast, Mauritania, Madagascar, and Barbados, which signed remotely, and Somalia, Angola, Tuvalu, Guinea, as well as the Commonwealth of Dominica, which signed at the event. He said that Thailand was also in the process of signing. H.E. Bj?rnar Selnes Skjaeran, Minister of Fisheries and Ocean Policy, Norway, said that with the new signings, the total number of signatories to the Copenhagen Declaration had surpassed 60.

“On behalf of all the members, I will–as depositor for the Copenhagen Declaration–thank you all for your strong support, and I will also thank our new members for their support,” said Minister Skjaeran as he welcomed them to the global fight and to the Blue Justice family.

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Black Immigrant Daily News

By Riyad Insanally

Last month, Trinidad and Tobago (T&T) Energy Minister Stuart Young proposed a Caribbean energy alliance involving Guyana, Suriname and, of course, his own country. In broad terms, he was offering T&T’s established capacity to process oil and gas from Guyana and Suriname, and T&T’s expertise to help the two relative newcomers build capacity to manage their offshore resources.

While Guyana really is the new kid sitting on blocks of ever-increasing resources, at least in the Stabroek Block, it should be borne in mind that Suriname has been a small-scale oil producer since 1982, pumping around 15,000 barrels per day (bpd) from onshore wells. It consequently also has some experience and expertise to share.

Presumably, the Minister is offering T&T’s experience of 100-plus years in the oil industry not only in terms of his country’s successes but also with regard to mistakes made and pitfalls to be avoided. Details regarding the energy alliance proposal are however sketchy. The most we know is that, at the opening session of Guyana’s International Energy Conference on February 14, T&T Prime Minister Keith Rowley declared that T&T was “a viable option” for countries seeking to optimise the speedy monetisation of their hydrocarbon resources without incurring substantial capital expenditure. In this respect, he elaborated that T&T is offering its 10 ammonia plants, seven methanol plants and four LNG facilities to process natural gas from neighbouring countries, as well as proposing taking its 140,000-bpd oil refinery out of mothballs.

In a panel discussion, later that day, on Regional Collaboration, Mr Young revisited the proposal, with important contributions also being made by Robert Persaud, Foreign Secretary in Guyana’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Dr Dax Driver, CEO of T&T’s Energy Chamber, the representative private sector organisation for the country’s energy industry.

To add to his Prime Minister’s earlier announcement, Mr Young posited that Guyana, Suriname and T&T need to come together to provide energy security for the region, stressing that T&T has “the intellectual capacity and… the resources.” He placed particular emphasis on natural gas as “the energy fuel of the future”, arguing that the global demand for LNG, ammonia and fertilisers should drive regional collaboration among the three countries to develop their gas reserves.

Clearly, based on what the Prime Minister and Energy Minister had to say, the proposed alliance is of high economic importance to T&T. According to Inter-American Development Bank figures, T&T’s economy contracted every year between 2015 and 2021. Crude oil production has been declining steadily from 144,000 bpd in 2005 to just around 60,000 bpd in 2022.[i] While increasing global demand for natural gas in 2022 has been beneficial to the T&T economy, the country’s LNG sector is operating at 75% capacity, with one of its four liquefaction trains having to be shut down in 2021 due to a lack of natural gas. For this reason, T&T has welcomed the conditional US waiver of sanctions on Venezuela (for which it had long been lobbying), which would allow it to develop the Dragon Field in Venezuelan waters. For this reason, too, T&T would be keen to process natural gas from Guyana and Suriname.

Notwithstanding the obvious element of self-interest in the T&T proposal, regional cooperation to promote energy security among the three southern Caribbean producers of hydrocarbons makes a whole lot of sense. For Guyana, at least, there should be no need to reinvent the proverbial wheel, especially at this early stage of the development of its oil and gas resources. Making use of T&T’s existing capacity and facilities therefore has a certain logical appeal in the context of economies of scale, Guyana’s own lack of domestic technical capacity and the need to avoid white elephant projects. Even as more specific details regarding the proposed energy alliance are awaited, the precise modalities for collaboration and the delivery of natural gas would have to be thoroughly thought out and carefully negotiated.

During the aforementioned panel discussion, Dr Driver underlined Mr Young’s point that there is a lot of capacity in T&T that is available to the entire region, more especially Guyana, adding that regional collaboration can be and should be private sector driven. In this respect, he stated that the private sector – presumably the T&T private sector – could drive industry standards across the region, specifically in terms of safety, skills training, competence development and certification. He also opined that the CARICOM Single Market and Economy (CSME) could be used as the framework to facilitate intra-regional investment and business opportunities. This is all very reasonable.

For his part, Mr Persaud agreed that small size demands collaboration but made it clear that regional collaboration on energy security should naturally lead to collaboration on finding solutions to food insecurity. In other words, regional collaboration should go “beyond energy.” One hopes that the message, put very diplomatically, was not lost on his T&T colleagues. For it is no secret that there have been tensions between Guyanese and Trinbagonians over the newfound eagerness of T&T firms to do business in Guyana.

Moreover, Guyanese businesspeople have long been irritated by non-tariff barriers to trade in T&T, particularly in agricultural products, which continue to frustrate the implementation of the CSME and undermine all the rhetoric about regional collaboration and closer economic ties in CARICOM. Indeed, a case in point is the recent fuss in Georgetown regarding T&T’s failure, either through bureaucratic sloth or an absence of political will, to amend an archaic 1935 Act, which prevents the importation or even the trans-shipment of honey from Guyana to other parts of the region. This is a breach of the Revised Treaty of Chaguaramas, which among other things lays the basis for the CSME, and in defiance of decisions of CARICOM’s Council for Trade and Economic Development (COTED).

For CARICOM, regional collaboration is not only central to the regional integration project, it is an absolute imperative. CARICOM’s energy security strategy is built around harnessing hydrocarbon resources to reduce import dependence, pursuing energy diversification and developing renewables. The idea that Guyana, Suriname and T&T could anchor energy security in the region is not new but, as yet, it has not been fleshed out. The T&T proposal could therefore very well be an important step in this direction, by combining the resources of Guyana, Suriname and T&T, and by leveraging the latter’s considerable experience, technical capacity and facilities.

As Dr Driver has pointed out, the CSME already provides something of a framework for the pursuit of deeper public and private sector partnerships in the region. Now that a formal alliance has been mooted, Mr Young should be encouraged to put some concrete proposals on the table. At the same time, his Government would do well to build trust among all regional partners by taking a holistic approach to regional collaboration, especially by showing real commitment to implementing the provisions of the CSME.

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Dr Riyad Insanally, CCH was a career diplomat for 31 years and last served as Guyana’s Ambassador to the United States of America and Permanent Representative to the Organization of American States, from September 2016 to June 2021. He is currently a Senior Fellow at the Caribbean Initiative of the Atlantic Council’s Adrienne Arsht Latin America Center and Senior Advisor for the Caribbean at the Transnational Strategy Group, both in Washington, DC, and a Fellow with the Caribbean Policy Consortium.

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Black Immigrant Daily News

The United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency says agents from its Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO) in Chicago apprehended a Trinidadian national among 17 noncitizens identified as having been convicted of sexual abuse, sexual exploitation, unlawful possession or use of a firearm, drug distribution or trafficking, or driving under the influence.

On Friday, ICE said those arrested also included several Mexican and Guatemalan nationals, who were released from incarceration on parole or placed on probation into communities under supervision during a nationwide enforcement effort between March 4 and March 13.

The immigration enforcement agency said the 68-year-old citizen of Trinidad and Tobago, who resided in Indianapolis, Indiana, was convicted by the Lake County Circuit Court in Illinois for aggravated sexual abuse of a minor in November 1995 and convicted by the Cook County Circuit Court in Illinois for aggravated kidnapping, inflicting harm and aggravated criminal sexual abuse in May 2016.

“The enforcement effort was implemented to address removable noncitizens identified as having been convicted of attempted murder, murder-second degree, domestic violence, rape by force, sexual abuse, sexual exploitation, burglary, unlawful possession or use of a firearm, drug distribution or trafficking, or driving under the influence who had been released from incarceration on parole or placed on probation into communities under local, state or federal supervision prior to the ICE enforcement action,” ICE said.

“The apprehended noncitizens will remain in ICE custody pending removal proceedings before an immigration judge.”

ERO Chicago acting Field Office Director Mike Melendez said, “We will continue to apprehend and remove individuals who pose a threat to public safety.

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Black Immigrant Daily News

The State Department in the United States says that it has been notified of the kidnapping of two US citizens who were on a trip to visit family in Haiti.

It is reported that Abigail Toussaint and Jean-Dickens Toussaint, both 33, from the state of Florida, were taken near the capital Port-au-Prince and have been held for days.

The couple was reportedly kidnapped during a bus ride.

“We are aware of reports of two US citizens missing in Haiti,” said a spokesperson from the State Department.

“When a US citizen is missing, we work closely with local authorities as they carry out their search efforts, and we share information with families however we can,” the spokesperson added.

In the aftermath of the 2021 assassination of President Jovenel Moise, gangs have grown in strength, with large portions of the capital and other areas considered lawless territory.

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