From domination to humiliation

(A message to the Caribbean on African Liberation Day 2026 – May 25) THE CARIBBEAN INDEPENDENCE PROJECT is now in the era of its humiliation. Caribbean sovereignty is now being mocked, spat upon and denied.

We are now in our most dangerous phase since independence.

While our independence projects were not perfect and remain incomplete, the last 50 years had afforded us the space to begin repairing the damage caused by the five centuries of European domination which had stripped us of resources, cultural worth and indeed, our humanity. We had begun the long hard climb out of that terrible legacy.

Our sovereignty had always been grudgingly tolerated by our colonisers. Every effort has been made to deny us the full capacity to make internal decisions and to determine our international relations. Our freedom was always constrained.

What we are faced with today, as we mark African Liberation Day 2026 a few days ago, is not the familiar neo-colonial domination against which we have always struggled, but a new phase in which the United States, with the acquiescence of the European colonial powers, is seeking to control the region directly. This project is being openly discussed by officials of the Donald Trump administration, including Stephen Millar, who recently suggested that sovereignty is a meaningless concept and that military might is the only accepted currency. This was echoed by Marco Rubio in a recent speech in Europe where he lamented that our post-colonial independence had undermined “Western civilisation”.

Today, therefore, the Caribbean is no longer facing domination but humiliation. In their quest to negate our independence, the current US leadership is now throwing insults. Trump’s boasts about controlling Venezuela, the denial of Cuba of oil, his Caribbean visa bans and his insistence that we terminate our medical assistance programmes with Cuba are all part of this ritualistic humiliation.

They are meant to demoralise us, and to make our sovereignties appear as nothing in our eyes so our people can be psychologically defeated. However, the Caribbean people have a long and unbroken history of struggle against domination and humiliation. Anyone who understands the collective consciousness of the Caribbean people know that once they are humiliated beyond tolerable levels, they become blind to threats. The Caribbean people are fast approaching the point where they will no longer be concerned about visa bans and trade embargoes if their human dignity is being denied.

Our formal state leaders, however, appear too tied to power to ignore threats of visa bans. It is now time for us to form a broad anti-imperialist, grass roots social movement to resist this last desperate push by historically racist empires who have now become desperately fascist as they sense the collapse of their world.

Tennyson Joseph is associate professor of political science at North Carolina Central University.

Email tjoe2008@live.com