Institute For Social Development

Put aside the emotional rhetoric, the romance of regional integration, and the familiar left-leaning public posturing. The seminal question is far more uncomfortable and far more urgent: what is actually happening to Trinidad and Tobago?

Trinidad is no longer merely underperforming; it is structurally cornered. The country is effectively broke—not because it lacks natural endowment, but because decades of policy failure, vanity projects, and an almost total dependence on the energy sector have hollowed out its economic base. What once made Trinidad wealthy has now become its greatest liability.

After more than a century, Trinidad’s oil industry has crossed a critical threshold from asset to burden. The cost of operating mature, onshore and near-shore oil fields now exceeds the revenue they generate. Successive governments failed to modernize the industry, failed to diversify the economy, and failed to anticipate competition from new producers. Trinidad built a country around energy rents and never planned for their decline.

The rise of Guyana has exposed this weakness mercilessly. Guyana enjoys easily accessible offshore oil and gas, lower extraction costs, and vast new reserves. Trinidad, by contrast, faces depleted fields, high production costs, and declining output. The closure of the refinery was not ideological or political—it was a tacit admission that the existing energy model is no longer viable.

Even more telling is how dramatically the regional economic hierarchy has shifted. Jamaica—long portrayed as the weaker, non-energy economy—now holds higher Net International Reserves (NIR) than Trinidad and Tobago. This alone should shatter lingering myths about Trinidad’s economic superiority. A country with oil and gas now has less external financial cushioning than a country with none.

The irony deepens. Jamaica, which does not produce oil, is currently exporting refined petroleum products and bunker gas to Trinidad. This is not a symbolic reversal; it is a structural indictment. Trinidad, once the region’s energy hub, now depends on refined products processed elsewhere—an extraordinary outcome for a petro-state.

Trade and capital flows further underline Trinidad’s diminished position. More Jamaican businesses now own assets and operations in Trinidad than the reverse, reflecting a shift in entrepreneurial confidence and financial strength. Meanwhile, over 60,000 Trinidadians travel to Jamaica annually, not only for leisure but increasingly for medical services, education, and business—another quiet signal of changing regional gravity.

Perhaps most damning of all, Jamaica has become Trinidad’s largest export market. This means Trinidad’s economic health is now partially tethered to a country it once subsidized through energy concessions and preferential arrangements. The former benefactor now relies on the former recipient to absorb its exports.

Against this backdrop, the notion that Trinidad can afford sentimental regionalism collapses entirely.
Why the New Prime Minister Is Effectively Anti-CARICOM
The new Prime Minister’s posture toward CARICOM is not ideological defiance; it is economic triage driven by stark realities.

CARICOM Cannot Solve Trinidad’s Revenue Crisis
Regional solidarity does not replenish foreign reserves, stabilize the currency, or fund government operations. Trinidad’s crisis is fiscal and structural, not diplomatic.

Energy Survival Trumps Regional Optics
Trinidad’s only realistic path to renewed energy revenue lies in repurposing its refinery to process natural gas. But the gas must come from Venezuela. CARICOM offers no alternative supply, and Guyana is a competitor, not a partner.

From Regional Anchor to Regional Dependent
Trinidad can no longer carry the financial or energy burden of regional leadership. With Jamaica holding higher reserves and exporting refined fuel, the old hierarchy has collapsed.

Fear of Jamaica-Style Collapse—Ironically Learned Too Late
Trinidad’s leadership sees echoes of Jamaica’s 1970s decline: falling revenues, ideological rigidity, and prolonged stagnation. The difference is that Jamaica adapted. Trinidad delayed.

Domestic Political Reality
Trinidadians are not voting on CARICOM resolutions; they are voting on jobs, inflation, energy prices, and fiscal stability. Any leader who prioritizes regional sentiment over national survival risks political extinction.

CARICOM as Constraint Rather Than Catalyst
In its current form, CARICOM does not enhance Trinidad’s competitiveness, does not unlock new capital, and does not replace lost hydrocarbon rents. From Port of Spain’s perspective, it increasingly looks like an obligation without payoff.

The new Prime Minister faces a brutal choice: secure new sources of income or preside over managed decline. That choice inevitably elevates national interest above regional consensus.
Trinidad is confronting the end of an era. The energy rents that once financed leadership, generosity, and regional ambition are gone. What remains is a country forced to choose pragmatism over posture.

The uncomfortable truth is this: a country that cannot generate revenue cannot lead a region. Until Trinidad rebuilds its economic base, CARICOM unity will remain a talking point rather than a strategy—and survival will trump solidarity every time.

Jamaica’s Economic Crisis: Policy Amplification, Debt, and the Legacy of Structural Fragility

Jamaica’s modern economic crisis is best understood not as the product of a single decade or ideology, but as the cumulative outcome of policy responses that amplified external shocks and weakened economic resilience over time. While global forces such as oil price shocks and international recessions played a significant role in shaping Jamaica’s economic environment, domestic policy choices—particularly during periods of People’s National Party (PNP) governance—deepened contraction, accelerated capital flight, and eroded productive capacity. By the end of the 1970s, Jamaica had suffered an estimated cumulative real GDP loss of approximately 30 percent relative to trend, leaving the economy structurally impaired as it entered the 1980s.

Jamaica had recorded a negative balance on its current account every year since 1963, largely due to chronic trade deficits. However, the 1970s marked a decisive deterioration. Expansionary fiscal policy, combined with declining export performance and rising import costs following the oil shocks of 1973 and 1979, pushed the economy into a balance-of-payments crisis. These shocks were exogenous, but their impact was magnified by domestic policy uncertainty, strained relations between the state and private capital, and rapidly rising public expenditure without commensurate increases in productive output. Investor confidence weakened, capital exited the economy at an accelerated pace, and professional emigration intensified, resulting in a pronounced brain drain that undermined long-term growth potential.

By the time the 1980s began, Jamaica’s economy was characterized by depleted domestic savings, weakened export sectors, and limited access to private capital. In this context, borrowing was not an ideological preference but a structural necessity. With insufficient export earnings to finance imports and no viable domestic credit market to support recovery, the government had little alternative but to rely on external financing to stabilize the economy and restart growth. Consequently, balance-of-payments shortfalls in the late 1970s and 1980s were increasingly financed through concessional loans from multilateral and bilateral institutions, with the International Monetary Fund emerging as the principal source of support.

During the early 1980s, Jamaica’s largest deficits were concentrated in the merchandise trade account. Trade liberalization coincided with depressed export prices, particularly in bauxite, which inflicted severe damage on foreign exchange earnings and the broader economy. Although the services account gradually improved—driven mainly by tourism—these gains were offset by substantial investment income repatriated abroad. Net transfers remained positive but insufficient to counterbalance structural trade weaknesses. Capital account surpluses during this period were overwhelmingly the result of official flows rather than private investment, with official financing accounting for more than 90 percent of capital account surpluses in the early 1980s. Net international reserves continued to decline, underscoring the fragility of recovery.

Jamaica’s rapidly expanding debt stock did not originate in the 1980s but was rooted in the fiscal and external imbalances of the 1970s. From 1980 to 1986, total public debt doubled, peaking at approximately US$3.5 billion and exceeding 150 percent of GDP by 1983. Debt servicing absorbed more than 40 percent of government expenditure by the mid-1980s and reached levels unmatched by most Latin American economies relative to export earnings. While debt rescheduling agreements in 1987 provided temporary relief, they did not resolve the underlying structural weaknesses of the economy.

The pattern of economic fragility resurfaced in the 1990s, when Jamaica experienced an additional estimated cumulative GDP loss of roughly 40 percent relative to trend, largely due to financial sector collapse and delayed corrective action. Although the global and domestic contexts differed from the 1970s, both periods shared institutional weaknesses in risk management, regulatory oversight, and confidence preservation. Notably, both major episodes of prolonged economic contraction occurred under PNP administrations, reflecting recurring structural vulnerabilities rather than identical policy frameworks.

In sum, Jamaica’s economic trajectory illustrates how external shocks, when met with miscalibrated domestic responses, can produce lasting damage. Borrowing in the 1980s was a constrained response to an economy already destabilized by earlier policy choices. The enduring lesson is not ideological but institutional: economic resilience depends on maintaining confidence, managing expectations, and aligning fiscal ambition with productive capacity.

Maroons and the Myth of Indigenous Assimilation in Jamaica

The argument that Jamaica’s Indigenous peoples were not extinguished but merely assimilated into Maroon communities is often presented as a convenient corrective to the uncomfortable reality of near-total Indigenous destruction. However, when examined critically—and especially when compared with Suriname—this claim collapses under historical, demographic, and cultural scrutiny. The enduring presence of First Peoples in Suriname alongside distinct Maroon societies provides a powerful refutation of the Jamaican “get-out” argument that extinction can be explained away by assimilation.

Suriname demonstrates a model of colonial survival fundamentally different from Jamaica’s. There, Indigenous peoples—such as the Lokono and Kaliña—persisted as identifiable communities well into the modern era, existing in parallel with Maroon groups formed by escaped Africans. These societies developed separately, with their own territories, leadership structures, and cultural continuities. Their coexistence proves an essential point: Maroon formation did not require or presume the absorption of Indigenous populations. Where Indigenous peoples survived in viable numbers, they remained distinct. The Surinamese case therefore exposes the logical flaw in the Jamaican claim that Maroon communities somehow subsumed Indigenous peoples entirely.

Turning to Jamaica, the historical record shows a dramatically different demographic reality. By 1655, when the English captured the island from Spain, the Indigenous Taíno population had already been reduced to a negligible remnant through disease, enslavement, forced relocation, and systematic violence. Spanish colonial practices had devastated Indigenous society to such an extent that there was no substantial population left to sustain cultural reproduction, let alone to meaningfully shape emerging Maroon communities. Assimilation, in this context, becomes less an explanation and more an evasion.

The Maroons themselves emerged primarily from Africans who escaped Spanish and later British enslavement. Their social organization, military tactics, spiritual practices, and languages overwhelmingly reflect West and Central African origins. While Maroon societies undoubtedly adapted to the Jamaican landscape—learning bushcraft, medicinal plant use, and guerrilla survival—this ecological knowledge does not equate to ethnic or cultural absorption of Indigenous peoples. Knowledge transfer can occur without demographic or cultural fusion, especially when one group has already been reduced to near extinction.

Moreover, Maroon identity in Jamaica has always been grounded in a narrative of African resistance, not Indigenous continuity. The treaties of 1739–1740, which recognized Maroon autonomy, were negotiated explicitly with African-descended communities who defined themselves in opposition to plantation slavery. There is no contemporaneous evidence from these treaties, from British colonial correspondence, or from Maroon oral tradition suggesting that they viewed themselves as custodians or continuations of Indigenous Jamaican identity. To retroactively impose such a role onto the Maroons is to instrumentalize them in service of a modern discomfort with extinction.

The assimilation argument also fails when assessed comparatively. If Indigenous absorption into Maroon communities were a generalizable pattern, we would expect to see it replicated across the Americas. Yet Suriname, Guyana, parts of Brazil, and even Central America show the opposite: where Indigenous peoples survived, they remained visible as Indigenous peoples. Jamaica stands out precisely because the Indigenous population did not survive in meaningful numbers. Exceptional destruction, not exceptional assimilation, explains the outcome.

Ultimately, the claim that Jamaica’s Indigenous peoples live on through the Maroons functions as a moral and political escape hatch. It allows society to soften the brutality of colonial history by substituting extinction with transformation. But history is not improved by euphemism. The Suriname comparison makes clear that survival leaves traces—demographic, cultural, institutional—and Jamaica lacks these markers in relation to its Indigenous past.

Acknowledging this does not diminish the Maroons. On the contrary, it respects their true history as African-descended freedom fighters who carved out sovereignty under extreme conditions. It also honors the Indigenous peoples of Jamaica by refusing to erase their destruction through convenient but unsupported narratives of assimilation. In this sense, the enduring presence of First Peoples in Suriname stands as a quiet but decisive indictment of the Jamaican “get-out” argument—and a reminder that historical honesty matters, even when it is uncomfortable.