CARICOM to hold emergency meeting ahead of Rubio’s visit

Caribbean leaders are meeting in an emergency session on Friday ahead of a visit by Secretary of State Marco Rubio next week to Jamaica where he will meet some heads of governments and to oil and gas-rich member states, Guyana and Suriname, an announcement stated.

The visit comes amid rising levels of concern about how some US policies will affect the Caribbean since the Trump administration took office in late January.

Chief among them are proposals, adumbrated by Rubio himself, in recent weeks include threats by the US to revoke the entry visas of government and other officials associated with the decades-old practice by most of the 15 nations in CARICOM to hire Cuban doctors, nurses and other professionals to help prop up the regional health system.

That arrangement has been ongoing for more than 40 years and many regional leaders say they would rather lose their American visas than chase away Cuban medical brigades from their systems. The US has accused CARICOM of enabling human trafficking and forced labor by agreeing to deduct a portion of their earnings and remit this to the Cubans government back home.

Several nations like Antigua and The Bahamas this week announced plans to review and tweak the payment system this week in order to comply with the American dictat and to avoid a confrontation of any kind.

Also, of concern, governments say, is the planned mass deportations of Caribbean nationals living illegally in the US even if they had been doing so for decades, paying taxes and having social security numbers and how their reentry into various nations would impact societies.

Officials say, it is unclear if the US will revive efforts to press some regional states like Grenada and The Turks and Caicos islands into accepting deportees from countries where they were not born following official overtures to some countries in recent weeks from Washington.