Returning to Chaguaramas
Recall from this curriculum's ninth unit that Chaguaramas, the land Britain had leased to the United States for a naval base in 1941, became a specific point of nationalist frustration for Trinidad's leaders during the West Indies Federation's brief existence, with Eric Williams and C.L.R. James pushing unsuccessfully to have the land released specifically to serve as the Federation's capital. It is a fitting historical detail that when Caribbean nations eventually built a successor to the failed political Federation, they did so through an agreement bearing that same location's name: the Treaty of Chaguaramas, signed in Trinidad on July 4, 1973, establishing the Caribbean Community, known by its acronym, CARICOM.
Economic Cooperation, Not Political Union
CARICOM's founders, having watched the more ambitious political federation collapse within four years in the previous unit's material, deliberately built something more limited in scope but, as it turned out, considerably more durable: an organization focused primarily on economic integration and functional cooperation rather than full political union. CARICOM grew directly out of the Caribbean Free Trade Association (CARIFTA), founded in 1968 with Barbados's Errol Barrow, examined in this curriculum's ninth unit, among its original signatories, expanding CARIFTA's free-trade framework into a broader institution covering coordinated foreign policy positions, functional cooperation on matters including health, education, and disaster response, and, eventually, a shared regional court, the Caribbean Court of Justice, established in 2005 to serve, for member states that adopted it, as a final court of appeal in place of Britain's Privy Council.
A Membership That Grew Steadily
CARICOM's membership expanded over subsequent decades to include most of the Anglophone Caribbean, alongside Suriname and Haiti, whose 2002 accession made it the organization's only full member with primarily French and Haitian Creole, rather than English, as its dominant language, reflecting this curriculum's own emphasis, established from its earliest units, that Caribbean regional identity extends meaningfully beyond strictly Anglophone territory. The organization headquartered its secretariat in Georgetown, Guyana, itself a deliberate choice reflecting the organization's aspiration to represent Caribbean unity broadly rather than centering any single dominant member state.
Real, If More Modest, Achievements
CARICOM has never achieved anything resembling the full political union the original West Indies Federation aimed for, and member states retain full individual sovereignty, separate governments, and, in most cases, separate currencies, a far more modest arrangement than federation's original vision. But within this narrower scope, CARICOM has produced durable, functioning institutions: coordinated regional responses to natural disasters, joint positions in international negotiations on climate change, an important concern given the Caribbean's particular vulnerability to hurricanes and sea-level rise, and, as this unit's next lesson will examine in detail, a coordinated regional platform for pursuing reparatory justice claims against former colonial powers, an initiative no single Caribbean nation could plausibly have pursued as effectively alone. In this sense, CARICOM represents this curriculum's broader pattern one final time: after a more ambitious unified vision failed, Caribbean nations built something more limited but genuinely functional in its place, choosing sustainable cooperation over an unsustainable attempt at full union.
