The STAR Businessweek - Big Data Boosts Tourism

THE STAR Businessweek August 4, 2018

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Big Data Boosts Tourism

Today’s travellers are creating more and more digital data, helping savvy tourism operators refine their product and grow their revenue The era of the travel agent is all but over. Today’s tourist is more likely to select his destination based on something she read on Facebook or a photo he liked on Instagram. Travellers begin browsing the web months ahead of their trip - visiting travel websites, reading reviews, researching attractions. All of which generates a huge amount of digital data. This avalanche of travel information is a goldmine for tourism operators, providing insight into who their customers are, what they want and how they can be reached.

Foreign ministries, not foreign ministers, matter It has become almost conventional wisdom that foreign ministries and traditional diplomacy are 19th-century anachronisms. In a hyperconnected, globalised world, ambassadors and even foreign ministers may seem about as useful as a horse and carriage Pages 3

By Catherine Morris, STAR Businessweek Correspondent Continued on page 4

Facebook exposes disinformation campaign to influence US midterms Facebook said it has discovered the first co-ordinated disinformation campaign designed to influence the US midterm elections, but stopped short of identifying Russia as being behind the attempts to interfere in US democracy Page 7

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History or Here We Go Again?

Data, Privacy, and Interference in Local Elections

By Ed Kennedy, STAR Businessweek Correspondent

Social Media’s Shift from Edges to Epicenter

The STAR Businessweek

BY Christian Wayne – Editor at Large

Neither by design nor by accident, the articles published in this weekend’s edition of The STAR Businessweek are heavily data-focused, but probably not in the way that you’re thinking.

The articles aren’t rife with questionable statistics, though in today’s world of alternative facts, questionable and statistics are almost synonyms—but they’re not done tabula rasa either. On the contrary, our lead stories are actually about data itself—and much like the items on the TSA’s (Transportation Security Administration) prohibited items list, data can be used for good and for evil.

For example, begin with our cover story, “Big Data Boosts Tourism” on how hospitality and travel companies are crawling the web, indexing and profiling data on millions of travellers in an effort to increase bookings and retention. On the other hand, you could begin with Cambridge Analytica’s highlight reel of political interference (or outright sabotage, depending on who you ask) in the Caribbean in “History or Here We Go Again? Data, Privacy, and Interference in Local Elections” starting on page 2.

And from the Financial Times, we have an excellent reader-submitted opinion piece on the importance, or lack thereof, of foreign ministries in the age of instant communication.

Are foreign ministries and all their luggage still worth it in the age of Skype and other video-conferencing technologies?

Be on the lookout for our special Banking & Finance-themed edition of The STAR Businessweek coming out in September 2018. If you’re interested in submitting an opinion on the state of banking in the Caribbean, we’d love to hear from you at starbusinessweek@stluciastar.com

It’s Nothing Personal. It’s Business.

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An index of large tech companies, including Facebook and Alphabet, suffered a correction on Monday as investors remained nervous about the group ahead of Apple’s earnings report this week

R

ecent months have seen Washington DC the subject of intense political attention domestically in the United States and around the world. Much of this is owed to the presidency of Donald Trump but DC has also become a focal point of ongoing debate surrounding data and its role in elections, especially after the fallout of the Facebook and Cambridge Analytica scandal.

The US may be the epicentre of this story but it is by no means an isolated occurrence. Old history and recent revelations affirm the Caribbean has also been subject to election interference.

Some may feel such interference is just odorous - something akin to annoying political attack ads - but, in reality, foreign interference of any kind can be a direct threat to a nation’s sovereignty.

Few Likes for Facebook By any measure the past week has been bad for Facebook. In a single day of trading on Thursday July 26 the company lost a whopping 19% of its market value, dropping US$119 billion in a single day. The loss also saw Mark Zuckerberg, the founder and CEO of Facebook, see his net worth

drop $15 billion to $66 billion.

While with that net worth Mr Zuckerberg won’t have any need to cut his monthly Netflix subscription to make ends meet, the drop nonetheless was Facebook’s worst trading day since 2012.

More significantly, it was also the biggest one-day decline in market capitalisation in US trading history, surpassing Intel’s record drop of $91 billion all the way back in September 2000.

The drop was largely attributed to be as a result of Europe. Not only has Facebook’s growth there been slower - and it has been hit by the new GDPR privacy regulations - but so, too, the news its user count in Europe had declined from 377 million to 376 million. Not only had growth stalled but the social media giant had contracted.

At the heart of this setback for Facebook has been the social media giant getting caught up the Cambridge Analytica scandal. Facebook sought to distance itself from blame but a lengthy history of its own questionable data management policies towards its users left room for little sympathy under the spotlight. Add in revelations it was a key conduit for the former UK political consulting firm on behalf of the Trump campaign in the 2016 US presidential election.

The management of personal data in a public context is a debate that’s continually evolving. It’s only when one looks back that the rate and scale of change is truly recognised.

While in many nations the internet has been a popular presence in homes and businesses around the world since the mid-1990s, it was only back in 2008 that social media first became a defining force in political elections. Incidentally, the 2016 US presidential election serves as a good bookend here.

The winner of the 2008 US presidential election, Barack Obama, was the first to truly harness social media’s power, launching a new era of social media.

No longer are Facebook and its competitors at the edges of public consciousness and pop culture; today they’re at the epicentre. Trump’s regular adventures on Twitter is proof positive. Yet even so, many citizens today still see social media as a plaything instead of a potential political threat.

While fake news has vividly shone a light on this in recent years, it’s also now clear that the forces behind Cambridge Analytica were actively engaging in election interference long before they turned their attention to the White House run of 2016.

Damning Data

What Cambridge Analytica’s parent company, SCL Group, did will be at least off-putting - and most likely infuriating - to people of the Caribbean family. James Bond movies have villains trying to roll leaders and fix elections but the apparent conduct of SCL Group proves truth is stranger than fiction. For much of the world, the intrusive influence of Cambridge Analytica may be revelatory but people of the Caribbean are already acquainted with it.

In 2009, in St. Vincent and the Grenadines, the referendum to establish a new constitution failed. Prime Minister Ralph Gonsalves alleged the defeat was in large part owed to the hiring of the SCL Group by opposition forces. Notwithstanding other factors -like some of Gonsalves’s more contentious reform proposals - the free views of voting citizens were Continued on page 5

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Foreign ministries, not foreign ministers, matter The legacy of the great 19th-century diplomats is a system that works By: Reader opinion to the Financial Times

I

t has become almost conventional wisdom that foreign ministries and traditional diplomacy are 19th-century anachronisms. In a hyperconnected, globalised world, ambassadors and even foreign ministers may seem about as useful as a horse and carriage. But while the golden age of foreign ministers may have passed, foreign ministries remain vital departments of state.

It is true that nowadays there are many more ways of communicating and gathering information about the outside world. It is also true that prime ministers and presidents are increasingly centralising crucial elements of foreign policy in their own hands. In recent years, Japan, China and the UK have all set up national security councils — centred around the prime minister or president’s office. Foreign ministers are more outer than inner circle.

It is also easy to judge modern foreign ministers as lacking the stature of the “greats” that the 1815 Vienna Congress helped to create. We see no Charles de Talleyrand-Périgord for France, no Dean Acheson for the US, no Willy Brandt for Germany and no Lord Carrington for the UK. Yet foreign ministers can be effective even if they are not household names.

Not standing out may be what allows the likes of Germany’s Heiko Maas and France’s Jean-Yves Le Drian and their staff to focus on the complex business of managing relations with other countries.

Indeed, the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office’s job was not made easier by being headed, until recently, by Boris Johnson, a foreign secretary best known for his alienating and bumbling showmanship. Mr Johnson resigned in July after a visible but dismal tenure.

Foreign ministries are sometimes in reasonable shape despite, not because of, their leaders. And they still have a critical job to do

Putting one’s foot in it: The UK Foreign Secretary, Jeremy Hunt, and his Chinese wife, Lucia, whom he described as Japanese while on a recent diplomatic mission to Beijng (Getty Images Europe)

Foreign ministries are sometimes in reasonable shape despite, not because of, their leaders. And they still have a critical job to do.

It may be that headline issues are no longer run out of foreign ministries. But that still leaves the day-to-day business of coordinating, planning and negotiating with other nations, which heads of state may lack the time and the expertise to address.

This is the reality that US president Donald Trump fails to acknowledge. He places little

value on the sophisticated planning and low-key teamwork that is essential to effective foreign ministries. He is also unwilling to share the stage, even with his own officials. While trying to revive a hollowed-out state department, Mike Pompeo, the US secretary of state, always follows one step behind the president.

Given Mr Trump’s knack for alienating America’s allies and making friends in strange places, Mr Pompeo has one of

the hardest foreign minister jobs going.

By focusing on personal relationships, Mr Trump is disrupting a diplomatic tradition that dates back to the Vienna Congress. As well as setting the precedent for diplomatic negotiations in plenary, the congress led to the rise in prominence of foreign ministers.

The “reign” of the foreign minister may be over, but in the 21st century there is even more for the diplomats to do. In an age of social media and lower cost air travel, states and societies interact more. Political realities shift rapidly, both within regional blocs and between major powers, even if, as Harvard psychology professor Stephen Pinker notes, the changes are less violent than in the past.

Foreign ministries, for the most part, are working well. They remain vital to the safe conduct of international relations. If they appear ineffective, it is because their often modest resources are increasingly diverted to adapting to the Trumpian era, patching holes in international agreements and multilateral relationships across the world.

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Sandals Grande St. Lucian Spa & Beach Resort, Pigeon Island Causeway

Government & Development at Mastercard Advisers said: “Customers are turning to different digital sources in order to plan their trips, making it more difficult to understand their behaviours and more difficult to reach them. This creates an enormous amount of data that is harder to digest and harder to action. New insights and new approaches in marketing are needed to effectively compete in the sector.”

QUALITY, NOT QUANTITY

Big Data Boosts Tourism Today’s travellers are creating more and more digital data, helping savvy tourism operators refine their product and grow their revenue Continued from page 1

A DIGITAL TRAIL

74% of leisure travellers and 77% of business travellers turn to the web when deciding where or how they want to travel, according to a 2014 study by Google and Ipsos MediaCT. Travel agents have fallen out of favour in recent years with only 13% of leisure travellers using their services. Online, potential tourists look at a wide variety of content including YouTube, search engines such as Google, and travel review websites. Millennials are likely to be swayed by social media in

particular. According to a study by American Express Insights, 84% of millennials say user-generated content has a real impact on their travel decisions and 57% update social media every day while travelling. In this way, just one Facebook photo of a group enjoying sunset cocktails in Antigua can ripple through the social network to create multiple bookings for that destination.

Everyone planning a trip leaves a digital trail - through booking sites, social media and online forums - and hot on their heels are

tourism operators, eager to find clues on who these travellers are and how to reach them. But harnassing the digital data, and using it to its fullest potential, requires a flexible, innovative and considered approach. The sheer volume of information online can overwhelm marketing departments if they don’t have an effective strategy in place.

Speaking at a recent seminar hosted by the Caribbean Hotel & Tourism Association, Antonia Stroeh, Senior Vice President,

The type of information generated online where tourists are visiting, what they want to do, where they want to stay, how much they want to spend - is useful at every level of the sector, from small tour operators to sprawling mega-resorts. It’s also a prime resource for government tourism bodies who have long been familiar with the power of reaching customers through their computers.

Many industry players are now using big data analytics services to manage and process their marketing information - tracking patterns, predicting behaviours and organising data into clear and detailed reports. Airlines were some of the earliest adopters of the technology with British Airways rolling out its ‘Know Me’ programme in 2012. This initiative used big data analytics to reward customers for their brand loyalty, track service performance and better target promotional offers.

Governments have also seen the benefits of big data platforms. In 2015 the Cuban government recruited a Spanish analytics firm to monitor hotel performance, social media chatter and activity from competitors.

Marriot was one of the first major hotel chains to embrace big data in relation to revenue management. The brand is heavily focused on ensuring customer loyalty and uses big data to personalise options for visitors to its website.

International hotel brand Starwood Hotels and Resorts has also invested heavily in its analytics platform, increasing its revenue per room by 5% through better pricing and promotion.

Brands such as Starwood have seen a boost from their analytics investment because they focus not just on the volume of information acquired, but the quality of that data. This is a crucial distinction according to Stroeh: “Lots of destinations do a fantastic job of trying to understand their tourists [but] we are trying to get to the next level of understanding. It is not just about volumes of tourists but the quality [of these tourists] and what they care about.”

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BENEFITS AND CHALLENGES

Attracting quality tourists requires precise marketing. Big data can help identify how tourists perceive destinations, how much they are prepared to spend, what they value in terms of experiences, how they feel about competitors and when they like to travel.

All of which adds up to intensely customerfocused marketing which not only helps a company’s bottom line, but makes for happier, more satisfied customers.

Leveraging big data will help those in the tourism industry make smarter investments and identify new niches - throwing up data that indicates if a certain segment has been overlooked or underfunded. It also helps operators weather any global shocks.

With the impact of Brexit still uncertain, and volatility in world markets, operators need to stay on top of emerging trends and be responsive to their customers. In a world where technology’s reach is ever-increasing, those that don’t embrace big data risk

falling behind, according to Stroeh.

“Use of digital tools will only continue to accelerate.”

Big data should not be seen as a panacea, however. While a tool for better decisionmaking, it is not risk-free and comes with its own set of challenges regarding data protection and privacy. Safeguards must be in place to ensure responsible handling of customer information - prioritising transparency and consent. These measures, combined with platforms used to analyse big data, can be a significant cost outlay for smaller firms, for whom the necessary expertise can be cost-prohibitive.

As digital tourism increases, the need for analytics will only grow. But while crunching the numbers can throw up valuable insights, it cannot replace genuine innovation and creativity. In an industry which has people at its core, the best marketing is based both on data and human ingenuity.

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History or Here We Go Again?

Data, Privacy, and Interference in Local Elections Continued from page 2

SCL Group reportedly entrapped the leader of the opposition party, Lindsay Grant (pictured), in St. Kitts and Nevis with a $1.4 million bribe in order to secure an election win for the country’s Labour party, which was a client of SCL Group, The Times reported

According to data released by Samsung, users are taking an average of 25,000 selfies in a lifetime, with 95% of all users having taken at least one selfie

allegedly undermined by SCL Group. That’s an issue for all citizens on any side of an issue.

In the 2010 election in St Kitts and Nevis, opposition leader Lindsay Grant was caught in an alleged sting operation, promising to sell crown land to a property developer at a favourable price. It was not a high moment for Grant’s career.

However, if the circumstances of the deal were not organic, but instead created by SCL Group simply as a stitch-up to catch Grant out, then that is still a clear-cut case of foreign interference. Such an act is not beneficial to the electoral process in the nation of 55,000; it is an act of sabotage.

Even here in Saint Lucia, SCL Group has been active. Seeking employment with thenPrime Minister Stephenson King, allegedly SCL

Group promised to work on behalf of King’s campaign in exchange for being retained to work on a public health awareness project if King were to win re-election. King denies ever having retained SCL Group.

Recent records have revealed SCL Group also had designs on making its presence known in Trinidad and Tobago during 2013.

Before it became infamous in the US, SCL Group was already making waves in the Caribbean.

Profitable Privacy

Ensuring greater individual privacy is not just valuable to the public sector but also the private.

Businesses that know they can operate in a secure environment will be drawn to nations that offer such security, especially as privacy is identified as a growing concern by many

citizens, and it can have flow-on effects from public to private, and vice-versa.

That’s why advents like ProtonMail have made such waves. Headquartered in Switzerland, the email client has made a huge selling point of its protection of personal data, with its Swiss location chosen due to the host country’s user-friendly privacy laws.

There’s no suggestion any Caribbean nation should (or could) overturn all existing laws overnight to mirror such a set-up but anyone suggesting that there’s no value in prioritising privacy in business would do well to take another look at ProtonMail, and ventures like it.

As time goes on, digital users will only grow more concerned with the use of their personal data online.

Any Caribbean business or nation that heeds their concerns could win sizeable business.

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Emerging economies should teach the curriculum of the future

By Interamerican Development Bank

A

ll around the world, leaders from government and industry debate the “future of work”. We have all seen predictions of a massive shift in the workforce needs of the future. The latest prediction from McKinsey Global Institute is that approximately 50% of existing work activities can be displaced, replaced or changed by automation of some form, whether caused by traditional software, robotics or new artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithms.

Despite a unanimous agreement about the wave of change, the world is not reacting fast enough to update our system of education. A student that begins primary school today will graduate from university in the mid-2030s, and their career will last through 2060 or beyond. While we cannot predict exactly what our workforce needs will be in the middle of the century, we can be certain that the workforce needs to be changed and will continue to change.

Any discussion of the future of work should go hand-in-hand with a discussion of the future of curriculum. Yet, when you visit most schools in 2018, you will see teachers teaching the exact same subject matter as taught in 1918: reading, writing, mathematics, science, history, and

Emerging economies have an opportunity to leapfrog technology and development, but must prepare their youth for the careers of the future

foreign languages. Debates about the future of education centre on changing how we teach, to embrace technology in the classroom, but there is nearly zero debate about changing what we teach.

Surely some of the topics we teach today will not be relevant in the 2030s: handwriting is increasingly obsolete, complex arithmetic is no longer done by hand, and the Internet has replaced our need for memorizing many

basic facts. Meanwhile, digital skills, problem solving, creativity and collaboration are all needed each year, yet not taught in our schools. Even when schools teach digital skills, they teach how to use technology - how to create a document or a presentation - rather than how to create technology.

To prepare all students for the creative, collaborative and digital problem solving skills of the future, schools must teach computer science as part of the curriculum.

This is not just about coding. Computer science is about coding, computational thinking, interface design, data analysis, machine learning, cyber security, networking and robotics. And learning computer science exercises creativity, problem solving and collaboration. These skills are not just important for technical careers in the developed world; they are valuable for every career in all economies.

Computer science should not be relegated to after-school clubs, robotics contests or hackathons. It should be taught as part of the primary and secondary school day. Education leaders should discuss removing aspects of the curriculum of 1918 to make room for the curriculum of 2018.

To prepare for the 2030s and beyond, emerging economies have an opportunity to leapfrog, to prepare their youth for the careers of the future. Our schools should teach the curriculum of the future, not just the curriculum of the past. Already, many countries have begun embracing computer science as part of their national curriculum.

In the United States, 44 states have changed policies to recognize computer science as part of the academic core. Beyond the US, more than 25 countries have plans to expand schoolday access to computer science: not only the UK, Australia, Japan and South Korea, but also Argentina, Ecuador, Italy, Malaysia, Sweden and Thailand.

Teaching computer science in schools may sound intimidating but it is an idea that generates hope. It inspires teachers and engages students. And even though the majority of the world’s teachers do not have experience in computer science, and many of the world’s schools lack connected computers, these are problems we can and should solve.

They are problems that countries like Brazil, Chile and Nigeria are establishing plans to solve, and the rest of the world should follow suit.

The future of work may be uncertain. But one thing is absolutely certain: computer science will be in greater demand than ever before, and every student in every school should have an opportunity to learn it as part of their school curriculum.

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Facebook exposes disinformation campaign to influence US midterms

Social network removes 32 pages and accounts for ‘co-ordinated inauthentic behaviour’

By Hannah Kuchler, Financial Times Correspondent in San Francisco

F

acebook said it has discovered the first coordinated disinformation campaign designed to influence the US midterm elections, but stopped short of identifying Russia as being behind the attempts to interfere in US democracy.

The social network has been working with the FBI on the attempted interference in the November vote, which follows its discovery of the Russian Internet Research Agency campaign to sow division in the US during the last presidential election campaign in 2016.

Facebook removed 32 pages and accounts from both Facebook and Instagram because they were involved in “co-ordinated inauthentic behaviour”, the company said. Almost 300,000 people followed at least one of these pages, created between March 2017 and May 2018. The pages ran about 150 ads at the cost of around $11,000 but Facebook said the operatives had not been able to run ads since the introduction of its new system to verify political advertisers.

Sheryl Sandberg, chief operating officer, said the company was sharing the information now because one page was promoting a protest set to take place in Washington next week.

Although the company did not accuse Russia of being behind the effort, Mark Warner, a senator and the top Democrat on the Senate intelligence committee, said it was “further evidence that the Kremlin” was using social media to “sow division and spread disinformation”.

Donald Trump has come under heavy criticism for his lukewarm backing of US intelligence findings that Russia was behind online campaigns to influence the 2016 presidential election.

During their recent summit in Helsinki, President Vladimir Putin acknowledged he had supported Mr Trump’s candidacy because he had advocated warmer USRussian ties.

An indictment filed by the US justice department in February charged the Russian IRA with using social media to promote causes such as Black Lives Matter and to spread allegations of voter fraud.

The pages identified by Facebook in its new disclosures included one that tried to stir up tensions by organising a counter-protest to a “Unite the Right” event in Washington on August 10-12.

Inviting people to “No Unite Right 2 —

An attack had been feared for months as America has prepared to take on the hackers. Election officials have gone to cyber security boot camp to learn how to combat fake news, malware and troll farms. (FT)

DC”, they posted information on locations and transport to encourage people to attend.

Facebook will now inform these potential attendees that the page was part of the co-ordinated campaign. In total, the newly suspended pages created 30 events, which about 4,700 people marked themselves as interested in attending. Some 28 of these events had dates that had already passed, but Facebook was not able to comment on whether they had taken place. Another event was not scheduled until next January.

The company said the actors had gone to much greater lengths to disguise their true identities than the Russian IRA operatives had in the past, using virtual private networks and internet phone services and recruiting third parties to run ads on their behalf. The company warned that it may never be able to identify the source of the disinformation campaigns with the same level of certainty as it did with the Russian IRA. Nathaniel Gleicher, head of cyber security policy at Facebook, said the company had first identified the accounts two weeks ago and removed them all on Tuesday.

“As we’ve told law enforcement and Congress, we still don’t have firm evidence to say with certainty who’s behind this effort,” he said. “Some of the activity is consistent

with what we saw from the IRA before and after the 2016 elections. And we’ve found evidence of some connections between these accounts and IRA accounts we disabled last year.”

Mr Gleicher noted there were differences between the two efforts as well. “While IP addresses are easy to spoof, the IRA accounts we disabled last year sometimes used Russian IP addresses,” he said. “We haven’t seen those here.”

Facebook‘s latest revelations come as US lawmakers continue to express concern that the country is not adequately prepared to fend off attacks ahead of the congressional midterm elections in November.

Adam Schiff, the top Democrat on the House intelligence committee, said the revelation by Facebook showed that “malicious foreign actors bearing the hallmarks of previously identified Russian influence campaigns continue to abuse and weaponise social media platforms to influence the US electorate”.

Mr Schiff added that Facebook should continue “proactively identifying these actors, notifying Congress and law enforcement, and taking necessary

steps to remove the foreign influence content”.

The most-followed Facebook pages that have been suspended were “Aztlan Warriors”, “Black Elevation”, “Mindful Being”, and “Resisters”. Facebook uncovered the pages because one of the IRA accounts that it disabled in 2017 shared a Facebook event hosted by the “Resisters” page and one of the admins for the page previously had an IRA account for just seven minutes.

The Resisters page posted anti-Trump content, including a post showing the president tweeting, with a caption: “If Trump wants to beat Barack Obama’s Twitter record for the most liked tweet he only needs to tweet 2 words ‘I resign’”.

Facebook said there were several mentions of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the agency that has been heavily criticised for separating parents and children at the border.

Both the Resisters page and the Black Elevation page, which included imagery of Huey Newton from the Black Panthers, advertised vacancies for parttime event co-ordinators.

Additional reporting by Demetri Sevastopulo in Washington

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MAKING

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MOVES

Joseph Charles; Saint Lucian theatre company owner peels back the blinds

By Keryn Nelson, STAR Businessweek Correspondent

What my company is trying to do is to multi-racially mix us all up reason I decided to direct because, obviously, I wanted a larger scope for myself.

Joseph’s latest project, White Witch, tells the story of how a house in Jamaica became the island’s most haunted

B

ehind every bright idea is the force of purpose – the lack of something essential that roused a transformative idea.

For actor and director Joseph Charles – a Saint Lucian-born resident of the UK who lives in Hornsey, North London – a lack of opportunities for black performers led to his founding of Thee Black Swan Theatre and Opera Company.

Birthed in 1992, the company has since staged multiple productions including White Witch (2017), Black Sparticus (2015) and Dido & Aeneas. Willing to speak about his journey, Charles checked in with The STAR Businessweek for a chat.

STAR: What led you to the performing arts?

Charles: Fate. I don’t really know the reasons. I ended up being an actor. Of course,

I was interested in it but there are lots of people who are interested in the arts who don’t necessarily go into it. That’s the usual. People give you a lot of humbug about why they get into acting but the truth is they just fall into it.

Sometimes people may want to be actors now but they don’t actually ever become an actor or work in the theatre or the cinema because the opportunities are not that easy. You just fall into it. It happens and then you just go on.

STAR: what is it like, working in the UK as a Caribbean performer and director?

Charles: It has its pitfalls. Being a black person sort of restricts you a bit because there is racism within the business – within everything. You are limited to playing parts based on your colour. Therefore, unless someone wants to make it “the black Julius Caesar”, you are restricted. And that’s the

STAR: Is this why you founded Thee Black Swan Theatre & Opera Company?

Charles: That’s very correct; to give other black actors opportunity. But, they don’t necessarily see my company as a company that gives them opportunity because racism is a two-way monitor really. Black people think if they work for a white director their opportunity is greater for growth. Therefore, they would prefer to take a small part from a white director because what they see is financial opportunities – the white population controls the wealth and the power. We as blacks don’t control it, so the opportunities are scarce. I still have problems of casting, say, “top black actors”. There are not many but the few that have a reputation of any sort would not want to work with me.

STAR: What does your company offer black performers?

Charles: What my company is trying to do is to multi-racially mix us all up. We have white, black, green, yellow, orange actors; whatever you want to call them. So we’re multi-racial.

STAR: How have you raised funding for the company?

Charles: We’ve gone “Arts Council” in this country which helps most small companies like mine with funding. They give you a certain percentage of your funding, about 45%, so you have to raise the rest from other sources. But the Arts Council has particular rules. Of course, there are moments

the Arts Council thought some of my ideas were trite. Or, if I wanted to do something large and exotic; like, I wanted to do Don Giovanni which is a huge opera. When I applied for it they told me it would be preferable for me to do something new rather than doing an established opera. So you can guess what they’re saying to me; that they didn’t think I was capable or I shouldn’t handle something like that because, obviously, I was going to change the cultural structure of it.

The second part is raising money from other sources. The local black businesses are not interested in theatre or cinema or they’re not interested in putting their money into it.

Therefore it causes a problem. So it is difficult that I have to sort of, by a wind and a prayer, beg, steal and borrow to create my theatre.

STAR: What is your advice to black performers pursuing careers in the performing arts?

Charles: To be more politically aware of what they’re doing. Most plays have a political status to them; there’s not a play in the world that doesn’t. I actually think that basically all Caribbean performers should be careful of scripts they’re handed and decide whether it makes them look stupid; whether its conforming with a stereotypical type.

Look at it politically and ask: “Why am I in this play?” If you think you would not like to live like that person, then don’t do it. Then things will change.

Joseph Charles moved to the UK at the age of 9.

Now he operates his own theatre company, Thee Black Swan Theatre and Opera Company

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