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www.stluciastar.com
JUNE 23, 2018 THE STAR
It Pays Always Remember Loose Can Sink Ship Y
ou just can’t beat experience. And trust St. Vincent & the Grenadines prime minister Ralph Gonsalves to drive the point forcefully home at, of all places, the latest OECS shindig held here on Monday evening. Speaking of which, wouldn’t it be far less expensive to mark our regional anniversaries via Skype or something like it? Certainly we’d save a ton on expensive hotel banquets, to say nothing of lubricants for diplomatic intercourse, which, evidently Gonsalves did not need. Unless of course he came down well lubed from his Harbor Club suite to the dignitary-packed auditorium. He was preceded in turn at the lectern by Saint Lucia’s prime minister Allen Chastanet and the region’s current most talked about leader of government, and not only because her party had turned the most recent Bajan general elections into a 30-0 cakewalk. There’s her name, for one thing. Say it at the wrong rpm, or with a stutter, and it comes out embarrassingly, some might say presumptuously, as My Love in Spanish. Then there’s that open space between her front teeth that won’t be denied, to which the Mighty Sparrow
had attributed magic so potent as to be capable of bringing strong men and priests to their knees. One can only speculate about the impact on her famously libidinous colleagues, untouchable as it seems they are even in the era of #MeToo. But we were talking about the Vincie prime minister’s contribution to Monday evening’s OECS show. Clearly he had carefully calculated his approach to the issue of Venezuela’s expulsion from the OAS. Allen Chastanet was among those who had openly acknowledged the plight of the Venezuelan people, the incarceration of opposition members, and other human rights abuses commonplace under Maduro. The experienced Vincentian leader could’ve chosen to express privately to his OECS colleagues his distaste for American highhandedness and hypocrisy. That he chose instead to advertise his socialist spleen in the presence of several diplomats from countries including the United States and Venezuela (the latter with its own on-island embassy) was hardly accidental. With several video cameras in attendance he had the perfect opportunity to not only cement relationships
of Maduro, it is my own personal conviction that when leaders of democracies speak in favor of dictators they betray the dictator in their own souls. It is as disturbing to me actually to see Donald Trump massaging Kim Jong-un’s back while waxing dithyrambic about the Korean dictator’s love for his starving people as it is to witness an OECS leader shilling for the current master of the recently established but also to embarrass his host the Saint Venezuelan people—regardless of how many bridges too far Lucian prime minister—whom he may have financed in the he was about to replace as particular shill’s backwater. Did chairman of the OECS—his the region learn no lessons from fellow small-island evictors, the Grenada debacle? and, importantly, the big To judge by their televised Republican elephant in the demeanor, it seemed to me room. many in his Harbor Club Of course Gonsalves was audience were rendered ill sufficiently well schooled to at ease, bewildered, even, avoid actually naming Donald by the calculated show-time Trump, neither the United radicalism of Ralph Gonsalves. States. Why bother when everyone who heard him would It’s almost guaranteed he will have the last laugh, however, know he was referring to the whether or not at further great giant of the north, to expense to abused thousands whom he was admittedly “so who heard not a word of what grateful for its protection of he said at the Harbor Club. our borders.” But undeniably Then again it made sense when important as that was, and as Gonsalves advised that fellow thankful as the Vincie prime OECS leaders devote more minister claimed to be, it did not mean the OECS had to bow of their time and energy to pursuing goals that are possible to the giant’s every demand. in the short term than the other Sometimes beggars can way around. choose whom they beg from. I Referencing the issue should acknowledge that Ralph of free travel throughout the Gonsalves spoke nothing but the truth that can set us free, if region, he declared futile only to starve. It is also true that the notion of persuading Jamaica with its over 200,000 general elections are around unemployed citizens to open the corner in St. Vincent and up its doors to its Caribbean Gonsalves knows only too well brothers and sisters. It made there’s nothing we Caribbean more sense, Gonsalves people love better than what suggested, to request that sounds in our Lilliputian ears “Mia” direct the Barbadian like a challenge to Gulliver! immigration authorities to be As for his open promotion
Smiles for days: St. Vincent & the Grenadines prime minister Ralph at the 65th meeting of the OECS aut
more accommodating of visitors from the region. As if already Ms Mottley were not already overburdened. None of the representatives at the OECS function had a word to say about the high cost of governance, the root cause of most of the region’s
problems. At one point during his lengthy delivery, as if by magic, a $50 note materialized in the right hand of Ralph Gonsalves. Dramatically, he held it aloft. “You see this?” he said, “this is proof of our strength and our resilience. Ours is the third strongest currency in the world, behind only the United States and Europe.” He
