Caribbean Archive

To the casual observer, Barbados appears to be the latest country to fall prey to increasing Chinese influence. Two years after signing up for China’s Belt and Road Initiative in 2019, the Commonwealth nation declared itself a republic, replacing Queen Elizabeth II as its head of state. Connecting these dots, the prestigious Sunday Times of London ran an article titled, “How Barbados went from Little England to Little China.” The piece noted that Barbados was flush with cash from China and implied that dropping the queen as head of state was the condition Beijing had set for further financing. A pharmaceutical salesman in Bridgetown, the […]

Last month, Barbadian Prime Minister Mia Mottley won a stunning landslide victory in the Caribbean nation’s first general election since it declared itself a republic last November. While most analysts predicted that Mottley would likely win a second term as prime minister, few anticipated that her Barbados Labour Party, or BLP, would repeat its unprecedented sweep of all 30 parliamentary seats in the 2018 election that brought Mottley to power. Back then, Mottley led the BLP to victory by riding a wave of popular discontent with the previous Democratic Labour Party, or DLP, which had been in power for the […]