Trump administration answers invite of Caribbean Community leaders; visit being planned

YAHOO: Days after Caribbean leaders announced plans to invite President Donald Trump for a visit, his administration is taking them up on their offer — sort of.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio, whose recent five-nation tour through the region included only one Caribbean country, the Dominican Republic, plans to visit the wider Caribbean region next month, said Mauricio Claver-Carone, Trump’s special envoy to the Americas.

“We’re going to go,” Claver-Carone, who will join the secretary on the visit, told the Miami Herald.

Claver-Carone said plans are still being finalized. But the tour of the mostly English-speaking Caribbean region could include stops in Jamaica, Guyana and Barbados or Suriname. Each of the countries, along with French-speaking Haiti, are part of the 15-member Caribbean Community regional bloc known as CARICOM.

During a regional summit last week in Barbados, CARICOM leaders announced that they planned to invite Trump for a visit. They also wanted a meeting with Rubio to discuss a number of concerns amid the United States’ foreign policy shifts, which have included freezes to foreign aid, the gutting of the U.S. Agency for International Development and the pulling out of global commitments on climate change and financing. The changes, which include a ramped-up deportation policy and a rollback of legal immigration protections for Haitians, have CARICOM leaders scrambling to figure out how to react.

“The CARICOM-USA relationship is an important one,” Barbados Prime Minister Mia Mottley told the Miami Herald in response to the planned visit. “We reached out to the new administration to meet at an early stage to see how best we as a community can work together. There is the issue of Haiti and its stability, which is paramount. There are also a number of other matters of mutual interest; it is best to see where we may work together as members of the same neighborhood.”

Those issues include climate change, which regional leaders have listed as the number one threat to their existence as small island states and economies, and ongoing security matters. During the CARICOM opening ceremony in which she called for the region to be “more unified and bolder” than ever before, Mottley said crime continues to “bedevil too many of our nations.”

“We in this region are paying too high a price for the Second Amendment rights of Americans,” she said, in reference to the illicit trade of U.S. manufactured guns that is sweeping through many countries.

Jamaica Prime Minister Andrew Holness, who has been raising the alarm about the threat of gang violence in the region, has said the threat of criminal groups goes beyond individual countries’ borders. Earlier this month, he called for “a global consensus that will create a global war on gangs.”

“Once that we accept that the threats we face are transnational, then our response must be equally transnational and we must embrace greater security cooperation and reciprocity, in some ways we need an international cooperation similar to the war on terrorism,” he said.

Holness told the Herald that he’s looking forward to Rubio’s visit. Before Rubio, a former Republican senator from Florida, became Trump’s secretary of state last month, the two had met on several occasions.

“I have found him to be exceptionally knowledgeable about the issues facing the region, and I believe he has the experience and support to make a positive impact,” Holness said. “It is expected that a new administration will seek to execute its mandate and this will bring changes. However, Jamaica has always been a reliable and consistent partner with the U.S., and we look forward to working together on the opportunities change brings.”

Neither Rubio nor Claver-Carone were at last week’s CARICOM summit, despite calls from some Democratic lawmakers that there should be representation from high-level U.S. officials. The secretary, however, did reach out to Holness hours before the opening ceremony, and the two discussed key regional issues, according to the State Department. The summit itself, featured a number of high-profile visitors including U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres, and the head of the European Union Commission, Ursula von der Leyen.

Claver-Carone said he and Rubio want to engage with leaders on a number of issues including the ongoing gang violence and humanitarian crisis in Haiti.

“We’re not immune to the tragedy,” he said about Haiti, where gangs have forced more than 13,000 people to leave their homes over the last 10 days during attacks on neighborhoods across the capital, Port-au-Prince. “It’s going to take some effort as well as our investment and our Caribbean partners are going to be really important in that regard.”

Each of the nations Rubio and Claver-Carone may visit are grappling with issues from arms trafficking to border disputes to rising food costs.

In the case of Guyana, the country has been enmeshed in a decades-long border dispute with neighboring Venezuela that has required assistance from Washington.

One issue certain to come up during the visit is the growing presence of the People’s Republic of China and its Belt and Road initiative in several Caribbean nations.

“They have worked hard to, not just court, but entrap a handful of votes around the world and including in our own hemisphere,” Rubio said last month about Beijing during his U.S. Senate confirmation hearing. “If you look at the Caribbean basin in Grenada and places like that, where they go into these countries… they don’t just provide a billion dollars to build a stadium, they also give you $5 million or $6 million under the table for your family and friends.”

Some Caribbean leaders say they don’t foresee any dramatic changes in their relations with the U.S. under Trump.

“It’s going to be OK,” Dominican Prime Minister Roosevelt Skerrit said. “We had four years of President Trump and we had collaborations on many fronts, so we don’t see any dramatic changes in the way we will engage ourselves with a second term.”

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