In the past few months WikiLeaks has released hundreds of thousands of private documents from the classified depositories of the government of the United States and has promised a similar flood of releases from private commercial companies. Since the original communications were supposed to be confidential, there has been a minor furore over the propriety, and in some cases the possible illegality of the releases. Around the world common folk have been provided with a glimpse of the seamy side of diplomacy.

Some newspapers have jumped on the releases as an opportunity to embarrass certain governments, and have selectively sensationalised parts of the reports. Some governments have even explored the possibility of taking legal action against the head of WikiLeaks, Julian Assange, who finds himself fighting extradition from Great Britain for apparently unrelated sexual misconduct charges brought by the Swedish government,

Yet nothing in the releases so far has been earth-shaking. Diplomats have always provided their superiors with candid assessments on any variety of topics. That represents an essential part of their job. That their observations have occasionally been deservedly unflattering to their hosts should not be surprising. Candour is often seen that way. Public access to the documents seems akin to seeing some distinguished person’s underwear in public. Regardless of how surprising or titillating the sight might be, one always suspected anyhow that the individual normally wore underwear.

Once a young student was travelling in Mexico and appeared one morning in the lobby of his hotel with his pants unzipped. The old receptionist looked at him and remarked: “Señor, ¡Caja abierta; pájaro muerto!” (“Young man, if the cage is open, the bird is dead!”) Diplomatic correspondence, of course, will not die from the sensationalising actions of WikiLeaks. But WikiLeaks has demonstrated that the art of diplomacy has entered a new era. Technology now makes it possible to garner years of correspondence on a single compact disk and broadcast it to the world with alarming impunity.

In ancient times, diplomats could find security in the fact that few among the general public could read, so the written word itself carried some measure of security. The tedious manual composition of correspondence required the patience and skill of the erudite. The correspondence of a single court, much less the entire official correspondence of a country, required a large amount of paper and miles of shelf space for official archives. But toward the end of the 20th century things began to change dramatically. First the Xerox machine and then electronic scanning made possible immediate duplication tasks that not long ago would have required a lifetime, or several lifetimes. Even private voice transmissions over the telephone can now be intercepted and immediately translated into any number of languages. Electronic mail, the increasingly popular way to communicate globally, facilitates this unconscious erosion of the private and the public sphere.

Of course, uncensored and unedited publication of internal government correspondence such as the WikiLeaks affair is definitely not what many governments considered when they advocated greater openness. Transparency and accountability were supposed to be done on their terms – or at least negotiated among themselves. But legal and constitutional propriety is not the only implication of unlimited access to government internal correspondence.

Even the Jamaican government was caught unprepared by the publications of WikiLeaks. Among the unsurprising negative comments about governmental inefficiency came a purported revelation by Cuban diplomats that the Jamaican foreign ministry claimed that its own officials could not understand Spanish and this greatly impeded communications between the two governments. Indeed, the reports implied that the Cubans were providing English translations of correspondence sent by their government to the government of Jamaica.

If that report is true then such would represent a most scandalous situation as well as a serious deficiency on the part of the Jamaican government. But it speaks volumes not only about the shortcomings of the government of Jamaica but also about the shortcomings of education in Jamaica. Although they live in a largely Spanish-speaking region, Jamaicans cannot effectively communicate with their neighbours.

Without including the nearby mainland countries, more than 60 per cent of the island Caribbean people speak Spanish as their primary language. The largest countries in terms of population – Cuba, the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico – are Spanish speakers. Indeed, within the Caribbean there are more speakers of Haitian Creole than of English. The English-speaking Caribbean represents a relatively small proportion of the region’s population. So if neighbourly curiosity did not mandate the acquisition of multiple foreign languages, then economic and cultural necessities should do so. For their own advantages in an increasingly globalising world, Jamaicans should have expanded the acquisition of Spanish, French, Dutch and Haitian Creole at all levels of the society. Language fluency could have been a vital tool in commercial competitiveness as well as in international relations.

Given the supposedly close relations with Cuba since the early 1970s when Prime Minister Michael Manley declared solidarity with the Cuban revolution of Fidel Castro and promoted his own form of democratic socialism, one expected from Jamaica a better appreciation of the value of the Spanish language. It would have been reasonable to expect that the government of Jamaica would then have encouraged the expanded teaching of Spanish in elementary schools. That would have paid great educational dividends, even if most of the students did not continue with the acquisition of the language. There would still be a large residual core of individuals with a capacity to operate bilingually. And Jamaicans and Cubans at all levels of social interaction would understand each other better.

If the Jamaican government confesses to an inability to understand communication in the language of its immediate neighbours, then one wonders how well it is doing with its larger international commercial masters. The thought that serious trade relations are based on the Chinese, the South Koreans, the Japanese or the Germans providing translated English versions of bilateral agreements boggles the mind. If so, despite the hoopla over Usain Bolt, Jamaica is not quite ready for prime time.