Dear Editor,

For more than half a century several Caribbean states have been talking about regional integration. Nevertheless the region is no closer to a cooperative system of political and economic association than it was a century ago. The problems of Caribbean integration are not hard to find. None is major. But the Caribbean has a strange way of magnifying simple things.

To start, Caribbean leaders should be working toward a loose cooperation rather than the proposed measures of integration that evoke models of the present European community. To make integration work in the Caribbean, much deliberate preparation over a reasonably long period of time is necessary. That preparation must take into account the realities of the region.

For the islands, Spanish is by far the most dominant Caribbean language, spoken by more than two-thirds of the population. By contrast, all English language speakers together are less than those who speak Haitian Creole, or by much less than 20 per cent of the total regional population. So to promote more effective cooperation, the Caribbean people must move toward the recognition of Spanish and English as the two official languages of the region.

Of course, this does not mean that other languages – Haitian Creole, French, Dutch, and Papiamento – are unimportant and would retain strong local attraction. But it does mean that Spanish and English should be introduced across the region no later than the elementary level of education. The Caribbean is a multilingual region and recognising that reality in the educational system would greatly facilitate closer cooperation.

Language deficiency is not the only regional handicap. Caribbean primary and secondary schools need to teach more about the geography and history of the region. That is, they need to know more than their individual unit. The goal should be that by age twelve every schoolchild should know the size, location, population and natural resources of every Caribbean state. Similarly, the historical contours of each state should be common knowledge across the region. But this geographical and historical knowledge has to be deeper than a set of facts and figures. It must strive to communicate the basic commonalities and values of the Caribbean experience.

Governments have a role to play in bringing the people of the Caribbean together. To do so they must abandon useless institutions and concentrate on long-term educational efforts. The more the common folk of the Caribbean know about one another the better they will work together. And that they can do without formal political integration.

Franklin W Knight

Baltimore, Maryland

USA