There is something quietly absurd about modern publishing, especially across the Caribbean.
A newsroom in Bridgetown can break a crucial story at breakfast. By lunchtime, editors in Kingston, Willemstad, or Port of…
When the Sea Moves In: The Caribbean Cities Running Out of Coast
The sea does not have to swallow an island to change the way people live on it. It only has…
The Oil Boom Next Door: Why Guyana and Suriname Matter to the Rest of the Caribbean
Guyana’s oil boom and Suriname’s coming production are changing more than two national economies. Curaçao and other Caribbean economies are already looking for their place in the new regional map.
Sugar, Spies and the Shah: The Forgotten Connection Between the Dominican Republic and Iran
October 1958. In a small private room in Tehran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the Shah of Iran, dines surrounded only by family and close friends. There is a single stranger at the table: a Dominican diplomat. According to his own report, he was the only…
The Punta Cana Trap: How the Caribbean’s $7 Billion Tourism Engine Runs on Empty
Punta Cana was never a town. It was a closed-loop financial apparatus, built on cheap land, imported concrete and total isolation. For thirty years it worked because mass tourism is an industry that explicitly trades in predictable containment: taking the customer to a private airstrip, transferring them directly to a Spanish-owned enclave, feeding them calculated calories and flying them out before they noticed the country they had been standing on…
The Social Security Myth: Where Expats Really Retire
Don’t trust the spreadsheets. The moment a piece of information gets digitized, averaged out, and formatted into a slick top-ten…
The Mystery of Columbus’s Bones: Not Even Technology Can Silence Historical Cunning
Some stories can be sustained for centuries only by modern genetics and a generous dose of nationalist stubbornness. The saga of Christopher Columbus’s remains is one of them. In October 2024, forensic geneticist José Antonio Lorente of the University of Granada…
The illusion of buried treasure: The botija myth in Dominican DNA
There is something deeply fascinating about our people’s ability to turn financial hardship into a living mythology. If you examine the famous legend of the “botijas” closely—those supposed treasures buried by grandparents in the yard behind the house—you realise that it is nothing more than the Caribbean version of the search for El Dorado. It is a narrative adapted to a country that, for generations, distrusted its governments and the volatility of the local currency more than the very ground beneath its feet…
The Fabelo Paradox: Why the Art Market is Punishing the Signature and Rewarding the Masterpiece
If you have been following recent auctions of Cuban art, you might have walked away with a cold feeling. You look at the catalog, spot a couple of pieces by Roberto Fabelo that should, in theory, be quite good, wait for the…
Why Modern Painters Broke Free
Beyond the Canvas: Why Modern Painters Broke Free from the Classical Line Step into almost any contemporary art gallery, and you’ll immediately notice a striking difference from the grand halls filled with Renaissance masters or Academic salon paintings. The meticulously rendered figures,…