There is nothing like being present in the flesh to speak directly with my brothers and sisters in the United States and from around the region.  There is only so much that can be communicated in the cyberspace of e-mails or in the cold, unfeeling print of a letter sent through diplomatic channels.  The subtle nuances of what we really believe and really want to say, the body language of how we truly feel, and the passion of our convictions can only be communicated effectively when we stand before one another, face-to-face, eyeball to eyeball, “up close and personal”.

That is the kind of interaction we need on a regular basis and that is why I am so delighted to be a part of this forum today.  No superior format can be found for the promotion of a better common understanding across the borders that separate us.  No better instrument of communication can be called into service than a symposium of this kind.  It allows us to explore common challenges from a variety of perspectives and to co-operate with each other, face-to-face, in our common endeavour to conceptualize policies and strategic initiatives that are relevant and timely and consistent with the values we share as neighbours in this region of the world.

Indeed that is how neighbours should behave with each other anyway.  Geographically we are all one and the cords of history bind us, each to each, in ways that are as enduring as they are profound.  We are not strangers.  We are neighbours.  Even more than neighbours, we are kin. And as kin, we should treat each other as family.

We, in The Bahamas, by reason of geography and history, feel this kinship to the United States more acutely perhaps than any of our neighbours to the south.  Allow me just a few moments to demonstrate why.

I was reading the other day of Catesby’s Natural History, an important, pioneering work published in the 18th century in which he mentions that at the time of his visit to Andros, the largest island in The Bahamas, just 150 miles or so from the eastern coast of Florida, there were alligators still to be found – compelling evidence perhaps of the time when Florida and The Bahamas formed part of a single land mass.   Less refutable evidence of the close geographical proximity between The Bahamas and the U.S. lies in the fact that Bimini in The Bahamas is, at its closest point, less than 50 miles from Miami.

The history of human interaction between The United States and The Bahamas bears even more eloquent testimony to the intimacy of our connection one to the other.

In the same island of Andros to which I have referred most of the inhabitants of the northern end of the island are the descendants of a group of “black Seminoles” who emigrated from Florida from about 1817 to 1821.  This explains why the surname “Bowleg” which, incidentally forms part of my own personal lineage, is still so prominent in North Andros – Bowleg being, as you know, the name of successive kings of the Seminole nation In Florida in the early to mid 19th century.

Well before that time, the single biggest change in the demographics of The Bahamas occurred in the aftermath of your revolutionary war when thousands of loyalists along with their slaves and free coloured retainers forsook the new republic and settled in The Bahamas where their descendants, both black and white, still live together in harmony as citizens of what is now the Commonwealth of The Bahamas.

Even before that, the very first mission ever undertaken by the U.S. Marines was in 1776 when they invaded the Bahamas, plugged up our cannon, stole all our gunpowder and slipped quietly away two days later carrying with them, but unbeknownst to them at the time, a great, big batch of smallpox – punishment perhaps for their depredations.  At any rate, they never tried it again.  If you have not already read it, I would commend Barbara Tuchman’s classic book “The First Salute” to you.  It speaks of this inaugural expedition by the fledgling U.S. Marines.

Miami - Coconut Grove in particular- and the Florida Keys, in particular, Key West - owe their growth in no small part to the many Bahamian families that immigrated there in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.  Similarly, the agricultural economies of Florida and other southern states in the early to mid 20th century were built, in no small part, on the backbone of Bahamian migrant labour.

We have also contributed, directly or indirectly, so many influential figures in American life as well.  James Weldon Johnson, for example, who became one of the most important figures in the early civil rights movement and who rose to become one of the most celebrated literary and musical figures in early 20th century America and who also claimed the distinction of being the first black lawyer admitted to the Florida bar, was the grandson of the very first free man of colour to be elected to our own parliament in The Bahamas.  Similarly W.E.B. Dubois was the grandson of a loyalist who had settled at Long Cay in the southern Bahamas.  In more recent times, we have given to the United States and to the world a legendary actor by the name of Sidney Poitier.

At the economic level today, we are major contributors to the mercantile and industrial economy of Florida.  Bahamians and Bahamian businesses annually spend billions of dollars in your shopping malls and in the purchase of food, automobiles, building materials, clothing, and just about everything else a country needs to sustain itself.  Indeed, you should all be aware of a figure that even the youngest Bahamian child can tell when asked:  that eight cents of every dollar we earn in The Bahamas is spent right here back in the United States.  At the other end of the spectrum, our tourism industry relies very heavily on the millions of tourists who make their way to our country aboard mega-cruiseships that embark from your ports or aboard airlines leaving your airports.

Through this symbiotic relationship we have mutually reinforced each other and contributed to each other’s prosperity and growth.

Sadly, even tragically, we have been reminded in the past few weeks of just how close we are in the eyesight of Mother Nature and of how inescapably conjoined we are in that terrible path along which hurricanes make their way in fury out of Africa across the Atlantic into our fragile homes.  Your misfortunes this year have engendered enormous sympathy throughout our region, not least in The Bahamas.

Although the magnitude of your devastation here in Florida and even farther north has been simply appalling, the suffering that we must now endure in Grenada, Jamaica, Haiti, the Cayman Islands, Cuba and The Bahamas cries out in a voice that is no less demanding of the most urgent and focused attention.  The losses we have sustained are simply staggering and remedial assistance on a global basis has become a matter of the first imperative, especially for Haiti and Grenada.

Let me say that I have been truly touched by the generous spirit of the State of Florida and the United States of America at this time of common calamity.  It is made all the more touching because I know how very much you, here in Florida, have suffered and are suffering still, with cumulative losses now being calculated in the tens of billions of dollars.  That you would be groaning under so crushing a burden at this time but would nonetheless extend your vision beyond your boundaries to render financial and material assistance to your devastated neighbours to the south speaks volumes of the generosity and humanitarian impulse that pumps so vigourosly in the heart of your republic.  We are deeply thankful.

Our losses in The Bahamas are very great indeed and justify the assistance that has been so generously foreshadowed.  The centre of both Hurricane Frances and Hurricane Jeanne passed over some of our major islands, although fortunately not Nassau, before making their way to Florida.  It will take us years to dig out from under the devastation.  The will of our people, however remains strong.  We are a resilient people. We will survive but we shall do so at enormous cost.

In Grand Bahama, not far from West Palm Beach, the settlements of West End, Eight Mile Rock and the city of Freeport were especially hard hit by the surges from Hurricane Frances.  Many people lost all of their possessions.  The city was without food, water and power for two weeks.  As for Hurricane Jeanne, Marsh Harbour in Abaco now lies in a terrible state of disrepair.  Its docks have been smashed to bits.  Its business community has been left in a devastated condition.  In other parts of Abaco, some have been left homeless.

In the aftermath of the hurricanes I have been spending nearly all of my time, much as I am sure Governor Bush has been doing, in attending to the urgent task of reconstruction and remedial assistance.   Even at this moment I feel that I should be back home, bringing aid and encouragement to the afflicted but this conference with its unique opportunity for dialogue on matters of common concern, including the after-effects of the hurricanes, was simply too important and timely to pass up.  I am glad that you invited me and I am happy that I came.

Mr. Moderator:

I must confess that I also thought that I should come because I was rather intrigued by the premise that is implicit in the topic that I have been assigned: “Friend or Foe”.  The topic, as framed, then goes on to ask: “Can the Caribbean and the U.S. repair their damaged relations?”

The topic presupposes that you know about something that is so fundamentally amiss in the US Caribbean relationship that it may possibly be beyond repair.  Let me say at once that I do not subscribe to such a view at all.

In the interest of complete candour I should perhaps add that I made inquiries as to why my assigned topic posed the question in such a curious and, I daresay, presumptuous way.  It seemed to me at first glance that the answer to the question posed in my topic was so obvious that the speech would be a short one indeed which, in turn, made me think that perhaps my reputation for long speeches was such that the planners of this conference deliberately assigned me a topic that would call for the utmost brevity.

Having had the benefit of more considered reflection, however, I am now satisfied that my assigned topic, as formulated, is merely a provocative way of probing the state of American relations with the region and an invitation to address how those relations can be improved upon to the mutual benefit of the United States and the region.
 
Randall Robinson, living in St. Kitts and Nevis, in a recent work, penned the following words, which, to my mind, aptly address the question to which I have been asked to speak.  This is what he had to say:

“Make no mistake, the people who live here and elsewhere along the archipelago of the eastern Caribbean very much want American economic partnership.  No island economy can afford to be cut adrift by so powerful a regional neighbour.  The governments of these islands have met every reasonable test for friendship.  They all rank high in the global community of civilly well-run democracies.  They all score high marks in the areas of human rights, literacy, health care and general quality of life.  They are all disposed toward the United States”.

That, I think, is as applicable to the Eastern Caribbean as it is to the rest of the region and I commend it as an article of faith to which we, in The Bahamas, subscribe.

The good intentions of American foreign policy in its application to the English-speaking Caribbean to which The Bahamas belongs is not in doubt.  Indeed there is a preponderance of evidence to support the proposition that the United States is generally well-intentioned.   Generous humanitarian assistance; co-operation in the fight against illicit narcotics trafficking and international terrorism; support for democratization; and the ongoing economic support for our tourism markets, all speak persuasively to the essentially favourable disposition of American foreign policy towards the region.

The conceptual underpinnings of this policy are readily discernible.  It is not altruism alone that explains the policy. Rather, it is precisely because we are so close to the United States that the United States has a vested interest in ensuring that the countries that sit in its backyard are, as far as is humanly possible, politically and economically stable.  By helping secure the stabilization of the region, the United States is thereby acting as guarantor of its own stability.  Moreover, by promoting the continued adherence to democratic values and the deepening of institutional democracy in the region, the United States re-affirms its own commitment to these things as the critical components of its own ethos and ideology.  This is no less true for us as it is for you.

That is why it is so important for the United States and the wider Caribbean region to jointly promote democracy, peace, stability and growth in our sister nation of Haiti.  The destruction that was wrought there by Tropical Storm Jeanne is of monumental and tragic proportions.  We continue to watch, helplessly at times, as that beleaguered nation still struggles to find its way.

Make no mistake about it, all our collective talk about neighbourly co-operation and democratization will be judged a fraud by history if we do not – and by “we” I mean all the countries of the region – pool our resources and bring the full weight of our resolve to bear on a permanent solution to the problems of Haiti.

Taking a broader view of US-regional relations, I would be less than candid if I did not say that there is a view in some quarters that there is not a sufficiently deep understanding in the United States of the issues and concerns which face our region.  Simply cutting a cheque or making a sympathetic speech does not address these issues at a fundamental level.  Concerns, for example, about emerging free trade arrangements seem sometimes to fall on deaf ears or are treated dismissively, without realizing that the entire economies of poor, struggling nations, especially in the eastern Caribbean, hang in the balance.

Take, for example, the case of Dominica and its banana industry.  The amount of the banana crop produced by Dominica is but a tiny fraction of the world trade in bananas but it is nonetheless the anchor of the economy in Dominica.  They have little else to fall back on.  And yet, with the proverbial stroke of the pen a decision was made in Washington by a former administration that effectively destroyed the banana industry in Dominica.  In the result, Dominica is now struggling for its very life.

I had the opportunity to speak with President Clinton about this once he had left office.  He was visiting our country and he agreed that his decision on bananas, unintended though it was, had a debilitating impact on Dominica and that if he had an opportunity to do it all again, he would seek to do it in way that mitigated its crippling effects.

If sustainable development and economic viability are to remain within the grasp of these smaller and more vulnerable states, there simply has to be a re-assessment of the direction in which free trade arrangements are headed and a more considered understanding of the potentially annihilating effects these arrangements may have on the national economic capacity of these smaller states.  It is in the interests of the United States to lead the way in this re-assessment because it goes right back to the most basic tenet of American foreign policy towards the region: to promote American stability by ensuring that the rest of the region is stable.  Each economically destabilized country in the region represents an incremental encroachment on the stability of the United States itself.

What is needed is regular, structured dialogue between the United States and the region so that the fears and concerns, the ideas and the hopes of the region can be ventilated and filtered through the policy-making apparatus of the U.S. Government before – I repeat before – policies are crystallized, by which time it may be too late in the day to reverse course or to introduce mitigating measures.  By taking this approach, relations between the United States and the region will be strengthened in a way that will build up to even grander heights the considerable reservoir of goodwill that already exists in the region towards the United States.

 Turning now to the matter of greatest immediacy, the United States will no doubt be called upon to provide the lion's share of relief for the hurricanes that have devastated so many of us.  Allow me to put in a special plea for our sister Caricom nation of Grenada, which has been devastated to an extent unparalleled in the region with the exception of Haiti on whose behalf I also make a special plea for intensified assistance on the most urgent basis.

The Bahamas also has major challenges of its own resulting from two hurricanes that came one behind the other.

One would expect, of course, that the first step must be taken by the affected nations themselves to do what they can to rebuild.  The will is certainly is there to rebuild and it should not be thought that any of the affected countries are just looking for handouts exclusively of self-help restoration programmes.

At the recent special Caricom heads meeting in Trinidad and Tobago, however, there was a consensus that the scale of the reconstruction effort is far beyond the resources of Caribbean countries.  Help is needed and in some instances, especially in Grenada and Haiti, help is desperately needed from the international community and to the most generous extent possible.  The humanitarian impulse aside, the generous assistance of the United States in this time of overwhelming regional need can be rationalized on the basis of self-interest because of the goodwill that will be generated in its favour both in the short and longer term.

There is no denying, however, that we need a new regional approach to disaster management and recovery in our region.  Florida and the other hurricane-prone states in the Gulf and along the Eastern seaboard have as much at stake in this as we do.  There needs to be a comprehensive overhaul of the methodology of hurricane relief and the resources put behind it.  I have already made this submission to the Inter American Development Bank as well.  The recent spate of hurricanes and the prospect of abnormally active and intense hurricane seasons for the next two decades oblige us to throw out the old models and to seek to develop new regional institutions and mechanisms for the speedy and effective delivery of aid and other disaster management programmes.  The Bahamas is prepared to take the lead in this regard and to host a regional conference, inclusive of the U.S.- to lay the groundwork for the creation of new models for disaster management and recovery in our region.  We hope that we will be supported in this initiative by our friends in the United States, especially here in Florida.

Mr. Moderator:

In closing, allow me to thank all the people of the state of Florida, and the city of Miami who responded so willingly and so generously to the emergency needs of the Bahamian population during the recent hurricanes.   The business community, the Bahamian community in Miami, and the wonderful people of Florida in general have contributed greatly to the alleviation of our plight.  Ours is an ongoing struggle but with your continued support and the help of the international community and, most importantly, with our own self-help, we shall rebound from these disasters and continue our steady march of progress.

I end with a short answer to the question framed by the topic assigned to me:  The relationship between the United States and the region is not broken to begin with but, as in all things, it can be improved and the path to that improvement lies in ongoing and regular dialogue of precisely the kind that this conference affords.  We need more such opportunities to build upon the common values and aspirations we share and to develop a deeper understanding of each other.  Be assured that all of us stand at the ready to deepen the closeness we already share and to work with you to bring about a new era of enhanced co-operation for your benefit and for ours.