Global Voices

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The world is talking, are you listening?

One of the most dastardly parts of the Atlantic slave trade was how fellow human beings were treated as as if they less than men and women. And it seems that many of us feel the same way about illegal Haitians here in The Bahamas.

Weblog Bahamas’ Rick Lowe adds, “I agree they are illegal and we must deal with it, but do we have to pretend these people are not human beings?”

The backlash, growing quietly by the second, apparently, against the Differentology video isn't that it's a bad video, it's that it's the wrong class of video entirely for the song.

Mark Lyndersay explains why he thinks the video for the most transformative soca song of the year is simply ordinary.

In this new discourse of the Good versus the Bad Gay, that what is being policed is class as much as sexuality.

Under the Saltire Flag explains.

A generation of Criminals, just like a generation of Professionals, don't simply pop up. They are raised.

Trini World Views challenges everyone “who breathes fire and brimstone at criminals and the policing of criminal activity…to put that same passion into getting involved in the process [of] crime prevention.”

The Bermudian government has introduced a set of reform initiatives; Vexed Bermoothes puts forward one of his own – “mak[ing] MPs accountable for their vote.”

To mark the tragic anniversary of the Tivoli incursion and the lives that were lost there, Jamaican bloggers are uniting to draw attention to the scourge of extra-judicial killings in Jamaica and a police force seemingly out of control and beyond restraint.

Active Voice is gearing up to comment on police brutality for Blog Action Day next week.

Blogger and feminist lawyer Verónica Rivera Torres writes [es] about the piece of legislations that seeks to extend the Law Against Domestic Violence (Law 54) in Puerto Rico to same sex couples:

Since our Supreme Court ruled that the Law of the Prevention and Intervention in Domestic Violence, known as Law 54, did not apply to same-sex couples, individuals and human rights groups have been waiting for the historic moment we are witnessing today.

Finally, after ten long years, the legislator Luis Vega Ramos has filed a measure to clarify what for many people was clear since Law 54 was created: the protection of all victims of domestic violence, regardless of their sexual orientation, marital status and gender identity.

Alternative blog Puerto Rico Indie reviews [es] the recent Puerto Rican film “I Am a Director,” which was partially financed through Kickstarter:

The film, made in the ‘mockumentary’ style or fictitious documentary, follows the steps of Carlos (Carlos Marchand), first-time filmmaker who longs to make a Hollywood-style film, but in Puerto Rico. Besides being a genuinely funny comedy, ‘I Am a Director’ succeeds in satirizing the mental process of many who believe that making films is to meet the artificial standards based on the immense American productions.

On occasion of the celebration of Mother's Day, tomorrow Sunday May 12, feminist activist Amárilis Pagán writes about the experience [es] of telling her mother she was in love with another woman:

The day I told my mom I was in love with a woman, she delivered a long and heartbreaking scream. It was as if someone had told her that her daughter had died… and to some extent I think that something like this happened. Something inside me died, and something inside her died too. She never accepted my relationship, and that love that filled my life for so many years is still unknown to her.

Blogger Yasmín S. Portales comments on the challenges of mapping the Cuban blogosphere, including everything and anything written in blogs. This is her most recent project:

A directory is a map: you have the swamps of glorious battles swamps and the mountains of infamy. You include it all, or it's not a map. In other words, there is yet to be a map of the Cuban blogosphere.

The worst: The Cuban blogosphere is chaotic. Luckily I do not pretend to make sense of it, only reveal its current demographics.

Detail of the official poster of the VI Conference against Homophobia in Cuba. “Family is love, respect, inclusion.”

Cuban blogger and LGBT activist Francisco Rodríguez announces the events [es] of the VI Cuban Conference Against Homophobia to be held during the month of May in the island.

Blogger Kevin Edmonds examines the impending Canada-CARICOM Free Trade Agreement.

kiskeácity links to a letter which “echoes many of the issues Haitians face with the White Savior Industrial Complex…and its army of 3,000 NGOs, 12,000 UN troops, innumerable speakers for Haiti, appropriators of Haiti's ancestral religion, culture and music and other so-called ‘allies’ who silence Haitians for a profit while assuming their voice.”

Facebook is free for all, but it doesn’t mean that we are liberated to slander others with impunity – or to make vile threats…without consequences.

POLITICAL BAHAMAS BLOG discusses “potentially criminal Facebook behavior.”

I don’t think this cigarette newspaper ad was necessary and it was in very poor taste.

aka_lol takes issue with a cigarette advertisement, which apparently found loopholes around the prohibitions applied to such advertising under the Tobacco Control Act.

My Chutney Garden is our guide through Trinidad's Royal Botanic Gardens.

In an era where youth…are seen as being dissolute it is truly heart warming to recognise the drive and talent of this young man.

Abeni salutes Kamara Jerome, a 20-year-old Vincentian entrepreneur, who won the Best Environmental Award in the Caribbean Innovation Challenge.

Like all urban legends, Jack will linger on minds of both the mindful and mindless.

Tongue firmly in cheek, aka_lol predicts Jack Warner's legacy.

Local charities are lobbying the Bermudian Government to institute a bag tax to encourage people to shop with reusable bags and reduce waste – but Vexed Bermoothes insists that “it’s nice to think that you can tax people into living or acting better; it rarely works out that way.”

Journalist and Global Voices author, Leila Nachawati, writes an open letter [es] to Cuban blogger Yoani Sánchez, who has been touring the United States, Latin America and Europe talking about Cuban technopolitics. Sánchez has been embraced by some, and criticized by others during her voyage. In her open letter, the Spanish-Syrian blogger Nachawati refers to some of Sánchez's comments on the Spanish state and society:

I was struck by your admiration towards the policies and institutions of this country [Spain]. I cannot deny that you may value aspects that pass unnoticed to many of us who live live here, but the truth is that our reality is far from a mirror to want to look into. I think we are far from being a model to follow or a formula to imitate.

Haiti does not need more prisons, it needs better prisons and fewer prisoners.

Haiti Chery provides some interesting statistics which support his view.

This is not the Bimshire I moved to six years ago…there was no gun culture. The problem is still one we could control if we had leadership who put resources into fixing the problem rather than denying its existence.

Notes From A Small Rock sees trouble in paradise.

Saying no to bad food will benefit the economy and the happiness index of the country.

aka_lol explains.

This was an event for people in the private and public sector tasked with making sense of fast moving changes in the digital realm.

BitDepth reports on the second Caribbean Digital Expo conference.

A canal in the capital smells so rancid “it can kill a nation”. Guyana-Gyal smelled it and lived to tell the tale.

Appalled by the “legal immunity” that the United Nations appears to have in the country's cholera epidemic, Kevin Edmonds says that it's high time Caribbean leaders speak up for Haiti.

She has to be admired for her ability to transform her country…as a middle-class woman in the conservative party. But I remember apartheid, and…how she almost destroyed the British university system, and…made Britain unwelcoming.

Blogworld writes limericks in commemoration of the Iron Lady.

Diaspora litblogger Geoffrey Philp notes the passing of Jamaican folklorist and author, Dr. Olive Lewin.

Can I get an A-MEN?

When it comes to an analysis of the country's aid management failures, kiskeácity admits she couldn't have said it better than Haitian filmmaker Raoul Peck.

The politics and economics of neoliberalism have been shown to…have failed. And yet neoliberalism continues, zombie-like. A living-dead socio-economic system.

In one of the few Caribbean blog posts acknowledging the death of former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher, Catch-a-fire sympathizes with her loved ones, but maintains that Thatcher's politics were “very much in opposition to [his] entire worldview.”