Stories about Haiti from January, 2006
The Caribbean Single Market
It's rare to find Caribbean bloggers across different islands talking about the same issue at the same time, but one would have thought that yesterday's historic signing in Jamaica of the document ratifying the Caribbean Single Market (CSM), might have created a little buzz. That, however, is exactly what it...
Caribbean: BlogHer's site launches
BlogHer's new “internationalized” site is now online, with Karen Walrond covering Latin America and the Caribbean.
Caribbean: The Taíno & Catholicism
Indigenous issues blog Voice of the Taino people links to an article entitled “Christianity, Capitalism, Corporations, and the Myth of Dominion”, noting that the “Roman” Catholic Church still has not properly addressed the call by the Taíno and other Indigenous Peoples world wide for the revocation of the 1493 Inter-Ceatera...
Caribbean: McWatt wins literary prizes
The Caribbean Beat Blog announces that Guyanese writer Mark McWatt has taken both the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for best first book in the Canada/Caribbean region, and the prestigious Casa de las Americas prize for Caribbean literature in English or Creole.
Caribbean: Does “pre-Columbian” also mean Chinese?
JT at the Caribbean Beat Blog writes about the “ancient-looking map” which turned up last month, suggesting that a Chinese admiral may have visited the Caribbean before Columbus.
Haiti: Election talk
The sight of a group of well-coiffed “poor” people demonstrating on television for the release of political prisoners compels Yon Aysien to analyse the strategies of the Lavalas movement. Yon Aysien also posts a list of the web sites for the parties contesting the upcoming elections, while doubting that Haiti...
Haiti: Kidnapping fears
“I fear receiving a phone call or an email giving me dreaded news,” says Mbayisyen, contemplating the changes wrought upon daily life in Haiti by the recent increase in kidnappings.
DR, Haiti: Deaths at the border
Solidaridad Fronteriza reports (ES) that members of religious organizations in Ouanaminthe, Haiti, have carried out religious rites at the mass grave containing the bodies od 24 Haitians who died of suffocation on January 11 in a vehicle in which they were trying to cross the border into the Dominican Republic....
Caribbean: Introducing Indigo Leaf magazine
Karen Walrond unveils her ambitious new venture, a Salon.com type web site called Indigo Leaf magazine featuring work by writers and artists previously unpublished in the US.
Haiti: Child soldiers photo hoax
Somebody seems to think the issue of child soliders is a joke. According to the Archivex Haiti Archives, photos of child soldiers, allegedly Haitian and “led supposedly by gang leaders who have announced that they will vote for René Préval,” have been circulating on the internet. The photos have been...
Caribbean: A blogger's book awards
For the fourth year in a row, Trinidadian Nicholas Laughlin publishes the “Nicholas Laughlin Book Awards” for Caribbean books — “i.e. books written by Caribbean authors, set in the Caribbean, or otherwise of particular Caribbean interest”. As interesting as the selections is Laughlin's analysis of his own reading patterns over...
Caribbean: Caribbeing
“In this CSME time. In this time of dancehall self-righteousness versus soca wutlessness. In this time when Trinis don't want to hear about “small islanders” reaching to the Billboard charts with soca music. In this time when Haitians still call out for our help and we still studiously ignore them....
11 key moments in [Anglo-]Caribbean blog history
THE INTERNET ARCHIVE IS preserving copies of many early blog pages, but most bloggers are too busy posting to think about otherwise documenting what they're doing. The history of the blogosphere goes back barely a decade, but evolution has been rapid, and bloggers who were around just three or four...
Haiti: Reviewing the review
Alice Backer returns to the blogosphere with a detailed and clearly stated critique of a review by Prof. Lucia Suarez of Jean-Robert Cadet's memoir Restavec: From Haitian Slave Child to Middle Class American. Among the errors pointed out by Backer is the assumption by Prof. Suarez that slavery still existed...
Caribbean: Plays, pantomimes, identity
The Caribbean Beat Blog solicits opinions on a newspaper review of this year's Jamaica pantomime, encourages Caribbean bloggers to engage in a “round of collective soul-searching” and publishes “outtakes” from an article in the current issue of the magazine.
Caribbean: Art, film & the Seven Caribbean Wonders
The Caribbean Beat Blog links to to a conversation between the director of Jamaica's National Gallery and the guest curator of a current exhibition; an article about a Hollywood film made on location in Grand Cayman by a young Caymanian director; and solicits input for a list of the “Seven...
Caribbean: Best to quote Best
Nicholas Laughlin finds he could have saved himself the work of writing his long post about “Caribbeanness” simply by quoting renowned Caribbean thinker Lloyd Best.
Haiti: Like a Dan Brown novel
“My return to Cap Haitien began like a Dan Brown novel,” says Baturrico (ES), relating the news of the death of General Urano Teixeira Da Matta Bacellar, military commander of the UN security force MINUSTAH and the increasing mystery surrounding its cause.
Caribbean: Diversity in sci-fi
Tobias Buckell quotes from an essay on diversity in sci-fi and remembers “the first book that took the islands seriously”
Caribbean: Wayback when
The Caribbean Beat Blog has some fun with the Wayback Machine, linking to early – and in a few cases embarrassing – incarnations of a few Caribbean web sites.
Caribbean: BlogHer goes international
Karen Walrond announces that she's been recruited as editor for the Caribbean section of an internationally-minded new web site soon to be launched by BlogHer.
