Georgia Popplewell · December, 2006

Latest posts by Georgia Popplewell from December, 2006

Trinidad & Tobago: Smeltdown

  30 December 2006

The Trinidad and Tobago government's decision to re-locate a controversial aluminium smelter project prompts Jeremy Taylor to raise numerous questions about some key development decisions taken by the current administration: “Would we really need a rapid-rail system costing TT$15 billion if a bit more common sense was applied to the...

Dominica: Respect the Caribbean consumer

  29 December 2006

Kenny Green of Dominica berates multinational companies for failing to create advertising and marketing campaigns that specifically target the Caribbean consumer, reserving some praise for Irish telecoms services provider Digicel: “I would love to see some multinational, be it LG or Pepsi or Starbucks or someone credible actually show Digicel...

Bahamas: Police brutality

  29 December 2006

Lynn Sweeting calls for an immediate investigation into police brutality in the Bahamas: “I call on the police force to recognize the enormity of this crisis in their ranks, and to assume that most men and women applying to the college are the products of violent homes, and to make...

Cuba: Christmas traditions

  29 December 2006

Cuba-based blogger Kaloian Santos Cabrera posts an excerpt from a book on traditional Christmas observances in San Juan de los Remedios, Cuba, plus some photos.

Trinidad, Guyana, South Africa: Book talk

  28 December 2006

85-year old Guyanese writer Wilson Harris has a new novel and Nobel prize-winning South African novelist Nadine Gordimer's estranged biographer is half-Trinidadian, reports Jeremy Taylor, who also reveals his favourite Caribbean novels of 2006.

Barbados: The other Eid

  28 December 2006

Titlayo discovers the “other” Eid — Eid al-Adha, when “Muslims who can afford to do so sacrifice domestic animals, usually sheep, as a symbol of Ibrahim’s sacrifice.”

Jamaica: What the country needs

  27 December 2006

Francis Wade grapples with his desire, as a returnee to Jamaica, to find solutions to some of the problems plaguing his homeland: “Certainly, I am sure, a part of the answer has to with where we draw our spiritual wisdom, and how we Jamaicans do not sufficiently engage in our...

Puerto Rico: Do you see what I see?

  27 December 2006

Gil the Jenius enlists the help of refrain from a Christmas carol in his diatribe against what he sees as some of the administrative and political problems affecting Puerto Rico.

Trinidad & Tobago: Trini geography

  27 December 2006

Chennette has an interesting commentary on the average Trinidadian's skewed vision of cardinal points: “Maybe it was growing up in a mathematical family, but I always viewed Trinidad as more or less a rectangle with some squiggly bits at the corners. Which means that I imagined lines bisecting the island...

Trinidad & Tobago: The smelter moves

  27 December 2006

As Trinidad and Tobago's caves into the protests against the establishment of an aluminium smelter in a community in south-western Trinidad — and moves the project to another part of the country — Taran Rampersad starts thinking that “it has become necessary to become vocal.”

Trinidad & Tobago: Christmas, credulity and commerce

  27 December 2006

Jeremy Taylor goes over some of the impossible notions about Christmas we have come to accept as fact, concluding “I take some comfort in the thought that the man at the centre of all the fuss would have dismissed it all, just as he furiously ran the bankers off the...

Jamaica: Development and apathy

  26 December 2006

Pondering the debate in Jamaica over proposed development for bauxite in Cockpit Country, AliceClaire asks: “Really, which is worse: our myopic vision and planning or a largely, and surprisingly, dormant civil society that let's too many things slide right on by them?“

Jamaica: Entrepreneurship and governance

  26 December 2006

Jamaican blogger Francis Wade is concerned that “our leaders of government who have never run companies do not understand the nature of business, and when they start to support the individual’s “right to a job” they do not understand what they are saying.”

Bermuda: Poison comment debate

  25 December 2006

A tongue-in-cheek post by the Limey, riffing off of a incident where a chef at a Bermuda resort was thrown off the island after making a joke about putting arsenic in a meal to be served to the island's Premier, occasions a string of comments debating issues of propriety and...

Belize: What do Christmas vacationers want?

  25 December 2006

Lee Vanderwalker in Caye Caulker, Belize, wonders: “Why do you think people vacation at Christmas time. Do you think they expect a traditional American Christmas? Do you think that if we play Marvin Gaye they will forget about Christmas?“