By  Peter Polack

Peter Polack

Generations of Caribbean citizens have fled their island home for decades to seek economic opportunity, educational advancement and no less importantly, to protest political intransigence that reveals no perpetual solutions.

It would be a mistake to limit the origins of Caribbean immigration to the well worn tropes of enrichment and avoid the importance of enfranchisement in a politically responsible system.

Cries of democracy or nationhood must go hand in hand with responsibility and most importantly integrity.

Worldwide migration is a response to the failure of true, real democracy not a catchphrase to underpin the latest invasion or conflict. Some perceive the end game to be an ill thought, enriched, returning residency that often ends with recurring disappointment and eventual secondary migration.

Statistics should exist somewhere.

So this great caravan over many decades purportedly to prosperity may have simply started as a tipping point of non-confidence in a political system that simply spews out more lies and failures every election cycle. Until the great mammoth known as the diaspora shakes off the slumber of having made it to seek political accountability or more importantly resignations on allegations we continue as a faux democracy. They are many that aid and abet the continuing status quo as does the failure to weaponize remittances to force political change. 

The more things change the more they remain the same.

Biography

Peter Polack was a former criminal lawyer in the Cayman Islands for several decades. He is the author of The Last Hot Battle of the Cold War: South Africa vs. Cuba in the Angolan Civil War (2013), Jamaica, The Land of Film (2017) and Guerrilla Warfare: Kings of Revolution (2018). He was a contributor to Encyclopedia of Warfare (2013) and worked as a part-time reporter for Reuters News Agency in the Cayman Islands 2014-19 but now lives in Canada. His work has been published in Small Wars Journal, Defence Procurement International, American Intelligence Journal, U.S. Army John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center magazine, Military Times, Foreign Policy News, EU Today, Radio Free Europe, VOA Portuguese, South Africa Times, History Cooperative, INews Cayman, Jamaica Gleaner, Miami Herald, Reuters, Toronto Star and The New York Times. McFarland will publish his latest book entitled Soviet Spies Worldwide: Country by Country, 1940–1988. 

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