The "Heads Only" Club: CARICOM’s Paper Trail of Exclusion
If you want to know how to dismantle a regional union, look no further than the recent paper trail emerging from the CARICOM Secretariat. For weeks, the organization has hidden behind a wall of "diplomatic process," but the receipts, published largely in the T&T Guardian, tell a much more cynical story. It wasn’t a misunderstanding; it was a lockout.
The "smoking gun" is a February 2026 email from the chef de cabinet, Janice Miller, which effectively turned a regional summit into a private party. By explicitly stating that the retreat was for "Heads of Government only," the Secretariat didn't just invite a few leaders to a private room; they legally and logistically barred the representatives of member states whose prime ministers could not be physically present.
In the world of serious diplomacy, if a prime minister is absent, their designated minister is the state. Yet, in CARICOM’s new "WhatsApp Protocol," a Foreign Minister like Sean Sobers is treated less like a high-ranking official and more like an uninvited wedding crasher. To be "disinvited" via a text message on the morning of a meeting is not just mismanagement; it’s a deliberate insult to the sovereignty of Trinidad and Tobago.
The irony is thick enough to clog the Caribbean Sea. While Chairman Dr. Terrance Drew insists that T&T was "invited," the Secretariat’s own emails prove they set a trap: they created a meeting where only "heads" could enter, knowing full well that T&T’s representative was a minister. They then held a "surreptitious" vote on the secretary-general's reappointment, an item conveniently left off the official agenda, and had the audacity to act surprised when the excluded members cried foul.
PM Kamla Persad-Bissessar’s demand for "timestamped minutes" has pulled back the curtain on a Secretariat that operates with the transparency of a lead pipe. Even a local "village council," the PM’s now-famous comparison, understands that you cannot vote on the region’s highest office in a room where a third of the members have been told they aren't allowed to sit.
As the Guardian columnists have noted, this isn't just about hurt feelings or "disrespect." It is about the 22% of the budget that T&T provides. It is about Article 24 of the Treaty of Chaguaramas. And most of all, it is about a Secretariat that has become so comfortable with its own silence that it has forgotten who it actually works for.
If Dr. Carla Barnett and her team believe that "Heads Only" is a valid way to run a 15-member community, they shouldn't be surprised when the "Body" of that community decides to stop writing the checks.
Excerpt of various newspaper columns in the Caribbean
Sarge