In Haiti, urbanization through “slumification” has generated an
overwhelming sense of crisis. In this article I trace the history of the urban
crisis and consider some examples of the making of slums in order to show
how the spatial form of the city has been shaped by a peculiar dialectic
between the state and statelessness. In Haiti, this dialectic takes shape in
Port-au-Prince, where people feel they ought to be well within the reach of
the state and yet feel excluded or left out. Ostensibly the center of political

We view indicators of success in health in the Caribbean with some

ambivalence. Macro-level indicators mask the inequities that threaten the

health of one of the most vulnerable groups in the society: the children. This

paper examines child health rights in five Caribbean countries: Barbados,

Grenada, Jamaica, St. Lucia, and Trinidad and Tobago. These countries

present interesting similarities and contrasts. They vary in size,

population and economic performance, yet they have all recorded either

What explains the proliferation of Ponzi and similar financial schemes and

scams which overtook Jamaica in the last decade? The explanation offered

in this article points to change in the structural and institutional environment

that effectively created the conditions for scams to flourish. The short

story is one in which neoliberal globalising forces refashioned the country

in Ponzi’s image.

¿Qué explica la proliferación de esquemas financieros Ponzi u otros

de naturaleza similar; o las estafas que han permeado Jamaica en la

The flying fish is a cultural icon of the Caribbean island of Barbados. Yet

the fish itself has been growing scarcer in Barbadian waters, instead

moving south into the waters of neighbouring state Trinidad and Tobago.

Continuing disagreement over the rights and ownership of these waters led

to an arbitration case in 2006 that settled the issue of a maritime boundary

between the pair, but not the fishery issues. This case serves as an

interesting examination of the importance of fishery resources for states,

This paper seeks to establish whether compliance with the Basel Prudential

Regulations and Requirements (BPRR) by commercial banks in the

emerging economy of Trinidad & Tobago brings about any measurable

improvement in their performance. A model is constructed in which bank

performance is explained by macroeconomic variables and bank-specific

variables, in particular a variable representing the BPRR compliance

rating constructed from confidential information provided by the Central

With a history of relatively poor performance by its health system, Trinidad

and Tobago introduced radical reform under a new Decentralisation Act of

1994, which was intended to be patient-driven, bottom-up, flexible and

close to customers, as well provide effective management to achieve the

goals of the Ministry of Health (MOH). A critical analysis of the reform in

decentralisation and its performance is the subject of this article.

Essentially, we challenge through empirical field research the claims of the

This paper’s central theoretical and empirical thrust is to examine the

processes of racial/ethnic group formation of early first-generation AfroCaribbean1

immigrants and African Americans in New York City in the

early decades of the twentieth century. These processes, generally called

“ethnogenesis”, turn primarily on the dynamics of social identity

boundary construction. Intersecting race with ethnicity, as I do mostly in

this paper, is an attempt, first, to discern the saliency of race and ethnicity

The Caribbean is at the heart of the Americas in many ways. Yet its

historical and contemporary effect on the US, and traffic between the two

is sometimes reduced in magnitude or scope because of a reliance on

demographic data that highlights the small numbers of its diaspora relative

to other racial and ethnic groups in the US. Those small numbers seem to

justify the use of comparative approaches in which a pan-Caribbean

categorisation is used to represent the Anglophone, Francophone, and

A number of theories have been put forward to explain the existence of the

matrifocal family in Jamaica. One of the most widely accepted is that it is

the result of changes wrought by the plantation system. One searches in

vain, however, to uncover any similar attempt to explain the development

of the prestige system of working-class men. Rather than follow the

conventional anthropological approach, which has been to document how

pervasive male peer groups are in the English-speaking Caribbean, I