Is TT a banana republic?

I didn’t know much about the Dominican Republic – except for the fact I had once stayed a couple of days in Santo Domingo on my way to Cuba – but I wasn’t taking that description from the professor who had flown helicopter rescue missions behind enemy lines in the Vietnam War.

The professor thought of himself as a hero with an untouchable status, and apparently he thought of himself as an expert on banana republics. I thought of him as a pontificating fool who had the audacity to post a stereotypic – not to mention derogatory – image of the Caribbean for my class to read.

After I had had enough of his banana republic rant, I wrote a blistering post that basically said, “You’re supposed to be a professor – a knowledgeable man – and you shouldn’t be engaging in stereotypic images of the Caribbean.

That should be beneath you.” Needless to say my post was promptly removed. If memory serves me well, I think his post came down like the Berlin Wall.

It took a while, but his post did come down.

All this took place about 25 years ago, but the memory came flooding back to me a few weeks ago when I suddenly realised I couldn’t muster that form of rebellion ever again. I’m not saying I buy into the stereotype of Caribbean islands as banana republics, but I’m becoming cynical enough to shrug my shoulders and save my breath, my brain and my writing fingers from the taxing task of coming up with some argument to counter what I once considered to be ignorant ramblings from neo-colonialists. If I’m honest, I have to say it’s becoming more and more difficult to argue against banana republic status.

Let me just take the case of Trinidad and Tobago. A banana republic? No. Not really, you might say.

We don’t even grow enough bananas to sustain the howler monkeys in the forest, let alone our population. We import bananas so we can’t be a banana republic.

Well, that’s sheer ignorance because a banana republic has nothing to do with the amount of bananas you grow.

I hate to burst your banana-filled bubble, but you don’t need banana plantations to be a banana republic.

You can qualify as one – if all you do is export oil.

All you really need is a pile of ignorance and the misguided belief that you only need one product to survive politically and economically speaking to qualify for being a banana republic.

If you look up the meaning of banana republic in the dictionary, you will find this definition: “a small state that is politically unstable as a result of the domination of its economy by a single export controlled by foreign capital.” Is that us? Are we a banana republic? If not, what are we? How would you qualify us economically speaking in this world? I’ll let you decide.

As far as I can tell, we are still far too dependent on oil. We haven’t even found effective ways to package the tourist industry here. Our paltry set of souvenirs for sale show that we have no real tourist-oriented artefacts that define our culture. We don’t even produce ceramic bananas to sell to tourists. So, I’ll ask you again: Are we a banana republic? Really, who are we?