
Iron Ladies Behind CARICOM Iron Curtain Cold War for PEACE in Pieces on Jubilee Summit with Dr Kris Rampersad
Along the Long Lonely Road to engendering Regional Unity
Dynamite or demureness … as we cast hard glances at CARICOM’s Iron Ladies to tuck in their skirts, fold their legs, cross their ankles, keep fisted knuckles on their laps and pack up their pokneys in the finest exhibition of Caribbean broughtupsy – the unspoken choreography of ‘acceptable’ femininity in power, the elephant in the room of the CARICOM Jubilee Summit remains.
You know Demokrissy doesn’t mince words, nor metaphors. And frankly, this is not instruction or advice, you can get that on request. Make Contact!
This is exposure, full frontal, as anyone claiming to ‘Lead from the Front’ (Wait for it, my analyses on this year’s Carnival fare is on the front burner too!) It exposes the gaze, and pinch, that does not stalk male leaders in the same way, that women are policed through etiquette, tone, posture, restraint, and demand for decorum. Because leadership, worn by women, must be powder-puffed, padded, perfumed, and palatable. Policing is the point, performance, the mode. (Yes you really want to read that Carnival piece, up next).
Fair Fears Feeding Trough Culture Fare
CARICOM ‘s Jubilee Summit in St Kitts and Nevis may be attempting to serve up a fine fare of regional unity, but it is our underlying culture and gender dynamics that will inevitably chomp it up into unrecogniseable indigestible bile, bits, bites, bytes, and a new era of fluid geopolitical negotiations in which, for the first time in its history, did anyone notice, men and male styles of diplomacy are overshadowed by Iron Lady leaders. This will remain indecipherable and difficult to define even in the new AI and data environment because the historical contexts are void, skewed, biased and deficient in informing data analyses that can succinctly drive meaningful change and transformation.
Iron Ladies Face to Face Before CARICOM Iron Curtain

For the first time at this Jubilee meet, CARICOM’s Iron Ladies will come face?to?face since the somewhat heated cold war began when CARICOM meets this week in St Kitts and Nevis, making it timely to sneak a peek behind the Caribbean’s Iron Curtain.
Trinidad and Tobago’s Kamla Persad?Bissessar will attend her first CARICOM Heads meeting since taking office for the second time. Barbados’ Mia Mottley has commandeered the fort as CARICOM’s leading woman’s voice for two terms. The region has been washed over with bridges drawn, swords crossed in divergent directions on regional sovereignty, security, diplomacy, trade, petro?nomics and geopolitics, and somewhat in the periphery, culture. Framing these are Persad?Bissessar’s electoral recrowning, which Mottley attended as Chair of CARICOM, and Mottley’s hattrick sweeping victory this month, when T&T’s Prime Minister warmly congratulated her, reaffirming a long?standing friendship.
Exposing CARICOM Bowels
So yes, if Demokrissy has popcorn bowl in hand with front?row seats to CARICOM’s bowels in this unfolding drama, it is because she recognises that this meet differs from others. It unfolds at a moment when national, regional and global pressures are converging with unusual force and for this it is worth surveying the backdrop that sets this meeting apart from others at this critical juncture of national, regional, and global developments. It is not because Demokrissy views governance as theatre, but because it is increasingly treated as such by political players as by media, academics and the commentary box that thrive on conflict-as-content click bait.

AuthenTHINK Intel AnalyEthics: Beyond the Spectacle
This AuthenTHINK Intel AnalyEthics, part of ongoing insights on issues of the emerging Global South, across three decades of global-to-local engagement. It moves beyond the superficial uproar surrounding regional fist-shaking.
I have tracked these patterns across pre- and post-Independence political development through journalism and academia, documented in works such as Finding a Place and Through the Political Glass Ceiling — works more often sidelined than engaged. That void in serious analysis is not accidental. Institutions of learning-for-hire instinctively suppress perspectives that disturb the status-quo core which hardens into policy blindness as contexts disappear, diversity and complexity, flattened and condensed.

My focus is the ignored socio-cultural grounding that shapes how power is interpreted, negotiated and exercised. It gives flesh to core, yet overlooked dimensions of the perceived divisions in which the Caribbean buys into and perpetuates its own illusions, as homogeneous, tranquil postcard serenity.
Emerging Global South
This AuthenTHINK Intel AnalyEthics forms part of my ongoing in?depth EPIC productions on the emergence of the Global South, consolidating work over three decades and research spanning centuries, across global?to?local arenas. It deliberately moves beyond the superficial uproar signalling regional fist?shaking.
It responds to the void in depth in prevailing analyses, enabled by institutions of learning?for?hire and click bait media that instinctively suppress divergence from status?quo narratives that hardens into policy blindness in geopolitical governance owing to insufficient understanding of unfolding phenomena. This blindness has persisted across pre? and post?Independence eras, despite evidence captured in works such as Finding a Place and Through the Political Glass Ceiling, more sidelined rather than engaged by our institutions that prefer comfort over confrontation still revolving on ‘chup’, and identity erasure as modus operandi.

Iron Ladies Moorings
The nonexistent comparative base is that the differing socio?cultural moorings of the Iron Ladies are rooted in post?Independence realities of the Caribbean, the Americas, and the Global South, and in even smaller denominations of national and localised realities that vary island to island, nation to nation.
This stands in sharp contrast to the Caribbean’s persistent broad?brushing itself as a homogeneous idyllic of paradisal peace and serenity, far removed from the lived turbulence of those of us within it, constantly jumping and manoeuvring the ‘bang bang’ minefields set to deter, detour, delay our progress
Still waters run deep into layered tensions shaped by post-Independence realities and colonial hauntings crying out for exorcism (Now there you have to see the sequel on Carnival bacchanalia and culture of governance).

Cosmetic Poster Picture Perfect
The international community caught glimpses of the fractures in the poster-picture-perfect illusion at the last UN General Assembly, where the region presented not a consolidated Caribbean voice with one of the strongest regional leadership cohorts revealed not cohesion, but fracture in a vivid display of its festering fissures and faultlines beneath the seemingly tranquil Caribbean Sea.
CARICOM’s Jubilee meeting may wish to foreground climate change and structural alliances. The reality is that no amount of cosmetic diplomacy will fix what is broken unless CARICOM is willing to confront its weaknesses, amplified by fragile, fragmented, and tottering regional institutions gripped by the same ineffectiveness, and engage those of us who stand ready to reengineer our futures out of planted historic quicksand.
Men Marginalised?

Pre?drafted communiqués may serve up unity, but under-engaged underlying cultural and gender dynamics already threaten to consume the geopolitical bloc for breakfast as the region enters a fluid, multipolar era, one in which men are, for the first time did you notice, no longer the default voice of authority. No communiqué can mask structural weakness. No diplomatic cosmetics can repair institutional fragility. Regional unity cannot be performed into existence while foundational fractures crumble under pressure.
The Long Lonely Road: Pokney in Papa Politics
Both CARICOM Iron Ladies have spoken publicly and in our private developmental sessions, of the long, lonely road in gender politics, often as the sole woman at CARICOM and other tables. That they now appear positioned in opposition and pitted against each other, pokneys in hand, reflect a papa political culture that defines them although they did not create, craft nor curate it.

This Iron Curtain of CARICOM of which I speak has less to do with traditional US-Russia Cold War ideology and everything to do with post?Independence democratic curtailments. My focus is how power, risk, authority, and survival function in our small, vulnerable states.
Embedded within these are gender, culture, rural-urban divides that leaders remain reluctant to address, and you know that has Demokrissy constantly shaking her head in despair! The Caribbean’s Iron Curtain is not ideological but structural, shaped by post-Independence democratic constraints, in an architecture of fragmenting institutional hierarchies and unresolved culture and gendered power relations. Is that plain speak enough for general comprehension? This Iron Curtain isn’t about ideology. It’s built into how CARICOM and its institutions function that do not respect or value how we does look, cook, eat, sleep, walk or talk! Yes, and analyses and decision making therefore remain shallow.
Suriname’s Jennifer Geerlings?Simons and Anguilla’s Cora Richardson?Hodge, also first female leaders, will have front?row seats, and some choice life-lessons, to this dynamic interplay.
Quick View: Iron Ladies Up Close
Both Iron Ladies are highly experienced but they were formed in fundamentally different strategic worlds.

Persad-Bissessar’s political life emerged within vulnerability, internationally and domestically. She navigated deeply fractured national papa politics while carving space for rural communities, marginal constituencies and women in public life. Her path was contested, negotiated, defended step by step. Power, in her formation, was and remains unstable terrain requiring constant securing.
Mottley emerged from a professional mainstream political-legal lineage embedded in Barbados’ governing class. Institutional authority, constitutional reasoning, diplomatic engagement, security and stability have been somewhat normal operating environments from early life. This changes how she treats power, which is structured terrain, handed to her to navigate and deploy, as her victories that demolish Parliamentary Opposition.
What analyses & public discourse miss
So to reduce the actions and pronouncements of either to personality or political ideology, largely patriarchal, is an immense disservice to both. Each reflect distinct historical and social identities that do not get the focused attention required of Caribbean diversity and multiculturalism that underpin formation of Caribbean States. I’ve been preaching, and waiting for the converts to kneel and accept the ash (Yea, you have to wait while I finish this before I wade into the ashes of post-Carnival culture post mortem! Coming up next. Support our developments and it might come sooner!)
Histories at a Glance

Persad?Bissessar entered parliamentary politics in 1987 while the global Cold War still structured diplomacy of small-states. Her political formation was shaped from the largely disenfranchised rural, women margins within a world of superpower rivalry, sovereignty anxiety and non-aligned survival swirling around a deeply fractured community and national political cultures. She has constantly been forced to choose an anchor, or invent one herself.
Mia Mottley entered Parliament after the Soviet collapse, from mainstream national political culture in a globalising post?Cold War environment defined by financial liberalisation, climate governance, and multipolar negotiation.
Both deeply experienced, were formed in fundamentally different worlds, beyond the perpetuated imposed notions of the Caribbean as a homogeneous verdant field of friendships. Here, on these sun kissed, wave lapped small island shores, camaraderie itself is in constant negotiation. You wouldn’t know unless you have lived it as we have.
Negotiating Power
Persad?Bissessar rose from rural poverty through educational mobility and constituency?rooted politics in Trinidad and Tobago’s plural, competitive landscape, where legitimacy must be constantly negotiated. Power is not given, nor entitled, it is unstable, earned, hard to hold on to and must be secured and defended for communities it immediately serves.

Mottley emerged from a mainstream political culture that envelops one dimension of Caribbean reality. She is from a political?legal family embedded within Barbados’ post?Independence governing class, socialised early into institutional authority and diplomacy as normal terrain, not a space to claim.
These distinctions are not personality traits; they are political cultures. For both Iron Ladies, background is not biography, it is political formation. And that is the error of blinkered institutions and their mouthpieces who continue to neglect the signals and forecasts of such landmark works as Finding a Place and Through the Political Glass Ceiling, for the fail to read and understand the room on which sits this elephant in full view of Demokrissy.
In the Trenches
Persad-Bissessar has nearly four decades in elected politics. Mottley roughly three-quarters of that. Their portfolios mirror each other — Attorney General, Minister of Education, Opposition Leader, Prime Minister — but their pathways differ. Persad-Bissessar rose through local government, constituency mobilisation and adversarial institutional engagement. Her presence was often treated as intrusion into established power.
Mottley rose rapidly through established institutional channels within a system that recognizes and respects her as inheritor of governance continuity. These distinctions shape diplomatic instinct, risk calculation and negotiation styles. Santimanitay!
What Lies Beneath & Behind the Dispute Iron Curtain
Public discourse centres on US regional operations, military presence and geopolitical alignment. This framing simplifies and polarises, casting both leaders at opposite ends of an external divide. But the deeper divergence lies in how each interprets power, sovereignty, risk and survival from distinct national realities. External tensions do not engineer or create the divisions. They only reveal the internal structural differences and weaknesses. And well, put that in your Cuban pipes and smoke it. Because I will be getting to the Cuban factor and how that too is being manipulated as well soon.

Faultlines in CARICOM’s Jubilee Summit
The Jubilee Summit convenes amid unresolved structural fractures that include institutional fragility, unequal representation, entrenched alliances, perception of internal hierarchies, persistent patriarchal authority structures
And let’s call a spade a spade, if we want to bury some hatchets. Some members remain more equal than others.
Regional institutions replicate these imbalances and instabilities forged within national contexts and shape the quality and credibility of Caribbean intervention globally.
This is the real elephant in the room. When I talk of the need to get into the culture beyond the song and dance spectacle into the closer look at the cultures of business, politics and governance, that is what I have been talking about. And even the Archbishop had his take on this – now yes, you going to have to read the Carnival post-mortem that coming next even though is Lent, and EID!
Institutional Blindness
Regional commentary remains superficial because media, academia and institutions across sectors remain entrenched within a fading status quo. By narrowing focus to visible disagreement, they obscure the real gaps in development and undermine us trying to recraft the structural drivers for transformation.
This deprives decision-makers of analytical depth precisely when strategic clarity is most needed.
It is for this reason that the GloCal Knowledge Pot and its satellite knowledge systems have become trusted sources of grounded, evidence-based regional interpretation.

Dynamite or Demureness: False Options
Will this CARICOM meeting descend into ideological dynamite or be smoothed into diplomatic demureness? This is a familiar double bind imposed when women sit at the leadership tables: assertiveness recast as volatility; diplomacy dismissed as softness. Yuh really cyar win eh!
Prevailing discourse on the controversy, centres the Dunroe Doctrine and U.S. operations in the Caribbean. This framing stereotypes the women as geopolitical opposites, obscuring the deeper, localised realities shaping each leader’s stance, outlined above.
Yes, oui, the Caribbean still waters run deep enough to set Peace efforts in pieces.
Men in the Middle – Shrugging off “A Woman Thing”
PM Terrence Drew, CARICOM Chair and host, alongside younger leaders such as Dickon Mitchell and Irfaan Ali, may be eagerly seeking resolution to move the regional agenda forward.

Older generation of politicians may be quick to dismiss this as “a woman thing” with ingrained convenient patriarchal shrug that feminises conflict, encouraging sidestepping the accountability that we who are forge a path to progress continue to demand.
Dismissal reflects the same institutional failures in media, academia, opinion?shaping elites embedded in CARICOM and its institutions, modus operandi that now spoil opportunities for advancement through education, trade, economics, data and other transparencies, preferencing spectacle over substance, in Encore performance (now you really want to read the next piece to come that dives frontally into the cultural affronts!)
Deeper Fault Lines Exposed
As familiar side glances and demands pervade the pontification of the paid and privileged patriarchal moles and trolls advocating tucked skirts, folded legs, crossed ankles in the enduring idiom of papa politics, the elephant in the room remains the superficiality, lack of depth, bias, blindness in public analysis that promotes social and cultural disrespects across the region and particularly to those marginalised cultural, rural, gendered and other communities.
What the prevailing discourse-focus exposes is not merely disagreement but entrenched dysfunction: perceptions of internal cliques, old boys’ and girls’ clubs and the sense that some CARICOM members are more equal than others that exist not as peripheral gossip groups, but are embedded within the architecture and construct of governance itself. And you know Demokrissy has been trying to open eyes to this since Thy Kingdom Come!
To us, the regional farm hands and animals looking on, the dysfunction extends into regional institutions that reproduce the same inequalities they are meant to dismantle. And this allegory is not an insult, but issued in Demokrissy’s sweetest sultry tones and insightful perspicacity into doublespeak and double do, where labour carries the burden while those assigned to leadership harvest the spoils.
Whether the Iron Ladies are once again expected to rest their pokneys aside in the perennial demand that women leaders neutralise authority for institutional comfort, the fractures remain.
Beyond Jubilee: Break the Barrier

If CARICOM is to take its place in new global dynamics, these sores, fractures, and fissures must be confronted head?on.
This marks my ongoing deepened interrogation into what it will take to Break the Barrier – theme of this year’s Woman Tech Makers’ Theme for International Women’s Day on women in leadership, drawing on more than three decades across journalism, education, governance, culture, and gender empowerment. I am available to lead, craft, and drive multi-sector initiatives, workshops, explorations, education and outreach in this regard.
The next posts, part of this trilogy, will take a microscopic view of other unexplored areas as Caribbean migration on the one hand, and on the other, why we continue to fail on culture despite our rich creative offerings while drawing the takeaways from this year’s scintillating Carnival season as I continue the tireless and perilous efforts to Break the Barrier surrounding our place in the world.
My doors, ears, eyes remain open, even as I pull out my compact and powder puff to mop up the sweat on my brows.
Did you know you can also commission AuthenTHINK Intel AnalyEthics related to your industry, sector, or organisation or community. Make Contact!
See The Future of Media, Education and AuthenTHINK Intel AnalyETHICS in this link
Make Contact to Get Involved
See the Trilogy on News of the Day Autopsy, Requiem, Rennaissance!
About Dr Kris Rampersad
Discover more from GLoCaL Knowledge Pot
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
















































