GUYANA CONSUL LETTER TO NATION NEWSPAPER: FIRST SETTLERS

The following is a letter to the editor of The Nation Newspaper of Barbados submitted by Norman Faria, Guyana's Honorary Consul in Barbados.

Guyana Honorary Consulate
#19 Pearl Drive, Eden terrace
St.Michael, Barbados
22 February 2010

The Editor
Letters to Editor section
Nation Publications
Fontabelle, St.Michael
Barbados.

To whom this may be presented:

I refer to a news item about the Holetown Festival in your Saturday edition ("Festival to end with a blast", Saturday Sun, 20 February 2010) in which it was printed that a Thanksgiving Service would be held the next day to "mark the first settlement of the island in 1627".

Before I point out your time frame error, I would like to commend the private entity Festival organisers, made up I believe in the main of business owners in the area, for what appears to be another successful Festival. I personally attended during the week and was glad to know that the businesses, including handicraft people and other stake holders were apparently benefiting. Certainly too, this most excellent get together has beome a welcome addition to the island's important tourist product.

It will be recalled that the Festival commemorates the arrival in 1627 of a number of English people and their African slaves who landed at what became Holetown where today a monument is erected to recognise that historical fact.

But there were settlers before 1627. These were the Hemisphere's indigenous people, called Amerindians in Guyana. Archealogical excavations here by University of London teams in collaboration with the Barbados Museum and Historical Society show these first settlers had big villages. They had a language and artistic expression and religion.They had material achievements. They had their own civilisation.

They had reached the island in courageous exploratory voyages up the chain of Caribbean islands in large ocean going canoes. They came from what is today Guyana and Venezuela on the north eastern and northern coasts of South America.

The time frame of their alleged absence from Barbados when the first Europeans sighted what was to become Barbados was not that great a gap in historical migration/settler patterns. Indeed, when the first Europeans sighted the island there may still have been indigenous peoples in the densely forested interior. They may have left an agricultural layout for the first settlers to build on. Guyanese indigenous persons were brought from what is today Guyana in the 17th Century to assist the second wave (after the indigenous peoples) of settlers who came in the 1600s.

The website of the private entity Holetown Festival organising committee is also incorrect in stating that Barbados' history began with the 1627 arrival, however noteworthy that happening may be.

Are the first true settlers, the indigenous peoples of the Americas, not worthy of any mention at all? Are their civilisations, past and present , not worth anything?

Their descendants make up sizable parts of the population of several of our Hemispheric neighbours (Bolivia, Guatemala and Mexico for example). It is a wrong message the organising committee is sending , perhaps unwittingly though the Guyana Consulate has offered research assistance in this area. Is this effective re-writing of history the type of thing should be given to school children and visitors to the otherwise commendable Festival?

I personally knew Alfred Pragnell, said to be the originator and motivator when this most useful event started. Alfred was a friend of Guyana and the Americas and I know he would have liked a more objective and well-rounded historical overview of what the Festival celebrates.

Respectfully Yours,

Norman Faria,
Guyana's Honorary Consul in Barbados

France seizes biggest contraband of Taino artifacts

A Taino cemi or zemi.

Santo Domingo.- The French authorities confiscated a piece of the Taino culture valued as high as one million euros, seized last year together with other archaeological items sent to Paris to be sold by an antiques dealer as modern handicraft.

The Taino artifacts are the highest valued confiscation of items from Dominican Republic, pertaining to the pre-Columbian Caribbean people in recent history.

The piece was dispatched from Dominican Republic on April 3 last year by the exporter Hicotea Club S.A., of Las Galeras, Samaná (northeast), to Simurg Antiquités, in Paris, France, and seized by French Customs in one of four boxes containing 200 objects weighing 50 kilos.

The information is contained in document of the Dominican Foreign Relations Ministry, which explains the procedures followed by the French authorities, from the piece\s confiscation, the evaluation of its authenticity and the report to the Dominican representation before the organization UNESCO, based in Paris.

The report doesn’t specify what object is appraised, but does note that among them are four trigonolites (stone of triangular form with three faces), which can cost as much as 80,000 Euros, a cemí (carved idol, generally stone) as high as 250,000 euros, axes and several Taino sculptures, and a dúho of wood (a ceremonial seat), as high as half a million euros, everything following its state of conservation, among other items.

SOURCE: listin.com.do

Taino Announce 2010 Census Partnership

UCTP Taino News - The United Confederation of Taino People this month affirmed its commitment to partnering with the U.S. Census Bureau during the 2010 Census. The announcement was issued via a proclamation by the Confederation's Office of International Relations and Regional Coordination. For indigenous Taíno and other American Indian and Alaska Native communities census data can provide tribal leaders with important information to help address community needs.

“Our 2010 commitment follows the precedent set in 2000 when the Confederation participated as an official U.S. Census partner along with other American Indian and Alaska Native community leaders" stated UCTP representative Roberto Borrero. “By clearly identifying ourselves as Taino the census provides a way for community members to express our basic human right of self-determination.”

Who gets counted as an American Indian in the Census is determined by his or her response to the question on the Census form about the person’s race. To the Census Bureau, a person is whatever race or races he or she says they are. It is a matter of self-identification.

“From our understanding the race question is number 9 on the Census form for the first person in the household" said Roger Guayacan Hernandez, a Confederation Liaison Officer in Borikén (Puerto Rico) . He continued noting that “If the box labeled ‘American Indian or Alaska Native’ is checked, that’s how the person is recorded.”

Individuals can insure that they are counted as belonging to the appropriate Tribal Nation by writing in the "principle tribe" in which they are enrolled. The Confederation is urging community members to write “Taino” in this space also provided as part of Question 9 on the Census form.

The Confederation will host several census information related events in the United States and in Boriken during the month of March to encourage community members to “be counted.”

Required once every 10 years by the U.S. Constitution, the census seeks to count everyone in the United States and Puerto Rico, including people of all ages, races and ethnic groups. Census data determine representation at all levels of the government as well as the need for new health care facilities, schools, community centers, roads and more.

UCTPTN 02.16.2010

Rush To Get New Puerto Rico Birth Certificate

SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico -- Puerto Rican-born citizens living in the United States will now have to request a new copy of their birth certificates.

The country’s Gov. Luis Fortuño signed a law making all old birth certificates processed prior to December 2009 not valid in any federal agency.

A transition period will be in effect until July 1. The new law is an effort to reduce all fraud cases reported by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement in the past year.

According to the governmental agency, a Puerto Rican birth certificate runs for about $5,000 to $10,000 on the black market.

Puerto Ricans born on the island receive an American Social Security number and are eligible for a United States passport from birth.

For more information, call (787) 767-9120 ext. 2402 or visit their Web site.

Source: 13 News

Cuba looks to suburban farms to boost food output

CAMAGUEY, Cuba, (Reuters) – Cuba has launched an ambitious project to ring urban areas with thousands of small farms in a bid to reverse the country’s long agricultural decline and ease its chronic economic woes.

The five-year plan calls for growing fruits and vegetables and raising livestock in 4-mile-wide (6.5 kilometer) rings around 150 of Cuba’s cities and towns, with the exception of the capital Havana.

The island’s Communist authorities hope suburban farming will make food cheaper and more abundant, cut transportation costs, be less reliant on machinery and encourage urban dwellers to leave bureaucratic jobs for more productive labor.

But the government will continue to hold a monopoly on most aspects of food production and distribution, including its control of most of the land in the Communist-run nation.

The pilot program for the project is being conducted in the central city of Camaguey, which the Cuban agriculture ministry has said eventually will have 1,400 small farms covering 52,000 hectares (128,490 acres), just minutes outside the town.

The farms, mostly in private hands but also including some cooperatives and state-owned enterprises, must grow everything organically, and the ministry expects they will produce 75 percent of the food for the city of 320,000 people, with big state-owned farms providing the rest.

On a recent day, dozens of people were hard at work plowing fields, hoeing earth, posting protective covering for crops and putting up fencing as the sun came up.

“This land they gave to us, the private farmers. I have four hectares (10 acres) and now they have leased me eight (20 acres) more,” one of the farmers, Camilo Mendoza, told Reuters.

“Look, on this side and the other side are other plots, and over there another. Here they have given quite a bit of land and support to private farmers,” he said.

The project is modeled after the hundreds of urban gardens developed by then-Defense Minister Raul Castro during the deep economic depression of the 1990s that followed the collapse of Communism in eastern Europe.

He proclaimed at the time that beans were more important than cannons, marking a strategic shift towards a more domestic focused agenda by Cuban leaders after decades of active support for liberation movements and leftist guerrillas overseas.

The suburban project dovetails with other steps introduced by President Raul Castro since he took over the day-to-day leadership from his ailing elder brother Fidel Castro in 2008.

These have included the leasing of fallow state lands to 100,000 mostly private farmers, raising prices for farm products and allowing farmers to sell part of their crops directly to the people instead of to the state.

On the other side of Camaguey and a few miles up Cuba’s central highway, Armando, the head of a cattle cooperative, said his group was persuaded to join the plan by the offer of land to raise garden and root vegetables and the chance for direct sales to the public.

Stands have been set up every mile or so along the city’s ring road for the sales, but Armando said they are taking their products to the customers.

“They assigned us a district where we can sell our produce. We are using a mobile system, a bicycle cart, and sell out every day,” he said.

“In December we produced around five tonnes. The root vegetables we had to sell to the state, but we were free to sell the garden vegetables directly,” he said.

The changes are tweaks to Cuba’s centralized socialism, not a major step away from it, keeping with Raul Castro’s vow to protect the system put in place after his brother took power in the 1959 Cuban revolution.

He has balked at more sweeping, market-oriented changes that many expected when he took power and without which many economists say Cuba will not significantly increase agricultural output.

Cubans have seen many past government efforts to transform the country’s agriculture fail, so the farmers at Camaguey said they were taking a wait-and-see attitude on this latest one.

“For sure there will be more food around here if you come back in a few years,” Camilio Mendoza said about his expectations.

“More than that, I can’t say.”