Chinese cranes rising over Kingston’s docks and a U.S. bill inching through Congress have placed the Caribbean at the heart of a new great‑power tug‑of‑war. Over the past two decades Beijing has poured more than ten billion dollars into island ports, highways, and 5G cables—investments critics say could double as logistics hubs for the People’s Liberation Army. Ten Caribbean states have signed Belt and Road memoranda; trade with China has ballooned eight‑fold, and debt to Chinese lenders now equals roughly a sixth of public liabilities in Guyana and Suriname.
Washington’s reply is the bipartisan Americas Act: tax breaks and development‑finance sweeteners designed to pull supply chains out of China and into a hemisphere‑wide trade zone anchored by U.S. rules. SOUTHCOM warns that accepting Beijing’s easy money could turn the region into a “Chinese lake,” yet island governments, still rebuilding from storms and a pandemic, value speedier funding and fewer policy strings.
Caught between columns of cranes and columns of legislation, Caribbean leaders are bargaining hard—slicing loan terms, courting EU climate funds, exploring blue bonds that insure coral reefs while refinancing debt. Whether the sea before them becomes an American moat, a Chinese lake, or a genuinely shared canal will hinge less on distant capitals than on the choices made in Bridgetown, Kingston, and Port of Spain.
