TT: Whatever happened to 'together we aspire, together we achieve'?

[T]here remains the challenge for Trinidad and Tobago--as it is also for Guyana--to systematically and passionately sensitise a multi-ethnic population to the sentiment so colourfully articulated by Williams in his final address to his PNM's 25th anniversary some three months before his death:

"We are a Caribbean people," he had declared. "All the many ethnic groups which constitute it, 'dem is one race' came on the same trip by the same ship-merely with variations of country of origin, length of the voyage, duration of the trip, etc--all to mess out of the same West Indian pot...

"In the main our relations (as citizens of Trinidad and Tobago) have lacked the tensions, the confrontations, the acute divisions which mark other multi-racial societies..."

Williams may have had in mind Guyana of the 1960s and 1970s.

Today, more than three decades later, we are witnessing a mushrooming of new and militant social and political groups, here and elsewhere in the Caricom region, that take full advantage of the latest in communications technology to spread their messages/propaganda with a mix of racial/political prejudices and their "catechism" for change.

What their "programmes" and "activities" often serve to underscore, is the relevance of the sentiment so passionately expressed 23 years ago by Williams, whatever his own leadership deficiencies, in nation-building in multi-ethnic, culturally diverse Caribbean states like Trinidad and Tobago, Guyana and Suriname.

A protege and political beneficiary of Williams's leadership of the PNM he has inherited, Prime Minister Patrick Manning has been showing the potential to at least foster a Williams-style vision for pan-Caribbean economic integration and functional cooperation.

The latest example of Manning's interest in pursuing Williams's vision on Caribbean economic integration came last month with his declaration to involve Guyana, Jamaica and Suriname in a proposed aluminium smelter project in Trinidad and Tobago.

Much earlier, he had gone on record as being committed to a single airline for the Caribbean Community and in favour also of involving Caricom as a whole in a proposed massive intra-regional piped natural gas scheme.