We need no hostility towards America to insist on self-respect. We need no romance about Havana to remember the humanity of Cubans. And we need no permission from either capital to think. Andrew, Kamla and every other custodian of Caribbean office should remember the distinction: you represent a people; you do not possess them. Keep the international friendships. Make the diplomatic journeys. Bring home an argument that can stand without the photograph. But leave our right

By Dennis A. Minott, PhD. October 23, 2026 Dr Dennis A. Minott Abstract Small Island Developing States (SIDS)—and the Jamaica Public Service Company (JPSCo) in particular—face an existential dual mandate: eliminating the macroeconomic drag of imported fossil fuels while maintaining grid stability against severe climate shocks. In response, vendors from the Global North heavily market Small Modular Reactors (SMRs), typically rated between 50 MWₑ and 300 MWₑ, as zero-carbon bas

Public sector compensation must remain firmly anchored in proportionality, transparency, and public trust. While securing capable leadership for national reconstruction is necessary, paying the CEO of NaRRA significantly more than the head of U.S. FEMA—in a country where average annual per capita income is a fraction of that in the United States—is indefensible. At a time when ordinary citizens are asked to endure hardship and fiscal constraint, executive compensation of this

The argument for SMRs as a “green economy” solution, when applied to a seismically active, debt-constrained, institutionally thin, tourism-dependent archipelago, becomes not merely optimistic but epistemically negligent. The book by Jorge Morales Pedraza and its successor paper are useful as catalogues of what SMR technology hopes to become. They are dangerous as blueprints for what Jamaica should do.

My old friend Everald “Warmy” Warmington deserves a patient answer. His reported contention that white people did not capture Africans, but merely bought people whom black people had captured, contains both a historically untenable generalisation and a conclusion that does not follow from its premise. Some African rulers, merchants and intermediaries participated knowingly in the slave trade. Their conduct deserves scrutiny and condemnation. But... Read More Online

By Dennis A. Minott, PhD September 28, 2026 For more than half a century, I have worked in and around renewable energy—hydroelectricity, biomass and solar—asking essentially the same Jamaican question: why should an island lavishly endowed with sunshine, wind, water, vegetation and human ingenuity remain chronically dependent on imported fuel? In Thunderclap 7, “Political Will Needed: The Arithmetic of Jamaica’s Energy Autonomy by 2031”, I argued that the answer is no longer

Four services. Four amens. No preliminary theological examination. Let us resist cheap conclusions. Those timings were my observations of one encounter, not controlled measurements of comparative intelligence. Network conditions, service configuration and other variables were uncontrolled. Neither did four agreeable replies prove that the systems had independently reached a theological conclusion. The word “Amen” ordinarily carries assent. On a screen, generated by an AI serv

All week, Western media, and voices elsewhere, have been conducting a lively conversation about artificial intelligence: from employment and education to autonomous agents, from industrial competition to safety, from extraordinary productivity to the uncomfortable question of who should govern the governors of these increasingly capable machines. This week’s coverage has included both the prospects for work and the promises of powerful technology companies to police themselve

After all these years, I have reached a conclusion that is at once technically conservative and politically audacious: Jamaica could, with sufficient political courage and structured capital reallocation, become substantially energy-self-sufficient by 2031. Let us look at the cold arithmetic To transition Jamaica’s power sector to an integrated, storm-hardened, green energy system by 2031 requires deploying approximately US$2.15 Billion in capital over five years... Read Mo

Failure can be an expensive tutor, but sometimes an excellent one. Ours drove me to spend considerable time examining why our venture did not succeed and, thereafter, to study tourism—not as a triumphant hotelier dispensing wisdom from some Olympian height, but as a chastened and intensely interested outside observer trying to understand how this enormous global industry actually works. Who owns what? Who controls what? Where does the tourist dollar enter?... Read More Onl

Our grievance is legitimate. Our memory is necessary. Our demand for justice is neither begging nor charity; CARICOM itself frames reparatory justice in terms of recognition, accountability and transformation. But beyond grievance lies a nobler embraceable possibility. Let Britain atone — not by paying backwards, but by helping the Caribbean move forwards.

“Test all things.” I no longer regard scepticism as discourtesy. When people exercising great power make grand claims, the citizen has not merely a right but a responsibility to ask: Where is the evidence? So when Prime Minister Andrew Holness told the Caribbean Infrastructure Forum in Miami on September 15 that “Jamaica will become the Singapore of the Caribbean”, I reached instinctively for several grains of salt. Singapore? That is an assertion capable of measurement

This is not an argument for indiscriminate punishment of contemporary Britons. Quite the contrary. It is an invitation to British institutions to investigate themselves honestly, and the documentary ground for doing so is unusually solid. Legitimate standing to negotiate reparations should belong to the injured and their descendants, not to intermediaries who have discovered a profitable enthusiasm for ancestry, rural Jamaican-accented vocabulary and darker complexions. Ima

When a superpower extends its *dewlap*, small countries are expected to retreat. But Jamaicans have lived too long with lizards to be easily impressed by throat fans. The real issue is not whether Marco Rubio can make Jamaica nervous. It is whether Jamaica’s institutions can remain sufficiently independent to scrutinise agreements, question foreign-policy decisions and defend the country’s constitutional sovereignty. From Cuban medical cooperation and Petrojam to the propo

A country that could look at its own ledgers without flinching, and then act with invention rather than evasion, would have done something no empire ever managed. It would have converted the smell of guilt into the fragrance of institutional courage. That is a form of national pride worth cultivating — the pride of a nation that chose honesty over amnesia, and creation over denial. That, to me, would be Sweat 4.0. And it is the one genuine reparative odour that no billione

There is an “F” word being spoken across Jamaica. I shall not print it. A Christian pulpit should not need profanity to tell the truth, and a national argument should not require obscenity to make itself heard. But there is another reason for my restraint: the unprinted word is less important than the material breakdown that has produced it. The word is being generated by frustration. By fear. By favouritism. By failure... Read More Online

Why, despite decades of policy recognition, legislation, licensing and official declarations, does the ordinary Jamaican still experience beach access as a contested privilege rather than an unquestioned component of citizenship? That question cannot be answered by blaming one hotel. Nor should it be reduced to a crude argument against tourism or private investment. Jamaica needs tourism. But JM does not need a tourism model in which the profitable natural asset is progre

I learned to swim in Portland. Not in a hotel pool. Not behind a resort gate. Not after producing a credit card, booking a room, or asking permission. My grandfather, Lester Maylor, taught me to swim in Jamaica’s sea. I was Jamaican. The sea was there. I went to the beach. Six decades later, I find myself asking a question that my grandfather never needed to ask: WHO OWNS JAMAICA’S BEACHES? Tourism is vital. Investment is important. Visitors are welcome. But tourism can

The question is not whether the enslaved created wealth. They did. The question is whether the beneficiaries of that wealth ever fully compensated its unwilling producers. They did not. And if the debt was never repaid, then the moral and institutional question remains: Who still owes—and what would genuine repayment look like?

Who supplied the energy and intelligence that made the extraordinary accumulation of wealth from chattel slavery possible?