PUBLISHED | The Death of a Little Shame-Tree

Geopolitical Servility & CARICOM’s Betrayal of Cuba

In the arid courtyard of Jamaican diplomacy, a small but telling species has withered. The Mimosa pudica—our colloquial “shame-tree”—once recoiled at the slightest impropriety. Today, it lies still. Its leaves no longer fold. Its roots, it would seem, have been scorched by a new and disquieting heat: the normalisation of expedience over principle.

The immediate occasion is the dismantling of the Cuban medical programme—a partnership that, for over five decades, quietly sustained Jamaica’s public health system, especially in the rural margins where market logic seldom ventures. To describe what has unfolded as mere “policy adjustment” is to insult both memory and intelligence. This is not adjustment. It is abandonment, executed with a haste and opacity that demand scrutiny.

Let us be clear about the causal chain. The United States, in recent years, has intensified pressure on countries participating in Cuba’s overseas medical missions, citing allegations ranging from labour exploitation to trafficking. Visa restrictions have been imposed; diplomatic signals have been unmistakable. Small states, already navigating asymmetrical power relations, now face a familiar dilemma: comply and preserve favour, or resist and risk reprisal. Jamaica, regrettably, has chosen the former.

The Government has suggested that its actions are motivated by compliance with international labour standards and a desire to ensure that all medical professionals are treated fairly. Such concerns, on their face, are not trivial. No ethical society should be indifferent to the conditions under which any worker labours. Yet this defence collapses under even modest scrutiny. If reform were the genuine objective, negotiation—not termination—would have been the instrument. The Cuban programme has, in multiple jurisdictions, been adjusted rather than abandoned. Why was Jamaica incapable of similar diplomacy?

FILE PHOTO: Prime Minister Dr Andrew Holness making his contribution to the 2026/27 Budget Debate in the House of Representatives on Thursday, March 19, 2026. (Photo: JIS, OurToday)

Moreover, the empirical record complicates the official narrative. According to regional health reports, Cuban doctors have historically staffed a significant proportion of posts in underserved Jamaican communities—areas where local recruitment has persistently fallen short. Their withdrawal is not an abstract diplomatic gesture; it is a material subtraction from already strained clinics and hospitals. One does not remove load-bearing beams from a fragile structure and then claim to be improving its integrity.

The consequences are already visible. Waiting times lengthen. Rural outposts, once tenuously staffed, face renewed uncertainty. The grandmother in Bamboo and the child in Rocky Point—figures too often absent from policy memoranda—are not beneficiaries of geopolitical realignment. They are its casualties.

This episode does not stand in isolation. It is part of a troubling pattern in which Jamaican decision-making appears increasingly calibrated to external approval rather than internal necessity. Consider the protracted debacle at Cornwall Regional Hospital, where remediation has been slow, costly, and opaque. Or the hesitant, often incoherent posture on Haiti, where humanitarian obligation has been entangled with diplomatic caution. And, in the energy sector, we have witnessed an unsettling willingness to flirt with technologically premature solutions while discounting decades of indigenous expertise in renewables—an omission that is not merely imprudent, but, in its own quiet way, a form of national self-disregard. In each case, the through-line is not merely error, but a deficit of moral and intellectual steadiness.

FILE PHOTO: Minister of Foreign Affairs and Foreign Trade, Senator Kamina Johnson Smith. (Photo: JIS/File, OurToday)

What, then, has become of the shame-tree?

In an earlier Jamaica, there existed—imperfect but palpable—a reflexive discomfort with actions that compromised sovereignty, gratitude, or basic decency. That reflex did not always prevail, but it was present. Today, its absence is striking. Decisions of profound consequence are taken with a curious emotional flatness, as though the moral dimension were an optional accessory rather than the very core of governance.

Some will argue that this is the price of realism in a turbulent world. Small states, they say, cannot afford the luxury of sentiment; survival demands alignment with power. There is, of course, a kernel of truth here. Diplomacy is rarely conducted in the language of idealism alone. Yet realism, properly understood, is not synonymous with servility. It requires the careful balancing of interests, the cultivation of multiple partnerships, and the preservation of strategic autonomy wherever possible. To reduce it to reflexive compliance is to misunderstand it entirely.

Indeed, history offers alternative models. Across the Caribbean and the wider Global South, states have navigated great-power pressures with a measure of dexterity—sometimes accommodating, sometimes resisting, but rarely capitulating without negotiation. Jamaica itself has, at moments, demonstrated such balance. That it appears now to have relinquished this capacity is cause for concern.

The Global South

There is also the matter of gratitude, a concept unfashionable in certain policy circles but indispensable to any coherent moral order. The Cuban medical presence in Jamaica was not a fleeting transaction. It was a sustained, often sacrificial engagement, extending into communities and crises where few others ventured. To sever such a relationship without transparent justification or credible transition planning is not merely a diplomatic misstep; it is a breach of trust.

None of this is to suggest that the Cuban programme was beyond critique. No international arrangement is. But critique, if it is to be meaningful, must be accompanied by evidence, by dialogue, and by a willingness to improve rather than discard. What we have witnessed instead is a form of policy amnesia, in which decades of cooperation are erased in a moment of geopolitical anxiety.

The deeper question, however, is not about Cuba alone. It is about Jamaica—about the kind of state we are becoming, and the values that animate our choices. Are we a polity capable of independent judgement, of principled engagement, of gratitude tempered by realism? Or are we drifting towards a posture in which external validation substitutes for internal coherence?

The shame-tree, in its modest way, once offered an answer. It recoiled. It registered disturbance. It insisted, silently but unmistakably, that something was amiss. Its apparent death is therefore more than botanical metaphor. It is a warning.

Minister of Health and Wellness Dr Christopher Tufton. (Photo: JIS/File, OurToday)

For if a society loses its capacity for shame—not the paralysing kind, but the corrective reflex that guards against excess and betrayal—it risks losing something far more fundamental: its moral bearings. And without those, no amount of diplomatic favour or economic calculation will suffice to steady the course.

Jamaica still has a choice. It can treat this moment as a closed chapter, an unfortunate but necessary adjustment in a complex world. Or it can pause, reflect, and ask whether, in seeking to secure its place among the powerful, it has diminished something essential within itself.

The shame-tree may yet be revived. But only if we are willing to acknowledge that it has been wounded—and to consider, with honesty and courage, exactly what—and whom—we have sacrificed.

by Dennis A. Minott, PhD.

Dennis A. Minott, PhD, is a physicist, green energy consultant, and long-time college counsellor. He is the CEO of A-QuEST.