Global Frontier this week highlights a Share Fair on Men’s Health, an initiative by the Caribbean Community's Pan Caribbean Partnerships Against HIV/AIDS (PANCAP) held on March 14, 2019 in Trinidad and Tobago.  It is an illustration of a prototype through an interactive methodology and active participation of practitioners. It  addresses the critical issues of men’s health with a focus on accelerating prevention to achieve the UNAIDS’ 90-90-90 Targets, a scientific approach to ending the AIDS epidemic by 2030.  The main features are: How to get 90% of men with HIV knowing their status? How to get 90% of those knowing their status on treatment?  How to get 90% of those on treatment with viral loads in the blood low enough as not to transmit HIV. 
 
The Share Fair​, ​a component of The PANCAP Knowledge for Health Project​, is ​funded by PEPFAR-USAID and implemented by the Center for Communication Programs, John Hopkins University.  It included a ‘knowledge cafe’  highlighting successful men’s health programmes.  In so doing, it provided a space for National AIDS Programme  managers, health professionals and representatives of  Civil Society Organizations (CSOs) in the Caribbean,  to showcase best practices, discuss critical challenges, and provide recommendations for increasing access to services for men, including men who have sex with men and other key populations in achieving 90-90-90.  
 
The Share Fair was a response to  the UNAIDS Global AIDS Update 2018 showing  that gay men and other men who have sex with men accounted for nearly a quarter of new infections in 2017.  The report also highlighted that efforts to reach men and boys, and particularly gay men and other men who have sex with men, are constrained by health services insufficiently tailored to their needs and limited community-based services.
Dr Shanti Singh-Anthony, Coordinator of the PANCAP Knowledge for Health Project hailed the activity as a success. She said it highlighted “ innovations from country programmes that have achieved positive results in relation to increasing access to prevention, treatment, care and support services for men and boys. Implementers of programmes who are challenged to reach men with health services can use the innovative practices to increase men’s access to quality health services.” 
 
​The link to the event  taken from the  PANCAP.org website​​ is: https://spark.adobe.com/page/iuc4XSGTBTrG1/
 
See the National AIDS Programme coordinators, health professionals and representatives of civil society in the Caribbean at work.  Engage in a dialogue with PANCAP’s Knowledge for Health Programme. Share your experiences. Make a difference to the challenge of ending the AIDS epidemic. 

​Eddie Greene

​Fifty years ago, political scientist Charles W. Anderson referred to Latin America as “a living museum.” By this he meant the co-existence of regimes that seemed to belong to very different eras, if not centuries: traditional military dictatorships like Alfredo Stroessner in Paraguay, as well as
bureaucratic-authoritarian ones like Argentina and Brazil; old-fashioned, patrimonial autocracies, like Anastasio Somoza in Nicaragua and François Duvalier’s Haiti and established multiparty democracies like Chile, Costa Rica and Uruguay; two-party systems like Colombia and Venezuela, and one-party- dominant ones, like Mexico’s. 
 
Today’s Latin America is more along the lines of “a living theater.” Comedy (closer often to farce), tragedy and drama are all in full display in presidential palaces throughout the region, with comic opera and operetta making occasional appearances on the playbill. Events in late February in Cúcuta, a Colombian town on the Venezuelan border, are Exhibit A of this new theatrical performative tendency. 
 
Orchestrated by Colombian President Iván Duque, who played the leading role, and with supporting actors like presidents Sebastián Piñera of Chile and Mario Abdo Benítez of Paraguay, it was portrayed as a grand operation to restore democracy in Venezuela. This veritable “diplomatic encirclement” was to bring to an end the Maduro regime, or so the script went. Dozens of trucks with humanitarian aid were poised to cross the bridge from Colombia to Venezuela over the Táchira river. As if on cue, the Venezuelan Armed Forces were then supposed to open the border, defect from the government and allow the self-proclaimed acting president of Venezuela, Juan Guaidó, to take over from President Nicolás Maduro. Although banned from leaving the country, the 35-year old, photogenic Guaidó slipped into Cúcuta, and was the undisputed star of the show. So much so, that Piñera and Benítez found themselves scrambling through Guaidó’s bodyguard-line to get their photo-ops next to the beaming young engineer. 
 
Led by billionaire-cum-celebrity Richard Branson, a rock concert (“Venezuela Live Aid”) to raise $100 million for the whole endeavor was held in situ and included attractions such as Colombian cumbia singer Carlos Vives. The high note of the day was provided by Spanish singer Miguel Bosé (who sang for Pinochet in the 1980s in Viña del Mar), when he elegantly asked former president of Chile and now UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Michelle

Bachelet, “to move her butt and get herself to Venezuela” (both the United Nations and the International Committee of the Red Cross had refused to be part of the show—including the concert and the shipment of humanitarian aid).
 
In the end, no truck crossed the San Martín bridge, a ship loaded with humanitarian aid sent from Puerto Rico to Venezuela returned with its full cargo to the island, and Maduro strengthened his grip on the country. 
 
Rarely has the region seen such an undiluted diplomatic fiasco. But then, perhaps that was the point. Stagecraft has replaced statecraft. 
 
Not to be outdone, a few days later in Paraguay, Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro, a former Army captain, paid homage to the man who ruled that country with an iron fist for 35 years, dictator Alfredo Stroessner, in the presence of his counterpart, Abdo Benítez, the son of Stroessner’s private
secretary. Yet, lest he be accused of showing too much affinity for the old right, Bolsonaro soon pulled other rabbits from his hat. An avid Twitter user, during Brazil’s Carnival Bolsonaro outdid himself by tweeting the picture of a naked man touching himself as another man urinated on him. Later the president posted another, asking, “What are golden showers?” Displaying his common touch and appealing to his base, while attending the World Economic Forum in Davos, the Brazilian president had lunch by himself in a supermarket cafeteria, rather than to do so with other participating heads of state in posh hotel suites. He has though, agreed to visit the White House on March 19, when presumably he won’t eat at the food court in Pentagon City. 
 
Coups, cocaine, corruption, and Cúcuta
 
In Honduras, the farce has gone into overdrive. In 2009, the country experienced one of the last old-fashioned military coups d’etats, which included the signature feature of detaining the incumbent president at the crack of dawn, and hoisting him, still in his pajamas, into a plane and out of the
country. The ostensible reason for the coup, as those who led it said themselves, was the government’s initiative for a new constitution, which might have allowed the possibility of presidential re-election, forbidden in the current charter. This is such a no-no that a coup was mandatory. Yet, the current president, Juan Orlando Hernández, a leading supporter of the coup,
and elected in 2013, got the Supreme Court to waive that constitutional ban to allow his re-election in 2017, in what was declared by independent observers and The Economist a fraudulent vote. 
 
After stealing the election, the United States recognized him as the president and the region has hailed him as one of the Americas paramount democratic leaders. President Hernández’ younger brother, Juan Antonio (“Tony”) was arrested last November in Miami for long-term drug-trafficking to the United States on behalf of the Sinaloa cartel. His closeness to narcotics traffickers was such that he even allegedly had a type of cocaine named after him. Tony is now behind bars. 
 
Yet, even countries that have done well these years find it hard not to be pulled to the stage. Peru has had among the best economic performances of any nation in the hemisphere this century, growing at an annual average of 6.1 per cent from 2002 to 2013. Yet, every single elected president in this period, Alberto Fujimori, Alan García, Alejandro Toledo, and Ollanta Humala—barring the most recent—is either in prison or has an arrest warrant over their head, a world record that led the New York Times famously to ask, “Does Peru need a special prison just for former presidents?” And even the most recent, Pedro Pablo Kuzcinsky, a banker-turned politician, elected president in 2016 under an anti-corruption platform, was forced to resign in 2018 when it turned out he had received payments from Odebrecht, the Brazilian construction company, while holding public office. 
 
Across the Andes, in Argentina, things are not much better. Once among the top five richest countries in the world, and blessed with the best agricultural land anywhere (the pampa húmeda), and untold (though mostly under-exploited) mineral wealth, Argentina regressed from development to underdevelopment, and fluctuates from boom to bust with bipolar frequency. After its most recent international default (in 2000-2001), and a roller coaster ride under the Kirchners (Néstor Kirchner, 2003-2007, and Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, 2007-2015), Argentines and the international community held out hopes for conservative Mauricio Macri, a millionaire businessman who, it was said, would balance the books and straighten out Argentina’s foreign debts. A businessman would clean up the mess left by the peronista politicians, or so the fairy tale went. Yet, a little over three years into Macri’s term, Argentina is drowning in red ink, the peso has hit rock bottom—requiring the International Monetary Fund to shore up the country’s Central Bank reserves—and talk of yet another default has already started. 
 
Venezuela, the country with the biggest oil reserves in the world, and once so rich that Venezuelans in Miami were known as “dame dos” (“give me two”, as whenever they wanted to buy something, they bought not one, but two items ) now undergoes periodic blackouts, and is unable to feed its people, let alone provide basic services. Its president, Nicolás Maduro has found it hard to fill the shoes of his once boss, Hugo Chávez, whose “21st century socialism” model is now in tatters. 
 
Much is made of Venezuela’s humanitarian crisis, and rightly so. Yet, in some ways Haiti’s humanitarian crisis is a lot worse, although nobody pays much attention to it. The country never recovered from the January 2010 earthquake that devastated it. Despite the billions of dollars committed by the international community for reconstruction, nearly ten years later, refugee camps still abound, and even the white stucco, birthday-cake-like presidential palace is still in ruins. Imposed from abroad, hapless Michel Martelly, a former crooner who had never held public office nor run anything before becoming president (2011-2016), limped through as the leader of the hemisphere’s poorest nation. His handpicked successor, Jovenel Moise (2017-present) has not fared much better. A businessman, accused of pocketing some of the proceeds from the discounted oil provided by Venezuela to Haiti under the Petrocaribe scheme, Moise has faced weeks of popular protests. The opposition managed to shut down the country for a week in February, and U.S. and Canadian travel advisories have decimated the tourist industry. Haitians have emigrated to countries as far away as Chile, which 100,000 of them now call home. 
 
As if the large number of existing regional organizations were not enough, a new one has been announced with great fanfare. It carries the imaginative name of PROSUR, taking a leaf from the export-promotion agencies (ProChile, ProColombia, ProMexico) that populate foreign ministries. The lead has been taken by a number of countries (Chile, Colombia, Peru, Argentina) that left another, previous organization, UNASUR, alleging it was “too ideological”—which this one presumably isn’t, even though it is launched by another side of the ideological aisle. 
 
Cúcuta was a trial run for what we can expect from PROSUR. The show goes on. 

Jorge Heine is a public policy fellow at The Wilson Center in Washington DC. He is former Chilean Ambassador to the People’s Republic of China; former Chilean Cabinet Minister and Ambassador; former CIGI Professor of Global Governance at the Balsillie School of International Affairs; and Professor of Political Science at Wilfrid Laurier University  His latest book (with Brigitte Weiffen) is 21st Century Democracy Promotion in the Americas: Standing Up for the Polity (Routledge, 2015).

It is fitting that Winston Bailey the enigmatic calypsonian known  as the Mighty Shadow was a celebrant at the 2019 Panorama Steel Band competition, one of the major events of Carnival in Trinidad and Tobago.  He was honored along with recently deceased - internationally acclaimed steel pannist and musical arranger, Professor Ken Philmore and musical composer and  calypsonian, Winston Scarborough better known as 'The Original De Fosto Himself'.
Shadow died on October 23,  2018, days before being awarded an Honorary  Doctorate of Letters posthumously at the University of the West Indies graduation ceremony, St Augustine campus, Trinidad and Tobago.   
Global one Frontier has reproduced this  tribute to Shadow with the permission of the author, Mr. Bokko Rennie. It is a thoughtful  portrait of this legend within the calypso art form and a powerful force in shaping calypso’s up-tempo descendant, soca.
Bukka Rennie, a national of Trinidad and Tobago is an historian, writer and advocate.   Among his publications is The History of the working class in Trinidad and Tobago 1919-1956 (Minority Press, USA) He attended St Mary's College in Port of Spain and Sir George William University in Montreal, Canada. ​

Wlliam Blake a British philosopher- poet who lived in the period 1757-1827 wrote the following words in one of his poems: “O see a world in a grain of sand/And heaven in a wild flower/Hold infinity in the palm of your hand/And eternity in an hour..." Listen now to Shadow- Winston Bailey, in his calypso "Evolution": "I am locked in a dungeon/in the middle of evolution/can't find the key/to escape destiny..."

Here's Blake again: "A robin redbreast in a cage/Puts all heaven in a rage/A dog starved at his master's gate/Predicts the ruin of the State/The lamb misused breeds public strife/And yet forgives the butcher's knife... And Listen again to Shadow: "Everything is in harmony/Until the farmer get hungry.../The farmer comes searching the nest/The cock bawl out loud in Protest/Cook curry ochro!..."

If you make the connection between those quotes, the revelation comes. Nature and time and space and all social activity are directly linked, integrated and interrelated. As Blake once wrote: “the sun rises and humanity rejoices and moves, the sun sets and humanity stops and sleeps.” Similarly Shadow would sing in his "My Belief": " I believe in the stars and the dark night/ I believe in the sun and the daylight/ /I believe in the little children/I believe in Life and its problems..."

I have always maintained that, like William Blake, Shadow in his very simplicity and apparent childlike lyrics remains a most complex artist.

Unlike our numerous social commentators who comment on particular and specific events and issues of a political or socio-economic nature, Shadow contemplates natural phenomena and man's relations to the universe. It explains why his approach to most topics: poverty, pressure, friendship, honesty, jealousy, survival, truth, human rights etc. ,all of which are titles of actual Shadow calypsos, signify that tendency of all philosophers including Shadow to draw concrete lessons from abstract treatment of subject matter.

William Blake was no different in his simplicity, poetic abstractions and glorifying of nature. With such an approach both Blake and Shadow force us beyond the ordinariness of daily existence to contemplate the meaning of Life itself, our purpose on Earth, the essence of death and its consequences, the juxtaposing of nature's opposites and how we stand in relation to the rest of the universe; the stars, the moon, the sun, the animals, trees and the birds, etc.

Blake, over the past centuries, came to be well known for the following poems: "Tiger, Tiger, burning bright/In the forests of the night..." and "Little Lamb who made thee? /Dost thou know who made thee?" And more so for the ending of the "Tiger" poem where he questions: "What immortal hand or eye/Dare frame thy fearful symmetry? /Did he who made the Lamb make thee?..."

Likewise Shadow's philosophical questions and statements as evidenced in "What is Life?", "I Believe", "Everybody is Somebody", "One Love", etc. shall in time guarantee the immortality of his work. Shadow symbolically says in song: “you only telling me what to do, telling me where to go, but the knowledge I want to get, is how to escape Mr. Death…” (Toe Jam?)

Besides their great ability to simplify abstract thought and to seek truth out of the clashing of opposites e.g., "the ladder of success is written in distress", both Blake and Shadow also hold in common a sense of alienation from official society. Blake grew up in 18th century England when the simple pastoral life of the countryside was giving way to the overcrowded towns and the exploitation of child-labour that was deemed a commercial necessity in the midst of the widespread Industrial Revolution.  At that time there seemed to be little value placed on human existence.

Blake rejected such development and created a body of poetic symbolism to make the meaning of his imagery more powerful. That also allowed him to protect himself from censorship in a time when one could be executed for sedition against Church or State, from which he, Blake, barely escaped on one occasion. Blake's alienation was reflected in his rejection then of all social convention. To him churches or organised religion were "mills of Satan" in which "Satan was called God and compelled man to serve him in abject submission." This God Blake called "Urizen" and he described him as "satanic holiness, revengeful, and a brooding, dark power." Sounds familiar. That is exactly what Farrel is to Shadow. Blake’s “Urizen” and Shadow’s “Farrel” are identical as spiritual, creative force that illuminates them for the world to see.
Shadow emerges out of the pastoral settings and closeness to nature of Les Coteaux, Tobago, to confront the madness of an urban existence that signifies him as "alien".  He comes in the midst of a quest, a demand, and an imperative of political Independence, to transform society unto an industrial basis as a platform to facilitate true development, but this "de-colonisation" process is bogged down by Euro-centric parameters that rejects the genuine self-determination of a people as it rejects everything about Shadow's persona: his blackness, his ethnicity (Tobagonian-ness), and most of all his artistic expressions which are described as "growls and groans and animal-like noises." Despite acclaim by the masses, official society kept seeing Shadow as a clown and his lyrics as childish, crass foolishness, and his singing was described as "baying", in other words, inhuman. Simply put; Shadow's raucousness disturbed the smooth urbane existence of the Port-of-Spain brown-skin middle-class creoles.

But the fact is that Shadow emerged after 1970, in the wake of a groundswell of "black consciousness" that clearly establishes that the Eurocentric creole-culture, the culture of official society, could no longer accommodate or embrace the divergences of all who settled here by force or choice and now wished to proclaim their own ways of seeing and doing. Shadow philosophically spearheads this groundswell, he becomes both the medium and the message as he confronts official society and attacks the Calypso Monarchy.

To accomplish this, Shadow summons inspiration and creative strength, not from "Heaven" as the ethics of this Western, Graeco-Roman-Christian world would want to suggest, but from "Hell", in order to overcome and break the musical monarchy ("The Threat").

However the inspiration is not immediate in coming so he considers going back to Tobago to plant peas, when "Farrel suddenly turns up. Victory comes as a result and it is then that we are told that this new "King" shall be a most exacting and revengeful one ("King from Hell"). It is the psychology of intense alienation that produces the brooding revenge of both "Blake’s Urizen" and "Shadow’s Farrel".

In Shadow's Hell he is comfortable. It is a state of mind that allows no limits to creative power. Farrel is the psychological manifestation of this. Farrel is what Winston is not. There is a constant struggle between Farrel and Winston, a struggle of personalities, a struggle between two worlds.

Winston is the tendency of compromise and surrender. Winston has been beaten down by society. Winston is the laid back, quiet, unassuming personality, while Farrel is uncompromising and cannot be accommodated. When Farrel and Winston combine you get "Shadow", a reflection of myth and reality, a new sense of power. Logically then the main symbols of Shadow as an artist have always been "death", "hell" and "children".

"Children" represent the new birth, the new consciousness and thrust against the old order and arrangement, while "death" and "hell", as sources of inspiration and strength, represent the space and time and action of social transformation.

Anyone can trace Shadow's use of these symbolic themes in all his calypsoes and show how he expands the symbols as he goes along to incorporate new imagery and new meaning. In short, Shadow turns all the norms upside down and around.

He was the first calypsonian who in dealing with man/woman and gender relationships in song put the sexes on equal footing and in fact in most instances placed women in control of the situations and in a position to determine outcome especially where their bodies and their sexuality are concerned.

That is quite obvious in "I Come Out to Play", "Rap to Me", "Country Boy", "Shift Yuh Carcass", etc and that in itself was revolutionary when one considers what obtained previously. Moreover, Shadow’s revolution was not only in terms of content but also in terms of form, for in searching for the best means through which to express his novel ideas, he found that it required a whole new approach to calypso, and in so doing ended up freeing calypso from the limitations of its traditional form and structure for all the others like Shorty to follow from 1975 onwards.

That in fact has been Shadow’s greatest contribution, he opened up the Art form, and it is why he is so revered by the present day Rapso exponents like Ataklan.

Describing him as the William Blake of Calypso was an attempt to get people to delve deeper into the man's work, the man's reasoning and into the stirrings of his soul.

One person felt that the analogy to Blake was far-fetched. Why is the analogy to Blake and Blake's England in the throes of early Industrialisation being viewed as far-fetched? Rejection and alienation and violence to the human spirit, violence to creative intelligence, violence to the essence of humanity, is the connecting link.

Both Shadow and Blake experienced rejection and, in turn, rejected the basic underpinnings of Eurocentric society. Blake rejected the God of organised religion in his time. So too Shadow was inspired by "Farrel" since there is really no conception in old African Religions of a Devil and all Gods are ascribed human attributes that are both "good" and "bad".

Finally, Blake in his time and Shadow, now, have created in their art very similar symbols of life and death, and of man's relation to nature in attempt to express their feelings, their reasoning and their truth. And they both did so with a childlike innocence that is not to be construed as childishness.

I have no doubt in my mind about the close affinity of these two in their thought patterns and approach to subject matter. This is rather strange for two men from different epochs, who could never have met but only share the same initials: “WB”. Listen to both of them:

Blake:
I asked a thief to steal me a peach;
He turned up his eyes.
I asked a lady to lie her down;
Holy and meek she cries.
As soon as I went
An Angel came. He winked at the thief
And smiled at the dame
And without one word said 
Had a peach from the tree 
And still as a maid 
Enjoyed the lady.

Shadow:
What is wrong with dis world
Like it gone outa control
Lunatics in politics
Like they all come out for kicks.
They legalise alcohol
And sell it to Rufus
After which he had ball
And started to cuss 
A policeman called Spinks
Came up and arrest him 
First he paid for the drinks 
And now he paying fuh drinking.

Do you see the common approach? Shadow came from Les Coteaux with these stirrings in his soul, confident, according to Leroy Clarke, in his own obeah and "jumbies" swirling around him. It is all about native sensibility and wit as the only basis from which to see and act differently. One calypsonian commentator said: “Nobody could compose like Shadow because nobody thinks like Shadow.” That reminds me of what he said to me during our last discussion when I went to his Mt. Hope home to discuss the Liner Notes to the special album that was launched in Europe. I said to him: “there is a certain musical arranger who claims that he made you.” Shadow laughed and said: “But he stupid, he shoulda make more.”
Fare thee well, Winston McGarland Bailey. Walk good, my brethren, and thanks for being YOU!