Submitted by Kammie Holder
So, let me get this straight, Barbados the “Land of the Flying Fish,” a nation whose very identity is marinated in the sea, dispatches its fishing fleet not to catch dinner, but to purchase ice from Grenada.
Puzzling, in a country that claims it punches above its weight. We once had a foundry and men like Vincent Layne and Frank Butcher who were creatives. Barbados may need to import brains for its decision makers as most are clueless.
Sadly, boats designed to hunt tuna and braved the open ocean, now setting sail in search of ice. It’s like sending a baker to Dominica for flour because the local mill forgot how to grind wheat.
One fisherman in another section of the press, in a moment of profound national absurdity, “I had to go to Grenada in order to get ice.” Not for rum, not for spices but ice. The same ice that, back home, is produced by two ancient machines more likely to cough up oil than cool a tuna.
Machines so old, they probably remember when Emancipation was still fresh news. When the compressors failed, the official response wasn’t innovation- it was geography. “Boats got to leave here to go Grenada to get ice to come back to go fishing,” lamented Captain Wayne Rose. It’s a sentence so circular, it deserves its own mobius strip.
And while the fishermen were out on this frosty foreign expedition, their catch back home suffered. Vendors reused bloody, fish-soaked ice, washing it like a pair of old socks because, well, what else were they going to do? “It’s not recommended really,” one angler admitted, “but I gine do what I gotta do.” This is not resilience. This is surrender dressed up as survival.
At the helm of the broken systems in Barbados is the friends and family of politicians.
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