THE expansion of the Brics bloc (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) to include Iran, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Argentina, the United Arab Emirates and Ethiopia has rightly received a lot of column inches.

It has given the millions of people in the global South who are fed up with the bullying behaviour of the US and the other former colonial powers some reasons to be optimistic and, indeed, to be just a little bit cheerful.

Those of us in the belly of the beast who work as dissidents against the behaviours of the neocolonialists also have much to organise in support of the resistance and fightback from the global South.

But, I must admit to wondering why Brics has no membership from Caribbean nations within its ranks.

Cuba took part in the South African Brics summit last month but that was through its role as president of the Group of 77 plus China bloc of nations — an important bloc representing two-thirds of the member nations of the United Nations and 80 per cent of the world’s population.

It was an important step and the first time that Cuba has taken part in Brics and it makes sense for them, on a number of levels, for them to become a member in due course.

But, the fact remains, there are no Caribbean members of Brics and none are approved to join the newbies in January.

The Brics bloc of nations is essentially an economic grouping that is managing to bring together countries with very divergent political views.

In many ways, India, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Iran make strange bedfellows alongside China, Brazil, and South Africa — although in other ways the alliance of these developing nations makes perfect sense.

Even though this is primarily an economic alliance, Ethiopia, a low-income country, has been invited to join Brics.

This was perhaps the biggest surprise amongst the new members. But Addis Ababa has excellent relations with the initial Brics members, a large population in the east of Africa and a high economic growth rate.

So there are reasons for membership — however unclear they might be at first glance.

It begs the question then what the islands of the Caribbean could bring to the table economically or politically that would make them worthwhile Brics members?

The nations of the Caribbean were once considered rich pickings for the slavers and the colonialists.

The sugar and tobacco plantations laboured by enslaved and then colonised Africans, such as my ancestors, put the equivalent of billions of pounds, dollars, francs, pesetas and gilders into the coffers of the colonial rulers.

A number of nations in the Caribbean have abundant natural resources that still help to build the economies of the rich nations while doing seemingly little for their own as the local peasant and working class.

Trinidad and Tobago has vast natural gas and oil reserves even though a recent survey showed nearly a quarter of the population, 22 per cent, are regarded as poor.

Guyana, where a major oil field has recently been discovered, has around three-quarters of its population in rural areas. Around 37 per cent of them are not just poor but live in poverty.

It seems unlikely that the poor in Guyana will get access to any of the wealth generated from the new oil fields without a fundamental shift in society in the country and a breakaway from the orbit of the major transnational oil companies, mainly from the US, who are likely to come in, clean up and then get out.

Bauxite, essential for the manufacture of aluminium goods, is a major product of Jamaica and vital for the economies of developed countries.

The island has always had high poverty rates which, according to official statistics, now stand at around a quarter of the entire population with many people still lacking access to decent housing and clean running water.

Jamaica relies almost entirely on tourism. Overall the industry accounts for around 70 per cent of the country’s GDP.

Even then Jamaica, like the other Caribbean nations heavily reliant on tourism, looks for substantial foreign investment from China and the US in particular, to support the development of the industry.

Having the wealth of these Caribbean nations stripped away by the use of free or cheap labour for the benefit of the neocolonialists sounds awfully familiar to what happened in Africa and was explained more than 50 years ago by Walter Rodney in the brilliant book How Europe Underdeveloped Africa.

In recent times we have seen the reaction in west and central Africa to this continued colonial process and I predict that we will soon see the same reaction from the poor nations of the Caribbean.

Leaving the Caribbean as a holiday playground after the colonial powers stripped bare their natural resources is not the basis for being invited to sit at the big kids’ table.

It is also not something that the working class and peasant communities of those countries will continue to put up with.

The Caribbean is effectively still under the iron heel of the empire that once ruled over it directly: this can be given a pretty new name of "the Commonwealth” — as if the “wealth” coming from the nations was going to be shared in “common” — but it is still colonialism.

Many of these countries, such as Jamaica, St Lucia, Trinidad and Tobago, and the Bahamas, are notionally independent island nations within the Commonwealth.

Barbados became an independent republic within the Commonwealth in 2021.

This still leaves them all too close to the British as the former colonial power. Indeed the final court of appeal for each of these countries is still in Britain.

How can you be independent if you can’t have the final say over your laws?

It’s a similar tale for French Caribbean nations, such as Guadeloupe and Martinique, as well as Dutch Suriname.

The French Caribbean islands are all official departments of France so there is only the pretence of independence when a small group of people sitting in plush surroundings thousands of miles away even get to decide on the proper use of French in your country.

Suriname is independent but also has a close relationship with its former colonial master the Netherlands.

It simply would not make much sense to allow the influence that the colonialists could bring to bear over these “not really yet independent” nations inside of Brics.

Brics is about creating new rules of the game. By definition, this means not allowing the old bullying tactics that the colonialists adopt to seep into the work of Brics.

But, beyond Brics, the question for the nations of the Caribbean is how and when they will fully break the ties with their former colonial rulers.

I believe that the working class and peasant communities struggling to survive in the Caribbean will be looking across the sacred burial grounds known as the Atlantic Ocean and watching their ancestors rise up against the plundering of the wealth of their countries by the colonialists.

They will see the similarities and will soon come to the conclusion that those politicians acting as clients for the generation of even more wealth for the colonialists, while they wonder where the next meal will come from, should be swept aside and replaced with people who represent their class interests.

Reggae legend Peter Tosh once said: “Hungry people are angry people.” Don’t be surprised if we soon see that anger turn into action across the Caribbean.