In February of this year, the Brazilian media enthusiastically reported on Puerto Rican singer Bad Bunny's visit to Brazil, boosted also by his appearance at the halftime show of the main sporting event in the United States. There is something revealing in this contrast: the performance, celebrated as a synthesis of global pop "Latinity," circulates precisely from a country that, at the same time, sustains policies of mass deportation and persecution of immigrants and their descendants—especially people from Africa, Latin America, and the Caribbean.
Seeing Puerto Rico celebrated on screens brought to mind a text [1] by W. Arthur Lewis, a Caribbean economist who was awarded the Nobel Prize and the English knighthood, Sir . In 1950, when the postwar period seemed to be reorganizing the world economy, Lewis was particularly insightful in identifying—at a still early stage—the importance that migration and, above all, remittances sent by Caribbean workers abroad would tend to acquire for the support of island economies. What he could not anticipate was that, decades later, this crucial material link would be traversed by an anti-immigration political movement, capable of restricting rights, criminalizing displacement, and transforming the Caribbean presence in the United States into a problem of national security and identity. The historical irony is that this occurs despite the Caribbean understanding—and being treated—as "close" to the US not only geographically, but also due to a longer political history than is often acknowledged: in parts of the archipelago, struggles for autonomy and independence were formulated even before the consolidation of the US process itself.
Bad Bunny's recent trajectory helps illuminate a larger contradiction in the new landscape: the symbolic exaltation of Latino identity coexists with the material devaluation of Latino populations as a workforce. The same system that incorporates "Latino" into music, cuisine, fashion, and family narratives simultaneously normalizes forms of expulsion, control, and precariousness. This is a structural dynamic: it is not a moral paradox to be resolved by the individual coherence of an artist, but a social mechanism that combines cultural inclusion and socioeconomic exclusion.
It is therefore not surprising that part of the public debate has attempted to shift this question to the singer himself, as if he alone could answer what Mark Fisher described as capitalism's capacity to absorb and neutralize revolts, converting critical gestures into merchandise and style. But, amidst the noise of social media, we often lose sight of what the scene exposes as most instructive: it forces us to look at economies about which we know little—the Caribbean island economies—and at how the colonial past continues to organize the present, now intertwined with asymmetrical relations with the United States.
The Caribbean is simultaneously a space of long-standing colonial history and a historical laboratory of modernity: it was there that social and economic technologies of the Atlantic world— plantations , enslavement, and transoceanic trade—were consolidated, and it was also there that the Haitian Revolution radically reopened the political imagination regarding freedom, sovereignty, and equality. This dual legacy helps explain why imperial pressure in the region often appears unmediated. To better understand it, it is worth highlighting two specificities: these are small economies intensely connected to the market and to US power; and, although it engages with the rest of Latin America, the region has been marked by its own sequence of tutelage, occupations, and institutional rearrangements that have shaped its political and economic trajectories.
The formation of Caribbean nation-states—with important exceptions such as Haiti—was marked by various forms of external intervention. In some cases, independence was conditional; in others, autonomy was restricted by prolonged colonial status ; and when sovereign projects threatened strategic interests, reprisals followed. Over time, the Caribbean functioned as a kind of “imperial frontier” where control mechanisms were tested: military occupations, protectorates, economic tutelage, and the construction of ambiguous legal arrangements that keep territories formally linked to the United States.
These dynamics have economic implications. For centuries, the Caribbean was a region of sugarcane production using cheap, violently disciplined Black labor. When this form of labor lost its centrality, the reduction in labor costs reappeared in other sectors, such as industrial assembly geared towards export. Today, the region is home to one of the world's most lucrative industries: sun and beach tourism. However, the logic bears uncomfortable similarities to the plantation system : workers—largely Black—circulate between islands to sustain labor-intensive services with low wages, weak rights, and high external dependence. And, as in the past, a significant portion of the value generated does not remain locally: it returns in the form of imports, intermediation through booking platforms, fees, and profit remittances from large groups (many of them based outside the region).
It is at this point that Bad Bunny's recent work gains political weight without relying on slogans. By denouncing, in his songs, the privatization of territory, the expulsion of residents, and the transformation of daily life into a tourist attraction, he points to a process that the Caribbean knows well: the conversion of space into an asset, of culture into a commodity, of population into a disposable service. The warning is not "romantic"; it is historical. And it helps to understand why, when a US government hardens its foreign policy, the Caribbean reappears as a priority—not only for its natural resources, but for its strategic position, its routes, its regional control, and the signals it sends to the rest of the Global South.
It is in this context that Cuba imposes a particular intellectual responsibility upon us: without idealizations and without denying its internal dilemmas, it is necessary to recognize with analytical honesty that the island has lived for decades under an economic and political siege that has direct material effects on daily life—and that, when these pressures intensify, what grows is not an abstraction, but social vulnerability: shortages, interrupted routines, scarcity of energy, transportation and medicines, impacts on concrete lives. Faced with this, declaring support for Cuba may be less about “taking sides” and more about refusing indifference in the face of avoidable suffering, reaffirming a basic principle for any rigorous reading of the Caribbean: sovereignty and self-determination are conditions for a people to face their own problems and try to build their path without external coercion; therefore, Cuba remains an unavoidable reference—and a topic before which our word, even academic and careful, also carries responsibility.
This text does not necessarily reflect the opinion of Unicamp.
[1] Lewis, A. The industrialization of the British West Indies , 1950.
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