Providencia: small island, big Caribbean

Since 2019, Providence had not celebrated a carnival. For this reason, the penultimate week of June the island gave itself over to a kind of collective anticipation that finally exploded on the 22nd of that month. “Carnival” is just one way of referring to the Old Providence and Santa Catalina Cultural and Folkloric Festival and Sports, the official commemoration of the island’s annexation to Colombia. Due to the pandemic and Hurricane Iota, the Raizal people had not been able to organize this huge party for years.

Although there are no records of any kind, the official history says that on June 23, 1822, the island adhered to the Constitution of Cúcuta. It is because of this lack of documentation that Josefina Huffington, president of the Civic Oversight Movement of Old Providence, insists that there is nothing to celebrate in said carnival, since the annexation of the island to Colombia has only brought countless problems.

► On June 22, 2023, a caravan of floats went around the island. The representatives of each sector were accompanied by young people on motorcycles who showed off by having the fastest and noisiest vehicles.

Josefina is a nurse by profession, but an incisive lawyer by vocation: she knows by heart the articles of the Constitution that protect the Raizal people and always brings to the conversation the judicial procedures that the Oversight has been carrying out for more than 40 years. Since 1980, the movement she represents has faced innumerable attempts at dispossession that various economic and political elites have tried to exercise on the island, an earthly paradise ideal for large tourism projects.

Most of the Oversight’s struggles have consisted of this, of preventing the island from being appropriated through bureaucratic tricks to carry out tourism projects. Among so many lawsuits and conflicts, which show the insistence of people who want to take advantage of the island, Josefina recalls that during the years of the 1991 Constitution, the Oversight prevented the construction of 17 hotel megaprojects, something that seems like a joke in very bad taste when talking about an island of 17 square kilometers. Since Father Martín Taylor founded it in 1980, the Oversight has had to face great political and economic powers, often represented by large hotel chains, high-level politicians and, until not long ago, the National Navy. Although the achievements have been immense, the defeats have also been painful blows.

Providence is far, very far, from mainland Colombia. It is the most northern inhabited territory of the country, which allows its territorial waters to share borders with the rest of the Caribbean: Jamaica, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Honduras, Costa Rica, and Nicaragua. With the latter, the conflict has been great, since the Central American country considered the islands part of its territory until not long ago; hence the ruling of the International Court of The Hague in 2012 that forced Colombia to hand over 75,000 square kilometers of territorial sea.

The ruling meant an even greater breakdown of the Raizal identity, shattered by the struggle between two countries that are disputing the territory. Josefina remembers that the island people not only live in San Andrés and Providence, there are also Raizal people in Bluefields and on the Corn Islands, which are on Nicaraguan soil, but whose population speaks the same type of Creole: a mixture of West African languages, English, and Spanish. The decision of the Court of The Hague did not mean a greater loss for Colombia, Josefina considers, if it is compared with the damage that was done to the Raizal population, which depends on fishing in those waters. She even knows that this scenario favors the dispossession that certain Colombian elites have been trying to exercise since the mid-20th century, as it feeds the colonial discourse of Colombian ownership over the islands. Josefina repeats like a mantra, «[the elites of] Colombia are not interested in the Raizal people, only the territory».

Josefina Huffington (right) shares her memories with Zully Archbold (left). Each has led projects to defend the Raizal identity on the islands.

After the hurricane… does the calm come?

Almost three years have passed since Hurricane Iota devastated the islands of Providence and Santa Catalina. Although something of such magnitude had not been seen in recent times, the Raizal people have always dealt with these storms. Although the immense coral reef that makes up the Seaflower biosphere reserve causes the sea waves to arrive lazily calm on its coasts, the truth is that Providence is on a usual hurricane route: before Iota, there was Beta, in 2005; Joan, in 1988, and Hattie, in 1961. Thus, a countless sum of cyclones noted for a long time. By knowing how to live with the force of the sea for centuries, the inhabitants of the island were saved on November 19, 2020.

Providence is an island where there is little rainfall, so before the hurricane, each house had an enormous cistern to store rainwater that they used during the summer. At the time of a hurricane, those cisterns could be drained and people could use them as bunkers. That, added to the fact that many houses had safe areas, usually the bathrooms, meant that only three people died on the night of Iota. However, when the reconstruction began at the head of the Colombian Government, the remaining cisterns were destroyed and replaced by 2,000-liter plastic tanks, insufficient to store water throughout a summer and useless when it came to sheltering from future storms.

The ironic thing about this situation is that the Government did not consult the community when building the houses, a constitutional right they have as an ethnic minority, and barely asked some people at informal tables to ignore the requests of the population anyway. Now several prefabricated houses are rotting and many others do not have the necessary structure to withstand even light storms. For this reason, with the advice of the Public Actions Group of the Universidad del Rosario and Dejusticia, the Oversight filed a lawsuit that reached the Constitutional Court. Through sentence T-333, the Court ordered the State to repair the damages it had incurred and, in a novel way, that the island be rebuilt in such a way that its inhabitants can gradually adapt to climate change.

For Jade Lunazzi, who is part of the legal team of the Oversight, this ruling marked a milestone in national jurisprudence and its implementation could set a precedent for how the State can protect ethnic minorities from climate change. She highlights that «in Colombia there had never been a ruling on hurricanes» and that the guidelines given by the Court take into account the growing changes in the climate and the need for populations to adapt.

From the island of Santa Catalina, you can see the entire center of Providence already rebuilt. In the photo, you can see the Lovers’ Bridge, which connects both islands.

Island Caribbean, Big Caribbean

Despite the reservations that the carnival could generate in some people, it is true that its objective is to highlight the Raizal culture. The floats, the food, the music, the dance, everything is an opportunity to revive the Raizal ethnic identity. For this reason, Zully Archbold and Jennifer Archbold, who are part of the Board of Directors of the Oversight, suggested visiting some people to understand the scope of this organization’s commitment.

In Santa Catalina lives Elvina Webster and she is rebuilding her restaurant “Big Mamma,” in honor of a secret sauce she has been preparing for years. For her, the carnival means working more than 15 hours a day: at her stand, she sells snail and fish meatballs, fried chicken and pork pieces, stuffed potatoes, and countless local delicacies. There was no crab, because it is a closed season and the islanders know that they must protect the balance with nature. She recently went to Trinidad and Tobago to learn about climate resilience and was surprised to see the incredible resemblance they had with a town thousands of kilometers away, on another Caribbean island.

Elvina Webster is recognized for the quality of her typical dishes. This fame led her to make a cameo in “El Día de la Cabra,” one of the two fiction feature films that have been filmed on the island.

Very close by, in the Santa Isabel sector, lives a retired carpenter. Adolf Henry retired years ago, but seeing that the engineers and architects of the reconstruction did not take into account the Raizal architecture and needs, he decided to resume his trade. He himself chose the wood that arrived at the port and recycled many good boards to remake his home. Now, satisfied, he feels that the house can last 30 years without needing repairs. He dedicates his free time to preparing his cotton boats and his cat boat —artisanal boats for sports competitions— for the next races. They are Raizal amusements that invite young people to have fun at sea. In front of his house, painted with pastel colors, is the carnival stage.

The music resonates over the land that once occupied the Hotel Aury, an architectural gem destroyed by the hurricane and discarded as trash by the reconstruction agents. In the end, that was what Zully and Jennifer wanted to show, that the Oversight seeks to protect ancestral culture and traditional practices, an identity at risk thanks to the colonial exercise of the Colombian State. But, also, that the Raizal people have an advantage, only they know how to inhabit the island and protect it from depredation, maintain harmony with the entire archipelago and the rest of the island Caribbean. The work of the Oversight only makes sense if the Raizal culture survives; their struggle consists in the future generations preserving and replicating the indigenous knowledge of people like Miss Elvina and Mr. Adolf.

A good part of Adolf Henry’s house was built with wood rescued from the hurricane debris. In the photo, Mr. Adolf shows his ‘cotton boat’ Rescue, which he managed to save from the hurricane to repair it and keep it as a memory of the tragedy.

(*) Journalist at Dejusticia

This article is part of the special #TejidoVivo, a product of a journalistic alliance between the Dejusticia study center and El Espectador.