Patterson lets Haiti in and doubles CARICOM’s population

At a CARICOM summit in Montego Bay attended by president René Préval, the Jamaican prime minister P. J. Patterson announced that Haiti would be granted full membership. The application had been lodged on 10 May of the same year. Patterson called the decision historic and argued it would help build democratic structure inside Haiti through contact with sister nations. Others were sceptical. Jerry Tardieu described it as a dramatic break from twenty years of subregional integration built almost entirely on historical and political homogeneity and judged it more politically motivated than economically justified. Smith notes that Haitian membership raised the combined population from roughly six million to fourteen million, which made the single market proposal more attractive, and that Haitian intellectuals complained that the Préval administration had done almost nothing to explain CARICOM to Haitians. Where this account departs from the standard one: Smith argues that describing Haiti as a French-speaking country, as CARICOM’s accession debate did, misstates the case, since fewer than fifteen percent of the population speak or comprehend French and proper integration would require formal recognition of Kreyòl as a CARICOM language.