U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio will be the headliner guest at this week’s Caribbean Community leaders’ summit in St. Kitts, and as expected, the meeting could be a tense one given the increasingly harsh set of policies Washington has imposed on a region that has traditionally been among the friendliest to it over the decades. Officials say that nearly every member state, except the British dependency of Montserrat, has confirmed plans to attend the three-day summit beginning on Tuesday. This is the first major in-person summit of leaders with Rubio ever since the Trump administration had, towards the end of last year, severely upped the pressure on the grouping of mostly small island nations to comply with a series of controversial edicts from Washington ranging from accepting deportees to cutting back on relations with Cuba. Rubio is scheduled to hold “closed door meetings” with the leaders on a number of issues, ranging from the visa suspensions for Antiguans and Dominicans, pressure on governments to scale back relations with China, demands from Washington for the region to also cut back on the decades-old Cuban medical brigade program and for the grouping to look more towards the U.S. Exim Bank for development loans rather than China’s. The U.S. and other Western nations have also been trying to force the minimization or cancellation of citizenship-by-investment or golden-passport programs for foreigners, despite the…Read more