Strictly Facts: A Guide to Caribbean History and Culture

Send us a text message and tell us your thoughts. A child grows up learning that love can arrive in a barrel, but comfort cannot. That tension sits at the heart of our conversation with Grenadian director, producer, and creative industry strategist Meschida Phillip, whose documentary work asks what migration costs families long after the plane takes off. We trace how the Grenada Revolution, early...

Send us a text message and tell us your thoughts. Caribbean food travels the world as flavor, nostalgia, and restaurant culture but what if it also traveled as real economic infrastructure? We’re asking a harder question: how do we move from beloved recipes to Caribbean food systems that reduce import dependence, strengthen food security, and create durable industries across the region. I’m joined...

Send us a text message and tell us your thoughts. Caribbean culture is one of the most copied, quoted, and consumed forces on the planet and yet the Caribbean is still too often treated like a place to extract value from, not a place to build value with. That tension sits at the heart of my conversation with Alistair Scott, founder of the Diaspora Legacy Collective, as we dig into how Caribbean fu...

Send us a text message and tell us your thoughts. Caribbean culture is everywhere, but visibility is not the same as power. As we mark Caribbean American Heritage Month this June, I want to push past the easy parts of celebration and ask a harder question: what are we building with what we know about our history, politics, and cultural practices? In today's episode, we ground ourselves in Car...

Send us a text message and tell us your thoughts. Museums don’t just preserve history. They decide which stories become a nation’s memory and which stories get buried under polite silence. I’m joined by Kevin Farmer, Deputy Director of the Barbados Museum and Historical Society, to talk about Caribbean museums as real tools of nation building, cultural heritage, and post-independence identity. We...

Send us a text message and tell us your thoughts. Obeah has been called superstition, “black magic,” and even a crime but those labels have a history, and that history was built to serve colonial power. We sit down with historian Dr. Katharine Gerbner to trace how African-derived spiritual and healing traditions in Jamaica were deliberately stigmatized through slavery, missionary politics, and law...

Send us a text message and tell us your thoughts. The strangest thing about the truth is how often it arrives late. A story your elders carried for years gets dismissed as “just talk” until an archive opens, a report drops, a government admits wrongdoing, or scholars finally confirm what communities already knew. When that happens, the past doesn’t simply become clearer. It becomes heavier, more c...

Send us a text message and tell us your thoughts. Today, we reshare our reasoning with Dr. Paul López Oro to trace the Garifuna story across Caribbean history, from St Vincent and the Carib Wars to forced exile in 1797 and the building of communities along the Central America Caribbean coast in Honduras, Belize, Guatemala, Nicaragua, and beyond. Along the way, we wrestle with what it means to be B...

Send us a text message and tell us your thoughts. Headlines turn migration into a single story about borders and crisis. We open the lens, traveling through the Caribbean and Latin America to reveal routes, identities, and cultural worlds that rarely make it into the frame. Joined by co-editors Dr. Patsy Lewis and Dr. Kristen Kolenz, we share how our new book, Unbordering Migration Studies in the...

Send us a text message and tell us your thoughts. What happens when you go searching for the words of Caribbean women—and find silence where there should be an echo? We follow that uneasy question into the kitchens, verandas, classrooms, and studios where wisdom has always lived, then ask why so little of it appears on slides, posters, and timelines. Along the way, we unpack how publishing power,...

Send us a text message and tell us your thoughts. A woman signs up 3,000 new members, walks into a meeting she was invited to lead, and is assassinated at the podium. That single moment opens a window into the hidden architecture of a global movement and the women who kept it alive when headlines and historians looked away. We continue our conversation with Dr. Natanya Duncan to explore the life a...

Send us a text message and tell us your thoughts. What happens when the archive starts talking back? We sat down with Dr. Natanya Duncan to illuminate the women who built the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) from the ground up and gave the movement its global muscle. From a Kingston porch to Harlem kitchens and London cafés, their labor carried Garveyism across continents while resha...

Send us a text message and tell us your thoughts. Think you know the Garvey story? Meet the two Amys who built its backbone. We dive into the lives of Amy Ashwood Garvey and Amy Jacques Garvey, Jamaican visionaries whose organizing, editing, and leadership turned a charismatic vision into a global movement. Their names appear in the margins of many textbooks, but their fingerprints are on every ch...

Send us a text message and tell us your thoughts. We are starting the year with a heart of gratitude and a clear plan for what comes next. We celebrate five years of Strictly Facts by looking at how this community-built project became a classroom, a living archive, and a love letter to Caribbean voices. Along the way, we reflect on the milestones of 2025. We revisit why this space exists: to cente...

Send us a text message and tell us your thoughts. Celebrate the holidays with us with a throwback episode as we open a window onto a season where streets become stages, kitchens turn into archives, and every drumbeat and carol carries a story. From the clatter of cowbells in Nassau to the smoky crackle of a roast pig on Christmas Eve, the region’s holidays reveal how history lives in sound, taste,...

Send us a text message and tell us your thoughts. A school bans “edges,” a graduation blocks braids, a child with locks is told to stay home—on the surface, they’re dress code debates. Look closer and you see a lineage of power: colonial respectability, “imperial cleanliness,” and the policing of Black and Brown bodies through hair. We sit down with artist, educator, and gender rights advocate ami...

Send us a text message and tell us your thoughts. A building can be history you can walk through, and in the Caribbean those stories are contested, resilient, and alive. With Professor Dahlia Nduom, we explore how colonial styles, tourist imagery, and community ingenuity have shaped what gets built and what gets erased as we move from great houses to tenement yards, spaces that encode climate logi...

Send us a text message and tell us your thoughts. A storm can level homes, but it also reveals what we stand on. Hurricane Melissa’s record winds and devastating surge tore through Jamaica and neighboring territories, but the story is bigger than wind speed—it’s a living history of language, science, memory, and community that runs through the Caribbean. We trace the roots of “hurricane” to Taino...

Send us a text message and tell us your thoughts. Sacred land, contested memory, and a centuries-long fight for sovereignty, this conversation with Dr. Garrey Dennie traces the deep antiquity of the Kalinago in St. Vincent, their transformation into a maritime powerhouse, and the strategic choices that delayed European domination for generations. Instead of a single “first contact,” we explore two...

Send us a text message and tell us your thoughts. What if the medicine you need was growing right outside your door? We sit down with author and farmer Aleya Fraser to trace the living thread of Caribbean herbalism as she details in her new book Caribbean Herbalism: Traditional Wisdom and Modern Herbal Healing .  Together, we unpack the tension between modern convenience and disappearing habitats,...

Send us a text message and tell us your thoughts. What if everything we thought we knew about Caribbean literary history was incomplete? That's the premise of today's captivating conversation with Professor Alison Donnell, whose groundbreaking new book, Lost and Found: An A to Z of Neglected Writers of the Anglophone Caribbean ( Papillote Press 2025), challenges the traditional narrative...

Send us a text message and tell us your thoughts. In the mid-20th century Caribbean, cinema became a powerful tool for nation-building, education, and political messaging through two remarkable organizations with surprisingly parallel methods but divergent ideologies. Dr. Pedro Noel Doreste Rodríguez joins us for this enchanting history in celebration of Hispanic Heritage Month. The story begins i...

Send us a text message and tell us your thoughts. Storytelling lies at the heart of Caribbean identity. Award-winning filmmaker Alyscia Cunningham joins us to unravel the power of Caribbean folklore through the lens of modern cinema. As a first-generation Trinidadian-American, Cunningham's childhood was filled with spine-tingling tales from her parents' homeland in southern Trinidad. Tod...

Send us a text message and tell us your thoughts. When we lose a loved one, the stories they carried often disappear with them—unless we find ways to preserve them. This powerful truth drives creative consultant Calvin Walker's experimental audio project " Daylight Come ," which traces his family's migration from Jamaica to the United Kingdom and connects deeply personal narrat...

Send us a text message and tell us your thoughts. What drives someone to pick up a camera and document untold Caribbean history with no formal training? For Richard Vaughn, it was a simple realization: the political stories that shaped the modern Caribbean were either missing from film archives or told through a heavily biased lens. Vaughn takes us on his remarkable journey from curious Jamaican-A...