Crossfire: ID travel deal — Bajan pride vs Guyanese practicality

Cousin Leroy (Jamaica, refereeing): Settle down, settle down. The question on the floor: Barbados and Guyana just agreed citizens can travel between the two countries on national ID cards instead of passports. Auntie Cheryl from Bridgetown is going first.

Auntie Cheryl (Barbados): About time. About time, Leroy. We’ve been talking CARICOM Single Market and Economy since before the children in this room were born. Twenty-something years. And now we finally have two governments actually doing the small bilateral thing that builds the larger arrangement. National ID. Easy. Family in Georgetown can come down for Crop Over without renewing a passport that’s sitting in a drawer half-expired. That is the integration. That is the dream that Errol Barrow and them put on paper.

Yardman (Trinidad-Tobago, jumping in from the side): (leaning over) But Cheryl, you not worried about the security angle though? Two-three people in the CBC clip said the same thing — somebody go run nefarious activity through this corridor. National ID systems are not passport systems. Different vetting, different fraud profile.

Auntie Cheryl: Yardman, every system in this region has a fraud profile. The passport system has a fraud profile. The visa-waiver system has a fraud profile. The question is whether we let perfect be the enemy of moving. We have been not-moving for twenty years.

Cousin Leroy: Pull up. Pull up. Big point on the table now. Cheryl — you saying this is the floor, not the ceiling. What’s the next bilateral that should land?

Auntie Cheryl: Jamaica–Barbados. Trinidad–Guyana. Saint Lucia–Barbados. By Christmas. If we serious, Leroy, we serious. If we just talking — well, we know what we are then. Don’t we.

Source: Caribbean Broadcasting Corporation, May 26, 2026 (factual underpinning); voices fictional, used per TWB Crossfire canon.