The flag of CARICOM is a piece of corporate identity design that ended up meaning more than most. Two horizontal bands of blue, light over dark, carry a yellow sun circled in green, and printed across the sun in black are two interlocked letters C, drawn as links in a chain, and drawn broken. A Georgetown design studio produced it, a room full of prime ministers edited it, and the result compresses the whole postcolonial story of the English-speaking Caribbean into a logo: links joined to one another, and a chain that no longer closes.
A community before a flag
The Caribbean Community and Common Market was established by the Treaty of Chaguaramas, signed at Chaguaramas, Trinidad, on 4 July 1973 by four states: Barbados, Guyana, Jamaica, and Trinidad and Tobago. It grew out of CARIFTA, the Caribbean Free Trade Association, and further back out of the wreckage of the West Indies Federation, the 1958 attempt to bring the British Caribbean to independence as a single country, which collapsed in 1962. CARICOM was the more modest successor: sovereign states cooperating on trade, foreign policy and shared services rather than merging.
Most of the other English-speaking islands joined through 1974, but the Community operated for its first decade without a flag of its own. Summits made do with the national flags of the members, which by the early 1980s numbered a dozen.
Georgetown design, Port of Spain approval
The flag that fixed this came from WINART Studies, a design firm in Georgetown, Guyana, the capital that hosts the CARICOM Secretariat. Its submission went before the Fourth Conference of Heads of Government, meeting in Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago, in July 1983. The heads did not simply rubber-stamp it; the record notes that the original design was substantially modified at the meeting before approval. Few flags can claim a design review conducted by a dozen sitting prime ministers.
The approved flag, formally the CARICOM Standard, was first hoisted on 4 July 1984 at the Fifth Conference of Heads of Government in Nassau, The Bahamas. The date was no accident: it was eleven years to the day since the Treaty of Chaguaramas was signed. The 1983 conference that approved the flag was itself a notable one, remembered mostly for admitting The Bahamas as a full member of the Community. The flag has flown unchanged since, in proportions of 2:3.
Sky, sea, sun, and a broken chain
The symbolism is laid out plainly in the Community's own literature. The upper band of light blue is the sky; the lower band of dark blue is the Caribbean Sea, the thing every member state touches and the thing that both separates and connects them. The yellow circle at the center is the sun. Around it runs a narrow ring of green for the vegetation of the region.
The black device on the sun is the CARICOM logo: two letters C, one hooked through the other, each drawn as a link of chain with a gap in it. The official reading gives the broken links a double meaning. Interlocked, they are unity, the member states holding together. Broken, they are the break with the colonial past. For a community whose members had been slave colonies, then sugar colonies, then late and sometimes reluctant recipients of independence (Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago in 1962, Barbados in 1966, Guyana in 1966, others through the 1970s and beyond), a broken chain is not a subtle image, and it is not meant to be. The same logo, without the flag around it, marks the Secretariat's documents and the Community's institutions.
Where the Standard flies
The flag flies at the CARICOM Secretariat in Georgetown, at the twice-yearly meetings of the Conference of Heads of Government, and at the Community's institutions around the region, from the Caribbean Court of Justice in Port of Spain to the Caribbean Examinations Council in Bridgetown. It appears beside the national flags of the 15 full member states, which now stretch beyond the Anglophone Caribbean: Suriname, Dutch-speaking, joined in 1995, and Haiti, French- and Creole-speaking, became a full member in 2002. Five British territories are associate members.
The Standard also does ceremonial duty for a community that citizens mostly encounter through paperwork: the CSME, the single market launched in 2006; the common passport format, burgundy with "Caribbean Community" above the national name, which most member states now issue; and CARIFESTA, the roving regional arts festival. During the Cricket World Cup of 2007, hosted jointly by eight CARICOM states under a single visa regime, the flag had one of its rare moments of mass visibility.
It remains a low-key flag for a low-key institution, and that is arguably faithful to the design. The West Indies Federation tried to make one nation and failed; CARICOM's flag promises less, a sun, a sea and a set of separate links that choose to interlock. Four and a half decades on, the links have held.
References
[1] Caribbean Community (CARICOM), "Symbols of Regional Integration." https://caricom.org/symbols-of-regional-integration/
[2] Caribbean Community (CARICOM), "Our Symbols," archived Secretariat page. https://oldsite.caricom.org/about-caricom/who-we-are/our-symbols
[3] Wikipedia, "Flag of the Caribbean Community." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_of_the_Caribbean_Community
[4] Flags of the World (FOTW), "CARICOM - Caribbean Community and Common Market." https://www.crwflags.com/fotw/flags/int-cari.html
[5] Treaty Establishing the Caribbean Community (Treaty of Chaguaramas), signed 4 July 1973; Revised Treaty of Chaguaramas, 2001. https://caricom.org/documents/revised-treaty-of-chaguaramas/