Caribbean business news, trade intelligence, and economic analysis covering CARICOM member states and the wider Caribbean region. Reported by La Caribeña News.
Hapag-Lloyd published a Peak Season Surcharge on 6 October and a General Rate Increase on 14 October, both on cargo from the East Coast of South America to the Caribbean. The surcharge runs 30 days from 5 November. The increase begins 15 November, until further notice.
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CARICOM's Regional Statistics Programme publishes merchandise trade series running from 1973 to 2024. Its own note states the regional totals cover 13 of 15 member states, excluding The Bahamas and Haiti because they are outside the Common External Tariff.
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IRENA says meeting Caribbean Nationally Determined Contributions needs another US$9 billion and around 4 GW, against a CARICOM target of 47 per cent renewables by 2027. Ember, publishing on 1 October 2026, found four of thirteen countries had weakened or dropped their targets since 2021.
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Cuba has 1,418 megawatts of solar across 144 parks and 50 megawatts of storage. Union Electrica forecasts the shortfall at the peak hour, when photovoltaic output is zero. On 17 October it put availability at 758 megawatts against 2,800 of demand.
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OFAC issued Venezuela-related General Licence 60A on 16 October 2026, authorising transactions for earthquake relief. Payments under it, including taxes and fees to the Government of Venezuela, need not go into the Foreign Government Deposit Funds Account. Seven other licences keep that requirement.
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The Guyana Development Bank's application pages name four documents that open an account. One of them, the Digital Identity Card, is a government record rather than a number on a document, and has been accepted for travel to Barbados since 1 July 2026. It carries no tax or NIS number.
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The United States announced about US$340.5 million for the Caribbean basin on 15 October 2026, the largest line being US$175 million for undersea cables. A congressional notification reported in July set out a US$175.8 million cable programme naming four Central American countries and Haiti.
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The OCC fined American Express National Bank US$350 million on 8 October 2026 and issued a cease-and-desist order. The bank processed approximately US$13 billion in suspected trade-based money laundering between June 2014 and May 2025, in card charges and their repayments.
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Alvaro Pulido Vargas appeared in the Southern District of Florida on 13 October 2026, two days after the Justice Department announced his arrest. The 2021 indictment against him charges four money laundering counts, and two of the charged transfers left accounts in Antigua and Barbuda.
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Cuba opened its first Mercado de Abasto.cu in Sancti Spiritus on 10 October, with a minimum purchase of US$200 or 24,000 Cuban pesos. Resolution 13/2026, the instrument that created these markets, contains no figure. It delegates the minimum to the company running the market.
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An Opposition senator told Jamaica's Senate on 9 October that J$96.3 billion budgeted for capital projects over a decade went unspent. His figures match the Ministry of Finance's own documents. The Ministry reports 94.6 per cent execution for one of those years, against a budget already cut.
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The IMF's October 2026 Global Financial Stability Report names sovereign total return swaps as a frontier-economy risk that standard debt statistics cannot fully capture. Reported users are Angola, Colombia, Nigeria and Senegal. Five Caribbean states are absent from the dataset it used.
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