Strictly Facts: A Guide to Caribbean History and Culture

Alexandria Miller

Are you passionate about Caribbean history, its diverse culture, and its impact on the world? Join Strictly Facts: A Guide to Caribbean History and Culture as we explore the rich tapestry of Caribbean stories told through the eyes of its people – historians, artists, experts, and enthusiasts who share empowering facts about the region’s past, present, and future. Strictly Facts is a biweekly podcast, hosted by Alexandria Miller, that delves deep into the heart and soul of the Caribbean, celebrating its vibrant heritage, widespread diaspora, and  the stories that shaped it. Through this immersive journey into the Caribbean experience, this educational series empowers, elevates, and unifies the Caribbean, its various cultures, and its global reach across borders. 

  1. 1d ago

    Caribbean Futures Through Creative Power with Alistair Scott

    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 futures can be shaped through renewed connection with Africa and the global African diaspora for Caribbean American Heritage Month. We get specific about cultural and creative industries (CCIs) and why music, film, fashion, festivals, and digital storytelling should be treated as serious economic development strategy. That leads us into intellectual property rights, licensing, brand protection, and the unglamorous but critical reality that policy only works when governments invest in enforcement capacity. From there, we zoom out to the bigger architecture of Afro-Caribbean cooperation: new business modalities that make cross-diaspora partnerships easier, visa and mobility barriers that slow trade, and why language learning and education can function like infrastructure. Along the way, we challenge misinformation that distorts Pan-Africanism, lift up older cooperative models like partner and susu, and point to modern examples like YouTube creator networks and major cultural moments that prove collaboration already works when we let it. If you care about Caribbean history, Caribbean culture, the creative economy, diaspora development, or people-centered sustainability, you’ll leave with both a clearer diagnosis and a more practical vision. Alistair Scott is founder of the nonprofit, Diaspora Legacy Collective. He is also Principal Advisor at Synergy Ecosystems LLC, a coaching and connections service. A lifelong development generalist and Pan African educator, Alistair is passionate about applying a systems and sustainability lens to rethinking how we organize thriving economies and societies. His career over the last two decades has spanned extensive community development, tourism, workforce development, sales and education; and as a civil servant, entrepreneur and non-profit professional across the U.S and the Caribbean. He has built up expertise in fostering developing and deploying social capital, particularly when  he led the build out of Basta’s Alumni Success workstream and also in his advisory of African diasporan entrepreneurs and young professionals in the diaspora. Alistair also maintains a blog on addressing socio-economic and African diasporan themes,  including futuristic takes on countries like Jamaica and Haiti and published a fictional essay in the Atlantic Fellowship’s Moya magazine. Support the show Connect with Strictly Facts -  Instagram | Facebook | Twitter | LinkedIn | YouTube | Website Looking to read more about the topics covered in this episode? Subscribe to the newsletter at www.strictlyfactspod.com to get the Strictly Facts Syllabus to your email! Want to Support Strictly Facts? Rate & Leave a Review on your favorite platformShare this episode with someone or online and tag usSend us a DM or voice note to have your thoughts featured on an upcoming episode Donate to help us continue empowering listeners with Caribbean history and educationProduced by Breadfruit Media

    48 min

  2. May 27

    Caribbean American Heritage Month And The Work Beyond Celebration

    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 Caribbean American Heritage Month's official recognition and why Caribbean identity in the US still fights to be seen clearly. Then we pivot to Caribbean futures: moving from global cultural recognition to structural power that sustains communities economically and politically. We talk institutions, learning across global communities, and diaspora responsibility beyond remittances. Most importantly, we want to know: what does Caribbean American Heritage Month mean to you, and what actions are you willing to take next to support our communities? Support the show Connect with Strictly Facts -  Instagram | Facebook | Twitter | LinkedIn | YouTube | Website Looking to read more about the topics covered in this episode? Subscribe to the newsletter at www.strictlyfactspod.com to get the Strictly Facts Syllabus to your email! Want to Support Strictly Facts? Rate & Leave a Review on your favorite platformShare this episode with someone or online and tag usSend us a DM or voice note to have your thoughts featured on an upcoming episode Donate to help us continue empowering listeners with Caribbean history and educationProduced by Breadfruit Media

    9 min

  3. May 13

    *Throwback* How Caribbean Museums Built National Identity with Kevin Farmer

    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 start by tracing the roots of colonial museums and collections built to explain the Caribbean to Europe, often without listening to Indigenous knowledge or acknowledging the realities of slavery, resistance, and survival. From there, we move into the radical energy of the post-1960s period, when new scholars, artists, national galleries, and cultural movements helped reshape what counted as “our” history and “our” creativity across the region.  Then we get practical about what museums still need to fix: whose voices were pushed aside, how co-curation and community collaboration can change exhibitions, and why documenting migration and labor history is urgent before firsthand accounts disappear. We also dig into decolonizing museums through provenance work and repatriation, and how technology can help connect Caribbean stories across borders and the diaspora.  Kevin Farmer is currently Deputy Director of the Barbados Museum and Historical Society (BMHS). As Deputy Director of the Barbados Museum, he has the responsibility for museum exhibition programming and capital campaign fundraising. He holds a Master’s degree in History (Heritage Studies) from the University of the West Indies, Cave Hill, Barbados, and has lectured in Archaeology at the Department of History at the University of the West Indies, St. Augustine, Trinidad and taught at the UWI Cave Hill in their MA Heritage Studies program.  His research interests include the creation of cultural identity in post-colonial states, the role of museums in national development, the management and curation of archaeological resources, and the role of heritage in national development.  Support the show Connect with Strictly Facts -  Instagram | Facebook | Twitter | LinkedIn | YouTube | Website Looking to read more about the topics covered in this episode? Subscribe to the newsletter at www.strictlyfactspod.com to get the Strictly Facts Syllabus to your email! Want to Support Strictly Facts? Rate & Leave a Review on your favorite platformShare this episode with someone or online and tag usSend us a DM or voice note to have your thoughts featured on an upcoming episode Donate to help us continue empowering listeners with Caribbean history and educationProduced by Breadfruit Media

    55 min

  4. Apr 29

    How Colonial Jamaica Turned Obeah Into A Crime with Dr. Katharine Gerbner

    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. We follow the chain from a rare 1755 archival reference to the shockwaves of 1760, when Tacky's Rebellion prompts British colonial authorities to outlaw Obeah as a threat to control. Along the way, we unpack why defining Obeah is so difficult when most surviving sources come from enslavers and missionaries, and how Gerbner’s microhistory method reads the archive for what it tries to hide. One of the most surprising turns is the Moravian missionary Zacharias George Caries being called an “Obeahman,” opening up a “space of correlation” where Afro-Jamaicans do not separate Christianity from Obeah in the rigid way many of us inherit today. We also connect this history to the present: Obeah remains illegal in Jamaica, and the long arc of criminalization still shapes public stigma, community silence, and debates about decriminalization. If you care about Caribbean history, Jamaican culture, African diaspora religion, and the politics of the archive, this conversation offers a new way to see what we have been taught to fear and who benefits from that fear.  Katharine Gerbner is a historian of religion, race, and freedom. She examines religious practices that have been excluded from traditional definitions of religion and develops multilingual archival strategies to uncover stories that have been marginalized and forgotten. She is the author of Archival Irruptions: Constructing Religion and Criminalizing Obeah in Eighteenth-Century Jamaica (Duke University Press, 2025) and Christian Slavery: Conversion and Race in the Protestant Atlantic World (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018). She is Associate Professor of History and Director of Religious Studies at the University of Minnesota. Support the show Connect with Strictly Facts -  Instagram | Facebook | Twitter | LinkedIn | YouTube | Website Looking to read more about the topics covered in this episode? Subscribe to the newsletter at www.strictlyfactspod.com to get the Strictly Facts Syllabus to your email! Want to Support Strictly Facts? Rate & Leave a Review on your favorite platformShare this episode with someone or online and tag usSend us a DM or voice note to have your thoughts featured on an upcoming episode Donate to help us continue empowering listeners with Caribbean history and educationProduced by Breadfruit Media

    44 min

  5. Apr 15

    The Truth Is A Process And We Still Have To Live With It

    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 complicated, and harder to tuck away. In today's episode, I offer a reflection on Caribbean history, memory, and what it means to relearn entire narratives, not just “humanize” individual historical figures. I think through why truth is less a single revelation and more a long process, shaped by silence, denial, and distortion.  Then comes the question that won’t let go: what does reconciliation actually require? Forgiveness, acknowledgement, accountability, compensation, structural change? And who gets to decide when it’s “done”? If you care about Caribbean history and culture, political violence, colonial legacies, activism, and public memory, this reflection is for you. Subscribe, share the episode with a friend, and leave a review, then tell me how you choose to carry your history forward. Support the show Connect with Strictly Facts -  Instagram | Facebook | Twitter | LinkedIn | YouTube | Website Looking to read more about the topics covered in this episode? Subscribe to the newsletter at www.strictlyfactspod.com to get the Strictly Facts Syllabus to your email! Want to Support Strictly Facts? Rate & Leave a Review on your favorite platformShare this episode with someone or online and tag usSend us a DM or voice note to have your thoughts featured on an upcoming episode Donate to help us continue empowering listeners with Caribbean history and educationProduced by Breadfruit Media

    7 min

  6. Apr 1

    *Throwback* How Exile From St. Vincent Shaped Garifuna Identity with Dr. Paul López Oro

    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 Black and Indigenous at the same time, especially in societies that insist those identities must be separate.  We dig into the “void in the archive” and why collective memory and oral tradition become more than storytelling. For Garifuna communities, memory shapes political life right now: claims to ancestral territories, fights for land rights, and daily resistance to anti-Blackness and anti-Indigeneity in nationalist narratives that erase contributions made long before the modern republics were born.  From there, we explore Garifuna Settlement Day as an embodied archive and a public demand for visibility, first in Belize and later in New York City. We connect diaspora routes to labor history in the United States, including pathways through New Orleans and the long work of building community “in the company of” other Black populations. Dr. Paul Joseph López Oro is an Assistant Professor and Director of Africana Studies at Bryn Mawr College. He is a transdisciplinary Black Studies scholar whose teaching and research interests are on Black Latin American and U.S. Black Latinx social movements, Black diaspora theories and ethnographies, and Black Queer Feminisms. His research interests include Black politics in Latin America, the Caribbean and U.S. AfroLatinidades, Black Latinx LGBTQ movements and performances, and Black transnationalism. He is working on his first book manuscript, Indigenous Blackness: The Queer Politics of Self-Making Garifuna New York, is a transdisciplinary ethnographic study analyzing oral histories, performances, social media, film, literary texts and visual cultures to unearth the political, intellectual, cultural and spiritual genealogies of Garifuna women and subaltern geographies of Garifuna LGBTQ+ folks at the forefront of Garifuna transnational movements in New York City. Support the show Connect with Strictly Facts -  Instagram | Facebook | Twitter | LinkedIn | YouTube | Website Looking to read more about the topics covered in this episode? Subscribe to the newsletter at www.strictlyfactspod.com to get the Strictly Facts Syllabus to your email! Want to Support Strictly Facts? Rate & Leave a Review on your favorite platformShare this episode with someone or online and tag usSend us a DM or voice note to have your thoughts featured on an upcoming episode Donate to help us continue empowering listeners with Caribbean history and educationProduced by Breadfruit Media

    43 min

  7. Mar 18

    Rethinking Borders, Rethinking Belonging with Drs. Patsy Lewis and Kristen Kolenz

    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 Caribbean and Latin America, brings together scholars and artists to map movement beyond the U.S.-centric view. We dive into case studies that challenge assumptions: Venezuelans navigating layered sovereignties in Curaçao and Trinidad, Haitian communities negotiating visibility and exclusion, and Chinese migration in Central America shaped by shifting ties between Taiwan and China. We unpack racial triangulation and diaspora politics from Miami to New York, examining how belonging shifts across languages, borders, and Blackness. Along the way, we discuss a people-centered approach that recognizes migrants as creators of social worlds, economies, and culture. Through interdisciplinary methods, we build a toolkit for studying migration that is rigorous, humane, and usable for students, organizers, and policymakers. Patsy Lewis is Research Professor, Department of Africana Studies, Brown University. She specializes in the political economy and development challenges of the Caribbean. Her publications include Caribbean Regional Integration: A Critical Development Approach; Caribbean Integration: Uncertainty in a Time of Global Fragmentation, Co-edited with Terri-Ann Gilbert-Roberts and Jessica Byron; and Surviving Small Size: Regional Integration in Caribbean Ministates. Kristen Kolenz is an assistant professor in the international studies program and co-chair of the gender studies program at Centre College in Kentucky. Before joining the Centre faculty in 2022, she was a postdoctoral associate in the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies at Brown University and earned her PhD in women’s, gender, and sexuality studies at  The Ohio State University. She also recently published “Mesomapping the Borderlands: Seeing Life, Making Home, and Thinking Iteratively” in Aztlán. Support the show Connect with Strictly Facts -  Instagram | Facebook | Twitter | LinkedIn | YouTube | Website Looking to read more about the topics covered in this episode? Subscribe to the newsletter at www.strictlyfactspod.com to get the Strictly Facts Syllabus to your email! Want to Support Strictly Facts? Rate & Leave a Review on your favorite platformShare this episode with someone or online and tag usSend us a DM or voice note to have your thoughts featured on an upcoming episode Donate to help us continue empowering listeners with Caribbean history and educationProduced by Breadfruit Media

    59 min

  8. Mar 4

    Building A Living Archive Of Caribbean Women’s Wisdom

    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, archival choices, and diaspora networks shape which voices become quotable and which remain unnamed, even as their ideas guide our lives. We explore proverbs like every mickle mek a muckle and one one coco full basket as distilled philosophies of patience, accumulation, and community care. These are not folk extras; they are intellectual traditions forged through scarcity, migration, and resistance. We contrast the global prominence of figures like Marcus Garvey or Audre Lorde with the many Caribbean women whose insights travel orally or locally and rarely get tagged to a name. Then we turn to a practical solution: building a living archive by treating our conversations with scholars, artists, and educators as citable sources. When a phrase reframes history, names a power dynamic, or offers a tool for survival, we capture it, attribute it, and pass it on. Together we commit to a simple practice with big stakes: cite women’s words. Citation is care, visibility, and lineage—a way to ensure that students, educators, and community organizers can trace ideas back to the women who shaped them. We close with an open invitation: share the quote by a Caribbean woman you live by, whether it came from a poet, a professor, a musician, a grandmother, or a guest on the show. Tag us and tell us what it means to you, and we’ll amplify it so those voices stay present in our feeds, our classrooms, and our futures. If this conversation resonates, follow the show, share it with a friend who loves Caribbean history and culture, and leave a review so more listeners can find these voices. Your citation, your share, and your story help build the archive. Support the show Connect with Strictly Facts -  Instagram | Facebook | Twitter | LinkedIn | YouTube | Website Looking to read more about the topics covered in this episode? Subscribe to the newsletter at www.strictlyfactspod.com to get the Strictly Facts Syllabus to your email! Want to Support Strictly Facts? Rate & Leave a Review on your favorite platformShare this episode with someone or online and tag usSend us a DM or voice note to have your thoughts featured on an upcoming episode Donate to help us continue empowering listeners with Caribbean history and educationProduced by Breadfruit Media

    9 min
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Are you passionate about Caribbean history, its diverse culture, and its impact on the world? Join Strictly Facts: A Guide to Caribbean History and Culture as we explore the rich tapestry of Caribbean stories told through the eyes of its people – historians, artists, experts, and enthusiasts who share empowering facts about the region’s past, present, and future. Strictly Facts is a biweekly podcast, hosted by Alexandria Miller, that delves deep into the heart and soul of the Caribbean, celebrating its vibrant heritage, widespread diaspora, and  the stories that shaped it. Through this immersive journey into the Caribbean experience, this educational series empowers, elevates, and unifies the Caribbean, its various cultures, and its global reach across borders. 

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