History of the Caribbeans | Exploring Resilience and Culture

history experts | Joe & Kevin
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Join Caribbean history experts Joe & Kevin as they uncover the #1 Caribbean History & Culture  Podcast powerful stories, cultural legacies, and untold truths that shaped the region in History of the Caribbeans: Tales of Resilience and Culture — a podcast for listeners passionate about Caribbean history, heritage, and the enduring spirit of a people who’ve shaped the world.

  1. The Army That Joined the Revolution: Trinidad 1970

    2D AGO

    The Army That Joined the Revolution: Trinidad 1970

    In April 1970, soldiers of the Trinidad Regiment boarded armed gunboats and sailed toward Port of Spain — not to suppress the uprising, but to join it. This episode of History of the Caribbean tells the full story of Trinidad's fifty-six-day Black Power Revolution: the marches of ten thousand, the forced removal of colonial statues, the historic army mutiny under Lieutenant Rex Lassalle, US warships offshore with classified orders, and the State of Emergency that dismantled the movement's leadership overnight. Within four years, the oil sector was nationalized. History of the Caribbean — the stories that didn't make it into the textbooks.

    10 min
  2. JAMAICAN GANGSTER: Jim Brown — The Rise of the Don Dadda and the Mystery of Cell 4

    4D AGO

    JAMAICAN GANGSTER: Jim Brown — The Rise of the Don Dadda and the Mystery of Cell 4

    Lester Lloyd Coke — known as Jim Brown — was the most powerful gang don Jamaica ever produced. From the bullet-riddled streets of Denham Town to the corridors of political power in Kingston, he built the Shower Posse into a transnational criminal empire that flooded forty American cities with crack cocaine, left bodies across two continents, and operated with the full knowledge — and alleged protection — of Jamaica's most powerful politicians. But Jim Brown was more than a gangster. He was a garrison don — the judge, the welfare system, the enforcer, and the government rolled into one man in Tivoli Gardens, West Kingston. He paid school fees. He settled disputes. He silenced witnesses. And he was allegedly present the night seven gunmen stormed Bob Marley's home at 56 Hope Road in 1976 — two days before the Smile Jamaica concert — in one of the most politically charged assassination attempts in Caribbean history. He survived six bullets at nineteen. He walked free from three murder trials. He outran a federal manhunt across two countries. But in February 1992 — on the very day they buried his murdered son — Lester Lloyd Coke burned to death in a maximum-security prison cell in Kingston, Jamaica. The fire's source was never identified. No one was charged. No official investigation produced a conclusion that satisfied anyone who looked at it seriously. He had reportedly told associates he would not go down alone. His extradition to Miami — where he was scheduled to testify before a federal grand jury — was less than twenty-four hours away. In this episode of Jamaican Gangster on the History of the Caribbean, we tell the full, fact-verified story of Jim Brown — the Don Dadda, the Shower Posse, the Bob Marley shooting, the Rema massacre, the political machine that built him, and the mystery of Cell 4 that has never been solved.

    36 min
  3. Reggae Dancehall Pioneers: King Edwards | The Third Giant of the Original Sound System Trinity

    4D AGO

    Reggae Dancehall Pioneers: King Edwards | The Third Giant of the Original Sound System Trinity

    Before the recording studios. Before the international labels. Before the world knew what Jamaica was capable of — three men were running speaker systems in Kingston's open yards, competing for the loyalty of a working-class community that needed music the way it needed air. Tom The Great Sebastian. Duke Reid. And King Edwards — the foundational figure the written record has been slowest to reclaim. This episode tells the story of the man who helped build the world's first DJ culture, who disappeared from the documentation before the cameras arrived, and whose mystery — a record he played at every dance but never let finish — has never been solved. Part of the History of the Caribbean series. New episodes weekly.

    23 min
  4. Reggae Dancehall Pioneers: The Skatalites | Don Drummond, Jackie Mittoo & The All-Star Band That Built Ska

    5D AGO

    Reggae Dancehall Pioneers: The Skatalites | Don Drummond, Jackie Mittoo & The All-Star Band That Built Ska

    The full story of The Skatalites — the Jamaican instrumental supergroup that invented ska. From the Alpha Boys' School alumni who formed its core, to Don Drummond's brilliance and tragic end, to Jackie Mittoo's musical legacy across two continents.

    24 min
  5. The Slave Who Called Himself Governor. The Dutch Had to Write Back. | History of the Caribbean

    6D AGO

    The Slave Who Called Himself Governor. The Dutch Had to Write Back. | History of the Caribbean

    In February of 1763, an enslaved Akan man named Cuffy led the largest slave revolt in Dutch colonial history — and then formally proposed splitting the colony of Berbice with the Dutch governor in writing. The letter he signed as 'Governor of the Black People of Berbice' still exists in the Dutch National Archives. This episode tells the story of the Berbice Rebellion: eight months of a provisional Black government, the internal fracture that ended it, and the question of what it means that this happened thirty years before Haiti and twelve years before the American Revolution. Today that territory is Guyana — home to one of the world's largest new oil discoveries. Cuffy is on the currency. The republic he never got to build chose him as its national hero. History of the Caribbean — stories the textbooks left out. New episodes every week.

    12 min
  6. The Woman History Forgot: Nanny Grigg & Bussa's 1816 Rebellion

    6D AGO

    The Woman History Forgot: Nanny Grigg & Bussa's 1816 Rebellion

    Easter Sunday, 1816. Barbados. Thousands of enslaved people rose up and burned the cane fields — and the woman who told them why they had to do it has been erased from the story for 210 years. Nanny Grigg was enslaved at Simmons Plantation in Saint Philip. She could read. She followed the British Parliamentary debates about the Registry Bill. She gathered people and explained what the newspapers said — that freedom had been granted in England and the planters were hiding it. Her words, preserved in the colonial trial records that followed the rebellion, show she built the political consciousness that made Bussa's military operation possible. This episode reads those records against the archive that created them, and asks why Caribbean history has kept her in the footnotes for two centuries. The History of the Caribbean | New episodes weekly on all major platforms.

    11 min
  7. Reggae Dancehall Pioneers: Toots & The Maytals | The Man Who Named Reggae

    6D AGO

    Reggae Dancehall Pioneers: Toots & The Maytals | The Man Who Named Reggae

    The definitive story of Frederick Nathaniel Hibbert — the man who named reggae, sang like Otis Redding, and spent 50 years in the shadow of an icon he helped create.

    30 min
  8. JAMAICAN GANGSTER: Vivian Blake — The Mastermind Behind the Global Shower Posse Empire

    MAY 7

    JAMAICAN GANGSTER: Vivian Blake — The Mastermind Behind the Global Shower Posse Empire

    He wasn't a gunman. He was an architect. In 1973, seventeen-year-old Vivian Blake boarded a plane to New York as part of a Jamaican cricket team tour — and never came back. What he built instead was the most sophisticated Caribbean drug distribution network in American history: a cellular cocaine operation spanning 20+ US cities, reaching as far as Alaska, responsible for an alleged 1,400 drug-related killings across the United States. This is the untold story of how the Shower Posse became the blueprint for the modern international drug cartel — and how, when the FBI finally closed the net in 1988, Vivian Blake walked calmly onto a cruise ship and sailed home while his entire American operation collapsed behind him. We go deep on the cricket team infiltration, the crack cocaine industrialization model that confused federal law enforcement for years, the cruise ship escape, the four-year extradition battle, and the one question nobody ever answered: was there a ledger? And if there was — where did it go?

    14 min
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2.6
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About

Join Caribbean history experts Joe & Kevin as they uncover the #1 Caribbean History & Culture  Podcast powerful stories, cultural legacies, and untold truths that shaped the region in History of the Caribbeans: Tales of Resilience and Culture — a podcast for listeners passionate about Caribbean history, heritage, and the enduring spirit of a people who’ve shaped the world.

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