Lloyd Best

LLOYD BEST
Lloyd Best
Lloyd Best

“Lloyd Best is most appropriately defined by the title of his seminal work, “Independent Thought and Caribbean Freedom”. First presented by Best at the age of 32, the title captures this Caribbean thinker’s uncompromising position that the Caribbean needed to find its own voice in defining its own path towards its own idea of development.

For him, the greatest challenge facing the region was that of liberating the Caribbean imagination and rebuilding its damaged psyche from the devastation of the colonial experience. He was fierce in his insistence that the Caribbean should avoid the trap of borrowed ideologies and borrowed solutions as it embraced the responsibility for creating a new society out of the many fragments of cultures that had been brought here, under duress, in the service of European colonial expansion.”  

He believed passionately in the importance of democratic engagement and organized discussion groups everywhere he went. In the 1960s, he founded the New World Group which would become a highly influential group of intellectuals in the Caribbean. He later founded the Tapia House Group in Trinidad, out of which came a political party, the Tapia House Movement and the weekly Tapianewspaper.  He was Leader of the Opposition in the Senate (1974-75 and 1981-83). The party contested the 1976 elections without success but later became a key force in building the opposition alliance that led to the birth of the National Alliance for Reconstruction (NAR) which swept to office in 1986.  Best, however, stayed out of the NAR on the grounds that it did not meet his own minimum conditions for offering itself for office.

He was a senior lecturer in economics at the St Augustine campus but resigned to start the Trinidad and Tobago Institute of the West Indies (now known as the Lloyd Best Institute of the W.I.) in Tunapuna in 1976. In 1977, he launched the Trinidad and Tobago Review newspaper which continues to be published as a monthly review of national life. Professionally, he worked as an economist with various organisations, most often with the United Nations Development Programme.

Above all, Lloyd Best believed in the people of the Caribbean and was a committed integrationist who remained completely confident in the generations to come, and in the eventual triumph of the Caribbean spirit.”

Biography Source

Texts by Best
  • “Race, class, and ethnicity: A Caribbean interpretation” (2001)

    Citation: Best, Lloyd. 2001. “Race, class, and ethnicity: A Caribbean interpretation”–Third Annual Jagan Lecture.  York University, Toronto.
    Info: “From Belize and Havana to Cayenne and Paramaribo, there is currently a crisis of Caribbean civilization….” Thus begins this unflinching analysis of Lloyd Best into the present Caribbean politico-cultural malaise – an analysis in which no historical figure or ideology is deemed beyond the need for critical reassessment, and in which the urgent need for a creative new departure is emphasized”.

  • “Economic and Business Ideas in the West Indies at the Dawn of the 21st Century” (2000)

    Citation: Best, Lloyd. 2000. “Economic and Business Ideas in the West Indies at the Dawn of the 21st Century”–Sixteenth Adlith Brown Memorial Lecture. St. Augustine, Trinidad and Tobago: Caribbean Center for Monetary Studies–The University of the West Indies.
    Info: “Lecture delivered on November 2, 2000, at the XXXII Annual Monetary Studies Conference of the Caribbean Centre for Monetary Studies, at the Le Meridien, Jamaica Pegasus Hotel”.

  • “Making Mas with Possibility–Five Hundred Years Later” (1999)

    Citation: Best, Lloyd. 1999. “Making Mas with Possibility–Five Hundred Years Later.” In George Lamming, ed., Enterprise of the Indies. Tunapuna, Trinidad and Tobago: Trinidad and Tobago Institute of the West Indies.

  • “Independent Thought and Caribbean Freedom: Thirty Years Later” (1997)

    Citation: Best, Lloyd. 2000. “Economic and Business Ideas in the West Indies at the Dawn of the 21st Century”–Sixteenth Adlith Brown Memorial Lecture. St. Augustine, Trinidad and Tobago: Caribbean Center for Monetary Studies–The University of the West Indies.
    Info: “Lecture delivered on November 2, 2000, at the XXXII Annual Monetary Studies Conference of the Caribbean Centre for Monetary Studies, at the Le Meridien, Jamaica Pegasus Hotel”.

  • “Development Issues and the Regional Imagination.” (1995)

    Citation: Best, Lloyd.  1995.  “Development Issues and the Regional Imagination.”  The New Aesthetic and the Meaning of Culture in the Caribbean—Proceedings of the CARIFESTA V Symposium.

  • “From Chagauramas to Slavery” (1971)

    Citation: Best, Lloyd.  1971. “From Chagauramas to Slavery.” In A. W. Singham et.al., eds.   Readings in Government and Politics in the West Indies.  Mona, Jamaica: University of the West Indies.

  • “Independent Thought and Caribbean Freedom” (1967)

    Citation: Best, Lloyd.  1967. “Independent Thought and Caribbean Freedom,” New World Quarterly 3(4).