Below is the opening to Sugar Aloes’ 1997 calypso, ‘One Caribbean’:

Sugar Aloes’ calypso draws attention to the importance of a shared Caribbean regional consciousness within a late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century globalised world. It celebrates the strength which could result from joining together as ‘one people’, connecting small island nations which have relatively little geopolitical power in a global context, to form a ‘super-powerful economy’. Directing his calypso to the heads of the CARICOM countries and proposing that they ‘take this little advice’, Sugar Aloes suggests that the region's writers, artists, musicians and other cultural practitioners have a role to play in this endeavour; a point reinforced in a later verse when he stresses the need to ‘unite our arts and culture’ as a way of strengthening the region. By associating the Caribbean community (CARICOM), which focuses on economic collaboration between Caribbean nations, with the potential for collaboration in the arenas of arts, culture and sports, the calypso comments on the importance of linking up economic, political, sociological and cultural perspectives in order to achieve a meaningful sense of community.

The vision of community which Sugar Aloes presents here is utopian, in that the calypso appears to offer an easy solution to long-standing problems. With a repetition of the word ‘one’ (‘one people’, ‘one destiny’, ‘one identity’, ‘one Caribbean’), the refrain glosses over the considerable difficulty of reconciling differences both across a region which is politically and geographically fragmented, and within Caribbean nations divided along the lines of race, ethnicity and class.