After Hurricane Dorian, COVID-19 is payback time for the Bahamas | Opinion

When the Bahamas closed its doors to American visitors this week – because of the U.S.‘s catastrophic inability to control the new coronavirus – you could hear the payback.

“The countries that come out of this better will be the disciplined countries,” Prime Minister Hubert Minnis said in what many took as a dig at President Trump’s widely condemned pandemic leadership. “Countries and people who do not follow sensible public health advice will have more deaths, sickness and chaos.”

The leader of one of the small, poor and predominantly Black island nations Trump likes to call “shitholes” is reminding us the world considers Trump’s America an epidemiological sinkhole – a place where public health discipline disappears.

It was especially notable coming from Minnis – and especially as we near the dangerous days of the hurricane season.

After Hurricane Dorian destroyed the northern Bahamas last September, Trump made a political base-pleasing point of denying Bahamians escaping the devastation a customary visa waiver. They could have entered the U.S. temporarily to recover and regroup – but it was too risky, Trump insisted. In racist Trumpese, he said too many refugees might be “very bad people and some very bad gang members and some very, very bad drug dealers.”

Read the complete Viewpoint here on the WLRN website.

Tim Padgett is the Americas editor for Miami NPR affiliate WLRN, covering Latin America and the Caribbean and their key links to South Florida.

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