When Secretary of State Marco Rubio arrives in Jamaica on Wednesday, he will be visiting what the Trump administration’s top envoy to the region describes as “probably our most like-minded partner in the Caribbean.”

Jamaica was once on the verge of bankruptcy, and its financial turnaround is regarded as a bright spot that has helped it stand out among other nations in the Caribbean and make inroads in what has long been a vexing crime problem fueled by guns, gangs and drugs. Also, the country’s strategic location near major sea shipping lanes makes it a key player in global trade.

The government of Prime Minister Andrew Holness “has been a great ally,” Mauricio Claver-Carone, Trump’s envoy for Latin America and the Caribbean, said Tuesday in a preview of Rubio’s visit for journalists.

That friendly relationship, however, could find itself tested this week as Holness and five other Caribbean leaders invited to meet with Rubio during his first official visit to the English-speaking Caribbean as secretary of state try to navigate shifts in U.S. policies that are creating tensions among leaders of the 15-member regional bloc known as CARICOM.

Claver-Carone said the visit will focus on three priorities: Energy security, economic development and crime and violence.

“I think the focus that the secretary wanted to hone in on is basically the big opportunity and the challenge,” Claver-Carone said. “We are in a historic moment in the Caribbean for energy security, which has been the Achilles heel of the Caribbean for so long in its economic development with disproportionately high electricity and energy prices.”

He said Rubio’s planned visit Thursday to oil-rich Guyana will be about energy security. Guyana recently had to reach out to the U.S. for help after a Venezuelan patrol boat entered its waters, threatening ExxonMobil offshore operations.

“We need to protect Guyana’s energy resources,” Claver-Carone said. “We want to see Guyana succeed. We want to see it develop.... We believe renewables are complementary in that regard, and are not a substitute. We want to support Guyana in this development, but protect it also from the threats.”

After Guyana, Rubio will travel to Suriname, which lags Guyana in energy development.

Guyana and Suriname are expected to be easy discussions, Caribbean observers say, but Rubio will also find that Caribbean leaders have their own agenda.

Rubio will meet with six Caribbean leaders during this two-day visit. While in Kingston, he will hold bilateral talks with Holness as well as Trinidad and Tobago Prime Minister Stuart Young, who is also his oil-rich nation’s energy minister; the head of Haiti’s Transitional Presidential Council, Fritz Alphonse Jean, and Barbados Prime Minister Mia Mottley.

Mottley currently serves as chairwoman of CARICOM, and leaders not invited to be a part of the Rubio visit have told Mottley to raise their worries about several matters. One involves a proposed tariff President Donald Trump is considering placing on Chinese-made ships docking at U.S. ports. The multimillion-dollar levy would raise inflation in the region, and leaders are likely to seek an exemption for the Caribbean.

Another issue concerns a possible travel ban targeting Eastern Caribbean countries that offer Citizenship by Investment programs, which allow foreigners to buy a citizenship, or “golden passport,” for as little as $100,000. The citizenship gives them visa-free access to more than 100 countries worldwide. Four of the five Caribbean countries are among 43 nations, including Haiti, Cuba and Venezuela, being considered for an expanded travel ban by the Trump administration restricting access to the U.S. The Eastern Caribbean nations would be on the lowest tier with 60 days to make corrections, which include possibly accepting undocumented migrants being kicked out by the U.S. to get off the list.

Mottley has been asked to make a pitch on behalf of the Eastern Caribbean countries being targeted. Their leaders’ argument: individuals seeking their citizenship are vetted, and possession of such passports does not guarantee access to the U.S. Travelers still have to apply for U.S. visas.

Another issue that is likely to be raised, said a government minister, is the matter of doctors provided as part of Cuba’s international medical program, 400 of whom are currently employed in Jamaica.

The State Department has likened the program to human trafficking and last month Rubio announced that steps were being taken to cancel the visas of any officials participating in the medical missions, which deploy nurses and doctors to countries around the world, including in the Caribbean. The threat has received pushback from Caribbean leaders, who say they are not aiding human trafficking and that the doctors provide critical support to their health care systems.

The Trump administration disagrees. Describing it as “white-robe trafficking,” Claver-Carone said Tuesday that individuals in the program do not receive their salary, which in fact goes directly to the Cuban regime, and they have “their passports hijacked by the Cuban government” during their stay in their foreign postings.

“This is not an issue about, like, the quality of Cuban doctors. The quality of Cuban doctors and the work they’ve done in the Caribbean, in Haiti, etc., is great; it’s extraordinary. And at the end of the day, we have to recognize that,” Claver-Carone said. “We understand, obviously, how the Cuban regime works in maintaining control over these individuals. But we want to basically have a united voice against indentured servitude, against human trafficking.”

The administration, he said, is looking forward to working with Caribbean governments to ensure that they are able to directly hire doctors. “If they choose to overshadow this trip with the issue of Cuban doctors, it’ll be a lost opportunity,” he added. “Again, the huge opportunity here is energy security, economic development that has plagued this region. And the biggest challenge that we have is Haiti.”

Claver-Carone said Rubio wants to talk to Haiti’s provisional leadership about the country’s problems with armed gangs and get feedback from Caribbean leaders on the dire crisis. The administration is coming up with a plan to assist Haiti with the gang situation, he said, but did not go into details.

“This trip is going to add in the urgency of the moment... to try to ensure that these gangs do not take over, obviously, Port-au-Prince and then expand beyond that,” he said. “That is something that we keep our eye on every day, that we’re very focused on.”

Ivelaw Lloyd Griffith, a Guyana-born Caribbean expert, said he will be looking at how the region’s leaders navigate the changing dynamics in U.S.-Caribbean relations.

“What we’re beginning to see with that visit is shades of Trump one,” he said, referring to divisions that crept up among leaders during the first Trump administration when he invited the leaders of only five Caribbean countries, Bahamas, Dominican Republic, Haiti, Jamaica and St. Lucia, to meet with him at Mar-a-Lago. “My worry is that the sentiments within some of the countries are so strong towards wanting to appease the U.S. policies that they’re going to fold and the division is going to get wider.”

Griffith said he hopes “this is the first and not the final set of conversations about the issues, because the signals being sent so far are not good. I hope that they’re able to talk about other issues that are critical to the region here.”

They include immigration, which he says could lead to tens of thousands of Caribbean nationals, including more than 5,000 Jamaicans and a half-million Haitians, being forced to return to their homeland under the Trump’s administration massive deportation plan, at a time when the U.S. government has frozen foreign aid and dismantled the U.S. Agency for International Development.

“I worry about the impact, particularly given the cuts on USAID, the impact of these people being returned to their countries,” he said.

Other issues that need to be addressed are the U.S. approach to financing for climate change issues and Caribbean security initiatives. And then there’s China, which is not only an emerging presence in Jamaica and six other Caribbean countries, but is also a player in Guyana’s oil industry.

“The energy issue is quite important, and I think Caribbean countries are gonna have to try to navigate between the space for supporting energy and not beating us up over relationships with China,” said Griffith, who has written extensively about the energy industry as a founding fellow of the Caribbean Policy Consortium and senior associate at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.

“But for me, the overarching anxiety now has to do with Cuban medical support provided by the Cuban workers in the medical field,” he said. “There needs to be a conversation about the process rather than having a blackmail flag being waved.”

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