Just back from ten days of cruising around the Caribbean with my two sisters, soaking up sun and all the history and local culture we could manage. As always, I kept an eye out for teachers and students, and I learned a little about what constitutes public education—and how that differs from French West Indies to British Virgin Islands to U.S. Virgin Islands, and to those islands that are now independent entities. Discipline seemed fairly strict everywhere, and we saw lots of uniformed as well as high-spirited kids. The people with whom we spoke were all public school educated (“You have to pay to go to private schools,” which are mostly Catholic). And for college, some students go to France or Britain or the U.S., though there are many universities—and especially several highly ranked medical schools—in the Islands.
My favorite island remains Dominica, which is lush, green, and pristine, thanks to the fact that sugar cane couldn’t thrive there in the steeply mountainous and rocky terrain. Once there, a guide took a small group of us on an indescribably tortuous track some miles into the mountains to visit the Bois Cotlette “estate.” 
Having seen the megahit musical “Hamilton” this last fall and now reading the Chernow biography that inspired it, as Lin-Manuel Miranda says, by “changing my life” forever, I was especially keen to visit this spot and to think about the role of Hamilton and so many other immigrants whose lives and works have shaped these United States of America. Miranda speaks eloquently to this issue in his musical as well as in talks and writings. In a recent New York Times op ed piece, Miranda speaks of his own upbringing in Puerto Rico and calls on Congress to act in response to the huge economic crisis there—as it would if that crisis were a little closer, both figuratively and literally, to Washington D.C.
As I write this post, demagogic Presidential candidates are calling for building walls, for excluding immigrants, for surveilling citizens of the Muslim Faith. Alexander Hamilton would have been horrified—and ashamed—of these attempts and he would have spoken out in opposition, as many are doing right now. So Hamilton’s commitment to freedom and equality for all lives on, though it is certainly embattled. Alexander Hamilton for national hero!
