PORT-OF-SPAIN (Trinidad and Tobago): After 200 years of turning its back on geography, this English-speaking former British colony is searching for its Latin American soul. Just seven miles off the coast of Venezuela and dappled with Spanish place names bestowed half a millennium ago by Christopher Columbus, Trinidad and Tobago have set the lofty goal of becoming a Spanish-speaking nation by 2020.

With this month’s start of the new academic year, Spanish instruction will be compulsory in public schools from first grade through high school. Civil servants also are expected to attain basic proficiency in the language of the conquistadors, who came and went so quickly here that Spanish was never really the dominant tongue.

The effort to transform the predominantly Indian- and African-origin islanders into bilingual citizens of Latin America is motivated by shifting trade ties, officials say. Today, Chile, Brazil and Costa Rica are more important partners than the Europeans with whom the Caribbean nation has long been politically aligned.

The oil and natural gas industries also stand to benefit from bridging the linguistic gap with Venezuela, the hemisphere’s biggest oil producer, whose president wants to reduce dependence on US refineries and markets. Trinidad has more processing capacity than it has oil, and it would love to take on the job of refining Venezuelan crude.

The strongest driver, however, may be the quixotic quest of Port-of-Spain, the capital, to be chosen as the seat of the emerging Free Trade Area of the Americas, an economic bloc of 800 million mostly Spanish-speaking consumers. Other prime contenders among the 11 cities seeking to host the FTAA headquarters include Miami and Panama City, both far ahead of the Trinidadian capital in the share of their populations who are proficient in English and Spanish.

“A Venezuelan colleague told me that for years we’ve been like Siamese twins joined at the back. We never see each other,” said Sharlene Yuille, an official with the government’s Secretariat for the Implementation of Spanish. Noting the geographic proximity to Venezuela, she said foreigners looking at a map of the Americas often assume that this is a Spanish-speaking country.

Only about 1,500 of Trinidad’s 1.3 million citizens are Spanish-speakers, said Pedro Centeno, academic director of the Caribbean Institute of Languages and International Business. With the officially mandated target of having at least 30 per cent of public employees proficient within five years, Centeno’s school and the handful of others in the capital are enjoying a boom in contracts for continuing education courses at government ministries and private companies alike.

“The need for Spanish-speakers is steadily rising because the export-import sector increasingly requires contact with colleagues in Latin America,” said Centeno, a relatively rare Trinidadian of Spanish descent. —Dawn/WP-LAT News Service