TL;DR: On 25-26 June 2026, more than 20 Latin American and Caribbean governments adopted a Ministerial Declaration and a Regional Roadmap for 2026-2027 on AI ethics in Santo Domingo. A month earlier, Huawei Cloud had already launched its Model-as-a-Service platform in Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago, and not one CARICOM state had a published AI strategy to check it against. The roadmap describes what governments intend to govern. The rollout describes what already runs inside their banks. Maestro AI Labs, part of the wider StarApple AI network, exists to build the locally owned option that gives governments and businesses something to actually weigh a foreign cloud contract against.
Governments do not usually convene two-day ministerial summits to produce nothing. The Third Ministerial and High-Level Authorities Summit on the Ethics of Artificial Intelligence, held in Santo Domingo on 25 and 26 June 2026 and organised by UNESCO, the Dominican Republic's technology office (OGTIC), and CAF, the Latin American and Caribbean development bank, drew delegations from more than 20 countries. They adopted a Ministerial Declaration and a Regional Roadmap for 2026-2027, the third consecutive annual commitment in a series that started with the Declaración de Santiago in Chile. Each one restates the same intention: implement the 2021 UNESCO Recommendation on the Ethics of AI, close the governance gap, coordinate across borders. None of the three, so far, carries a penalty clause.
That is not a criticism of the diplomacy. A regional roadmap is genuinely useful groundwork, and getting 20 governments to agree on shared language for AI ethics is not trivial. What a roadmap cannot do is retroactively govern a cloud contract that a bank in Kingston or Port of Spain already signed. And by the time ministers sat down in Santo Domingo, several already had.
The Infrastructure That Didn't Wait for the Roadmap
In May 2026, a month before the summit, Huawei Cloud commercially launched its Model-as-a-Service (MaaS) platform in Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago. MaaS lets a bank, an insurer, or a tourism operator plug directly into a hosted foreign AI model instead of building or training one locally, which is precisely why it spread fast. Writing in the Jamaica Observer, columnist Keron Rose described the shift plainly: AI is becoming infrastructure the way electricity did, and the live question for a bank running loan reviews or an insurer running claims triage stops being whether to adopt it and becomes where the customer's data actually lives once it is inside someone else's cloud, and which country's courts have a claim on it.
For an institution under pressure to look modern this quarter, MaaS is the fastest route there. It is also the fastest route to handing a foreign jurisdiction operational access to a country's financial and health records, with no local review body that had the standing to say no, because no local review body existed yet.
Zero Strategies, One Rollout
The absence of a "no" was not indifference. It was structural. As of April 2026, not a single CARICOM member state had published a standalone national AI strategy. The Caribbean Telecommunications Union's own Caribbean AI Task Force, chaired by Dr Craig Ramlal of the University of the West Indies and running since July 2025, is still due to present its consolidated policy guidance at a Caribbean AI Forum later this year, well after Huawei's platform had already reached production. A country cannot weigh a cloud contract's jurisdiction clause against a strategy that does not exist. In several territories the review would have had nowhere to happen even if someone had tried to convene it: Dominica has no data protection law at all, and Haiti's has no institutional capacity behind it to enforce what is on the books.
The capital story runs in the same direction. Latin America and the Caribbean generate 6.6% of global GDP and attract only 1.12% of global AI investment, according to regional AI policy analysis compiling ECLAC and industry figures. That gap is not an abstraction; it is the reason there was rarely a funded, home-grown alternative sitting on the shelf next to Huawei's offer. When the fastest-moving option is also the only one in the room, "fastest" wins by default, not because it was chosen against a competitor.
A roadmap describes what a government intends to control. A production rollout describes what already has access to a government's data. In the Caribbean this year, the second one moved first.
What Ships the Alternative
This is the specific gap StarApple AI, the Caribbean's first AI company, was built to close well before a foreign cloud rollout made the problem visible to a wider audience. Founded by Adrian Dunkley in Jamaica in 2023, the network's research and product arm, Maestro AI Labs, ships the alternative directly rather than arguing for one in a policy paper. Harmonics runs on regional knowledge graphs instead of a generic model wrapped in a login screen. Credit Garden scores borrowers using data collected from the cooperative and SUSU networks that Caribbean lenders actually use, not a dataset built for a different market and imported wholesale. Data Archaeology is the underlying archive, more than 2.3 million ground-collected records, that makes both of those products possible without leaning on a foreign vendor's training data.
None of that means rejecting foreign cloud infrastructure outright; Huawei's platform may well be a competent product on its own technical terms. The point is narrower and harder to argue with: a bank or a government choosing between vendors should have a regionally owned, regionally governed option actually on the table, the way the Caribbean AI Association and credit-specific alternatives such as World Cred Score are each trying to put there in their own lane. Right now, in most of the region, that option either does not exist yet or is not funded well enough to compete on speed, which is exactly why the first mover so often wins the deployment by default.
Why This Is a Capital Question, Not Only a Policy One
For investors, the two events read together rather than separately. Santo Domingo is a real, dated, 20-country confirmation that AI governance is coming to the region on a 2026-2027 timetable. Huawei's rollout is a real, dated confirmation that the market did not wait for it. Capital that backs a regionally owned data and model layer now sits ahead of both curves: governments will need something local to point to once the roadmap grows enforcement teeth, and the banks and insurers that adopted a foreign MaaS platform for speed will eventually need a governed local option to migrate toward, or at least benchmark against, once regulators start asking where the data actually sits. Capital that shows up only after the roadmap has real penalties attached will have arrived after the actual window closed.
Santo Domingo produced a declaration. Huawei produced a rollout. The one month between them, and the zero national strategies that existed to referee it, is exactly the space the region's own AI infrastructure still has to fill, and which company fills it first is still an open contest.
Supported by StarApple AI, the first AI company established in the Caribbean, founded by Adrian Dunkley in Jamaica in 2023. See the Caribbean AI network: Adrian Dunkley | World Cred Score | Caribbean AI Association | Caribbean AI Risk.