By *Guevara Leacock
On A View from the Outside this week, we turn our attention to Vincymas 2026, with the view being that Vincymas 2026 earns a pass.
The image that lingers from Vincymas 2026 is Jasper “Jasper YMC” Alexander walking onto the stage at Victoria Park at sunrise, performing “Rum Island” as the 15th and final act of a Soca Monarch show whose patrons had been in the venue since 7 the previous evening.
He won the title by a single point. The performance deserved darkness, stage lighting and a crowd at full energy. It got daylight, exhaustion and props assembled in full view of the audience. That contrast, between the quality of what Vincentian artistes produced and the conditions under which it was delivered, is the story of this year’s festival.
Vincymas 2026 ran from June 26 to July 7 under the theme “The Great Escape”. It was the first carnival since last November’s general elections, in which the New Democratic Party (NDP) took office, winning 14 of 15 seats, and the first under a new Minister of Culture, Kaschaka Cupid.
By the measures that matter most to us on A View from the Outside, the vitality of the art forms and the breadth of participation, Vincymas 2026 was a success. Judged on what the Carnival Development Corporation (CDC) controls most directly, the staging and scheduling of its own shows, it fell short, and it fell short against the yardstick its own chairman set: culture over commerce, cultural ownership, and a safe, culturally grounded, economically impactful product.
There was no shortage of culture in Vincymas 2026. Chanique Rogers-Bailey was crowned Calypso Monarch on her first attempt, dedicating the crown to her late mother and ending Reon “Madzzart” Primus’ reign. A first-time winner taking the festival’s most coveted crown is exactly the renewal the calypso artform needs, and it answers, at least in part, the perennial complaint that the art form belongs to an ageing generation. Young people, it turns out, are still interested.
Shertz “Problem Child” James took the Road March title again, completing a hat trick and a sixth title overall. J’Ouvert Fanatics captured seven J’ouvert categories, at times taking every top-three position, with presentations such as “Security Compromises” and “CDC Great X-cape” proving the satirical instinct of ole mas is alive and well. Mirage took Band of the Year with a production honouring its founder, Lennox “Becks” Gonsalves, a formidable mas man respected across Vincentian carnival circles.
The CDC earns credit for revivals and additions to this year’s Vincymas festival. The Miss SVG pageant returned to the Vincymas calendar after its awkward exile to the independence season and its cancellation during last year’s election campaign, and from all reports, it was a resounding success.
The cultural village at Arnos Vale ran for the length of the festival. Friends of A View from the Outside who visited St. Vincent and the Grenadines for Vincymas reported that the airport activities and decorations at Argyle welcomed visitors with cultural performances rather than just posters.
The monkey band and other traditional artforms forms were deliberately revived for J’ouvert and the Soca Monarch’s new Wild Card, letting the public vote an artiste onto the stage, drew 3,700 votes in its first 24 hours from a pool of 179 entries. These features, old and new, really enhanced and lifted Vincymas 2026 and the CDC ought to be commended for these efforts to enhance the national festival.
There was a political achievement, too, which can easily be missed. In a country where a change of government after 25 years could have meant a clean-out of every board in the land, the CDC kept Ricky Adams as chairman and Rodney Small as CEO despite calls to remove anyone appointed by the outgoing Unity Labour Party (ULP) administration.
Many commented that this was a sensible decision by the new government and we on A View from the Outside agree. Institutional continuity is important. Vincymas, as a festival, is an institution and institutions run better on institutional and accumulated knowledge. It does not mean, however, that there is no room for new blood. We should always be thinking about succession and thereby avoiding single points of failure.
The rural carnival season passed without a single reported act of violence and the police ban on all private firearms in Victoria Park, licensed or not, was proportionate and sensible. It is a pity, though, that there were some reports of violent crimes during the main festival in Kingstown.
Now, the failure — and there is no gentler or kinder word for it. As in years past, the CDC’s official shows at Victoria Park started late and even with late starts, some had long breaks and unexplained delays. The Soca Monarch poster gave no start time at all, only that the gates opened at 7 p.m. The show began after 11. Dimanche Gras, advertised for 8 p.m, started after 10, and the Calypso Monarch was crowned after 3 a.m. We have to do better than this. Some argue that during a national cultural festival, patrons should write off the ten days entirely. That is ridiculous. Making people wait three hours for a show to begin is not culture. It is contempt.
The consequences were visible in the seats. Attendance at Dimanche Gras was reportedly poor, with one commentator on the National Broadcasting Corporation calling it the worst he had ever seen. The people who choose to attend Dimanche Gras and sit through a calypso final to its end are not casual feters. They are the festival’s cultural core; the very audience Ricky Adams pledged at the festival’s launch to protect.
A show that crowns its monarch at 3 a.m. selects patrons for endurance rather than appreciation and drives away the older patrons who are genuinely interested in calypso and carry the art form’s memory. It hands the commercial fetes, which at least start when they say they will, a competitive advantage the CDC claims to be resisting.
The complaints predate Dimanche Gras. Calypso tent patrons complained about shows starting at 9 p.m. breaking for half an hour, and ending past midnight, a schedule one commentator called punishment for diehard calypso lovers.
The CDC should do better to improve the experience of calypso during Vincymas in order to breathe new life into what many think is a dying artform. This is the CDC’s most fixable failure and, for that reason, its least excusable.
On A View from the Outside, we ask a simple question: Who is Vincymas for? The sharpest critique of Vincymas 2026 came, unusually, from the man responsible for it. A week before the final stretch, Ricky Adams warned against reducing Vincymas to “a festival of fetes”, observing that “not everybody can afford three and $400 a night to go into an all-inclusive event”, and that a carnival organised around premium parties excludes ordinary Vincentians from a festival their culture created. He is right, and the point deserves urgent national attention from policymakers, the Ministry of Culture included.
The Caribbean version of carnival, of which Vincymas is an integral part, was born in the bowels of enslavement. When participation in modern-day carnival requires a fete ticket priced at a meaningful fraction of a monthly wage, or when Vincentians are encouraged to take carnival loans openly advertised by commercial banks and other lending institutions during the season, the festival has quietly inverted its own founding logic. The streets remain free, and J’ouvert and Mardi Gras remain the great levellers. However, the gravitational pull of the festival’s energy and money is toward the gated, all-inclusive events. We on A View from the Outside say, this pull is dangerous. The test for the CDC is whether its prices and programming can compete against the gravitational pull of the all-inclusive fetes. On this year’s evidence, the all-inclusive fetes are winning, and the CDC is answering with events that make its most loyal patrons suffer for their loyalty.
One quieter development in Vincymas 2026 deserved more attention than it received: reform inside calypso itself. The Calypsonians Association agreed a new judging framework with clearer sub-criteria and pressed for judges, rather than a CDC official and auditor alone, to tally scores. These are simple procedural changes, but competitions live or die on the perceived integrity of their results, and an art form fighting for relevance cannot afford disputed crowns. Whether the reforms explain, or survive, a first-time winner taking the title is a question the next carnival season will answer.
A gap which we on A View from the Outside wish to highlight is that every year in every review made about Vincymas, positive or negative, there is no economic data to measure. At least we have never seen any. The festival is routinely described as economically impactful. The minister of culture called it an economic opportunity. Yet Ricky Adams, to his credit, renewed his appeal this year for a formal economic study of the festival, which is a polite way of admitting that none exists.
The CDC’s departure activities at the Argyle International Airport, branded “Promise to come back” collected visitor feedback for the first time in any systematic way. That is a good start but it is not enough. A state that invests public money in a festival every year, under admittedly tight fiscal constraints, owes taxpayers an account of what the investment returns, in arrivals, spending, earnings for the artisans and vendors the festival is said to sustain. Until that study is done, every argument about whether Vincymas is worth its costs, including the arguments we on A View from the Outside make today, rests on impression rather than evidence. The government and the CDC should commission it now, before planning for 2027 begins in earnest.
Vincymas 2026 earns a pass, and its cultural content something slightly better than a pass. The crowns were competitive, the traditional art forms were deliberately revived, participation was broad, the season was largely peaceful and the festival survived a change of government without being purged or politicised. Those are real achievements.
However, the CDC cannot keep preaching culture over commerce while running shows that exhaust and punish the festival’s most faithful audience. The CDC cannot keep asserting economic impact it has never measured. The 50th anniversary of Vincymas arrives next year, branded “The Road to 50”. That road needs two repairs before the celebration, first shows that start when they say they will and numbers that prove what the festival is worth. Neither requires a committee. Both require will.
*Guevara Leacock is a barrister at law of Lincoln’s Inn in England and an attorney at law in St. Vincent and the Grenadines. He has a keen interest in history and politics and is a social commentator.
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