While Trinidad and Tobago has won plaudits for its culture, it came in an unusual manner. US Secretary of State Hilary Clinton was impressed with the cultural extravaganza that climaxed the official ceremony Friday night at the Hyatt Regency in Port-of-Spain. But the context in which Clinton hailed the Brian MacFarlane-produced show was intriguing.

“I thought the cultural performance was fascinating,” she stated. But, Clinton was actually responding to a question on Nicaraguan leader Daniel Ortega’s 50-minute rambling discourse. Asked again to comment on Ortega’s address, in which he damned the US, the Secretary of State proffered another rejoinder. She said: “To have those first-class Caribbean entertainers all on one stage and to see how much was done in such a small amount of space, I was overwhelmed.” Canada’s Prime Minister Stephen Harper also was reticent on the subject. “It was 50 minutes long. That’s what I thought,” he said.

But the American media wasn’t bothered by diplomacy. US journalists reached for caustic words like “rant” and “diatribe” to describe Ortega’s bruising attack on US policy toward his country. There have so far been limited international news reports on Trinidad and Tobago’s domestic matters, with a fresh The Associated Press article on the Beetham Estate getting some prominence. “A slum that nags site of Americas summit” was the headline of the article, which stated that the community embodies Trinidad and Tobago’s “biggest challenges: drug-related violence and an economic crisis that threatens to erase gains against poverty.”

The report describes the Beetham as an area where “society’s bottom feeders gather” and generally reports on the country’s high homicide rate. The article pointed to an Inter-American Development Bank report and quoted unnamed experts as arguing that “the region is losing in a matter of months what it took years to gain.” An expected thaw in relations between the US and Cuba is one of the major headline reports in the first 24 hours of the conference. There has been much animated media discussion on the subject in the US, including on Fox News, which is perceived as being partial to Obama’s rival party, the Republicans.