A gantry crane at a Caribbean container terminal breaks down on a Tuesday afternoon. There is no spare part on the island, so the part has to come by sea, on the kind of vessel the broken crane is meant to unload. That is an ordinary week at many of the region's ports, and it is the sort of failure a June 2026 Atlantic Council issue brief had in mind when it said Caribbean ports are failing and taking US trade and security down with them.
The brief landed the same week CARICOM heads of government met in Saint Lucia for the 51st Regular Meeting of the Conference, which closed on July 8. Climate finance, food security and crime led the public agenda, and ports barely featured. Yet disaster resilience, trade and organised crime all run through a handful of ageing, understaffed terminals that move the region's food, fuel and visitors.
Two things changed this year. The US pledged $10 million for Caribbean port infrastructure, and ransomware hit port operators across the Americas. The AI tools that address both problems layer onto terminals that already exist.
What the Atlantic Council brief found
The brief, by Maite Latorre Yerou and Patricia R. Francis, starts from dependence. The Caribbean handles 43 percent of global cruise traffic, and more than 60 million visitors arrive each year, almost all of them, along with most of the region's food and fuel, by sea. The authors describe an infrastructure gap ninety miles from Florida while China expands port investment across the region. Four weaknesses run through their argument.
Ageing equipment with no redundancy
Cranes, gantries and reefer plug systems at many terminals run past their designed service life, and investment has not kept up with cruise and cargo volumes. A breakdown that costs a few hours at a large hub port costs days when the nearest spare part or qualified technician is a flight away.
Terminal systems open to ransomware
Maritime cyber incidents rose 103 percent in 2025, according to industry tracking cited by the maritime cybersecurity firm CYTUR. In 2026 a coordinated ransomware campaign against freight and logistics providers at major US port gateways locked terminal operators out of their automated systems. More than 200 entities were affected, operators fell back on clipboards and paper manifests, and the delays and container backlogs were estimated at $380 million across the Americas.
The US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) traced the attack to unpatched legacy software and missing multi-factor authentication. Many smaller Caribbean terminals match that description: older terminal operating systems, small security budgets and two or three IT staff.
Staff who leave before they are fully trained
Average port employee tenure in the Caribbean is three to five years. The brief puts the time needed to build a fully qualified port professional at fifteen to twenty years, so the typical employee leaves after a quarter to a third of that time. Staff trained in Caribbean ports are recruited by better-paying employers abroad, and new equipment is only as safe as the people running it.
Screening gaps that traffickers use
The US Coast Guard seized 510,000 pounds of cocaine in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific in 2025. Much of the trade moves through the same stretched cargo channels legitimate importers use, and traffickers rely on understaffed customs posts and inconsistent screening.
The Core Argument
The Caribbean cannot rebuild every terminal, and it does not need to. A layer of AI monitoring, screening and training can make existing equipment last longer and make it harder to attack or exploit, at a cost small island ports can carry. The CBSI money is committed; the decision to spend part of it this way is still open.
Five AI uses that fit existing Caribbean terminals
None of these requires a port to replace its core systems. Each answers one of the weaknesses above.
1. Predictive maintenance for cranes and reefers
Vibration, temperature and load sensors on cranes, gantries and reefer systems feed models trained to recognise the early signature of a mechanical failure, days or weeks ahead. The terminal gets time to order the part and book a maintenance window instead of losing several days to an unplanned stop. Rotterdam, Singapore and Los Angeles already run predictive maintenance programmes. A mid-sized terminal can start with sensors on its two or three most failure-prone cranes and extend from there.
2. Network monitoring for terminal operating systems
AI monitoring tools learn what normal logins, file access and data transfers look like on a terminal operating system and its control systems, then flag departures from that pattern: a login from an unfamiliar location, a burst of file access at 3 a.m., a spike in outbound data. Monitoring does not replace the basics CISA named. Patching and multi-factor authentication come first, and monitoring catches what gets past them. Ports too small to staff a security operations centre can buy the service jointly, with one central team watching several island ports.
3. Cargo and manifest screening
Computer vision models read container scan images and flag cargo whose density or weight distribution does not match its declared contents. Paired with analysis of manifests, routing histories and past seizures, the system ranks shipments so officers inspect the riskiest few and let the rest move. The officer still decides; the model decides only where to look first.
4. Simulation training for the workforce gap
Much of what a veteran port professional knows is pattern recognition: the sound of a failing bearing, a manifest whose weights look wrong, a login page that is slightly off. Simulations and adaptive tutoring let crane operators, customs officers and terminal managers work through hundreds of such cases in months. They will not replace fifteen years on the quay, but they narrow the distance between a three-year employee and a qualified one.
5. Storm-aware logistics for hurricane season
Logistics platforms that combine hurricane forecasts, vessel schedules and cargo priorities can model a port closure days ahead and reroute medical supplies, fuel and food to the nearest port that will stay open. With few alternative shipping routes in the region, moving priority cargo early limits how far one storm's damage spreads.
What a port outage costs an island economy
Caribbean ports serve 43 percent of world cruise traffic, more than 60 million visitors a year, and roughly 44 million residents. A typical island has one or two ports that can handle large cargo volumes, and no road alternative when they close.
An outage spreads in three directions at once. Cruise lines reroute and destinations lose visitor spending for months. Food and fuel run short and prices rise. Construction, manufacturing and retail wait for imported inputs. The $380 million cost of the 2026 US incident was spread across many gateways. On a single island, where the affected port may be the country's only large point of entry, a comparable attack would hit a far larger share of the economy.
What port authorities and CARICOM should do next
The $10 million the US State Department pledged through the Caribbean Basin Security Initiative on April 20, 2026 covers physical and digital port infrastructure and is meant to attract private investment, not to pay for everything. The first move sits with Caribbean governments and port authorities.
- Port authority IT leads: run a two-week exposure check. List every terminal operating system and remote-access account, and record which lack current patches or multi-factor authentication. These are the conditions CISA found in the US incident. Turn on multi-factor authentication for every remote and administrator account before any AI purchase.
- CARICOM IMPACS and member port authorities: scope a shared monitoring service. Agree which ports would join, what data each would share and who staffs the central desk. A joint service lets ports that could never fund their own security operations centre buy one share of it.
- Terminal engineering managers: sensor the worst two cranes first. Pull the last three years of breakdown records, pick the two machines with the most unplanned downtime, and fit condition monitoring to those before extending it to the fleet.
- Customs commissioners: prepare the data for a risk model. Export five years of declarations and seizure outcomes from the customs system, clean the commodity codes, and only then ask vendors to bid on screening.
- Governments applying for CBSI support: tie funds to a measured pilot. Propose simulation training at two of the busiest terminals, with baselines taken before it starts for equipment downtime, time to detect a cyber incident and customs hit rates. Report the results after twelve months.
One part of this I cannot settle from the evidence. Simulation shortens training, but it does nothing about the pay gap that pulls trained staff abroad, and the brief offers no fix for that either.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the Caribbean Basin Security Initiative and which countries take part?
The Caribbean Basin Security Initiative (CBSI) is a US security cooperation programme launched in 2010 with thirteen partners: Antigua and Barbuda, the Bahamas, Barbados, Dominica, the Dominican Republic, Grenada, Guyana, Jamaica, Saint Lucia, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Suriname, and Trinidad and Tobago. Funding flows through partner governments, so a port authority that wants support needs its ministry to put the project forward. The US embassy covering your country is the first point of contact for how the 2026 port programming will be allocated.
Which rules already govern port security in the Caribbean?
The International Maritime Organization's ISPS Code, in force since 2004, requires every port facility serving international ships to have an approved security plan, overseen by a national designated authority. Cyber risk is covered by IMO guidelines (MSC-FAL.1/Circ.3), which are guidance rather than binding rules for port facilities. In practice, a port's cyber obligations come from national law, so check what your country's cybercrime and data protection acts require of critical infrastructure operators.
What is the cheapest first cyber step for a small port?
Turn on multi-factor authentication for every remote-access and administrator account, which costs little beyond staff time. Next, keep an offline backup of the terminal operating system and test a restore at least once before hurricane season. CISA publishes its Cross-Sector Cybersecurity Performance Goals free online, and they make a usable checklist for a port with no security staff.
What does CARICOM IMPACS do, and why would it host a shared service?
CARICOM IMPACS, the Implementation Agency for Crime and Security, was set up in 2006 and is headquartered in Trinidad and Tobago. It already runs regional intelligence sharing and passenger screening through its Joint Regional Communications Centre and Regional Intelligence Fusion Centre. Because member states already share sensitive security data through it, a joint port monitoring desk would not need a new treaty or a new institution.
Does AI cargo screening replace customs officers?
No. It ranks shipments by risk so officers spend their inspection time on the riskiest ones, and the officer still decides what to open. Its accuracy depends on labelled history: past declarations matched to what was found on inspection. Many Caribbean customs services run UNCTAD's ASYCUDA system, and its declaration records are the usual starting dataset.