OPINION: Beyond the Caribbean's white sand and palm trees

This week, Pope Francis visited Cuba, where for many decades the communist party didn't allow believers into its ranks, and Easter and Christmas were not celebrated. The Cuba of today is different, however. For one, believers are now allowed in the party. Cuban President Raúl Castro has even said, referring to the Argentine pope, that he might return to being a practicing Catholic.

At the end of the Pope's trip, Castro shook hands with Francis at the Santiago airport. A few hours later, the Pope landed at Andrews Airforce Base in Maryland, where US President Barack Obama greeted him. This journey was, of course, symbolic of the improved relations between Cuba and the US – a rapprochement more than partly facilitated by the brilliant Francis.

A day later, Castro presided over a surprise meeting in Havana between Rodrigo Londoño, also known as Timochenko, the top commander of the FARC rebel group, and Colombia's President Juan Manuel Santos. The meeting, during which a six-month deadline to sign a final peace agreement was agreed upon, could signal the end of the longest running guerilla war in Latin America. Santos on his Twitter account said that "Peace is near."

Also this week in the Caribbean, members of Venezuela's government went island hopping to promote cooperation. In a flurry of press releases, Venezuela's state oil company PDVSA and the Venezuelan government proclaimed the continued importance of the PetroCaribe energy agreement – which sees Venezuela ship heavily subsidized oil to ideologically aligned countries in the region.

"A few weeks from the celebration in Jamaica of the 10 years of Petrocaribe, the energy agreement is responsible today for the social, political, economic, and energy stability of Latin America and the Caribbean," President Maduro said from the islands of St. Kitts and Nevis.

The tone gave every indication that PetroCaribe oil shipments will remain in place, despite low oil prices and the disastrous impact they have had on Venezuela.

"I was surprised that they seem to be trying to revive it," Francisco Monaldi, a Venezuelan economist and oil expert at Rice University's Baker Institute for Public Policy, told me.

After Castro's change in direction, it will be interesting to see whether Venezuela continues to send Cuba the 100,000b/d it has shipped the country over the last decade. Barclay's said in a report earlier in the year that the island was actually only receiving about 55,000b/d from Venezuela. With Cuba and the US now on better footing, thanks to the pope, perhaps this is irrelevant.

Either way, this week shows that the Caribbean and its small island states are more than white sands and palm trees. They remain very much an important ideological battlefield.