The National Heroes Day annual achievement awards have been renamed the ‘National Recognition Awards’ by Cabinet.
The change seeks to delineate award recipients from the venerated group of people bestowed with the title of ‘national hero’.
Minutes released by the Cabinet Office from an 18 June meeting confirmed the renaming will come into effect for the National Heroes Day observance in 2026. The annually celebrated ceremony honours people from across all three Cayman Islands who have made valuable contributions to the nation.
Teresa Echenique, chief officer in the Ministry of Culture and Heritage, explained that the title of ‘national hero’ carries profound meaning and that it was important to establish a clear distinction between those individuals and award recipients.
“We have them clearly outlined and at this point, with the addition of the four [national heroes] announced last Heroes Day, we have gone from 10 to 14 national heroes, which is quite exciting for us,” she told the Compass.
“However, what we have realised is that the awards that [other] persons are getting on National Heroes Day are not ‘national heroes awards’. There’s a distinction between the two.”
National heroes are a select group of distinguished individuals identified by Cabinet, she explained. They hold this title permanently. Award recipients, on the other hand, are people who are recognised annually at the National Heroes Day celebration for outstanding achievements.
“We didn’t want to confuse the two but, of course, we wanted to ensure that both of those areas got the value and the appreciation that we wanted them to have. That was the reason for there being a slight change in terms of the naming of the actual award that people are getting on National Heroes Day,” she said.
At January’s celebration, Cayman’s four new national heroes were announced – Captain Keith Tibbetts, Ernest Craddock Ebanks, Frank Hugh George Scotland and Francine Eldona Jackson, the only national hero still alive today. Close to 200 other people were honoured for their contributions to business and innovation.
A key and crucial role
The theme for National Heroes Day in 2026 will be ‘Physical Infrastructure’, according to Cabinet minutes. Echenique has been named chair of the National Heroes Day 2026 committee.
The committee is selected on an annual basis through Cabinet, Echenique said, adding, “It is a representation from a number of cross-sections that is applicable to the subject area that year, and from each of the districts.”
Other members include Denny Ebanks, Marie Martin, Carl Brown, Archie Whittaker, Kendal Connor and Shirley Lolita Bodden. The committee will represent a number of government departments and agencies, including the Ministry of Infrastructure, Public Works, the Utility Regulation and Competition Office, the Ministry of Culture and Heritage, the Cabinet Office, the Department of Communications and the Cayman Islands National Archive.
Echenique said the entire process for the committee members is extremely important.
“These are persons that we are hoping will give us guidance because of applications that are coming in. We also rely on committee members to give us some additional information to be able to guide us in terms of the recommendation process, so the members hold a key and crucial role in this process,” she said.
“We sometimes get thousands of applications that come in to us, which I’m sure everyone will appreciate is not an easy process to go through all of them, and to be able to truly select and identify those that will be getting awards.”
Selection process
Brown has been on several committees for the celebrations over the years and told the Compass he is honoured once again to be a part of the decision-making for the annual recognition awards ceremony.
“It is exciting to be there, and it’s exciting to motivate others to do the nominating that they should, and it’s always saddening when we come to the end of the exercise and we realise that there is a group of people who could’ve been selected, who were qualified but did not make it because someone else did not nominate them, and we cannot do that job. We can only prompt people within a certain framework to do so,” he said.
The committee will have its first meeting for orientation in the coming weeks. Once that is complete, a time frame will be established for nominations to come in for the subject area. The committee then makes its recommendations, which are sent to Cabinet for a final decision.
“We’re relying very heavily on the applications that are coming in from the public. Once that period is open, we’re encouraging the public to submit nominations for those deserving of the award and to provide as much information as possible along with supporting documentation,” Echenique noted.
For the annual celebrations, Brown emphasised that it is important to recognise people in the community who do remarkable things.
The process, he explained, allows younger generations to understand the importance of the past and that they can also become future heroes.
He encouraged members of the public to nominate relatives or people they know in the industry who are making notable contributions.
Echenique said, “We’re really excited once again to be able to go through this process because the nominees are so deserving and it is a very exciting time, not only for the ministry but for the country as a whole to be able to recognise those persons that have contributed to our country and have got us to where we are today.”
This year marked the 22nd annual National Heroes Day celebration in the Cayman Islands under the theme ‘Icons of Business and Entrepreneurship: A Tribute to Caymanian Business Ingenuity, Creativity, Successes, Hard Work, Innovation, and Leadership’. Some 200 people awarded this year have now joined a growing list of honorees that are recognised annually.
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