Dear Editor,
Anna Correia in her SN letter of September 30 writes: “The late Kennedy might be a hero in his country but for this Guyanese woman he was an instigator of dictatorial oppression and ethnic cleavages [in Guyana]”.
This was quite an interesting letter. My take is that Ms Correia does not understand the context in which the US intervention in Guyana took place. She is asking for more declassified documents from the 1960s. Enough documents have already been released. The whole story is already out.
The two super powers that decide everything that happens in the world were caught up in the Cold War to decide whose system will prevail (capitalism or Communism). The war ran its course and ended in 1989 with the death of communism. Today free market capitalism rules in China and Russia (former bastions of communism), and indeed in most of the world with the rare exceptions of Cuba and North Korea.
Had one of the leaders in Guyana not been a self-proclaimed communist, there would have been no US intervention here. (There was no such intervention in Barbados, Trinidad, Jamaica, simply because there were no communist leaders in those countries.)
“Dictatorial oppression and ethnic cleavages” were the legacies of the intervention. We should not carp over these things, and continue to be embittered by what the United States did. We should just accept it as realpolitik and move forward. Ask the United States to help us deal with the fall-out of that mess. The United States has the power and influence to help us solve the problems of ethnic cleavages.
Today Guyana is an extremely poor, undeveloped country, with an economy based on five things ‒ sugar, rice, bauxite, gold, lumber. When two or three of these things underperform, the economy tanks and the people become unemployed and impoverished. We need a more diversified economy. Let us spend our energy fixing the economy rather than asking the United States for more declassified documents from the 1960s. How would those documents help us solve our problems of today?
And I put forward a different point of view for Ms Correia. We need billions of dollars of finance capital, machinery and technology to manufacture products using resources available in Guyana. We need markets for our goods: sugar, rice, bauxite, gold. We need people with entrepreneurial and technological skills, managerial talent and experience to return to Guyana. All of these things would help develop the country and provide a higher standard of living for the 700,000 Guyanese who live there.
How do we achieve these things? Half-a-million Guyanese live in the United States, most of whom have been settled there for more than 35-years. So I propose that Guyana consider and debate the idea of becoming an overseas state of the United States, one with full state rights, just like those all the other 50 states currently enjoy. One of the benefits, if this idea were to become reality, is that Guyana would have no shortage of investment capital and it would also enjoy a ready market for all its products. With development there would be other benefits. Every able-bodied adult would have one-and-a-half jobs and the ‘ethnic cleavage’ problem would disappear, as it did in Singapore.
Let’s debate this idea and stop moping about Guyana being one of the many victims of the Cold War.
Yours faithfully,
Mike Persaud
