Talking to you(th)
By Shaun Samaroo
QUICK wealth. Fast money. Posh cars. Steady trips to the developed world. It reads like a fairytale life.
But for many Guyanese today, this is life everyday.
Somebody told me once that more than two billion dollars circulate daily in Guyana’s informal economy.
The people who control this enormous wealth are largely poverty-stricken young people who had enough brains to con the official restrictions on the economy, and acquired quick riches.
You see them all over Guyana these days. Men who can afford a car for $7.5M or a Pathfinder for US$36,000: just for the sake of luxury.
Yet quick riches have come from an intelligent application of wits, a strong informal economy and almost institutionalised corruption.
You talk to some of the young, stinkingly rich men in Guyana today, and you realise what Guyana would have been had restrictions not tied people’s initiatives down.
The ones who have succeeded displayed guts, grit and determination to achieve their crude wealth.
They bring vividly to life that fantastic character Jay Gatsby whom the American author F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote of in the 1920s.
Fitzgerald’s Gatsby is an extraordinarily wealthy man with an attractively mysterious background. He rose from the ashes of poverty as a boy, ran away from his parents and relentlessly pursued his dream of success. Gatsby achieves enormous wealth, hosts huge, grandiose parties and lives in shrouded mystery unto his death.
And he achieved his wealth by mysterious means during the Prohibition period of the 1920s USA when alcohol was banned.
I’ve spoken to quite a few of Guyana’s young, mysterious millionaires, and for some reason, they bare their struggles to me, just like Gatsby bared his dreams to Fitzgerald’s narrator, Nick Carraway.
And, believe me, the young millionaires have fantastic tales to tell. I’m looking forward to the day when Guyanese will begin to write books about their struggles. They would make fascinating reading.
Take this 28 year old man I met the other day. At times with him I felt as if I was in the physical presence of Jay Gatsby, Fitzgerald’s pioneer of the great American Dream.
The man lives in a huge house, owns four brand new, expensive vehicles, and relaxes in pure luxury at home – floor model TV, a large circular suite and food fit for a king. His gadgets include a fax- machine at home for communication with his relatives in exile overseas, a cellular phone, and a TV in every room in the house.
One day he sat comfortably on his sofa, the TV remote-control a toy in his hand, and reminisced about the first time he migrated from the Essequibo rural area to live in the capital. He, then 21 years old in the early 1980s, turned up at the landlord’s door with two bags of clothes – his and his wife’s.
The lady said, “where’s your things” and, ashamed, I said they’d come later. For six months my wife and I ate at a restaurant, we couldn’t buy a stove,” the young man said.
Because of the “state of the country” in 1985. this man developed an urge to seek his fortune in the U.S.A. of which he was hearing so much good.
He applied for a US Visa in April, 1985 and was turned down, he needed to have enough money in the bank here.
Unconfirmed reports say around 200,000 Guyanese live in the US, many arriving there through illegal crossings ewer the Mexican Border.
This man decided to do just that, and applied for his Mexican Visa in Trinidad.
He prepared himself well He secured several bank slips as evidence that he had hundreds of thousands of dollars banked here. In fact, his real account was $30,000. He withdrew that after pleading to the bank that his bank-book was lost. His book therefore did not reveal this withdrawal.
This withdrawn money was loaned to a friend and the bank gave the man a deposit slip to prove he had banked $30,000 in the friend’s account. Shortly after, the friend withdrew the money and re-paid it in cash, unknown to the bank.
The man used his money to obtain several such slips, ending up with papers proving he owned hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Through bribes at the appropriate channels, he obtained false vehicle registrations, house and land transport, import licences for several items, the Mexican Visa in Trinidad.
The man popped into an airline office in Trinidad and reserved the flight. Then he visited the US Embassy in Trinidad, produced the documents, the visa, and the flight reservation. He explained his Guyana visa refusal by saying he had only obtained his house and land transport after he was turned down and did not want to waste time flying back to Guyana after securing the visa to Mexico. So he applied at the Trinidad US Embassy.
“Okay,” the Officer ‘’ said, “fine, here’s your US visa.“
It was a dream come true for the fortune-seeker. The man landed in New York on August 5, 1985, one day before Forbes Burnham died, and now six years later, he lives a luxurious life here
in Guyana and is contributing significantly to the country’s economy.
He is fabulously rich, has high connections because of the days he bribed officials, and is young
enough to grow by even greater leaps and bounds legally now because of the capital he acquired.
He used “bogus” documents for three years in his travels, but the man symbolises a virtual repeat of history, American history as told in Fitzgerald’s Gatsby – in today’s Guyana.
