In the previous column I explained that these articles on Forbes Burnham are from a talk I gave to a PNCR confab on his contemporary relevance and are grounded in my wish to find a political narrative, devoid of excessive bias that could contribute to Guyana’s elusive struggle for national unity. I argued that communist expansionism was against western interests and the West sought to determine that Guyana did not take that path. I concluded where the PNC took government alone in 1968 and in 1970 declared Guyana a Cooperative republic. With independence and the West somewhat out of the way giving Burnham some policy space, he immediately developed and sought to implement his own national priorities based upon his ambitions, experiences, assessment of his context and the resources at his disposal.
Two days before Guyana’s independence on the 26th May 1966 John Chamberlain wrote that Gamal Abdel Nasser, the president of Egypt and one of the founders of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), had advised Fidel Castro that he should ‘play both ends (West and East) against the middle’ to win Western support. However, while Castro was unable to do so because he was already too committed to communism, Chamberlain believed that Burnham was not so committed, and right up to about 1980 he played the East/West hand quite adroitly. (https://news.google.com/newspapers? nid= 1979&dat=19660524 &id=w YwiAAAAIBAJ&sjid =BaoFAAAAIBAJ&pg=990,4924914).
