The Cold War is long dead; who cares about it now?

Oct 03, 2016 Letters

Dear Editor;
Anna Correia in her Stabroek News’ letter of Sept. 30th titled: “The US barely tolerated Jagan’s visit in 1961”, writes; “The late [president] 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 U.S. intervention in Guyana took place. She is asking for more declassified documents from the1960’s. Enough documents have already been released. The whole story is already out.
The two super powers that decided everything that happened 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 exception of Cuba and North Korea.
Had one of the leaders in Guyana not been a self-proclaimed communist, there would have been no U.S. intervention there. (There were no such interventions 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 with what the United States did. Just accept it as realpolitik and move forward. Ask the United States to help us deal with the fallout from 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. An economy based on five things – sugar, rice, bauxite, gold, lumber. When two or three of these things underperform, the economy halts and the people become unemployed and impoverished.
We need a more diversified economy. Let us spend our energy fixing the economy – rather than to ask United States for more declassified documents from the 1960’s. How would those documents help us solve our problems of today?
And, Ms. Anna Correia, I put forward a different point of view. 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 Guyana 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 them have 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 that shall have full State’s rights, just as all of 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.
Mike Persaud

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