Burnham stood firm

Mar 01, 2026 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom

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(Kaieteur News) – In the autumn of 1983, the America found itself staring at a crater in the sands of Beirut. Two hundred and forty-one marines lay dead beneath the rubble of a barracks blown open by a truck bomb. The images flickered across the television screens like a bad dream. The pageant of invincibility had been interrupted; the eagle’s feathers were singed.

President Ronald Reagan suddenly found himself presiding over a country sunk in humiliation. Empires, like stage magicians, depend upon distraction. Within days, the gaze of shifted from the Levant to the Caribbean, from the wreckage of Beirut to the beaches of a small island few Americans could find on a map.

Grenada — population modest, ambitions revolutionary — became the theater in which American prestige might be repainted. Operation Urgent Fury was launched with the solemnity of a moral crusade. The stated justification was an invitation from the island’s Governor-General. The subtext was simpler: America would not be seen to bleed without reply.

The tragedy, if one may use the word without irony, was that the Grenada Revolution was already collapsing under the weight of its own contradictions. A power struggle between Prime Minister Maurice Bishop and his deputy, Bernard Coard, had curdled into fratricide. Bishop was executed; the revolution devoured itself. History, impatient as always, was already closing the chapter. The American invasion merely slammed the book shut.

In the Caribbean itself, the invasion did not pass without applause. Dame Eugenia Charles of Dominica, quickly christened the “Iron Lady” of the Antilles, lent her public blessing to the enterprise. So too did Tom Adams of Barbados, for which endorsement he was rewarded in certain leftist quarters with the sobriquet “Uncle Tom.” The spectacle of regional leaders endorsing an American landing force supplied Washington with the fig leaf of regional consent.

Yet dissent also found its voice. Forbes Burnham of Guyana and Eric Williams of Trinidad and Tobago came out stoutly against the invasion, Burnham more vigorously than Williams. Burnham, never shy of a rhetorical barricade, denounced the action as a violation of sovereignty. It may not have been a fashionable position in 1983, but it was a principled one.

Principle, however, rarely travels without invoice. Guyana found itself excluded from the Caribbean Basin Initiative, Washington’s trade preference program for the region. The message was clear: stand up against America and pay the price.

But Burnham was made of sterner stuff. He did not bend. He stood his ground, absorbing the chill wind from the north.

The same Eugenia Charles who had supported the invasion would later become sharply critical of Guyana’s democratic deficiencies. After the widely condemned 1985 elections, she publicly described them as flawed and argued within CARICOM that Guyana’s membership should not be tolerated. She even urged that the CARICOM Secretariat be moved from Georgetown.

It was in this climate of regional pressure that President Desmond Hoyte sought damage control. At a summit in Mustique in January 1986, concessions were floated — commitments to a freer press and, eventually, freer elections. In time, Guyana would permit the emergence of an independent newspaper, Stabroek News. The permission to establish Stabroek news must be viewed in the context of Hoyte’s concessions at Mustique.

You may ask: Why exhume this history? Because the ghosts of 1983 have resumed their patrol.

Today the United States tightens its sanctions regime against Cuba, restricting the island’s access to oil and financial lifelines. The policy, framed as pressure against authoritarianism, functions in practice as a tourniquet around the neck of a fragile economy. Energy shortages grinds the already stuttering economy to a halt.

Meanwhile Washington extends selective invitations — to Guyana’s President Irfaan Ali and to Trinidad and Tobago’s Prime Minister Kamla Persad-Bissessar — for a security summit. One is entitled to ask why these two, and not the sitting chairman of CARICOM.  Is it not a case of divide and fragment? The method is not new.

President Ali has hedged on the question of supplying oil to Cuba, observing that oil is not “humanitarian aid,” even while conceding that without energy food will spoil. The distinction is clever, but hunger is unimpressed by semantics.

CARICOM now risks reducing itself to a chorus line of cautious statements about “humanitarian assistance,” as though the island’s dilemma were a natural disaster rather than the product of policy. Cuba, long suspicious of aid with strings attached, does not require charity so much as solidarity — a collective demand that sanctions cease to function as siege.

The question before Guyana is therefore not merely diplomatic but moral. Will it attend summits while Cuba gasps for fuel? Or will it insist that regional unity is binding obligation?

In 1983 Guyana chose defiance and endured the consequences. The present hour demands similar clarity. Principles are costly commodities. But without them, sovereignty becomes little more than a flag fluttering above someone else’s wind.

In 1983, Burnham stood firm. Will Ali do the same in 2026? I think we all know the answer.

(The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of this newspaper.)

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• Beirut, Burnham, CARICOM, Peeping Tom, Ronald Reagan

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