U.S. Intervention in British Guiana

A Cold War Story

Stephen G. Rabe

• Editorial: The University of North Carolina Press
• Año: 2006
• ISBN:
  9780807876961
• Categoría: Politics & International Relations
• Categoría: Diplomacy & Treaties

In the first published account of the massive U.S. covert intervention in British Guiana between 1953 and 1969, Stephen G. Rabe uncovers a Cold War story of imperialism, gender bias, and racism. When the South American colony now known as Guyana was due to gain independence from Britain in the 1960s, U.S. officials in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations feared it would become a communist nation under the leadership of Cheddi Jagan, a Marxist who was very popular among the South Asian (mostly Indian) majority. Although to this day the CIA refuses to confirm or deny involvement, Rabe presents evidence that CIA funding, through a program run by the AFL-CIO, helped foment the labor unrest, race riots, and general chaos that led to Jagan's replacement in 1964. The political leader preferred by the United States, Forbes Burnham, went on to lead a twenty-year dictatorship in which he persecuted the majority Indian population. Considering race, gender, religion, and ethnicity along with traditional approaches to diplomatic history, Rabe's analysis of this Cold War tragedy serves as a needed corrective to interpretations that depict the Cold War as an unsullied U.S. triumph.

CHAPTER ONE

BRITISH GUIANA 1831-1953

British Guiana/Guyana’s modern political history began in April 1953, when the People’s Progressive Party (PPP) led by Cheddi Jagan and Forbes Burnham achieved an overwhelming victory in the colony’s first national election. The PPP’s triumph seemingly heralded the beginning of British Guiana’s evolution into an independent nation with a multiracial, parliamentary democracy. Within five months after the election, however, imperial Great Britain, citing fears of communism, sent troops to British Guiana and suspended the new constitution. The tumultuous events of 1953 would force the United States to consider what it envisioned for British Guiana, a foreign colony within its traditional Western Hemisphere sphere of influence. Over the next two decades, U.S. policies would bear out Prime Minister Winston Churchill’s smug prediction that, when it came to British Guiana, their “anti-Colonialism will be more than balanced by their anti-Communism.”¹

NEITHER GEOGRAPHY NOR HISTORY has been especially kind to the people of Guyana. Guyana is part of the general region of the Guiana Highlands on the northeastern coast of South America, bounded by the Amazon, Negro, and Orinoco rivers. The Guianas today include the nations of Guyana, Surinam, a former Dutch colony, and French Guiana. The Guianas all border Brazil, with Guyana sharing to its west a disputed border with Venezuela. The visual beauty of the region is spectacular, serving as locale for romantic fables, including Sir Walter Raleigh’s mythic El Dorado and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Lost World. England’s great poets, William Shakespeare and John Milton, refer to Guiana’s “good and bounty” and its “unspoiled” nature. Making a living in this fabled land has proved, however, challenging.

The word “Guiana” is a word of Amerindian origin, signifying “land of many waters.” Three major rivers, the Essequibo, Demerara, and Berbice, drain Guyana, originating in a system of mountain ranges in the interior and descending northward into the Atlantic Ocean. The rivers flow through largely uninhabitable land. More than 80 percent of Guyana is tropical rain forest. The rain forests do produce some commercially valuable trees, but the timber industry has never been a leading sector of Guyana’s economy. Prospectors have not found significant quantities of precious minerals, like gold and diamonds, in the forested mountains. Two other interior regions—the savanna and the hilly sand and clay belt—also provide poor prospects for agricultural development. For cattle ranching, for example, one animal requires approximately seventy acres of savanna for grazing. The three regions comprise 96 percent of Guyana’s territory.

Guyana’s human history has played out along Guyana’s fertile coastal plain, which stretches along the Atlantic shoreline and varies in depth from ten to forty miles. The rich land is capable of producing cash crops like coffee, cotton, rice, and sugar. Heavy rain and high humidity make the region’s climate difficult but tolerable. The major city, Georgetown, situated at the mouth of the Demerara River, has a mean temperature of 80 degrees Fahrenheit, but with cooling sea breezes at night. Tidal flooding and river flooding caused by torrential downpours bar easy cultivation of Guyana’s coastal plain. For a depth of five to eight miles, the coastal plain is below sea level at high tide. Guyanese have had to construct and constantly maintain an intricate network of seawalls and dikes to hold back the sea and canals, dams, and sluices to improve drainage and pump water back into the Atlantic at low tide. A typical sugar plantation would have 250 miles of waterways for irrigation and transport of sugar cane and 80 miles of drainage canals. Agricultural production in the coastal plain has consequently required abundant sources of labor and constant work.²

The first European explorers found the Guianas thinly settled by Amerindian people, who lacked the great wealth and resources of urban societies like those of the Aztecs and Incas. The Amerindians either succumbed to European diseases or fled to the interior, resisting European attempts to enslave them; by the mid-twentieth century, Amerindians comprised only about 4 percent of Guyana’s population. The Dutch became the first permanent European occupier of Guyana. Under the aegis of the West India Company of the Netherlands, they founded a colony on the Berbice River in 1620s. They subsequently established the colonies of Essequibo and Demerara. Until the mid-eighteenth century, the three colonies were small and economically insignificant. In 1701, only sixty-seven Europeans resided in the Essequibo colony. But in the mid-eighteenth century, the governor general of the West India Company opened the colonies to British settlement, and the colonies, especially Demerara and Essequibo, began to grow and prosper. British planters migrated from agriculturally depleted, overpopulated areas such as Barbados. Settlers also gradually mastered the techniques of draining the coastal plain.³

During the period between the Seven Years’ War (1756-63) and the end of the Napoleonic Wars (1815), Europeans fought among themselves for control of the South American continent and domination of the world. The colony of Demerara changed colonial hands a bewildering six times during this period. Despite its loss of its thirteen North American colonies, Great Britain emerged triumphant in this global struggle. In 1803 Great Britain assumed effective control over the Dutch colonies and in 1814-15, at the Congress of Vienna, the Dutch formally ceded Berbice, Demerara, and Essequibo to the British. In 1831, the imperial British united the colonies to form the colony of British Guiana, with Georgetown as its administrative center. Georgetown had previously carried the Dutch name of Stabroek. The British ruled British Guiana until 1966, when the colony secured its independence and took the name of Guyana.

Although the colonial masters of the region changed hands, the socioeconomic structure of colonial life—plantation agriculture based on imported coerced labor—remained constant. On the river banks and coastal plain, Dutch planters oversaw the cultivation of coffee, cotton, and especially sugar for sale on the international market. Slaves stolen from Africa nurtured these cash crops. Africans quickly became the largest group in the three Dutch colonies. Although only 67 Europeans resided in Essequibo in 1701, thirty of them owned 800 slaves. Slavery grew rapidly from the mid-eighteenth century on, when British planters from the West Indian islands migrated to the Dutch colonies and quickly came to dominate plantation life. By 1800 perhaps 100,000 slaves toiled in the three colonies. By 1820, about 80,000 people lived in Demerara and Essequibo, with 75,000 of them being slaves. The other 5,000 consisted of approximately 2,500 whites and 2,500 free blacks. Some plantations became like giant factories with over 300 slaves harvesting the sugarcane and processing it in the sugar mills. Slavery lasted until 1838 in British Guiana. In 1807, the House of Commons made it illegal for any British ship to be involved in the international slave trade after 1 January 1808. British legislators followed this with a gradual, compensated emancipation law in 1834. In 1838, approximately 85,000 slaves gained their freedom in British Guiana.⁴

Twentieth-century Afro-Guyanese had the right to bitter historical memories of the viciousness and cruelty that their ancestors endured under slavery and the disappointments and injustices they experienced after emancipation. Sugar planters customarily worked slaves to death and, before 1808, imported new ones. Slaves were supposed to work twelve hours a day but their work days often stretched over twenty hours. Pregnant women and nursing mothers often did not receive the reduced work loads that the slave codes promised. In 1824, a British doctor reported that twenty-nine of the sixty-seven children born on one estate died within two years. Disease, inadequate medical care, overwork, unhealthy working conditions, and poor diet all contributed to high slave mortality rates. Between 1808 and 1821 in Demerara, the slave population declined by almost 20 percent. Little wonder that slaves resisted their oppression in every conceivable way from physical aggression to insubordination. In 1828, colonial officers recorded over 20,000 “Offences Committed by Slaves.” A dramatic challenge came in 1823 when perhaps 12,000 slaves in Demerara rebelled in one of the most massive slave rebellions in the history of the Western Hemisphere. British troops forcibly suppressed the rebellion, killing over 200 slaves and executing many others thereafter following summary trials. British authorities placed the heads of the executed on poles, hoping to terrorize the slaves.⁵

Emancipation brought neither progress nor prosperity to British Guiana’s oppressed black majority. Slave owners received an average rate of fifty-one pounds sterling per slave or a total of over £4 million in compensation for losing control over 85,000 people. But as one historian of nineteenth-century British Guiana ironically remarked, “It occurred to no one to compensate the slaves for their previous bondage.”⁶ Freed people also had no opportunity to exercise their numbers to bring about meaningful change in the colony. Voting rights were tied to high property requirements, ensuring continued planter control under British rule through the nineteenth century. Despite their poverty and powerlessness, former slaves made heroic efforts to improve their lives. Groups bought abandoned sugar plantations and tried establishing rural cooperative ventures. These enterprises failed because of a lack of capital and the unending difficulty and cost in British Guiana of draining the land. Blacks further thought that they might bargain collectively with planters at the critical harvesting times for the sugar cane. Planters successfully resisted these efforts by finding alternative labor sources. In any case, many blacks associated plantation labor with their former degradation. They drifted toward the coastal towns and especially toward Georgetown, becoming wage laborers. As the colonial bureaucracy grew, a few blacks gained lower-level civil service positions and entered the lower ranks of the police force. In the twentieth-century, the blacks of British Guiana also became miners and workers in the bauxite industry. Former slaves, many of whom were born in Africa, and their descendants gradually became acculturated to British colonial life, learning English and converting to Protestant Christianity. They also gradually gained literacy. In the mid-nineteenth century, the colonial government began to support financially a system of schools owned and operated by Christian churches.⁷

The end of slavery did not abolish British Guiana’s system of plantation agriculture based on imported coerced labor. Colonial authorities and planters responded to the end of slavery and demands by freed people for good wages by returning to a labor system used in the seventeenth century in the North American colonies—indentured servitude. Antislavery groups in Britain actually encouraged the practice, believing the resuscitation of plantation agriculture in the British West Indies and British Guiana would demonstrate to slaveholders in the United States that they need not fear abolition. British authorities were also meeting imperial labor demands, shifting impoverished people from one part of the empire to another. In the period from 1838 to 1860, Portuguese from the Madeira Islands and Chinese from Hong Kong were the predominant groups to arrive as indentured servants in British Guiana. Both groups, about 25,000 people in total, detested plantation work and either returned home or moved to villages and towns after completing their contracts. Portuguese and Chinese came to dominate British Guiana’s retail trade, becoming shopkeepers, peddlers, and merchants. Colonial India, however, provided the bulk of British Guiana’s new labor force. Between 1838 and 1917, when indentured servitude was abolished in the empire, approximately 240,000 “East Indians” arrived in British Guiana as indentured servants.⁸ (British colonial authorities used the misleading term “East Indians” to characterize their colonial subjects in India and to distinguish them from their subjects in the Caribbean, the “West Indians”.) With this influx of Portuguese, Chinese, and Indians, combined with Amerindians, blacks, and English, British Guiana became in the nineteenth century one of the most ethnically, racially, and religiously diverse places in the Western Hemisphere.

The hungry and poor Indians who were persuaded to risk their lives in British Guiana generally belonged to lower agricultural and laboring castes, and a few were outcastes or “pariahs.” The vast majority were illiterate. Most Indians were Hindus but a substantial proportion, perhaps 18 percent, were Muslims. India insisted that at least 25 percent of the recruits be female. Most Indians came from Bengal, Bihar, and the Northwest Provinces, agricultural regions located in contemporary India. These regions experienced periodic famines in the nineteenth century. The indentured servants embarked from the ports of Calcutta and Madras. The voyage to British Guiana lasted about ninety days, with ships going around the Cape of Good Hope. Voyagers were subjected to cold, poor diet, and seasickness. Mortality rates on the overcrowded ships averaged 2 percent for each month aboard in the 1860s and could soar if a catastrophic disease broke out.⁹ Helpless Indians got a taste of what West Africans had suffered during the infamous “middle passage.”

Upon arriving in British Guiana, Indians entered what contemporary observers denounced as “slavery.” The immigrants signed a five-year contract to work on sugar plantations, but actually had to serve ten years in order to win passage back to India. Colonial ordinances mandated seemingly reasonable work and living conditions for indentured servants. Planters, with the silent acquiescence of most colonial officers, ignored those ordinances. British Guiana’s survival depended on the sale of sugar in a globally competitive market. As a British governor reported to London in 1871, sugar was “the one great staple export, upon the prosperity of which the general welfare of the Colony may be said almost wholly to depend.”¹⁰ After the mid- 1850s, Great Britain, which was embracing free trade principles, no longer granted a preference to sugar from its West Indian colonies. British Guiana’s sugar also competed with Brazilian and Cuban sugar produced by slave labor. These economic imperatives, when fused with racism and planter control, made, in one historian’s view, “for an oppressive society which allowed no serious opposition.”¹¹

Indian workers, referred to as “coolies” by planters and colonial officers, lived in the former slave quarters, dubbed “nigger yards.” They worked endlessly, cultivating the fields, maintaining drainage systems, and boiling the sugarcane. They had to meet roll call every morning at 6:00 A.M., and they needed a pass to leave the plantation. Mortality rates were ghastly, averaging 4-6 percent a year, with some plantations having a 10 percent mortality rate. In 1863, for example, 1,718 indentured servants out of 32,001 died in the colony. Indians were also subjected to legal abuse. In 1872, 9,045 out of 38,918 indentured immigrants on plantations, a full 23 percent, were charged with breaching their contracts.¹² They stood no chance in the colonial judicial system, for, as one appalled colonial magistrate charged in a report to the Colonial Office in late 1869, “the manager can always produce a number of overseers, drivers, and others dependent upon him to make an overwhelming weight of testimony in his favor.” Without legal protections, the immigrants “are thus often reduced to a position which in some respects is not far removed from slavery.”¹³ Such dispatches prompted London to send an inquiry commission in 1870 to investigate life in British Guiana. The commissioners confirmed the horror that was life on a sugar plantation in British Guiana, but the Colonial Office predictably ended up supporting the planters.

As had the black slaves of British Guiana, Indians resisted their abusers, frequently rioting on the plantations. But most servants concentrated on living and building a community. Of Indians who survived indenture, perhaps two out of three stayed in British Guiana. They recreated Indian village life, with a strong emphasis on family life, and celebrated their religion, building temples and mosques. Groups of immigrants combined their meager earnings to buy a cow to be shared by the group. Hindus and Moslems lived peacefully together. Indians also gradually submerged the communal and caste differences of Mother India. Most Indians continued working on sugar plantations, often as wage laborers. Some Indians purchased tracts of British Guiana’s inexpensive wetland and remarkably became independent rice farmers, creating a small property-owning class. Rice production did not require the massive capital investments associated with sugar production. By the early twentieth century, British Guiana began to export rice. Indian life remained largely rural, and most Indians lacked literacy skills. Colonial authorities declined to fund schools operated by non-Christians. Indians were reluctant to send their children to Georgetown for education in Christian denominational schools. As Joseph A. Luckhoo, an Indian barrister whose family had converted to Christianity, noted in 1919, for an Indian “to send his boy to a denominational school to be taught English is to denationalize him and jeopardize his religious faith, and so the Indian maintains a calm indifference towards it.”¹⁴ As British Guiana moved into the twentieth century, the colony’s largest groups—the peoples of West Africa and India and their descendants—remained physically and culturally separated.

Whereas sugar remained the basis of British Guiana’s political economy, significant change rocked the industry in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The planters prospered in the 1870s as British Guiana, along with Trinidad, became leading producers of sugar in the empire. In the 1880s, however, cane producers faced tough competition in the British market from beet sugar produced in Germany. British Guiana’s sugar also lost its place in the U.S. market. After the United States occupied Cuba in 1898, it negotiated the Reciprocity Treaty of 1903, which gave Cuban cane sugar preferential treatment in the U.S. market. With prices collapsing, economic consolidation quickly followed. In 1870, British Guiana had 136 sugar estates, with 123 of them having indentured servants. By 1900, the number of plantations had fallen to fifty and would further fall to nineteen by 1950. Ownership of the plantations also changed hands from individual planters to shipping and transport companies. In 1900, the two leading sugar operators—Booker Brothers and John McConnell and Company—combined to form Booker Brothers McConnell and Company Limited, a London-based, limited liability company. Booker Brothers had a virtual monopoly in sugar production, controlling eighteen of the surviving nineteen plantations. Booker Brothers also owned a host of ...