Overview

Cheddi Jagan (1918-1997) was the first major politician in the Anglophone Caribbean enraptured by Marxism-Leninism as espoused by the Soviet Union - the beacon for the radical transformation of colonies like his country, British Guiana (Guyana). Moreover, he sought to persuade US President Kennedy, that although this was the essence of his post-colonial vision, it would not vitiate the fundamentals of liberal democracy. Jagan's political mission of fifty years was deeply rooted in his repulsion by 'bitter sugar' - an anti-sugar plantation, anti-Booker obsession refracted through Marxism/Leninism. Engrossed by class analysis at the core of his epistemology, he routinely minimised, if not circumvented, the racial anxieties and religious and cultural complexities of colonial Guyana. Yet his aspiration to create a communist society never did resonate with African Guyanese, nor was it apprehended by his unfailingly loyal Indian supporters, most of whom disclaimed that he was a communist. But this work establishes that Jagan's fidelity to Marxism was incontrovertible from the inception; and this was at variance with America's Cold War susceptibilities, in their 'backyard.' Seecharan locates the intellectual origins of Jagan's 'secular religion' - Marxism - as a 'pure science' applicable to human societies, equally valid as the natural sciences and validated by the supposedly irreproachable Soviet example. This was what led to his sleepwalking into the Cold War on the side of the Soviets and the Cubans. As early as 1960, enchanted and emboldened by the Cuban Revolution, Cheddi deemed Fidel Castro the greatest liberator of the twentieth century. Jagan lost power in 1964 through subterfuge hatched by the Kennedy administration, with the belated connivance of the British, who had magnanimously counselled him (in 1961 in Washington) not to divulge his Marxist predilection to President Kennedy. Cheddi ignored them. This precipitately facilitated the resurgence of the clever, slick, and ideologically amorphous L.F.S. Burnham, culminating in his fading Guyana to Independence. In Seecharan's words, 'Cheddi had all the trumps in his hand and still lost the game.' By his ideological intransigence, he opened the door for Burnham's 'Cooperative Socialist Republic,' thereby entrenching electoral rigging, the undermining of liberal democracy, economic stagnation, and the flight of the country's best and brightest of all races to the heartlands of capitalism. This study does not duplicate the well-documented subversion of Jagan by the US and Britain. Its principal aim is to explore the prompting and character of Jagan's Marxism, particularly his conviction that the Soviet Union was paving the road to the communist utopia. In so doing, Seecharan does what no other researcher has done - dig deep into the vast writings of Jagan himself, publications of his People's Progressive Party and its precursor, dating back to the late 1940s; in addition to the hitherto unexamined copious correspondence between Cheddi, his wife Janet and Billy Strachan (their foremost ideological mentor), a leading communist in the Communist Party of Great Britain. The work is enhanced by a series of interviews with several notable personalities who worked with or against them.

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Clem Seecharan is Emeritus Professor of History, London Metropolitan University. He is the author of books on Indo-Caribbean history and the history of West Indies cricket. His Joc Solomon and the Spirit of Port Mourant was awarded the first Guyana Prize for Literature in Non-Fiction, 2022.

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