British Guiana: Old Leftist, New Game

When Dr. Cheddi Jagan. 42. a politically ambitious East Indian dentist, first took power in British Guiana eight years ago, he fluttered the dovecots of empire. Sounding every inch a Marxist. Jagan vowed: “The same bullets which were fired on poor people will be fired on our oppressors.” announced that he was forming a “people’s police” and abolishing the civil service. In a day when Winston Churchill was still Prime Minister. Britain’s reply was to send four warships and 1,600 troops, who ousted Jagan and suspended the brand-new constitution that granted the 147-year-old colony internal self-government. Last week, in elections that represented a second attempt at self-government. Jagan was again the runaway winner, with 20 of the 35 seats in the legislature. But the fiery messiah of 1953 was now playing a much cozier game.

The ballots were barely counted before Jagan began agitating for an end to the last vestige of British control (foreign affairs, defense) and demanding immediate independence. Domestically, he promised democracy and social reform. Abroad, he said, “we plan to follow a policy of neutralism like Nehru and Nasser.” No longer shouting about oppressors, bullets or people’s police, Jagan said reassuringly: “We also cherish the things the West fights for—personal liberties.” The West kept its fingers crossed.

Marrying Marx. A plantation foreman’s son who went to Northwestern University in 1941, married a Chicago-born Young Communist Leaguer named Janet Rosenberg, and came home yelling Marxist war cries. Jagan has simmered down in recent years, swung toward advocating order and development.

What may make Jagan’s task more difficult is a tense racial issue that pits the more numerous East Indians, imported to work the cane fields, against the colony’s Negroes. In last week’s election, his People’s Progressive Party wooed rural Moslem and Hindu sugar workers, promising socialist reform to those getting $3.50 a day, did not even put up candidates in Negro strongholds.

“Like Tito.” Jagan’s main hope to knit his fractured country together is massive aid from abroad. With Cuba, he has a deal to export rice and timber in return for a Castro-confiscated printing plant. But to the U.S., he cooed that he does not intend to fulfill an old pledge to nationalize the sugar and bauxite industries. When final independence is won, he intends to join the Organization of American States. He wants to travel to the U.S. this fall to talk over his share of the Alliance for Progress with President Kennedy, and sees no reason why he should not get “aid from the Western world.” Why not? he asks. “Tito and Nehru get aid, and even Poland.”