Articles by Cheddi Jagan 1964-1992
Sugar workers not only get low wages. Engaged mostly in task or piece work, they suffer exploitation from low rates and speed-up. And because of MPCA-company unionism, the sugar planters generally take advantage of the certain variable factors - soil conditions, moisture, etc. to change the task rates.
But the greatest hardship facing workers is the lack of work, thus the lack of income, in non-grinding periods. Two or three days work per week cannot sustain a family, especially under today's daily rise in the prices of consumer necessities.
What is needed is a minimum guaranteed wage; work or no work. This has been instituted in several countries. The workers and their militant unions have fought and obtained this right as a condition of their employment. And this right must be fought for in Guyana. After all, it is not the role of the workers only to slave while the employers continue to make huge profits.
The sugar planters must accept blame and responsibility for the present plight of the sugar workers. At the latter's expense, the former continue to modernize and mechanize and to export raw products - rum, molasses and dark sugar to be processed and manufactured abroad.
From the days of slavery, raw sugar is still being sent abroad and sent back as refined sugar. Rum and molasses are sold overseas at dirt-cheap prices - about $2 per gallon for high-proof alcohol and about 50 cents per gallon for molasses.
The sugar industry can provide more jobs and the workers have to struggle for this. Take Cuba as an example. Before the Castro revolution, the sugar workers suffered from the usual problems affecting Guyanese workers - poor living and working conditions and high unemployment.
Today, there is no more unemployment. Cuba has a labour shortage problem. Civil servants have to volunteer one week's labour every month to help with cane-cutting.
The unemployment problem has been licked in Cuba because a transformation has taken place in the countryside. Ever sugar estate has become a hive of activity and the center of a huge agro-industrial complex. Waste and by-products of sugar are now being used to establish other industries for the enhancement of national income and employment opportunities. As much income is earned from by-products of sugar as from sugar itself.
A factory converts molasses into high-protein yeast. Molasses, yeast, bagasse (burnt in Guyana) and fish meal (produced from fish waste from an expanded fishing industry) produce a cheap stockfeed, which has revolutionized the livestock and dairy industry.
Guyana has to pay in cash for the buses bought from Leland Motors of Great Britain. Cuba pays for buses from the same company by the sale of eggs, millions of which are produced yearly by chickens feeding on cheap stockfeed.
Then there is the cattle - beef and dairy - industries. Here again cheap stockfeed has radically changed the situation.
Beef cattle not only provide beef, but the raw material for many related industries - leather, medicinal, etc.
From milk, there are the dairy industries - butter, cheese, ice cream, condensed milk, etc.
Little wonder that Dr Iton, Chief Livestock Officer of the Trinidad delegation which visited Cuba told the press that Cuba had made more progress in ten years in the livestock industry than Trinidad had made in fifty years.
Norman Girwar, the manager of Trinidad's Cane Farmers Association, after a visit to Cuba in 1971 told newsmen that "the Cuban experience indicates that a greater measure of diversification of the economy and the dedication and commitment of its people to nation-building hold lessons for us which might be followed by profit in Trinidad and Tobago."
Mr Girwar went on to say that Cuba had more than seven million head of high grade cattle and the total area for cattle farming was greater than that for sugar cane. In addition, large acreages was under citrus, corn, tobacco, pineapple and coffee. Nickle and copper were being mined and an increasing quantity of petroleum was being won.
He observed also that there was no unemployment, no begging in the streets. A cane farmer lived in a house a little less comfortable than that of a general manager of a factory.
In Guyana, on the other hand, there is not progress but retrogression under the PNC and the poor are getting poorer. Rene Dumont, FAO agronomist had recommended that Guyana should concentrate on the dairy industry. We have a captive market, he said. About $8 million of milk and milk products are imported into Guyana annually. But under the PNC regime, which penalize the farmers, milk production is going down.
In Guyana, the problems of the people are compounding. Apart from unemployment, there are rising prices and cut in educational and health services.
In Cuba, on the other hand, one is constantly hearing of more and more benefits and free services for the people.
In addition to previous tree-of-charge services (in housing, education, popular participation in sports), there have been added the following items to the free or nearly-free list.
1. Nursery schools, entirely free of charge since January, 1967, including pedagogical and medical care, breakfast, lunch and dinner, and in some, bed and board for six days of the week.
2. Free admission to all types of national sporting events.
3. Reduction of urban bus fares.
4. Elimination of the tunnel fare under Havana Bay (the only installation of 800 additional public telephones).
6. Completely free funeral services (since August 1967).
7. Elimination of the tax on water on all kinds of dwellings.
8. Elimination of a series of taxes on the peasant population (which had been paid by the private peasants).
To all this, we must add free education from grade school to the university, including technological training; public medicine on a nation-wide scale; reduction of charges for electricity and private telephones (earlier achievements).
The coming years will bring the elimination of payments in Cuba's clinic or "mutualist" system, the elimination of all rents (on dwellings whose owners still pay rent) for all dwellings throughout the country, without forgetting that the Revolution had already reduced rents by 40 to 50%.
The latest praise for Cuba has come from a study by the Twentieth Century Fund. Entitled "The Alliance that lost its way," the study stated that Cuba had come closer to some goals of the Alliance for Progress than most of the Latin American countries, and in health and education, the Castro Government had carried out more ambitious and nationally comprehensive programmes than any of the other Latin American counties.
Guyana must follow the lead of Cuba. Sugar faces a difficult future with Britain's proposed entry into the European Common Market. The sugar planters will either curtail production or go into further mechanization. In either case the workers will suffer.
While the sugar workers are fighting for reforms - increased wages, profit-sharing, better working and living conditions - they must demand revolutionary changes. This means firstly, the nationalization of the sugar industry; and secondly, transformation as has been carried out in Cuba.
APRIL 14, 1972
© Nadira Jagan-Brancier 2000
Critical Support
STRAIGHT TALK September 14, 1975
There have been mixed reactions to "critical support." By and large, they fall into two broad categories -- it's nothing new, it's the old PPP line, it's only some new words; it's a sellout, Jagan has made a deal with Burnham, the PPP is merging with the PNC.
The PNC's reaction is based on the proposition that the PPP's non-co-operation, civil resistance campaign had failed, and thus its proposed changed political line. Its Chairman, Cammie Ramsaroop, referred to "critical support of the PNC as a vindication of the rightness of the approach of the PNC's Party policy. ("Guyana Graphic", August 19, 1975).
The PNC General Secretary, P Reid, said that the PPP was being influenced by the seemingly progressive things the government was doing; they "were seeing the benefits that can be had from going and doing the things that are right and useful to them.
DANGER
There is a dangerous smugness in these assertions. There is a danger, but not the one mentioned by Dr Reid. And the danger cannot be seen unless one has a broad, world perspective.
Looked at it that way, what is the position? Particularly during the past thirty years, the world has been gripped by a titanic struggle between the socio-economic systems -- capitalism and socialism. The capitalist world launched a cold war to contain national liberation, socialism and communism.
But the socialist world has been growing stronger and stronger economically, militarily, morally and politically. At the same time, the capitalist world has been growing weaker and is now in a deepening crisis.
Meanwhile, in the "third world" (Asia, Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean), the struggle intensified for national liberation -- to free the nation from political, economic, military and cultural domination.
COUNTER REVOLUTION
Some "third world" countries like Cuba have succeeded in moving, or completely breaking, away from the capitalist world.
Others have failed largely because of the machinations and manoeuvres of imperialism. Because of its counter-revolutionary moves, many "third world" governments were toppled - Dr Mossadegh of Iran, Jacobo Arbens of Guatemala, Patrice Lumumba of Congo, Joao Goulart of Brazil, Kwame Nkhrumah of Ghana, Dr Sukarno of Indonesia, Dr Milton Obote of Uganda, Salvador Allende of Chile, Mujib Rahman of Bangladesh.
The governments were overthrown largely because their policies were in the direction against imperialism and for socialism.
And the instruments for the overthrow were mainly the military, in the majority of cases backed by the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).
Attempts were also made against the Nasser government of Egypt by the Anglo-French-Israeli military attack in 1956, and against the Castro government in 1961 by the CIA-directed Bay of Rigs invasion. Fortunately, these attacks failed.
FASCISM
What were the results in the countries where imperialist counter-revolutionary blows succeeded? A rightist, neo-fascist regime was set up. The previous anti-imperialist policies were reversed. And communist parties, where they existed, were banned, and a systematic attempt was made to exterminate all communists and revolutionaries.
After the downfall of Dr Sukarno, one of the founders of the Non-Aligned Movement, the Suharto military dictatorship slaughtered nearly two million Indonesians, mostly communists (the Suharto regime's delegation walked out of the meeting of Foreign Ministers of the Non-Aligned states held in Guyana in August 1972, after it had seated the Provisional Revolutionary government of South Vietnam and the Cambodian government led by Prince Sihanouk).
In Bangladesh, after the tremendous electoral success of Mujib Rahman in 1970 and his arrest, the Pakistan military forces killed nearly 500,000 among whom were communists and revolutionary democrats. There the systematic killings in the first night indicated that the fascist worked with prepared lists with names and addresses.
TORTURE
In Chile, after the murder of Salvador Allende in 1973, hundreds of thousands of socialists and communists were killed and imprisoned. The First Secretary of the Communist Party is still in a concentration camp, and his son was jailed and tortured.
In Brazil, under the fascist military regime, all political parties except one with a right-wing orientation are banned and all Constitution liberties are suspended. The Communist Party of Brazil have been forced underground and its First Secretary is forced to live in exile in Moscow. Any communist caught in Brazil is either killed or imprisoned. And torture is an everyday occurrence. Even Catholic priests and nuns who have challenged and exposed the excesses of the fascist regime have been tortured. And the Brazilian state has become a sub-imperialism, a gendarme of US imperialism in Latin America. It has played a reactionary role in the South African continent, and has influenced fascist trends in neighbouring Uruguay, Chile, Bolivia and Paraguay.
COMMUNISM
It is this possible danger that the PPP sees in the Guyana situation. Our concern is not to save the PNC but to safeguard the interests of the Guyanese nation and the lives of the PPP leaders, activists, members and supporters. Experience has shown that weakening imperialism is like an enraged tiger. Wherever it succeeds with its counter-revolutionary blows, the first target is the Communist Party. It knows that such parties as the PPP in Guyana do not make deals with it; they are uncompromising, principled and consistent fighters against imperialism. For that reason, when the revolutionary forces succeed with their counter-revolutionary coups they strike at the "branch and root" of socialism and communism.
INDIA
It is necessary to see the enemy clearly in all forms. The situation in Guyana is bad with violation of civil liberties, harassment, discrimination, lack of democracy, electoral fraud, etc. But it is immeasurably worse in Brazil, Indonesia, Chile and Bangladesh. While fighting for the preservation and implementation of our Constitutional Fundamental Rights, we cannot by deed or default permit the development of a fascist state in Guyana.
Consider the situation in India, where the imperialists want to turn the clock of history as they have done in Bangladesh by the removal of the Mujib Rahman government (in 1970, Rahman was arrested in East Pakistan and jailed in West Pakistan; in 1975, he was murdered).
Indira Gandhi, like Mujib Rahman, is being attacked by imperialism because her nationalist government pursues a policy of active non-alignment with a socialist orientation and close relations with the Soviet Union.
BALANCE
Just before India's military solution in East Pakistan (now Bangladesh), the Indian government signed a twenty-year treaty of friendship with the Soviet Union, which helped to check intervention by USA and China on the side of West Pakistan.
US imperialism, faced with the reality of Indira's and Mujib's policies were helping to change the balance of power in favour of socialism and against imperialism, is backing a rightist move to overthrow the Indira Gandhi government -- a coalition of five parties from the extreme right to extreme ultra-left headed by Jhyhprakesh Narayan's Socialist Party ("socialist" Norman Thomas of the Socialist Party of the USA admitted receiving US$1 million from the CIA which he used to set up seventeen socialist parties in Latin America to fight communism); the pro-Hindu Jan Sangh Party is fanatically anti-Muslim and reactionary (it opposes the slaughter of decrepit cows which compete against humans for survival), and harbours the same elements who were responsible for the shooting and killing of Mahatma Gandhi; the Swatantra Party is backed by Indian big business like Tata, one of the chief executives of which was at one time chairman of the CIA-financed Congress of Cultural Freedom which published the high-brow magazine "Encounter"; a Maoist-oriented Communist Party. This CIA-backed coalition was calling not only on the Indian Prime Minister to resign (she was convicted for a minor technical electoral offence), but also on the security forces to revolt.
BRUTALITY
With the experience of fascist brutality and tyranny in neighbouring Indonesia and Bangladesh, and faced with a dilemma, a choice between the petty-bourgeois government led by the Congress Party and a rightist-fascist clique backed by the CIA, the Communist Party of India supports the Indira Gandhi government. It has no illusions about the Congress Party which still has influential landlords and capitalists playing a big role and thus obstructing the path to socialism. But with fascist danger near, it has no alterative.
Chilean fascism should also be a lesson to middle-of-the-roaders and even right-wingers who have political ambitions. The rightist Nationalist Party led by Jorge Alessandri and the reformist Christian Democratic Party led by Eduardo Frei joined with the CIA and the military to bring about the downfall of Salvador Allende. They had hoped to replace Popular Unity and to become the beneficiaries. But the CIA and the ultra-rightist had other plans; they had not forgotten that those parties at the early stage had given parliamentary support to Allende's government to nationalized the foreign copper mines. Thus, they too have become the targets of the military Pinochet clique.
SUPPORT
The development of fascism in Guyana, whether from within or without, must be vigorously opposed. This was why the Central Committee, in its Report to the 25th PPP Anniversary celebration, declared: "the situation now therefore demands a more flexible approach on the part of the PPP...our political line should be changed from non-co-operation to critical support....Critical support does not mean unconditional support. It means just what it says -- giving support for any progressive measure, opposing any reactionary moves and criticizing all shortcomings."
© Nadira Jagan-Brancier 2000