Basket case of the Caribbean.

BASKET CASE OF THE CARIBBEAN

AMID PHYSICAL VIOLENCE, the banning of foreign observers, the beating of Dr. Cheddi Jagan, and expected allegations of fraud, Guyana has now elected Desmond Hoyte to succeed President Forbes Burnham, whose long rule over the country ended in August. Burnham, known to his friends as Odo, died during throat surgery performed by Cuban doctors. Hoyte, a 56-year-old lawyer, had been his vice president. The continuation of Burnham's PNC (People's National Congress) party in power will maintain Guyana as--in Jeane Kirkpatrick's recent description--one of the most densely packed Soviet forward bases in the world. It more than compensates the Soviets for the loss of Grenada.

A beautiful, bankrupt country, Guyana more closely resembles an impoverished African sub-state than its sophisticated neighbors Venezuela and Brazil. Today a beggar state, desperately in debt to the International Monetary Fund, Guyana is the poorest country in the Caribbean, with a per-capita income below Haiti's. Hemorrhaging currency, this "suitcase economy" considers even the importation of toilet paper a drain on foreign-currency reserves, while a packet of Kleenex costs upward of U.S.$10 on the black market.

Guyana's population is a little more than half a million, of whom East Indians are in a small majority (take a look at their cricket teams). But unlike Trinidad's Eric Williams, Burnham did not seem proud of those endless varieties of racial mix that we see in several southern Caribbean countries, and which endow them with some of the loveliest women in the world; he always ostentatiously favored the African element, though he himself looked Carib. Nor did the Guyanese radicalism he championed go along with that sociological conservatism which makes some West Indians look like the last Englishmen.

Cuba is well aware of the possiblities for trouble-making in this diverse region. The Caribbean desk in Havana is considered of the greatest importance, being at present under a high-ranking DGI (Directorio General de Inteligencia) agent and former ambassador to Guyana, where the Cuban mission occupies half a block.

Guyana is divided down the middle by the Essequibo River. From its backlands, including the celebrated Jim Jones area (for a while Burnham encouraged what he thought to be radical communes), come the best bauxite in the world and some of the finest lumber. My house in Grenada is built of Guyanese purple-heart wood floated downriver to the capital, Georgetown, in rafts. Divers pull out gold and diamonds from the rivers; I know at least one emigrating Guyanese who brought out all his wealth in such river diamonds, which are not susceptible to electronic screening at airports. Today no Guyanese is allowed a cent of foreign currency in his or her possession, and the pockets of emigrating nationals are searched at Timehri International. Despite crackdowns on the anarchic Rastafarians, and despite killings and beatings in the prisons (which appear to be run by the prisoners), Guyana has the highest crime rate in the world. Airline pilots sometimes decline to leave their craft overnight. There has been the telltale managerial exodus.

So Burnham's Guyana became Haitianized. Not only does its economy now subsist on barter agreements, river gold, and clandestine gun and drug running, but the country lacks any consistent schooling at all. Students work in the fields and are graded by their political loyalties. By the end of Burnham's life Guyana had become the customary "floating orchestra" of Communism, initiating agreements with North Korea, China, Bulgaria, and of course Cuba. It has now constructed 12 major air bases of the eight-thousand-foot category, with all-weather hardtops and control towers, microwave navigational aids, fuel storage, hangars, and barracks. Apart from these it offers no fewer than 45 intermediatelength air strips of six thousand feet or more (to the questioning uninitiated, these are presented as wide roads). The runway requirement of a MiG-23 is less than three thousand feet, with only the Tu-20 Bear reconnaissance bomber requiring more than seven thousand. Nor can it be said, as was said of Grenada's Point Salines, that this concatenation of bases, with barracks and camouflage, is for tourism. Guyana has none.

Burnham founded his PNC in 1955, became mayor of Georgetown shortly thereafter, then premier in 1964, after strikes brought down his predecessor. During his tenure he nationalized his country's wealth, in particular the Canadian-owned bauxite mines and the British sugar estates of Booker McConnell. The venality of his voting procedures became notorious, with ballot boxes found floating on the river and ghosts voting from all over. None of that seemed to have changed in the first post-Burnham election.

Further, Burnham kept his press muzzled by libel actions decided by his own judiciary; shortly before he died, the Catholic Standard, edited by the liberal Father Andrew Morrison, felt the force of this ploy. Another trick was government rationing of newsprint. Burnham built up a considerable army and, for his civilian bully boys, employed the Cleveland fugitive from justice David Hill (Rabbi Washington), whose House of Israel thugs beat up opponents, allegedly stabbing the much-liked Father Bernard Darke to death in 1979.

Grenada's Maurice Bishop was forever trying to take a posture that would impress the Soviets; yet they remained unimpressed, and referred to his revolution as a coup d'etat, or gosudarstvennyi povorot, sending minor figures like Tikhonov or Ponomarev to meet him, whereas Daniel Ortega and Burnham both rated Andropov, after Brezhnev's death. At the end, Burnham told the Caracas El Nacional, "I have always maintained that I am a socialist in the sense that I accept Marx's tactical argument."

Referring to himself as a "military man," Burnham never went near a battlefield, despite the medals that hung practically down to his ankles. He was interested in power, with rum a close second, and, unlike Bishop, he hung on to power, which is what the Soviet Union requires in the first instance of its client states. And, after all, it was not so very difficult. Burnham controlled his own Leninist PNC, with, for most of the time, his only serious opposition being the U.S.-educated dentist Cheddi Jagan, who heads the Stalinist PPP (People's Progressive Party). Rounding out the political picture were Eusi Kwayana and his WPA (Working People's Alliance), also Marxist-Leninist. It was a situation in which Moscow could scarcely lose and in the odious Odo's life did not do so.

After the recent elections, one wonders whether enough is left for Guyana to become a consensual democracy again. Is the country redeemable, if not by an internal military coup (cf. Surinam), then by intervention from Venezuela, which has ongoing territorial suits against it (to say nothing of an excellent air force)?

Since the death of Burnham and the accession of Hoyte as president, the human-rights record in Guyana has been totally miserable, with further curtailments of civil liberties, and a leading Catholic priest expelled. Quite frankly, Guyana is much further from civilization than even Grenada had become. The general impression I got was that Hoyte might be more moderate in the future, but that his prime minister, Hamilton Green, a black Muslim racist, commanded far more power in the PNC and was responsible for the large trade agreements with the Soviet Union that Guyana has just entered into. Cheddi Jagan is circulating around the area looking for assistance, so that another South Yemen-like intra-Marxist civil war is not an impossibility.

The lesson of Burnham's interregnum is simply this: The Cuban card he played has two faces. On one side, it offers total power; on the other, economic destitution. It remains to be seen whether the new regime in Guyana will really be a new one and offer a viable economic alternative to the sinking Cuban model, or whether it will continue in Burnham's mold to cement itself further into the Soviet empire, to the detriment of its already pitiable people.