U.S. Intervention in British Guiana: A Cold War Story (review)

Stephen G. Rabe, a professor of history at the University of Texas at Dallas and a leading authority on the history of the Cold War in Latin America and the Caribbean, has written a deeply engaging, lucid, and superb book on how the Cold War affected the colony of British Guiana (now independent Guyana) from the 1950s to the 1990s, with particular emphasis on U.S. intervention in the colony in the 1960s. This book fills a gap in the history of the Cold War's impact on the developing world and helps to explain to the people of Guyana the complex web of events that continue to haunt the life of the country to this day. Rabe deserves commendation on both counts.

Following an introduction, the book traces the history of British Guiana from 1831 to 1853. Rabe writes with feeling about the miserable fate of enslaved Africans and indentured Indians. The enslaved Afro-Guyanese population opened up the country through hard work only to find themselves later competing for wages with later arrivals and indentured Indians, who eventually outnumbered them and surpassed them in wealth, even if the Africans predominated in the civil and police services during the first part of the twentieth century. Rabe notes that this situation would have required the greatest care and wisdom on the part of emerging leaders such as Forbes Burnham and Cheddi Jagan. Rabe depicts Jagan as a sincere nationalist who failed to appreciate that his country was in the heart of the U.S. sphere of influence during the height of the Cold War. The portrait of Burnham is that of a brilliant, opportunistic, and racist demagogue.

Chapter one deals with events in British Guiana from 1953 to 1960. The British, keen to rid themselves of the colonies, gave British Guiana an internally self-governing constitution and held the first election with universal suffrage in 1953. The Peoples' Progressive Party (PPP), led by Jagan, with Burnham in a prominent leadership position, won a landslide victory and formed a government that was in office for 133 days before the two men were removed from power for allegedly pro-Communist leanings. Rabe carefully sifts through the British archival materials to show that the British governor in Guiana did not share the view that the PPP was an international Communist threat. But the Conservative government headed by Winston Churchill was determined to unseat the left-leaning PPP. Jagan, as Rabe points out, acknowledged that he and his colleagues, including Burnham, were bombastic in some of their utterances. The U.S. government was not involved in the overthrow of the PPP but was informed prior to the landing of British troops and actively supported the British move through U.S. foreign missions. The Americans and the British subsequently colluded to engineer a split in the PPP between Jagan and Burnham, something that cost Guyana dearly for many years after.

Chapter two deals with events in British Guiana from 1961 to 1962. By then, the Suez affair had transpired, weakening the British, and Fidel Castro had taken power in Cuba, stirring U.S. fears of a string of Communist dominoes in Latin America. Jagan and his wife, Janet Jagan, a leading figure in the PPP, had hailed the Cuban revolution—something that did not endear them to the Americans. The Eisenhower administration wanted to prevent another Communist beachhead in Latin America and began actively intervening with the British, and on the ground in British Guiana, to stop Jagan from winning the elections scheduled to be held in 1961. Nonetheless, Jagan's party won handsomely, and the U.S. government turned its attention to ensuring that Jagan would not lead the country into independence.

The drive for independence is the story of chapter three, 1963–1964. Drawing on archival materials from the United Kingdom, United States, Canada, and Israel, Rabe provides a detailed account of how the U.S. government, including President John Kennedy the State Department the National Security Council, and...