propaganda press! freedom in Guyana

I hope Dr. Randy Persaud does not take it personally (I am just being polemical) when I say that he made the right choice in that he and his family live in the US, where he teaches at an American university. He chose not to settle down with his qualifications in a Third World country. I am referring to his comments in a letter in KN on Sunday on one of my articles last week.
Responding to my observation in that column that the West’s penetration of world trade and its colonial control of the Third World had brought some positive values with it, Dr. Persaud fired back, claiming: “The realization of democratic developments in the Third World was not the result of the benevolence of the metropolitan powers, but through the long struggles of Third World peoples.”
There are many theories one can use to debate this quote of Dr. Persaud. Of course, there can be no denial that the peoples of the Third World demanded their freedom after WW2 was over. But that statement needs qualification.
First, the West was literally drained after WW2 and no longer could have administered the colonial territories. Second, you can count on your fingers the Third World countries that confronted the West for independence. It is hard to come up with more than six. I can think of Algeria, Yemen, India, Kenya, the Congo (well that is only five).
Third, independence was granted to those who happily waited in their colonial suits for the governor to hand them the papers from London. Soon after, they took over his colonial mansion.
The traditional cry that the West mercilessly exploited the Third World is something etched in the collective psyche of the Third World. It is an undeniable fact. The evidence abounds. The evidence exists right here in Guyana, with the guaranteed price of sugar that was a huge con, and in the rest of the Caribbean.
It is a complex story whose dimensions need to be unravelled and discussed with careful attention to the statistics. One of these dimensions is that a great many Third World countries had more freedom and a higher standard of living under colonialism than under their own rulers after the white man departed.
This brings me to the title of my article. Cuba is the place to start with. The Cubans were told by Castro and his Sierra Maestra fighters in 1959 that Cuba was a playground for the rich and famous of the US. It was a casino country. Forty eight years after the removal of casino culture and the expulsion of the American capitalists with the forceful expropriation of their capitalist assets, Cuba is a less free country than in 1959.
The description of the enslavement of the Cuban people is too depressing to listen to. One cannot own a magazine from a western country. It is taken away, and if you are found with it again, you can be charged. If you have a short-wave radio in your home, you can be charged.
You are not allowed to own a movie disc. You are not allowed to buy the player for the disc. You cannot leave Cuba without permission from the Government, which never gives it to you. Legally, you cannot change your job without state approval. A Cuban citizen is not permitted to migrate internally.
This is only half the picture. For over forty years, the Cuban system has been divorced from the world’s capitalist trading system. The West ceased to exploit Cuban resources forty years ago. Yet, Cuba has nothing to show for it in terms of industrial manufacturing. South Korea, which is part of the global capitalist network, is now competing in the car market. It makes its own vehicles.
Cuba has a trading relationship with many small, poor Third World countries, and you can predict the thing it will send to help them –medical doctors. It seems that the only thing Cuba has worked on for the past forty years, when Fidel kicked out the Yankee capitalists, is medical doctors. How about some generators to Guyana to help GPL?
Let’s remind readers of Dr. Persaud’s statement. He spoke about “the realization of the democratic developments of the Third World.” Where are these “democratic developments?
In 1980, you could have counted on your fingers the free countries in the Third World – India, New Zealand, Malta, Fiji and the English-speaking Caribbean. All over the Third World brutal dictatorships had kept their peoples in oppressive environments. The cage comprised the entire Arab world, the entire African continent, all of Central America, all of South America, Pakistan and South East Asia.
This was in 1980, thirty years after independence. As the eighties wore on, Samuel Huntington, the learned political theorist, wrote about the Third Wave. He argued that, in the logic of history, freedom moves in one prodigious wave, and it frees huge chunks of mankind.
According to Huntington, the Third Wave began in the middle of the eighties. This was the period that saw the end of Latin American dictatorships, communist totalitarianism, and oligarchic governments in Africa.
Sadly, the Third Wave missed the Arab World. Are we at the end of the Third Wave? Russia, Guyana and Venezuela can now be described as elected dictatorships. Fiji is lost. Africa has slid back into brutal rule. Central America is far from meeting the requirements of democracy, maybe with the exception of Costa Rica. Latin America is holding on. Where, then, are the freedoms of the Third World that Dr. Persaud alluded to in his reply to me?
Refugees from Third World countries into Europe have intensified over the past five years. There are now xenophobic restrictions in almost all EU countries against Third World refugee claimants. Singapore, India, Malaysia and Trinidad are doing well. This is just four of more than a hundred Third World countries, where the economy is yet to reach decent levels of development.
Finally, Dr. Persaud, in that letter, asserted that the state in the Western industrialized countries exists to regulate capitalism, so it can ensure its survival. This is too simplistic an understanding of politics in Europe and the US. In a forthcoming column, I will show that the rise of Clinton and Chavez and the demise of Blair do not support such a theory.