Guyana is a Caribbean nation firmly attached to South America. It shares an Amazon border with Brazil and an intractable territorial dispute with neighbors–something that the Caribbean islands only long ago faced: in the mid-19th century when Hispaniola split into Haiti and the Dominican Republic, and in the mid-17th that divided Dutch Sint Maarten and French St. Martin.
Venezuela claims two-thirds of Guyana’s mass, and Suriname a small portion. Negotiations have mostly superseded border actions.
Guyana is different also by its land mass bigger than any of the islands — twice as big as Cuba, 20 times bigger than Jamaica — that allows survival by indigenous populations free from claims of manifest destiny meant to justify land grabs by coastal elites who control expansive economies. Extraction of offshore fossil fuels, bauxite mining, agriculture and timbering are leading export and job sectors, although different from Brazil, Guyana is more pro-active in its protection of wilderness, abetted by the Virginia-based Rainforest Trust that buys tropical forest land for conservation and by the rapid expansion of ecotourism.
In April, the country became the second after Andorra to submit a Biennial Transparency Report under the UN Climate Change protocol assessing progress under the Paris Agreement to reach Net Zero by 2050.
A population of 8.08 thousand is 39.8% of East Indian origin, 30% Black African, 19.9% multiracial, 10.5% Amerindian and 0.5% other, mostly Chinese and whites. Whites are mainly of Dutch and English descent from colonial times and Portuguese who arrived enslaved. Languages are mainly English, Guyanese Creole, Amerindian Carib and Arawak. Tiny by contrast, nearby Trinidad and Tobago contains almost twice Guyana’s population. Guyana is a big unpopulated place.
The U.S.A.’s mixed baggage with Guyana
Guyana is also a gateway onto a continent unfamiliar to Americans compared to Europe and the Far East. Exxon Mobil’s discovery in 2015 of oil and gas deposits in Guyana’s territorial waters has worked to secure Guyana’s territorial integrity by a United States that’s now politically aligned with a country that not too long ago the CIA subverted with catastrophic consequences.
As fast as you can say “petro-state,” nonstop flights now operate from Houston, New York and Toronto. Five hours. Less than hopping the pond. Marriott has franchised a 197-unit hotel distanced from the capital’s muddy shore at Georgetown.
But starting in the 1960s and for almost 30 years the freely elected socialist Cheddi Jagan was subverted by the U.S. and the U.K. that feared his successful drive for an independent Guyana would place him in the orbit of Soviet Russia. That, and Jagan’s call for empowering trade unions at a time when British Guiana’s economy was dominated by powerful foreign companies.
The U.S. installed the authoritarian Forbes Burnham as prime minister. Burnham had been a co-founder of the People’s Progressive Party with Jagan and his Chicago-born wife Janet, who married while both studied in Chicago before Jagan acquired a DDS from Howard University. Jagan and Burnham would split their alliance in 1955. Under Burnham, descended from Africans, Guyana turned erratic and expoited the racial divide. Following independence in 1966, Burnham declared the railway a relic of colonization. It was carrying 1 million passengers a year.
Jimmy Carter and later Bill Clinton evaluated Jagan as a social democrat. Though imprisoned at times under British rule, he would become Chief Minister in 1953 and later Premier of British Guiana from 1961 to 1964. He later served as President of Guyana from 1992 to his death in 1997. Today’s oil executives fly into and out of Cheddi Jagan International Airport.
Burnham also turned a blind eye to the People’s Temple, a cult led by the California evangelist Jim Jones that practiced suicide for a nuclear age in Jonestown, 100 miles south from the capital. In 1978, when U.S. Congressman Leo Ryan from San Francisco arrived to investigate, Jones had Ryan and his entourage killed, then induced more than 900 of his followers to commit suicide, most from swallowing a brew of toxic chemicals. Jones shot himself.
Two brief visits
I visited Guyana twice during my employment by the Caribbean Travel Association. Both times were brief but fruitful. I came first in 1971, three years after formation of the Caribbean Free Trade Area (Carifta) that by 1975 was succeeded by the more auspicious Caribbean Community and Common Market (Caricom). These regional development authorities were meant to overcome the failure of political integration with the West Indies Federation brokered by the U.S. and U.K. in 1958 that collapsed in 1962 over issues of central planning and taxation raised chiefly by Jamaica.
I had read about the Trinidadian economist William Demas, who sounded like he would hear me out about my regionally integrative approach to tourism. I would learn only in the very month that I am preparing this posting — a half-century later — how my visit with Demas bore fruit. I will detail this story in a subsequent posting.
I was elated by Georgetown and by the visits I arranged: one by coastal train that ran 18.5 miles north from the capital and the other deep inland by propeller plane to the Rupununi Region near the Brazilian border.
In Georgetown I stayed downtown at the colonial era Pegasus Hotel. I was charmed by two features redolent of times when sugar ruled the economy.
One was the Demerara windows that hinged at the top and, usually held by a stick, slope outward at the bottom to let breeze flow across an ice chest for cooling. The windows became ubiquitous across the Caribbean for their practicality and design before replaced by air conditioners.
Also distinct and to the manner born were the “planter’s chairs.” These were the wood-framed lobby chairs with typically sling backs, broad arms with round openings for a fresh gin and tonic, and with wood plank extensions that fold out as leg rests (good for the circulation and for an afternoon snooze).
My first day in Georgetown, I walked from the old colonial hotel to Stabroek Market with its distinct clock tower, enclosed like some grand European railroad terminal. The broad landscaped boulevards and narrow side streets were everywhere free of pale faces pushing cameras.
From the market I walked to the ferry across the Demerara River to Vreed en Hoop and continued onward by train to the village of Parika. I bought a large hand of fig bananas for the equivalent of a U.S. nickel.
Evenings, I walked to inexpensive restaurants where I binged on Indian,
Chinese, and Amerindian meals. I walked back along the greenswards set off by the broad avenues blithely unconcerned about infamous choke-and-rob gangs. I relished how CTA made these explorations possible and how I was reinventing myself.
Ecotourism
Once I flew by small plane across the vast interior where from our low altitude the all-encompassing forest looked like endless broccoli tops. Where we landed, near the Brazilian border, an all-terrain vehicle bounced me across roadless savannas interrupted only by ant towers that stood as high as one man on another’s shoulders to a ranch beside the Rupununi River. This was the ranch of the conservationist Diane McTurk, who was studying giant river otters, a pair of which she had coaxed to flop their way up from the river to a stall she had fixed with wet blankets where they rested after meals she fed them. The ranch house had no outside source of electricity. When Diane needed light, she cranked up her stationary bike rigged to bulbs that flickered till lights shone.
Melanie Turk, married to a nephew of Diane and president of Visit Rupununi, an umbrella group of this region’s tourism enterprises, says, “Instead of a big lodge serving 100 guests, I want to see five amazing and different sites spread across the Rupununi, each serving 20 guests and each bringing benefits to a different area.”
