Cheddi Jagan
Cheddi Jagan was president of Guyana from October 1992 until he died in office in March 1997, the dentist and Marxist who had won the colony's first free election in 1953 and been removed by British troops after a hundred and thirty-three days. He had won again in 1957 and 1961 and been kept from independence by Kennedy's CIA and Macmillan's Colonial Office, who changed the voting system to put Burnham in. He then waited twenty-eight years in opposition through Burnham's rigged elections until Carter's observers made the election of 1992 an honest one. He won it at seventy-four. He was the son of a sugar estate driver from Port Mourant. He was the grandson of indentured labourers from India. He was sent to Howard University and Northwestern's dental school in the 1930s, where he met his wife Janet Rosenberg, a Chicago nursing student and Marxist who came home with him in 1943. She was, for fifty years, the party's other half and, after his death, its president. The 1953 government lasted from April to October. The labour relations bill that would have let the sugar workers choose their own union frightened the Booker company and Churchill's government. It suspended the constitution, sent the Royal Welch Fusiliers, and jailed him for six months for breaking a confinement order. The 1961 government asked Kennedy for aid and was told, after a White House meeting in which Jagan said he admired Aneurin Bevan, that he was a communist. The CIA financed the strikes and the race riots of 1962 and 1963 that made the case for the electoral change. The independence of May 1966 was Burnham's. The presidency, when it came, was the reverse of everything he had preached. The structural adjustment was programme kept, the state companies sold, the debt rescheduled, the foreign investors courted. The Omai gold mine opened and its cyanide spilled into the Essequibo in 1995. There was the New Global Human Order he preached at the UN, which nobody adopted. He governed, the observers said, honestly. That was the change. He died in Washington after a heart attack, at seventy-eight. He was cremated at Port Mourant. The American files opened in the 1990s showed what had been done to him. The country's Indians had always known.
- Lived: 1918 CE – 1997 CE
- Nationality: Guyanese
- Roles: president, dentist, politician
