Betty, Cheddi and me: Memoir of a budding Communist

CHEDDI AND JANET JAGAN 007

Where do our political ideas come from? What influences act upon us? Which key individuals affect our personal evolution?

The summer of 1957, at the age of twelve and a half, I had to take it easy for a few weeks recuperating from appendicitis. So my Aunt Helen invited me to spend some time at a resort camp on Lake Charles in New York State where lot of communists and leftie types had cabins. I met Paul Robeson, Jr., and his family there. Her guests that summer included a woman Helen had worked with, and traveled to Europe and Latin America with, on behalf of the Congress of American Women (CAW), the U.S. branch of the Women's International Democratic Federation affiliated with the communist movement.

Only two years later, I would later learn, this new friend of mine testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee regarding the CAW, but at 14 I was not yet a member of her innermost circle. As for my Aunt Helen, she ran for office three times on the American Labor Party ticket, but was not a Communist Party member, as she took care not to endanger her husband's medical practice. But she had to be fully aware of the company she kept.   

Betty Millard turned out to play a huge role in my life. Forty-five at the time that I met her, she found in me a precocious 12-year-old iconoclast, and took me under her wing. She gave me Ogden Nash's Parents Keep Out. Inspired by Nash's oddball sensibility, Betty and I wrote poems together. One that survived in my archive, dating from that summer at Lake Charles, we called "The Child's Garden of Commercials," in which is revealed a visceral Luddite's revulsion at being tele-seduced into the American consumerist mentality. The concluding three verses:

And drifting up through mist and fog,

I thought I heard, "Winstons taste good,"

And then an echoing ghostly voice

Said, "Like a cigarette should!"

 

And what are they appearing now?

By gosh! They're Sheaffer pens,

And easing toward me through the mist,

There floats a box of NEW! Post Tens.

 

You, too, dear children, can see this cloud,

With its colorful display,

Just stay tuned to your TV set

The whole darn livelong day.

 

 

I might observe that from an early age I've never been a habitual television watcher. Today, my friends refer to TV shows from the 1950s, 1960s, and beyond, and for the most part their pop-culture references fly straight over my head.

Betty had devoted much of her adult life, since Barnard College, to the communist movement. In 1948, International Publishers, a party publishing house, released her pamphlet Woman Against Myth, which examined the inequality between the sexes and which stands out as an entry of note in the annals of feminist history. (1948 was a double centennial year - the Woman's Rights Convention in Seneca Falls, New York, and publication of The Communist Manifesto.)

Betty had been an editor at the New Masses, a leading party journal wherein month after month party ideas came to life in articles, poems, and reviews by writers and other cultural workers, among them some of most familiar names in American letters. And in the 1950s she edited a singular publication called Latin America Today, which carried news of the Latin American world from a left, or shall I say communist point of view, because it was, I believe, a project of the party. In those pages, and through her many Latin American contacts, she mustered support for imprisoned artists and writers, for union drives in Latin America, and for left-wing political figures, as well as opposition to U.S. imperialism.

When I met Betty in 1957, she was just winding down the magazine, around the time she left the party, as so many did, after the Khrushchev revelations. I remember once or twice, when we first met, visiting the Latin America Today office and helping her to crate up files and books, and a couple of complete sets of the magazine I used to love thumbing through over the years. It is a direct influence from Betty that I would major in Latin American Studies in college and graduate school.

Enter the Jagans

Having been in the party so long, Betty's circle of friends consisted in very large part of former - and some remaining - communists. It's not just that they had known each other for years, but given the tension of living in a McCarthyite America, these people lent each other emotional and other forms of support that for the most part only former comrades could give. They understood the injustices, the crimes, the racism of capitalism and imperialism at the substratum of their consciousness. At the same time, it had become either too dangerous or awkward to remain in the party in the 1950s. Or they had arrived at a point of no return over Stalin, or Hungary or Czechoslovakia or Israel, or the woman question, the gay question, or any of a number of other issues. Yet no other movement or faction on the left attracted their interest either.

Among Betty's closest friends were a couple of highly impressive organizers and thinkers, Cheddi and Janet Jagan of the then British Guiana, and not technically Latin American. Upon independence it became the country of Guyana, one of the three Guianas on the north coast of South America. Janet's maiden name was Rosenberg; she came from Chicago, and they had met there while Cheddi was attending dental school.

In 1962, my senior year of high school, I wrote a history term paper on British Guiana's People's Progressive Party, which had organized heavily in the East Indian population of Guyana and had actually won for Cheddi the Prime Ministership of the colony. Concerted British and CIA maneuvers ousted him from office, however, under the usual charge of trying to establish a beachhead for communism in South America. I dedicated the paper to Janet Jagan, and sent her a copy for comment. With ample footnotes and references, it constituted a significant piece of research for a high school student. Its concluding paragraphs read:

Dr. Jagan has stated on many occasions that his country will surely remain within the Commonwealth of Nations when Guiana becomes independent. It may well be injudiciously skeptical, but, nonetheless, perhaps forewarning to say that his promise is vaguely reminiscent of some we heard from Fidel Castro at the time of the victory of his revolution. Again, we do not know.

British Guiana is a country of people desiring independence, freedom from colonialist domination. It has many problems. The future of the country is wielded in part by the People's Progressive Party. A successfully emerging free nation will be to their credit. An additional country lost to the "international conspiracy" of Communism will be a discredit to the Western world.

I now peruse this work of a 17-year-old future historian and see that I come across as an inconsistent left-liberal with some phobias consistent with its haute Cold War era - and also, not inconsequentially, with the perspective of Miss Peck, our right-of-center teacher from whom I sought a good grade! What I likely was thinking, but not saying, is that the West's attitude toward the emerging new countries had everything to do with the global allegiances they would seek out. A case can be made that blind U.S. outrage at the audacity of the Cuban Revolution nationalizing the country's major industries - and setting an example for the rest of the developing world - drove Cuba into the Soviet camp, the only alternative available. Similarly, would the West cooperate with an independent and socialist-leaning Guyana, or would it too compel the new nation to seek trade and support from the Soviet Bloc?

Comrade from America

With my Yale undergraduate degree in hand, I earned a full scholarship to Tulane University for more Latin American Studies, now with a focus on Brazil. After my first year I got a university grant to go to Rio de Janeiro to research Brazilian musical culture in the first half of the 19th century for my master's thesis. I planned to include a stopover in Guyana (independent now), then drop in to Suriname, and visit Belém and Brasília before landing in Rio about the middle of June 1967.

Guyana struck me as a truly undeveloped country, not much to look at in terms of culture or tourism. Of course, "developed" is a tricky term: Bauxite, sugar, rice, timber, these were developed industries, largely for export. The question always comes down to "developed" for whom? For that reason the term "undeveloped" and even "underdeveloped country" are in some ways misnomers and not used much any more. But I did find in a general merchandise store an item I treasured for some years - a Chinese-made umbrella. "Made in China" (communist China, that is) could not be seen on anything in the United States at that time, still a few years before Nixon's famous visit. The contrast to today is barely worthy of comment.

Fortunately Cheddi and Janet Jagan were both in the country at the time and I spent many hours talking with them and other members of the People's Progressive Party (PPP) that I had studied in high school. Feeling inducted into anti-imperialist service by virtue of my close friendship with the Jagans, I made myself useful and started a little amateur sleuthing operation. Somehow, being a young student with well-known American university credentials immunized me from suspicion, and I got to talking with one Tommy Bourne, a man who truly frightened me. Here are some of my notes on that conversation:

June 8, 1967, Georgetown

Leader of Democratic Action Committee, work primarily in Amerindian areas-hopes to settle in Bartica, so that he will have local political rights if area is ceded to Venezuela or to joint development. Also trying to take PPP areas. Philosophy claimed-democratic socialism, but does not beat the anti-Communist drum. Says [Prime Minister Forbes] Burnham has little hope after present term. Studied 1½ weeks in Florida anti-communist course [with] Dr. Fred Shwartz and Sluice. Money comes from various institutes in the U.S., including some ex-Cubans, and a retired U.S. military man who goes to Guyana frequently. This man gave money to Burnham, and also Bourne mentioned $100,000 to himself. Responsible for organizing and paying thugs to incite riots. In 1963 and 1964 Bourne (still in PNC [People's National Congress]) taught how to make explosives + detonators. He said he org'd riots at Wismar because PNC had been losing most of the riots, and they wanted to show a decisive victory. He imported bombs in cases of automobile batteries, but most of the arms were flown in from Venezuela (orig. U.S. arms, though). Wife and wife's family are officers of his party. They are Indians in the tailoring business [with] shop at 56 James St.

Expects to win 2, maybe 4 seats in next elections, but does not see likelihood of more terrorism, because now the population is more pro-PPP than it was before, and "the time isn't ripe yet." Has contacts in the U.S. + Venezuela...also a sister...studying in N.Y. 

Wow! I believed I had stumbled on some top-level revelations about the machinations of U.S. imperialism in this small country, with juicy details about agents, arms, bombs, inciting riots, and money from the U.S., all tried-and-true elements of our foreign policy effected in coordination with the CIA. As I was leaving the next day, I made it my business to hurry this ticking time bomb intelligence over to Cheddi, who read my notes, listened to my urgent report, and said, "Yes, we know all about him already. He's rather full of himself with a lot of grandiose ideas." Oh, well. Still, for my own edification, I learned something about how our country manipulates the politics of other countries, even if parts of Bourne's discourse might have been self-interested and exaggerated.

My "Letter from Guyana" appeared in the August newsletter of our local New Orleans Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) group. I started off by recounting how Cheddi had been Prime Minister of British Guiana 1957-64. Then, in preparation for the independence elections, the British imposed proportional representation to bring the opposition to power.

The People's National Congress is an eclectic conglomeration of ideas from every position on the political spectrum. Its library, significantly, displays the works of Mao Tse-tung alongside pamphlets violently denouncing "godless communism." Parading as a socialist party, PNC cynically uses such media as the church, the schools, trade unions, the press and radio, foreign commissions and Guyanese "intellectuals" to subvert the rising nation to the bourgeois ethic and Protestant mentality of its new masters - Canadian, British, and U.S. capital.

PNC spokesmen are generally political illiterates. I recently questioned a municipal official as to the advantage of the system of proportional representation. After beating around the bush a while, he finally said, "Well, you see, without it we couldn't have the kind of government we have now" - admitting, implicitly, that it was only a mechanical device to keep the PNC in power.

By contrast the PPP, in existence since the early 1950's, is a self-disciplined party with a progressive and scientific ideology. During the time it was in office - under the British - most attention was focused on day to day government work, and the party itself was neglected. Now the emphasis is on building a strong party through education of the people and through internal education. For party workers, there are two weekly classes, one on immediate issues and one on general theory. An organizers' training school with two and three month courses is maintained in the country. The PPP bookstore displays a wide range of publications and books on the left, including Challenge, Monthly Review, Progressive Labor, various magazines from China, Korea, Vietnam, Cuba, etc., as well as writings of the major Marxist theoreticians. In addition the party publishes a daily newspaper (The Mirror), a monthly magazine (Thunder), numerous pamphlets and a newsletter for foreign friends.

Mass meetings are very important. I was introduced recently at a meeting of about 100 rice farmers as a "comrade from America." On this occasion, Dr. Jagan spoke for two hours on a high level about world poverty, imperialism, government corruption, nationalization, tariffs, and other subjects; and made comparisons of Indian vs. Chinese developmental economics! No mincing words or ideas, and no talking down to the many women and children and many listeners who had to stand - he realistically predicted that if the government (the PNC) had used fraudulent means to gain power, it would also wheel, deal, and steal to remain in power. Thus the people must be prepared for the possibility of the PPP's winning an election, but remaining physically unable to assume power. Dr. Jagan's emphasis was not on the vote, but on building strong party support to effectualize Guyana's national aspirations. In this regard the example of the heroic Vietnamese people was put forward....

Last night, a PPP film showing entertained an audience made up mostly of Negroes - not the PPP's usual support. The enthusiastic response by applause and cheering to the appearances of Ho Chi Minh and Mao Tse-tung on the screen gave me the impression that the people of Guyana are intimately aware of world developments, and are able to associate the international scene with local, Guyanese problems. They seem ready to meet the challenge of tomorrow in a militant and courageous manner. 

Clearly, from my report, I had been profoundly impressed not just by the Jagans' determination, but their manifest skills in organizing a political party articulated on so many levels throughout the country. Compared to our inchoate, divisive, spontaneous and mostly ineffectual movements at home, I saw first-hand a well functioning radical party truly with an eye to gaining the reins of state power.

Confusion on the ideological front

Within a couple of years, under the influence of SDS, and particularly its Progressive Labor Party wing, my global perspective had pivoted eastward. It seemed to me that the Soviet Union had completely sold out, and that China was really the only place where anything revolutionary was happening. I had once thought very highly of Cuba, and still respected their tremendous advances. But increasingly I found myself critical of tendencies there that I called "revisionist"- owing, no doubt, to the quantity and character of so much Soviet aid, which I saw as stultifying their own potential. Although an admirer of Che Guevara (who of us in those years was not?), I felt nonplussed by his adventure in Bolivia, which seemed out of touch with the people. On the other hand, the Cultural Revolution in China appeared to me as the most sensible and workable way to purify the Communist Party of China, and bring it back to proletarian control.

Here's another example of my thinking at the time. I saw a squib in the New York Times on August 3, 1969, to the effect that the People's Progressive Party of Guyana had reorganized along lines of "Communist parties in Soviet-bloc countries." So within days I fired off a personal letter to Cheddi Jagan, saying that:

In the international struggle that now characterizes the progressive movement, the Soviet Union has rejected the principles of Marxist-Leninist solidarity with people around the world fighting (and winning) against imperialism and capitalism. I believe that its leaders are objectively accomplices of the ruling class in the United States, and that its armed opposition to the People's Republic of China is but one sign that this is a fact....

[T]hose progressive movements who accept "aid" from the Soviet Union are making a very serious mistake. The entire world supports the Cuban people and their revolution, but it is still true that the aid Cuba receives does not come without strings attached. Fidel was the first to support the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, and internally the Cuban economy is being suppressed, the emphasis remaining on agriculture, so that it can become a supplier to the needs of the imperialist nation - the Soviet Union.

I am embarrassed by many of these statements today. My only defense is that I had been caught up in a worldwide fervor surrounding the impending cataclysm we all knew was coming. What models did we seek for guidance out of the morass of war, poverty, and exploitation? The CP looked to the USSR, of course; the Maoists in SDS looked to China, and to the Cultural Revolution going on there that would cauterize corruption and adherence to old ways. Now it all seems so naïve of us to tail the Chinese, and no more creative ideologically than tailing the Soviet line as I believed the CP did so uncritically. We rejected peaceful coexistence as a sellout to imperialism.

This thinking strikes me today as "un-American," not in the sense of anti-American, but simply alienated from the daily concerns of our own multi-racial working class, its aspirations and needs. The curse of American radicals and revolutionaries - and elsewhere in the world, too - looking for perfection and ideals in the experiments of other countries, has severely damaged our credibility at home.

The other thing that makes me shrink from these sentiments is the sheer arrogance of presuming to know what the best course is for the USSR, for Cuba, for China, for Guyana, not to mention our ignorance of their cultures, a faulty appreciation for the global balance of forces, and perhaps certain inevitabilities of history. Along with many others in our movement, perhaps especially among university-trained intellectuals, ideology trumped analysis, the lazy reach for easy answers and the shorthand of slurs like "revisionist" substituting poorly for patient, historically rooted materialist study.

And yet, and yet: In a world where U.S. imperialism was (so I still believe) doing a whole lot more damage than the Soviets or the Chinese ever could, we saw ourselves "in the belly of the beast" - our ideas and movements repressed, our leaders jailed and assassinated, Nixon's and J. Edgar Hoover's Cointelpro program in full swing, with an onslaught of extra-constitutional measures to demoralize us and destroy dissent. We did not always enjoy the luxury of the armchair. The times called for action and moral witness, and we responded the best we knew how.

To my old friend Betty I wrote in a similar vein regarding Cheddi Jagan:

It should be obvious by now that Burnham or his type of government will never be voted out, and if the PPP is going to continue the same dead-end parliamentary road that seems to be the Moscow-oriented CP line, then I think that eventually the Guyanese people will have to recognize Cheddi's political contributions as historically valid but actually a damper on building a revolutionary movement whose aim is to establish a socialist government. I would imagine that there must already be a certain political formation in Guyana that agrees with this point of view.

I went on to acknowledge Betty's enormous contribution to my political understanding, as well as a certain distancing at this point, hoping that the bonds of friendship would not be overly strained by our differences. At the same time that I consigned Cheddi to a "historical" role, Betty must have picked up that I was basically saying the same thing about her.

Comrade from Guyana

Cheddi Jagan answered my letter on November 12th in a cool, collected, clear and comradely manner. The PPP sharpened up its ideological organization, he said, having witnessed the failures and weaknesses in other newly liberated countries such as Ghana, Indonesia, and Sri Lanka without sound Marxist party leadership. "I do not share your views about the Soviet Union," he wrote:

It is regrettable that there is so much confusion on the ideological front at this time. Of course, I understand why this is so particularly in the United States of America and especially on the youth and student fronts. After all, students and youths have within the last 5-6 years mushroomed into political activities. This has to be considered in the context that previously, particularly during the McCarthy era, their ideological development was stifled. Now, they are so-to-speak striking out willy-nilly in all directions without firm ideological roots and direction.

I do not agree with your point about the Cuban economy.... One must view the economic planning and development of third-world countries particularly like Cuba dialectically. It is one thing to plan in keeping with the "capitalist jungle"; quite another for an international division of labour in a socialist world.

I neither claim nor say that the Soviet Union is perfect. There are still a lot of things which possible [sic] need to be corrected, but one must not fall into the trap as many progressives do of equating the USSR with the USA. Many now counter-pose socalled Soviet imperialism with US

imperialism. We cannot fight capitalism and socialism at the same time. By criticisms in a principled manner, one can help to correct the aberrations within the socialist camp, but we must not as I have said in my Moscow speech give grist to the mill of the imperialists. Anti-Sovietism is certainly a new form of anti-communism.

I knew and deeply respected Cheddi Jagan, and felt honored (or should I say honoured?) to receive a personal, reasonable, and honest response. I suppose if I had listened to him then and taken his perspective to heart, I would have turned about-face and joined the CPUSA right then. His words to me were wise and informed, and came out of a lifetime of experience on the world stage. I have often quoted his saying, "We cannot fight capitalism and socialism at the same time." I have to say now that I agree with him in large part. But of course history has moved on.

My friendship with Betty continued on with warm regard, but we had to acknowledge a certain divergence in our politics. I should add that I soon became disillusioned with Maoism, and subsequently, fed up with nation states of any description, spent several years identifying as an anarchist.

Fast forward 25 years

On October 5, 1992, an amazing people's victory took place in Guyana. Cheddi Jagan had never stopped his organizing work in the People's Progressive Party. As the world observed the 500th anniversary of Columbus's landing in the Americas, this lifelong communist was elected Prime Minister at the age of 74. Betty, of course, went down to visit her dear comrades and check things out. It's ironic that as much of a pro-Soviet type as he'd been all his life, he won power only now that the Soviet Union was a spent force. I wrote to Janet and Cheddi on November 15:

This whole turn of events is just so incredible, but wonderful and exhilarating and encouraging and hopeful. I remember so well visiting Guyana in June 1967 (I was 22 then) and Cheddi driving me out to the countryside on a campaign visit, introducing me as "our comrade from America," and feeling so proud to be at your side. And now 25 years later....

There has been so little press in the U.S. about your victory. I'm not terribly close politically to the CP, but I have a kind of historical sympathy for them (perhaps nostalgia for something I never knew), and so I get the People's Weekly World. Not even they have had a word about it so far. How come?

And now with Clinton coming in....  He's no messiah, I know, but I do believe that he will provide an opportunity for the left to at least be heard. I never expected in my lifetime to see a president installed in the White House who actually demonstrated against the Vietnam War! I think he'll do a lot of good, progressive things, perhaps a lot of symbolic things that will turn back the tide of racism, sexism, homophobia that the Republicans have given us all these years. I'd like to think that his election will mean some hesitation before he sends in the CIA and the Marines to places like Guyana where the left comes to power, but this remains to be seen. Perhaps you have a kind of breathing spell for a while that you might not have had under Bush.

Of course, you no longer have Comecon and the goodwill of a dozen socialist countries behind you. Maybe, in a perverse sort of way, that's a good thing, because it will mean that that bogeyman can't be hauled out as a scare tactic against you. The true test of your government will simply have to be getting government honest again, and with decency and planning, the people ought to be in a lot better shape by the time the next elections come around than they are now. Of course, it's highly important to create a real movement and train the next generation of leaders that can carry on in the future.

You know, if there were a way I could be useful, I would consider coming down. Unfortunately, my life partner is living/dying with AIDS now and I can't leave him. Perhaps in some months the situation will be different.

I would like to donate a copy of my biography of the radical composer Marc Blitzstein to the University of Guyana library - what address should I send it to?

It's odd reading in my letter to the Jagans that I did not feel close to the CP, although I read and subscribed to its paper. I guess that means I was close to the party! - certainly if I compare my awareness of the party to that of most Americans! I just had trouble admitting it; although by way of partial explanation I need to say I was dismayed by the party's then rather obtuse position on LGBT issues.

I never got back to Guyana, but the PPP is still the lead party in the government. After Cheddi's death, Janet herself became president of her adopted homeland, one of only three Jewish women to my knowledge ever to head a country.

Betty Millard died at the age of 98 in 2010, after a sad, prolonged convalescence. In the last couple of decades of her life she had begun to openly acknowledge her lesbianism, and that drew us closer together. The old political issues had faded away.

With vivid, grateful memories of my teachers, Betty and Cheddi, I joined the Communist Party USA in the year 2009. Now my byline appears regularly in the People's World.

Photo: Janet and Cheddi Jagan with their children.  jewishcurrents.org

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  • This is a very interesting story and an enjoyable read. There are several sub-plots that would also call for more ink. And it particularly interesting to some new to the leftist/progressive space. Thanks!

    Posted by MSHosford, 03/06/2015 1:57am (9 years ago)

  • This is a great story. Thanks for telling it and thanks to PA for post it.

    Posted by Beth Edelman, 03/05/2015 5:26pm (9 years ago)

  • This interesting article shows one of the many ways we come to be communist. The sincere ones differ from time to time on what is the right way to proceed. Too often these differences have resulted in harmful disruptions. I think history has put before us the challenge of how to differ but not become weakened. A starting point for communist might be to elevate the notion of respect for each other coupled with a determination to find unity in all areas of our endeavors.

    Posted by Shelby Richardson Jr, 03/03/2015 11:11pm (9 years ago)

  • Lots of interesting history and important political lessons here!

    Posted by Art Perlo, 03/03/2015 2:02pm (9 years ago)

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