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FREEDOMWAYS                            FIRST QUARTER 1968

been displaced numerous times, with American connivance, in Africa, in the Caribbean and South America, and in the East.
  Jagan traces the history of his country from the time it was believed to be the fabled "El Dorado" of old-world myths when it was first taken over by the Spanish marauders It was then traded to the Dutch in the seventeenth century, fought over for years by the French and Dutch who tossed it back and forth as a prize-of-war. It was finally seized by the British at the beginning of the nineteenth century and became part of the empire on which "the sun never set."
  "Sovereigns changed and flags changed, but sugar reigned supreme," Jagan points out, and, with sugar, from the earliest days, came slavery. First the Americans, the aborigines of the area, then in turn, the Africans, indentured Portuguese and Chinese, and East Indians were enslaved by the European landowners. Each successive wave of shacked workers struggled against plantation servitude and gained nominal freedom, but the chains of economic servitude were forged stronger and stronger.
  The Amerindians were decimated, stripped of their ancestral lands, and  pushed out to reservations The Africans, once emancipated, mostly migrated tot he coastal cities where they became industrial workers and petty civil servants. The Portuguese and the Chinese who had been imported in smaller numbers also drifted tot he cities and became merchants. The East Indians who form the majority, 51 per cent of the populations, remained in the countryside as the base of the peasant class.
  There was a one-crop economy-sugar, and, despite vastly rich minerals in the land, only bauxite is exported, a mineral which the United States has found essential in war production.
  A challenge to poverty, hunger, illiteracy, and political oppression was most effectively presented in the program of the People's Propressive Party, headed by Cheddi Jagan, which was popularly elected to the first representative government of the colony in 1953. The mildly Socialist-oriented program of the new government, however, was a danger signal to the colonial masters, and within a few months the Constitution was suspended, the duly elected government ousted by the British, and its leaders jailed. The story of the subsequent fifteen years of struggle for political and economic independence forms the major part of this book.
  There is every evidence from that time on of increasing United

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