What a comical way to remember CJ.  He pulled my fricking teeth.  LOL

He Pulled My Teeth! 

by Dudley Kissore (Former archavist of the CJRC)

In the early nineteen-fifties someone suggested that I visit Dr. Cheddi Jagan for my dental needs. His reputation as a good dentist, and that he did not charge much had become known. One of the reasons I went to him as the low fees he charged. I could not afford much as a teacher. By that time, I had heard him speak at meetings in the countryside and he quite enraptured his audiences and endeared himself to people.

On the fateful day, the waiting room was quite orderly and I did not have to wait long to see him. The office assistant, whom I later learned was Mrs. Jagan, was courteous and kind, neatly clad in white uniform. The air smelled of some cleansing fluid and I felt I was in a sanitary environment.

I looked up at the framed certificate from North-Western University with Dr. Jagan's name as a graduate and small photos of the graduates of that year. Of course I tried to spot Dr. Jagan's picture, and I wished I could go to such a school to become like him.

Once I got into the chair I felt completely at ease. Always fearful of dental work, this was an entirely different experience. He gave me the feeling I was in very capable hands. I felt the confidence he gave out. After the examination of every tooth, there was the diagnosis of an extraction. I had the extraction, I had to return later in the day, because it turned out I was a bleeder. He sutured the gums and sent me to the Public Hospital outpatient's department for a hemophiliac examination. It turned out to be negative. I suffered only from dental bleeding. After that, he always had the sutures prepared when I had an extraction. Later on, I took fellow students from my college into the surgery on Saturday evenings to discuss politics and economics.

Thank you Dr. Jagan. You were both my dentist and my teacher.

Caribbean Person of the Century - Cheddi B. Jagan, Freedom Fighter

by Gerald V. Paul

The turn of the century provides a unique opportunity for all of us to reflect on the past and those who helped shaped the future as we now know it.

For Caribbean people, the one who stands out the most is an extraordinary man who dedicated his life to better the lot for his own people, much to his own peril, to ensure that the future they would face would be one offering far more freedom than before.

Freedom fighters, a rare breed, are heroes, whether they come in the form of Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, Che Guevara, Martin Luther King Jr. or Cheddi Jagan. They all stand head and shoulder above the rest, for what makes them special is that their fight is for the people.

But Cheddi Jagan was more than a hero, more than a freedom fighter. To the People of Guyana, the country he helped forge from the shackles of colonialism, C.B.Jagan was the man on whom all their hopes and dreams were pinned. And beyond Guyana’s borders, Jagan became the epitome of democracy - an irony that was never lost on a small dentist whose early political life was purely Marxist.

In the concrete jungle at home and abroad his message was that human rights must embrace civil and political, as will as Economic, social and cultural rights. "Human needs and human security must be the object of development," declared Dr. Jagan in the various continents around the world.

I still have the autographed copy of The West on Trial by Dr. Cheddi "Berret" Jagan. "Berret", not Bharrat was a middle name he adopted because it was fashionable at the time for East Indians in the Caribbean to anglicise their names.

The book is inscribed: "To Gerald: In the cause of Peace, Freedom and Socialism. Cheddi Jagan, 28/3/85."

I remember when he signed it, He was smiling, though he had just experienced another rigged general election by Forbes Burnham, his former partner and then self-declared President-for-Life, which once again cast him into Guyana's political wilderness. It was a place to which he had become accustomed, though as we were soon to find out, he was soon to emerge in triumph.

Our conversation was brief. He asked if I was a member of his People's Progressive Party (PPP) - which will be celebrating its fiftieth anniversary on January 1, 2000 - and although my answer was in the negative, he appeared unperturbed. Just being in his presence, however, was awesome. Here was a man who had gone to prison for his beliefs, survived a bomb attack which killed a loyal supporter, Michael Forde, had been beaten, belittled and ostracized, and yet refused to give up the fight, simply because his people needed him and he had no intention of letting them down.

Cheddi Jagan was born in humble surroundings on March 22, 1918 in a Plantation in Port Mourant to Hindu parents who hailed from Baste in Uttar Pradesh, in India. The shoeless - until he was twelve - Dr. Jagan spent a stint at Port Mourant Primary School, then at Scots School at Rose Hall Village and R.N.Persaud's private secondary school in Port Mourant, the only secondary school of its kind in the area.

Dr. Jagan - who once wore earrings because of his culture - laboured diligently as a child and credited his father as the fountain for any leadership qualities he had acquired. However as for the elements of finance, his mother was called blessed.

He enrolled in the prestigious Queens College in Georgetown in 1933, one of the few poor children at the institution at the time. He was then sent abroad to the United States to study dentistry, and while there, he married Janet Rosenberg, the woman who would stand by his side through trial and tribulation - and even prison - until his death.

But dentistry was not his passion. What Cheddi Jagan wanted more than anything was to be in a position where he could better the lot for his fellow Guyanese, most of whom, like his parents, remained poor as the country's wealth was filtered to the colonial masters in Britain. So in 1947, four years after his return from the United States, he ran for office and became the youngest member at age 29 of the Legislative Council of Guyana. Three years later, he co-founded the People’s Progressive Party with an affable bright young lawyer named Forbes Burnham, and his wife Janet.

The PPP became a thorn in the side of the British for a turbulent decade. Jagan’s Marxisist philosophy ran counter to the democratic systems being touted by the Western World in what was then the Cold War era, and the possibility of a communist ruling an important chuck of South America was not something neither the British nor the Americans were prepared to tolerate.

So from day, one, they devised a system called proportional representation, or PR, to keep Jagan from power; and threw their support behind Burnham, who by then had broken away from the PPP to form his own party, the People's National Congress. That support for Burnham never waned, in spite of reports coming out of Guyana of horrendous atrocities against the people. Jagan, once kept out, remained out, even as Burnham openly rigged elections to remain in power. And while eventually, Burnham fell foul of the "masters" through a campaign of nationalization which saw the British and Americans lose millions of dollars in assets, there appeared to be no international will to pressure him to return to the system of democracy they touted.

Undefeated, Jagan kept up the battle, winning the support of labour movements in neighboring Caribbean countries who then began pressuring their respective governments to turn the screws on Burnham. But there was little political will to do so, even following Burnham’s death in 1985.

Jagan also began championing the New Global Human Order cause, which as mentioned earlier, began attracting the attention of the intellectual communities in North America and Europe. This coming out of the cold, so to speak, as well as his shift to acceptance of a more democratic system of government, is what eventually won him grudging support from the United States and Canada, which then mobilized its own systems to push Burnham's successor, Desmond Hoyte, into holding free and fair elections in September 1992.

Jagan's victory at these polls was a vindication as well as a testament to his strength as a person, and a realization of his lifelong promise to deliver freedom to his people. It brought an end to three decades of one of the most oppressive regimes in the history of the Caribbean, and with it the dawn of a new era for the impoverished nation. Jagan's return to the Presidency from which he was so unfairly removed by the superpowers was also roundly applauded by the Caribbean for it ushered in the only time in the post-colonial era that democracy in none of the member nations was under threat.

That he came to power so late served as both a testimony to his resilience as well as a sad footnote in history, for Jagan would not live to serve out his first full term in office.

In March 1997, just shy of his 79th birthday, he succumbed to heart failure. Jagan’s popularity as the greatest Caribbean Person of the Century was evident at his funeral, where an estimated half of the entire population of Guyana attended the ceremony. It was the biggest ever funeral for a leader in the region.

Globally, Dr. Jagan stressed interdependence, particularly between the North and the South, between the developed and the developing countries but with human development as the unifying factor between the two camps. He was bold enough to point out that the availability of new financial resources was critical for human development. His was the view that developing countries, because of their high foreign debt burden, could not embark on the road to prosperity and that handouts, and mendicancy were not the solution, nor was aid with strings attached. What was needed, he argued, was a totally new approach which would address the debt question and find new and innovative ways of mobilizing fresh resources to overcome underdevelopment so as to enable the developing countries, in partnership with the developed countries, to play a more positive and meaningful role in the global marketplace, currently characterized by rapid globalization and trade liberalization. This was long before the World Trade Organization (WTO) got a run for their money in Seattle.

Dr. Jagan also believed that the ideal of freedom is tied to the reality of poverty and suffering of tens of millions of human beings. Until the problem of "freedom from want" is tackled, the other freedoms, important as they are, can have little meaning for them.

"Men, parties, notions, systems and faiths can only be judged by their attitude to this, the fundamental problem of our time. It is only when the system of exploitation ends and poverty is abolished that men will really begin to be free," he once said.

 (Printed in The Caribbean Camera, January 1, 2000)

dat fool Sase cyant give up this PPP shit. Load a shit. Shit head dem this. Jagan and Burnham a wan bunch a destructive JACKASS. betta dem two bin neva born. 

Democracy was never a plausible idea for the Jagans. Communists are dictatorial.

And he is dead, but bequeath the country to his proteges. The PPP has no desire to honor decency and fair play.

It is time for those who has the stomach for confrontation to take to the streets. The Peoples Progressive Party is same as the whites of South Africa. You got to light fires everywhere-dey hiding under the guise of democracy. And they have the gall to talk about the PNC. 

He was not only a teeth puller but he was also full of shyte and a cock man.

Is this anything to celebrate - GUYEXPO and to remember Jagan by?  

http://guyanachronicle.com/guy...wth-and-development/