Neither President Dr. Irfaan Ali nor the People’s Progressive Party (PPP) has the moral standing to be suggesting regime change to improve the democratic situation in Cuba when the core of their socio/political policies over the last two and a half decades has been ethnic/political dominance in Guyana.
In 2004, President Jimmy Carter left Guyana in disgust after making this very point, and almost two decades later ,an independent study published by President Joe Biden’s administration made a similar point. Indeed, the Biden administration was making every effort to ‘encourage’ the PPP regime to make reforms and behave inclusively. So much so that a huge billboard that welcomed President Donald Trump’s victory appeared in Georgetown immediately after the Republicans took government in 2024.
Please note that President Ali is being criticised here for his hypocrisy and not because of his regime change suggestion. The Caribbean Community has been a beacon of liberal democracy, and every citizen has the right to assess and if necessary, criticise the operations of their democracy own and any other government. Furthermore, the community is a democracy because its people and their leaders consider ‘democracy’ to be a ‘good’. The maintenance of democratic governance requires persistent nurturing, and it is the duty and right of all who support its growth and development to raise their voice in support, identify counterfeit democrats and suggest solutions to ongoing problems.
Indeed, reinforcing this point in 2005 a United Nations resolution placed upon states the ‘responsibility to protect’ the global citizenry from crimes against genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and general transgressions against humanity. This responsibility rests upon the notion that state sovereignty entails the responsibility to protect all its citizens from human rights violations.
By way of this resolution, states also pledge to assist each other to fulfill their protection responsibilities, and where any a state is clearly failing in its duty other states should take collective action to protect the affected population. However, using force is considered a measure of last resort and importantly, the authority to use force rests solely with United Nations Security Council (UNSC).
Herein lies an important problem having to do with the nature of state sovereignty and the structural configuration of the UNSC. A fundamental tenet of international relations discourse and law is that nation states are sovereign and equal entities when in fact they are not. And it is said that ‘The degree of equality achieved largely depends on the organisation structure of the given international institutions.’
Five of the UNSC fifteen members are permanent members with veto powers, and given the usual global ideological quarrels between communism/capitalism, democracy/autocracy, etc., this makes decision-making on controversial issues difficult and on occasions states have proceeded to intervene militarily in countries without the UNSC agreement. For example, in 1999 NATO attacked Kosovo without UNSC approval but President Bill Clinton took comfort in having the support of his Congress and allies.
In his ‘Subjugation or self determination: Kamla Persad-Bissessar and the choice we face’ (SN: 6/3/2026) Professor Percy C. Hintzen chided the prime minister of Trinidad and Tobago for accusing eight former CARICOM heads of government (HOG) of advocacy and support for “communism and dictatorship”. According to him, the former heads asserted the right of each sovereign state to promote regional solidarity and cooperation, and he pointed to the unrequested and free assistance Cuba has provided to the Caribbean in times of its greatest need in the fields of medicine, education, sports, etc.
Like President Ali, PM Persad-Bissessar has a right and – given her position – a duty to express her views, for Caribbean cooperation can only be truly built upon open and frank discourse. Cuba has indeed been helpful to the Caribbean and to oppressed people everywhere. It is not an existential threat to the region and its efforts to create a more equitable and inclusive nation and world have been widely admired. But understanding and referencing this need not be equated with being in support of ‘communism and dictatorship’ – certainly not for people who have been themselves lifelong democrats.
But as noted, there is a problematical lacuna in the operation of the UNSC that allows powerful states to bend and break international law to protect. The former HOGs did recognise and warn against this tendency, and I for one hold that this is much more of an existential threat to small states than the current political status quo in Cuba.
Developments in Cuba have resulted as much from initial faulty historical ideological conceptualisation as from the surrounding political and economic pressure under which for decades it has had to survive, which did not leave sufficient space for it to implement the kind of reforms that are necessary to truly fulfil its socialist goals. As Clara Mattei recently claimed, in our times capitalism is not inevitable. (2026, ‘Escape from Capitalism: An Intervention,’ Simon & Schuster).
This column has suggested that Marxian socialism has arguably been one of the most radical conceptualisations of human freedom to result from the European Enlightenment. Liberal democracy is at best a halfway house that focuses upon the political but largely excludes economic democracy (Future Notes, VV: ‘Liberty, democracy and autocracy,’ 01/03/2026).
Among other ‘good news’ is that at present 12 billionaires own as much wealth as the bottom half of the world’s population and are making every effort to take political control, deny climate change, and, if they are lucky, far from working less, working people must do two or three jobs to make their perceived ends meet!
Professor Hintzen claimed that ‘Since the end of World War II, the labels ‘communist’ and ‘dictatorship’ have been used to justify the unleashing of violence and cruelty as collective punishment on unprecedented scales against people and populations in the non-European tricontinental Global South (meaning Latin America and the Caribbean, Africa and the Middle East, and Asia and the Pacific), ostensibly to ‘liberate’ them from those who challenge Euro-American power.’
This kind of antiwesternism/racial/ethnic position does not tell important aspects of the story and is largely a divide and rule tactic that is most prevalent in autocratic circles that wish to present themselves as alternatives to liberal democracy as they extract even the little political freedom that it contains.
Given its history, the US was opposed to European colonialism, but in 1947, George F. Kennan, a US. diplomat in the Soviet Union, wrote an anonymous article in Foreign Affairs Magazine suggesting that the US should adopt ‘long-term, patient but firm and vigilant containment of Russian expansive tendencies.’ Later that same year, US President Harry Truman and his European allies introduced the ‘doctrine of containment’ which gave some priority to checking communist expansion.
Soviet communism was not only resisted in the ‘third world’ but everywhere, including in the US. Respectively, worldwide and in Europe, some 129 and 20 communist parties were banned or politically restricted in some manner during the period of containment and resultant cold war. Cheddi Jagan and the PPP were part of this, and we now know that in 1951, unbeknownst to his party, he wrote to the Stalinist Communist international asking for aid to take ‘Guyana and the Caribbean’ into the communist fold and thus, like many others, even in Europe, he fell foul of the doctrine of the doctrine of containment.
