Dear Editor
WHEN a prominent person passes on some try to put words in their mouths that they had never uttered and/or attribute actions to them that they never performed. This is often done to distort events, history, or to promote something or the other.
I see this is happening to my comrade and friend, Cyril Calvin Belgrave, who only recently passed away. In the Sunday ‘Kaieteur News,’ Mr Lincoln Lewis wrote a very long piece about an incident at a TUC conference involving Comrade Cyril Belgrave. I believe that Mr Lewis must have mistaken someone else for Belgrave.

After all, according to him, that event occurred in 1982. His memory must be failing him. Cyril Calvin Belgrave, even though he was a giant in the labour movement and a person loved by the workers at large, but more particularly, those workers whom he represented on the waterfront, never had the opportunity to attend a Guyana Trade Union Congress conference. Belgrave defeated every opponent who came against him for chairman of the waterfront branch of the Guyana Labour Union. This included Mr Fowler, a leading person in the PNC at the time and one of its parliamentarians.

The PNC always supported Fowler, but he was regularly beaten by Belgrave. Because of Belgrave’s political convictions and an open leader of the PPP, the union headed by Forbes Burnham and later Desmond Hoyte never selected Belgrave as a delegate to the TUC conference; that was how undemocratic they were. Instead, they always chose Fowler as a delegate. Therefore, Mr Lewis has made a monumental mistake in identifying Belgrave as supporting the PNC’s Kenneth Denny. It never happened. If it is not a mistake, then Lewis is trying to turn Belgrave into a PNC supporter after his death.
I hope the latter is not the case!

Regards
Donald Ramotar
Former President