I HAVE done two interviews with Hamilton Green that are in the public domain. One for Kaieteur News (KN) and the other for the Gildarie-Freddie Kissoon Show (GFKS). I will not interview Green again.

At the end of the KN’s session, I asked him if he regrets anything in his 28 years of being in power with the PNC. He said absolutely nothing. I remember Andaiye telling me that she found that response incredible.

In the GFKS interview, Mr. Green was unmoved about any of the atrocities committed by him and Forbes Burnham. Mr. Green will once more deny the accusations Yesu Persaud made against him in Yesu’s second installment of his memoir “Reaching for the stars: The Life of Dr. Yesu Persaud,” released on October 18. In this second book, Yesu roams over the political terrain with revelations that will now pass neatly into Guyana’s historiography.
Yesu documents the bullyism, violence and intolerance of Hamilton Green as the de facto second in charge after Burnham. In July, 1979, a nation-wide general strike was called. Walter Rodney had much influence over the urban African proletariat at that time and was involved in the strike call.
I was in the national archive which is directly opposite Guyana Stores. I saw Green aggressively engaging striking workers. When I asked him in the KN interview, if he regretted that, he said he did not assault anyone but was there to protect non-strikers. Yesu describes that as the strike spread to the private sector including DDL, Green sent an army of scabs to take over operations.

Yesu wrote that when he told Green that the scabs had no specialised knowledge of how to operate a distillery, Green shouted out, “Are you with the strikers? Why are you telling me my people can’t take over the operation? Don’t you know the Guyana Government owns this place?” When Green reads this, no doubt he will deny that ever happened.
The release of the second volume of Yesu’s autobiography comes at an interesting time. For the past six months in these columns of mine, I have been doing a class analysis of the Stabroek News and the Mulatto/Creole class (MCC). Up comes Yesu’s biography and handed me more material on this class.
Yesu’s account of a particular story is simply a description of the event without any analysis. But it is for the academic to put his/her interpretation. He tells the story of the oldest trust company in Guyana owned by the Royal Bank of Canada. When the bank left Guyana in 1984, it sold its trust company shares to David DeCaires and Miles Fitzpatrick, the two founders of the Stabroek News.

Now it is interesting to note that when the Stabroek News was born, DeCaires noted that its purpose was to help in the resuscitation of the business climate. This explains why the newspaper has a weekly supplement devoted to business in Guyana. Is it any accident that the newspaper founded and funded by wealthy members of the MCC has always used its journalism to champion the politics of the MCC?

I have argued several times in my columns that if we had a free and fair election in 1973, Guyana’s history afterwards would have been completely different. Dr. Jagan would have won that contest and the Jagan government would not have bullied the University of Guyana to reject an application by Walter Rodney.
Yesu’s second autobiography has many lessons for young Guyanese to learn and it should evoke thoughts in Guyanese as to what happens when a country cannot change its government. Yesu went at length to describe the extreme methods President Hoyte went to destabilise DDL and its related arms and the physical danger the Hoyte Government put him through.
An absorbing part of the book is the role the Private Sector Commission (PSC) played in 1997 in saving Guyana’s democracy, when the PNC rejected the results of the 1997 general elections, a role the PSC reprised in 2020.

During the debate on who should be on the board of the Natural Resource Fund, the Stabroek News in an editorial denounced the nomination of anyone from the PSC, the reason being the PSC is close to the government.

After the board was constituted, co-owner of the Stabroek News, Isabelle DeCaires described Guyana as a dysfunctional democracy. The management of the paper and Ms. DeCaires need to read Yesu’s second memoir right away.

The most fascinating section of the book in terms of the mystery of human psychology is Yesu’s ruminations of how President Hoyte went at length through the initiative of Stanley Ming and Eric Phillips to have Yesu run as Hoyte’s prime ministerial candidate in the 1992 election. Yesu murmured: “After all he did to me.”