THEY say what you put in black and white lasts forever. It will never go away. What you wrote in 1720 or 1820 or 1920 will be there for the world to see forever. On November 11, 1993, as a weekly columnist with the Stabroek News, I wrote a piece titled: “Fireball and Rambo” in which I compared two well-known political personalities – Ramon Gaskin aka Rambo and top PPP woman leader, Philomena Sahoye-Shury, aka Fireball.

This is what I wrote back then, 31 years ago: “My conceptualisation of both were (sic) based on diametrically opposed perceptions. Fireball was warm and inviting, Rambo always came across unmistakably as a middle class elitist.”
This analysis here is not about the changing nature of Gaskin’s politics. People’s political activism can swing in extremely opposite directions – from the sublime to the absurd or from the humane to the sadistic. The examples are limitless, but two stand out for me. Regis Debray, as a young French radical, followed Che Guevara wherever Guevara went to fight imperialism and he was captured when Guevara was killed.

Debray, as he got older in France, became a strong supporter of French imperialism. The other extremist is Eldridge Cleaver, one of founders of the Black Panther organisation. He sought to violently overthrow the American capitalist system. After exile in Algeria and Cuba, he returned to the US, joined the Republican Party and became a member of the Mormon Church

In this profile here, I will look at Gaskin’s psychology, which I believe made him swing from one political stance to another in quick succession, and it was his eerie, tragic psychology that lies at the heart of his failed politics and failed life. I knew Gaskin when I was about 18 years old. He was a flashy Portuguese middle class guy who drove the latest sports model Fiat from Italy.
I quote from my 1993 article once more: “I said to him that I saw a sports model Fiat that looked identical to the one he used to drive. He politely turned to me and said, in those days, he drove six different sports models of Fiats.” He left Guyana in the early 1970s for Canada and I got to know him better when he returned in 1989.

By 1989, the political horizon looked set to accommodate free and fair elections. In that milieu, I encountered Gaskin in unlimited forums where we had unlimited conversations. What I saw and heard deterred me from having any appreciation for Gaskin. It was clear to me that Gaskin had a troubled Freudian mind and such people never make any lasting contribution to the expansion of human freedoms.
Gaskin is one of the few people I met in this life who loved no one, respected no one, admired no one. I never heard Gaskin say anything positive about any Guyanese in politics or in social life. He had no heroes in history. He was dismissive of every major heroic figure in and out of Guyana, in the world, and in history. He was cynically dismissive of every person on Planet Earth.

I never engaged him in philosophical discourse, but I am 100 percent certain that he would have ridiculed all the major thinkers in philosophy. The other side of this coin was that Gaskin has a gargantuan belief in his omnipotence. Gaskin believed he had superior

knowledge to anyone around him. It was impossible for him to achieve organisational success in whichever entity he functioned in because he would never listen to anyone because he felt he was a superior person.
He made a mess of the Guyana Electricity Cooperation after President Cheddi Jagan put him in charge and had to be removed for one fundamental reason: he did not accept the suggestions of his bosses. Not even President Jagan could have spoken to Gaskin. He was a king unto himself. He spearheaded the 1999 public service strike, and it ended in ignominious defeat because Gaskin refused to accommodate the positions of the union.

Anyone who knew Gaskin in a deep, political way and had engagements with him will be dishonest to deny that he had no respect for people. He had to get his own way, and he will lecture down to you. He was psychologically incapable of accepting another person’s theory.

Freudian analysis best offers an academic explanation of who Gaskin was. A mere newspaper column cannot do justice to the analysis. But deep down inside, I think Gaskin carried the psychological burden of being an underachiever. He sublimated that character fault by finding mental comfort in two ways–disparaging people who have achieved and, as they say in common parlance, “bigging up” himself always.