In 1983 I thought that my credentials in the Garifuna community were strong enough so that I could criticize Dr. Ted Aranda. The 1974 area representative for Dangriga, Paul “Pags” Guerrero, had stood godfather for my daughter, Jacinta, in 1970, and Pags was an icon in Griga. His wife, “Din Din,” was probably even more powerful than Pags. Suffice to say, my friendly relationship with the Guerreros, as well as with other Garifuna leaders like Pablo Lambey and Phyllis Miranda Cayetano, meant that I did not consider myself the average giao.

As one of the relatively small group of Roman Catholic Creoles in British Honduras during the 1960’s, I had come in contact with young Caribs more often than the average Belize (City) Creole. The reason was religion. Whereas most Creoles were Anglican and Methodist, most Caribs were Roman Catholic.

At St. John’s College Sixth Form in 1964/65, for instance, my best friend had been Marion Paulino, a Carib youth who had come up from Punta Gorda to attend Sixth Form in the capital. Marion and I parted ways in the summer of 1965, but as fate would have it, he became good friends with my younger brother, Michael, when both worked at the Lands Department in Belmopan during the early/mid 1970’s.

Dr. Ted Aranda had returned from the United States with a Ph.D. in the middle of 1970’s, and he quickly joined the United Democratic Party, which had done very well in the 1974 general elections and looked as if it would become the next government of Belize. Dr. Aranda’s credentials were so gilt-edged that he was the head of a United States government agency in Belize. (I think it was CARE, which would be a social assistance institution.)

I believe Dr. Ted was the first Garifuna Ph.D. in Belize. More than that, I am wondering whether he wasn’t the first Belizean Ph.D. to live and work in Belize. For sure, Dr. Ted was a Garifuna idol, so much so that Hon. Paul Guerrero stepped aside to allow Dr. Aranda to become the UDP Dangriga candidate for the House of Representatives in 1979. I really admired Pags for his graciousness and dignity when he made that move.

Anyway, when the UDP lost in 1979, it was a stunning upset for the party. In fact, the UDP had been so sure of victory that they had printed issues of their then party newspaper, THE BEACON, with news of the victory, and then had to burn all those bogus publications after the counting was done.

The UDP Leader, Dean Russell Lindo, lost his Fort George seat in 1979, and so the five newly elected area representatives for the UDP had to choose a new UDP Leader. There were two UDP Toledo area reps – Charles Wagner and Basilio Ah; the Dangriga rep – Dr. Ted; and the Belize City area reps – Philip Goldson (Albert) and Curl Thompson (Mesopotamia). The reports were that the three representatives from the southern districts maintained solidarity, and went for Aranda. (Goldson, who had been Leader of the NIP Opposition from 1965 to 1974, was suffering from glaucoma, and Thompson was a rookie.)

Aranda as UDP Leader did not work out for the UDP. As time went on, Dr. Ted tried to lead the UDP from Dangriga, which is a financially depressed community. (At what point his United States government contract ended, I can’t say.) There were various reasons Aranda’s leadership of the UDP did not work, but it is for sure, in my mind, that ethnic discrimination was one of them.

In the late part of 1982, when the UDP were preparing for Belize City Council elections in December 1983 and general elections in December 1984, they moved Aranda from the leadership. It seemed to me, from outside, that the ouster of Aranda was clumsily handled. More than twenty years later when I worked with Dr. Ted to help Hon. Sylvia Flores in her successful 2003 campaign for the Dangriga seat, Dr. Ted informed me that he had not been ousted, that he had walked away. For twenty years, however, I was of a different impression.

Anyway, the UDP chose Manuel Esquivel as their new Leader in January of 1983, and Dr. Aranda formed his own party. I think he named the party the Christian Democratic Party. At one point he was holding talks with Alejandro Vernon, the Leader of the Toledo Progressive Party. Belizeans like myself believed that Alejandro Vernon and his party were being financed by the Guatemalan government, and we considered them treacherous.

Now Belize being as small as it is, it happens that Alejandro Vernon is married to Marion Paulino’s sister. Tangentially, I called Alejandro a couple weeks ago, because I did not like the vicious newspaper exchange between himself and my longstanding friend, Herman Lewis. Alejandro was guarded at first when talking to me, because he and I have never been friends. But we ended up talking genially.

I understand today why a Toledo leader during that era would have been doing business with the Guatemalans. I will discuss this some other time. But in 1983 I chastised Dr. Aranda for linking up with Alejandro.

The Garifuna intellectuals jumped all over me. I was angry about this. Trust me. But I backed off Dr. Ted. The Garifuna intellectuals had said to me, in effect, you are a giao.

Today things have changed somewhat in Belize’s Garifuna community. The Garifuna have become more comfortable and secure in Belize. There are younger Garifuna, like Michael Flores and Pen Cayetano, who criticize the traditional and bourgeois Garifuna leadership. The Garinagu are less monolithic in their perspective. I think if the same thing happened today that happened in 1983, the reaction of Garifuna intellectuals would not be so knee jerk. Just my opinion.