Next Tuesday, November 17, KREM Radio will be marking its twentieth anniversary of broadcasting. In my immediate family’s context, the story of KREM is more the story of my dad (in retirement), C. B. Hyde, and my eldest son (in his youth), Mose Hyde, than it is my story. In the context of UBAD activism, KREM is more the story of Rufus X than it is my story. And, finally, the story of the nuts and bolts of KREM is more the story of J. C. Arzu than it is my story.
Let me start with J. C. first. I remember vaguely that in 1989, maybe a couple months before KREM went on the air, at a time when there was the first private radio station “buzz” around, J. C. wrote a letter to Amandala, which we published. It was about the dream of radio, if I remember correctly. I absolutely didn’t know the guy, and I guess I still do not know J. C. He is a unique, private and special brother. In my mind, he will be forever linked with KREM. If I think of the radio station, I think of J. C. On his own initiative, he made his way to Partridge, from whence I do not know, and made the link with Rodolfo Silva, the engineer who put KREM on the air on Saturday morning, November 17, 1989. In fact, J. C. who helped begin the broadcasting. He was on the spot in the “studio” itself, along with Silva, Glenn Godfrey and Rufus X.
Leaving J. C. in charge of the baby KREM, Silva, Glenn Godfrey and Rufus then drove to my home on Seashore Drive to give me what they thought was the great news. Less than four months later, I thought that KREM Radio would give me a nervous breakdown. (That’s a long story involving a contract with the Baron Bliss Harbour Regatta Committee, headed by the late Sir George Brown.)
As I have explained in these pages before, I didn’t want KREM Radio to begin broadcasting. I wanted a radio license so I could organize investment capital to set up the station properly. The new PUP Cabinet, elected just ten weeks earlier, and specifically the new Attorney General and Minister of Tourism/Broadcasting, Glenn Godfrey, had a different agenda, and for sure they had the power.
The PUP had gotten this power, by a last minute 15-13 margin of seats, because Prime Minister/UDP Leader, Manuel Esquivel, disrespected Rufus X, and by extension the UBAD reality, in 1988. I don’t know what was going through Esquivel’s head. Perhaps the UDP financiers told him what to do, or maybe he just believed he was doing what the financiers wanted him to do. Or maybe he just didn’t like Rufus’ combat fatigues. Yes, Rufus was and is a radical, but he had been one of the founders of the UDP in September of 1973. He was a Belizean, and he had fought valiantly for the UDP for fifteen consecutive years. Esquivel disenfranchised Rufus inside a party to which X had been loyal, and this was the main reason why he blew a 21-7 super majority in the House. Rufus X came back to haunt the UDP. Straight like that.
Insofar as my father’s career as a senior citizen, I think KREM Radio in the beginning was an enjoyable experiment and employment for my dad, who had been a senior public officer when he retired from the government service in 1978. As time went along, though, the station began to drag him down. He was being repeatedly betrayed by people he thought were his friends – PUP government officials.
And finally, KREM became Mose Hyde’s personal stage. He came there straight from the Belize Technical College’s sixth form. He was just a teenager, and the relationship between him and me was still touchy, sometimes even rocky. You know, life is a process, and there are aspects of it to which all of us must make adjustments. One of the aspects of the life process which I understand and accept, is that at some point we adults begin to fade, and our young must be given their space. That’s just how it is. Aging adults who do not want to move out of the way, inevitably become caricatures of themselves.
Having fulfilled its general election promise of granting the Amandala a radio licence, and having won the September 1989 general elections, the PUP leadership almost immediately made a series of moves to cripple, and I believe to destroy, KREM Radio. KREM survived because it was subsidized by Amandala and because of community support.
Successive governments since 1989, in the wake of the PUP’s giving Rene Villanueva, Sr., his radio licence in 1993, have given out about forty radio licenses. They’ve made the radio business competitive in a crazy way. Everybody (especially politicians and religions) has a radio station. On this twentieth anniversary of KREM, I think those who have benefited from jobs at the radio stations, should know that there was a time when radio was a closed shop in this country. On November 17, 1989, KREM opened the door to free radio. We paid a price for that revolution then, and we are paying a price for it now. And we paid a price for it through all those twenty years.
Yes, I’m glad we did it, but it has been too often along the way that the words of the old “Negro spiritual” have come to my soul: “Nobody knows the trouble I’ve seen.”
Power to the people. Power in the struggle.