Defenders of the Rt. Hon. George Cadle Price have always argued that where he appeared to be otherwise than he should have been, so to speak, it was because he was fighting against a reactionary, established, pro-British element on the domestic political scene. The argument has some validity, but the question then has to be, what about when Mr. Price’s power was at its peak in the 1960’s, why did it seem that his attitude towards Guatemala was conciliatory, and why did young black people feel uncomfortable, to put it mildly, with his “vibes”?
The nationalist People’s United Party experienced a crisis in 1956 which culminated with Mr. Price’s taking power from Leigh Richardson and Philip Goldson. The following year, Mr. Price was sent home from London by the British for “secret” meetings with a Guatemalan official, and the year after that, 1958, the British arrested Mr. Price and charged him with sedition.
Remember now, that the British Honduras’ population was clearly majority black in those days, so that when Mr. Price, a Latin-looking gentleman, overthrew Richardson and Goldson, two visibly black individuals, there was a period between 1956 and 1958 when the British may have felt that blacks would turn against the PUP. It did not happen. Roots black people essentially remained loyal to Mr. Price’s PUP, which had been an urban, black political party at its foundation in 1950.
In 1969, however, just 11 years after Mr. Price’s glorious acquittal on sedition charges in the British Honduras Supreme Court, young roots blacks whose antecedents were more PUP than NIP, rose up in the UBAD movement. UBAD did not attract a significant support amongst young NIP-origin blacks until 1971. (I speak in general terms.)
The sustained period in my generation’s lifetime when the Guatemalan claim was most alarming was the period when General Miguel Ydígoras Fuentes ruled Guatemala – from 1958 to 1963. Black people in Belize have always felt especially threatened by the Guatemalan claim, because of its ethnic undercurrents, and having remained loyal to Mr. Price during the critical years of 1956 to 1958, how should they have reacted when Mr. Price made such troubling comments as telling the foreign press that if independence failed, he would give the southern part of the country to Guatemala and the northern part to Mexico?
Again, Mr. Price’s approach to establishing a historical foundation for Belize’s right to independence and national sovereignty involved a campaign to glorify Belize’s “Mayan past.” To be truthful, if we had been properly educated in school, we would have understood Mr. Price’s message. But we didn’t know anything about the Maya, so the whole “Mayan past” propaganda campaign seemed sinister, especially when, at the exact same time, Fuentes was talking all kinds of crazy stuff across the border in Guatemala.
In those days of the late 1950s and early 1960s, the most powerful black leader in the PUP was Mr. Albert Cattouse, Sr. “Dandy Cat” was a man of respect from a ranking Belizean family, but he is, historically, a political mystery. What were his views? What was his agenda? In a sense, all the young people in Belize in the 1960s knew about Mr. Cattouse was the report that he had pushed his famous daughter, Nadia Cattouse, down some steps when she complained about Mr. Price’s Guatemalan position. A few older Belizeans knew that Mr. Cattouse’s brother, Gerald, was a businessman in Guatemala City. (Gerald Cattouse was gunned down in Guatemala in the 1980s.) Some political observers have also claimed that Mr. Cattouse saved Mr. Price’s political skin in 1957 after the London crisis.
The most important socio-economic move Mr. Price made during his years of political dominance was the Tate and Lyle sugar industry move around 1963. The sugar industry, and accompanying land reform in the Corozal and Orange Walk Districts, assured the PUP a northern support they did not lose until more than twenty years later in 1984.
There was a pattern which emerged in the country in the late 1950s and in the 1960s, a pattern which alienated young black people from a PUP background. When the PUP decided to use Hurricane Hattie reconstruction money to build Belmopan in the western countryside, it fit into a pattern which helped to produce, firstly in 1969, the UBAD movement, and, secondly, the near bursting of the PUP’s political bubble in 1974.
In the decades after the end of UBAD, when I could begin to put matters into a historical perspective, it occurred to me that such a movement as UBAD should not have taken place just 19 years after the revolutionary PUP rose up in 1950. In this essay I have presented some of the background which I believe contributed to the UBAD phenomenon. I was just a teenager in the early and middle 1960s, so I would welcome any opinions on the era. I am willing to be educated.
Power to the people. Power in the struggle.