March 31, 1997, Seattle Times - AP, U.S.-Born Wife Set To Follow Husband As Guyana Leader, by Bert Wilkinson,

March 31, 1997, Seattle Times - AP, U.S.-Born Wife Set To Follow Husband As Guyana Leader, by Bert Wilkinson,

GEORGETOWN, Guyana - When he - a Guyana man born of indentured Indian immigrants - asked for her hand in 1943, her father threatened to shoot him.

When she - a Jewish woman from suburban Chicago - accompanied her new husband home to Guyana, his family was furious he had taken a foreign bride.

Five decades after nurse Janet Rosenberg first met dentist Cheddi Jagan, she is now set to follow her husband on one final step - succeeding him as president after his death in office March 6.

As fiercely protective of her husband's legacy as she was of him, Jagan, 76, calls it a duty and a labor of love to further her husband's political accomplishments.

"It's not for me to decide," she said. "It is for the party."

The Jagans' mutual devotion and shared communist ideology kept them together despite the racial and political pressures on their marriage.

Janet Jagan endured three years of house arrest and five months in jail with her husband in the 1950s, when he first won an election in this Caribbean country.

British and U.S. administrations subsequently blocked him from power for decades, alarmed by his ties to Havana and Moscow.

Jagan finally got to rule Guyana in 1992, but death robbed him of completing even one term. He surprised many people by the capitalist reforms he introduced, including stringent measures to repay the nation's foreign debt.

Becoming the first foreign-born leader of a Caribbean state would add to Janet Jagan's string of firsts: first female legislator in the Caribbean, first female Cabinet minister in the region and, most recently, Guyana's first female prime minister and vice president.

Although a member of Parliament, she held no official position in her husband's government at the time of his death other than roving ambassador.

But many Guyanese, including members of her own party, say that she was the real power - and that if you weren't in her good graces, you couldn't reach her husband.

She has been accustomed to hearing that since the 1940s, when she was criticized by Guyana's rich whites, she said.

"There was much hatred and malice against me because I was a white person (married to a non-white), but also they claimed that I was the brains behind Jagan that wrote all his speeches," she said. "They were trying to say only white people had brains."

On the other side, black Guyanese of African descent accuse Jagan of favoring her husband's Indian people, who are a majority in Guyana.

The ruling People's Progressive Party, which the Jagans helped found, chose her as premier when Jagan died. Prime Minister Samuel Hinds succeeded him as interim president but has shown no interest in the job permanently.

Her party - which draws its backing from the country's ethnic Indians - chose her as the presidential candidate, and the opposition parties of Guyana's minority blacks seem unlikely to mount a successful challenger.

"She is the most experienced and the best in a collective of leaders who are committed to a policy of continuity," Information Minister Moses Nagamootoo said.