Robert Milton Cato (born June 3, 1915 in St. Vincent, † February 10, 1997 in Kingstown, St. Vincent) was a politician from St. Vincent and the Grenadines. BiographyChange source
During the Second World War he entered the Royal Canadian Army and served as a soldier in Europe. After his return to St. Vincent, he began to engage in communal politics. In 1955, he was one of the co-founders of the St. Vincent Labor Party (SVLP) and was a member of the Parliamentary Assembly of the West Indies Federation between 1958 and 1962. He later became chairman of the SVLP.
In May 1967 he was succeeded by Ebenezer Theodore Joshua chief minister of St. Vincent and the Grenadines. After becoming an Associated State within the Commonwealth of Nations on October 27, 1969, he remained the Prime Minister, not a government minister. In April 1972, the SVLP lost the elections against a party alliance of the New Democratic Party (NDP) under James Fitz-Allen Mitchell, who became the Premier.
In December 1974, the SVLP won a victory against the NDP in the early elections, so that Cato was again premier on 8 December 1974. Although the coalition led by him fell apart in 1976, Cato continued to act as a premier because the SVLP continued to have the majority in the Legislative Assembly.
Following the sovereignty of the country on October 27, 1979, Cato became the first Prime Minister and, as such, in the elections to the House of Assembly on 5 December 1979 on the basis of the new constitution. At this time, Cato was one of the last Prime Ministers of the Caribbean, who was already politically active in the West Indies. Although he was politically a socialist, he did not allow modern regional interpretations of socialism, but merely based his views on Marxism-Leninism. Both publicly and privately, he later became a strong critic of the revolution in Grenada under Maurice Bishop and the developments in Jamaica under Michael Manley and Guyana under Forbes Burnham. Instead, he preferred the establishment of closer relations with the relatively conservative governments of Trinidad and Tobago and Barbados in the economy. In particular, the establishment of a common coastguard and a fishery protection provided good relations with Barbados.
After losing the elections in 1984, Cato was replaced as Prime Minister by James Mitchell on July 30, 1984. Weblinks Edit sourcetext
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