From the moment you step off the plane and onto the tarmac at Guyana’s Cheddi Jagan International Airport, you know this is going to be like no place you’ve ever visited before.

For one thing, Guyana is South America’s only English-speaking republic, and it’s a melting pot of cultures, religions and ethnicities and rather exotic traditions.

This becomes quickly evident along the 28-mile highway to Georgetown, where grown men congregate on the side of the road, holding birds in bright red cages and placing bets on whose bird sings the sweetest melodies.

Don’t be surprised to see stalls displaying live chickens, clay pots and fresh mutton carcasses under handpainted “Bibi Halaal Meat Center” signs, interspersed with roadside billboards pushing Digicel mobile phone service and El Dorado premium rum.

You’ll also pass Hindu temples, Muslim mosques and an occasional Chinese pagoda and you’ll have to keep reminding yourself that this is South America, not Asia.

Guyana, an Amerindian word meaning “Land of Many Waters,” is home to only 750,000 people, more than 90% of whom live in the narrow coastal strip along the Atlantic Ocean.

That makes the largely forested nation, about the size of its former colonizer, Great Britain, one of the most sparsely inhabited on Earth.

Among other things, Guyana is home to the world’s tallest wooden church, its highest single-drop waterfall, one of South America’s most colorful markets and one of the continent’s best-preserved mangrove wetlands.

It’s also one of Cuba’s most loyal friends in the Western Hemisphere.

Last year, Cuba celebrated 40 years of diplomatic relations with Guyana. The presence of hundreds of Cuban doctors working in clinics and hospitals throughout Guyana has earned the Caribbean island widespread acclaim here; in fact, Guyana’s warm embrace of Fidel and Raúl Castro is one of the few foreign policy issues that have sharply divided George-town and Washington over the years.

“In my view, Cuba has been kind to everyone,” Carolyn Rodrigues-Birkett, Guyana’s outspoken foreign minister, told CubaNews recently. “For a country suffering under an economic blockade, being able to give scholarships to medical students in over 100 countries has to be a really large feat.”

In 2011, bilateral trade came to no more than $4 million, according to Cuba’s Oficina Nacional de Estadísticas (see chart, page 15). This is a drop in the bucket compared to Guyana’s trade with neighboring Venezuela or Brazil and Rodrigues-Birkett wants to see those numbers go up dramatically.

“Our relationship should not be one where we just receive from Cuba. I think we need to look at what more we can do with Cuba in terms of trade,” she told us. “Hopefully in the not-so-distant future, Cuba’s minister of trade will visit Guyana to see where we can work together.”

Indeed, from nearby Brasília to faraway Beijing, Rodrigues-Birkett and other Guyanese diplomats are working hard to cultivate bilateral relationships they hope will pay off someday in the form of foreign investments.

So far, that strategy appears to be working.

And the fact that Georgetown happens to be the headquarters of the 15-member Caribbean Community (Caricom) gives Guyana far more clout than its small population might suggest.

“Even though the United States remains our largest trading partner and the place with our largest diaspora population we are looking at relations with other countries, particularly with emerging economies,” said Rodrigues-Birkett.

The Cuban Embassy in Georgetown fronts High Street, in a beige compound that’s sandwiched between the Image boutique on one side and a large white clapboard house on the other that’s home to the Guyana branch of the Inter-American Development Bank.

Directly across the street is the Guyana Bureau of Statistics and the Brahma Kumaris spiritual organization.

Raúl Gortazar Marrero is Cuba’s ambassador to Guyana, though he never made himself available to talk to CubaNews despite repeated attempts to secure an interview.

A secretary at the Cuban Embassy referred us to Halim Khan, president of the Guyana-Cuba Friendship Society, who had little information to offer on Guyanese trade with Cuba.

In his book “The West on Trial: My Fight for Guyana’s Freedom,” Cheddi Jagan, considered the father of Guyanese independence — recalled how the United States did everything it could to prevent his country from getting too close to Fidel Castro, but ultimately failed.

Jagan, who died in 1997, quoted from a Mar. 22, 1964, article by U.S. newspaper columnist Drew Pearson: “The United States permitted Cuba to go Communist purely through default and diplomatic bungling. The problem now is to look ahead and make sure we don’t make the same mistake again,” he wrote.

This is why, Pearson said, President John F. Kennedy visited London in the summer of 1963: “Because of Kennedy’s haunting worry that British Guiana would get its independence from England in July 1963, and set up another Communist government under the guidance of Fidel Castro.”

If this happened just before the presidential election of 1964, and if at that time a Communist Guiana began seizing the Reynolds Metals aluminum operation and other American properties,” he continued, “Kennedy knew the political effect would be disastrous.”

Donald Ramotar, who for decades worked closely with Cheddi Jagan as a longtime activist in the People’s Progressive Party, is today president of Guyana.

In a recent interview, Ramotar clad in a Cuban-style guayabera favored by those in the PPP’s upper echelons insisted that Guyana “was never a threat to the United States,” even though JFK openly viewed Jagan as Public Enemy No. 2 in the Americas after Fidel.

“It is unfortunate that during the Cold War, the mentality was, ‘if you’re not with me, you’re against me.’ That’s what led to the U.S. attitude toward Guyana, even though Cheddi Jagan offered to make Guyana a neutral state,” said the president.

“But Washington was not ready to do that. They wanted a government that would be totally subservient,” he said. “And all we wanted was to have a better quality of life.”

Ramotar and his wife, Deolatchmee, greeted Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama at New York’s Waldorf Astoria last September.

A month later, Romotar met his Cuban counterpart, Raúl Castro, in Havana.

Ramotar told us he sees no reason why Guyana cannot be friends with both countries.

“Guyana wants good relations with the United States, because it’s the biggest power in the world and because it’s in our interest to have good relations,” he said. “That doesn’t mean we agree with everything the U.S. does. I totally disagree with their attitude on Palestine, and I think the blockade against Cuba is archaic. My hope is that the Americans will have learned their lesson.”

He continued: “In a way, they destroyed our country. It was their maneuvering that supported the government of [President] Forbes Burnham. In 1964, when he took power in Guyana, we had the highest standard of living in the English-speaking Caribbean.”

That’s certainly no longer the case, though in recent years Guyana has managed to stabilize its economy and attract foreign investors drawn to its vast natural resources. Even so, there’s very little direct U.S. investment in Guyana; Ramotar said he suspects that has to do with “misinformation” about the country. Asked to explain, the president said the opposition People’s National Congress frequently accuses his government of corruption a ploy he dismisses as a “political weapon” with little, if any, substance.

“I’m not saying there’s no corruption. I would be the last to say there’s no corruption in our society — but not the kind of corruption they’re speaking about,” he said.

“About two months ago, I released every privatization action taken by the PPP to clear up any questions they had. That is a public document. It shows how many bids we got, how they were advertised and where the money went. I think they took advantage of the fact that in peoples’ minds the previous government we very corrupt.”

One of the biggest possibilities for foreign investment in Guyana is oil and gas. Venezuela, its neighbor to the west, boasts the planet’s biggest petroleum reserves even larger than Saudi Arabia. And Brazil, directly to the south, has become a major oil producer and exporter in its own right.

No wonder the world’s energy giants have their eyes trained on Guyana.

The U.S. Geological Survey says the offshore Guyana-Suriname Basin holds a potential 15.2 billion barrels of oil and 42 trillion cubic feet of natural gas, making it one of the biggest potential reserves of hydrocarbons in the Western Hemisphere.

“It’s clearly an exciting basin to be in, yet it hasn’t seen as much exploration activity by as many people as we would have expected,” said Suresh Narine, chairman of Toronto-based CGX Energy Inc., which has spent $290 million on exploration in the last 15 years.

In February, Colombia’s Pacific Rubiales bought a 48% stake in CGX and said it would pay off $35-40 million in debts owed by CGX for oil exploration in the basin. CGX and Pacific Rubiales say they plan to invest $600 million to $1 billion in oil exploration activities over the next five years.

Repsol-YPF SA, the same Spanish-Argentine conglomerate that gave up on Cuba after three wells in the Gulf of Mexico came up dry, is also active in the Guyana-Suriname Basin.

Repsol has spent about $220 million in Guyana since 1997, with new drilling expected to cost an additional $300 million.

Despite the many problems facing his country, Ramotar seems confident his administration will make a difference by the time he leaves office at the end of 2016.

“Guyana is a free and open society. We have respect for democracy and the rule of law. We have a lot in common with the United States,” he said though it’s clear this president isn’t taking anything for granted.

“I’d consider 20 years of democratic rule quite young. I would be the last to say it is totally irreversible,” Ramotar said. “Probably dangers are still lurking out there.”