[In the throes of the Cold War, a tiny Caribbean island dared to
wage a revolutionary experiment. As the Revo imploded, the United
States invaded.]
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FORWARD EVER: 40 YEARS ON FROM THE END OF THE REVOLUTION AND THE U.S.
INVASION OF GRENADA  
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Amy Li Baksh
October 24, 2023
NACLA [[link removed]]

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_ In the throes of the Cold War, a tiny Caribbean island dared to
wage a revolutionary experiment. As the Revo imploded, the United
States invaded. _

U.S. soldiers carrying M16A1 rifles watch an aircraft arrive in
Grenada as part of Operation Urgent Fury, the U.S. invasion, November
3, 1983., TSGT MIKE CREEN / Wikimedia Commons / Public domain

 

D_ear Comrades_
_if it must be_
_you speak no more with me_
_nor smile no more with me_
_nor march no more with me_
_then let me take_
_a patience and a calm_
_for even now the greener leaf explodes_
_sun brightens stone_
_and all the river burns._
_Now from the mourning vanguard moving on_
_dear Comrades I salute you and I say_
_Death will not find us thinking that we die._

—Martin Carter

With this poem, George Lamming, Barbadian novelist and poet, ended
his address at a December 1983 memorial service
[[link removed]] in
Trinidad for Maurice Bishop, Jacqueline Creft, Norris Bain, Vincent
Noel, Unison Whiteman, and all who had been killed during the abrupt
end to the Grenada Revolution.

“It is the tragedy of a whole region which has brought us here,”
said Lamming during his address. “The landscape of Grenada and its
people are the immediate victims… But all of us are now the
casualties of the American invasion.”

When an intra-party conflict broke out, leading to the killing of
revolutionary leader Bishop and other victims on October 19, 1983, the
Reagan administration seized the pretext to invade. On October 25,
1983, thousands of U.S. troops landed on the island.

This year, Grenada commemorates both 50 years as an independent nation
and 40 years since the violent implosion of the People’s
Revolutionary Government and subsequent U.S. invasion. For the first
time, the government of Grenada has recognized October 19 as a
national holiday, designated as “National Heroes Day.” Decades on,
reckoning with the events of 1983 continues.

The shocking events of 19 October 1983, whose effects reverberated
across the Caribbean and beyond, created deep psychological wounds
that have never really healed.

Writer Marise La Grenade-Lashley spoke at the inaugural National
Heroes Day gathering [[link removed]],
where she echoed sentiments expressed in her article in Now Grenada
[[link removed]] a year
prior. “The shocking events of 19 October 1983, whose effects
reverberated across the Caribbean and beyond, created deep
psychological wounds that have never really healed. One coping
mechanism adopted by some persons directly affected by the events of
that fateful day has been to retreat in silence,” she wrote.  

“While silence is a common reaction to trauma, it has, in the case
of Grenada, created a void in our society that needs to be filled with
factual and unbiased information related to those four and a half
years during which Grenada embarked on an alternative path to
development that crumbled so abruptly, so brutally, so tragically,”
La Grenade-Lashley added
[[link removed]].  

The designation of National Heroes Day includes a mandate to bring the
history of Grenada’s revolution to civics classes in Grenadian
schools.

A Revolutionary Movement Provokes U.S. Ire

In 1979, Maurice Bishop and his New Jewel Movement (NJM) took control
from the increasingly authoritarian regime of Sir Eric Gairy,
Grenada’s first prime minister. Gairy, an ally of Chilean dictator
General Augusto Pinochet and creator of the notorious “Mongoose
Gang” private militia, modelled after the Haitian Tonton Macoutes,
had lost public support and remained in power through rigged
elections.

The insurrection installed the NJM as the People’s Revolutionary
Government (PRG), suspended the 1974 Constitution, and declared Bishop
prime minister. The government’s first steps were to encourage trade
union representation, introduce free medical services, and to
prioritize education and adult literacy programs as well as projects
benefitting small farmers and farmworkers.

One month into the PRG’s rule, Bishop gave a national broadcast
[[link removed]] after a
visit from U.S. Ambassador Frank Ortiz. “The ambassador pointed out
that his country was the richest, freest, and most generous country in
the world, but as he put it, ‘We have two sides,’” said Bishop.
“We understood that to mean that the other side he was referring to
was the side which stamped on freedom and democracy when the American
government felt that their interests were being threatened.”

Over the next four years, Bishop spoke often of the U.S. pressure on
the PRG. He felt that the Reagan administration was seeking to
destabilize the revolution through the media and through economic
trade disruptions. The Monroe Doctrine had given way to the Reagan
Doctrine, and closer Cold War ties from Grenada to Cuba and the USSR
could not be tolerated. As Hugh O’Shaughnessy, a British journalist
who was on the ground in Grenada when the invasion finally
happened, put it
[[link removed]]:
“The State Department and the Pentagon in Washington…had been
seeking ways of putting an end to the left-wing government of
Grenada.”

Meanwhile, the PRG was putting in place a variety of projects, one of
which was a program—the National Cooperative Development Agency
(NACDA)—to deal with the joblessness and landlessness faced by the
country’s youth. Trinidadian-born Regina Dumas moved to Grenada in
March 1980 to take up a role as registrar of cooperatives within
NACDA. “It was like all my dreams had come true,” Dumas said when
we spoke on October 17, a few days before the National Heroes Day
celebrations. “Here I am, working with rural people, farmers, and
listening to them talk, and realizing—these people know what they
want.” 

In her book, _Memoir of a Cocoa Farmer’s Daughter_
[[link removed]],
Dumas describes her work at NACDA, which involved helping to get
privately held, uncultivated land into the hands of young prospective
farmers tasked with reviving the local and export agriculture markets.

In those days, Dumas often took Sunday afternoon drives to visit the
construction site of the new international airport. Supported by Cuba
and other countries, the airport was one of the PRG’s flagship
projects. “That the government of Cuba chose to support this
initiative by providing a skilled work force…was the cause of much
rancour with the United States which stridently opposed it,” Dumas
writes in her memoir.

During a nationally televised address in March 1983, Reagan displayed
a picture of the airport runway under construction. “The Cubans with
Soviet financing and backing are in the process of building an
airfield with a 10,000-foot runway,” he said
[[link removed]].
“Grenada doesn’t even have an air force. Who is it intended
for?” The implication was clear. During the invasion later that
year, the airport would be one of the locations bombed by the U.S.
military.

People gather for a packed rally during the Revolution, March 1979.
(Grenada National Museum)

The Revolutionary Government Implodes

Months away from the Revolution’s fifth anniversary, divisions
within the PRG between Bishop and his deputy prime minister, Bernard
Coard, began to come to a head. “Why, when they knew that the Reagan
administration was poised to pounce at the slightest error made, would
they play into their hands so easily?” said Dumas. “I dismissed,
completely out of hand, the rumors that I heard as
counter-revolutionary propaganda. What an error on my part!”

The rumors were becoming reality. Disagreements between Bishop and
Coard over a plan for shared leadership turned sour, and Bishop was
deposed and placed under house arrest in the first week of October
1983. On October 19, six days after Bishop had been placed under house
arrest, Dumas recalls hearing the chanting of hundreds of Grenadians
marching the streets in support of Bishop. “The plan, apparently,
was to march to the residence of Maurice Bishop, where he was being
held, confront the members of the People’s Revolutionary Army (PRA),
who were holding him hostage, and forcibly, if necessary, free him
from his temporary prison and reinstate him as prime minister,” she
said.

After gathering her two children from school and returning home, Dumas
watched in horror from her veranda as the march, which had
successfully liberated Bishop, went to Fort Rupert (originally called
Fort George, but renamed after Bishop’s father Rupert, who had been
killed by Gairy’s Mongoose Gang in 1974). Once at Fort Rupert, they
were faced with a hail of bullets. “Armored personnel carriers began
to shoot directly into the crowd of people who were climbing the fort,
singing and dancing with Maurice on their shoulders,” Dumas writes
in her book. “With no other point of exit…I watched as people
leaped over the edge of that fort, quite substantial in height, and
into the crashing waves and rocks below.”

Within hours, Bishop had been executed alongside 10 others at Fort
Rupert. General Hudson Austin issued a national announcement: “With
immediate effect, and until further notice, anyone caught on the
streets of St. George’s and environs will be shot on sight.”

The Invasion Strikes

For Dumas, the events were both political and personal. “They had
killed the prime minister of the country and others of their own group
and party. They had killed my friend Jacqui, thus leaving her young
son an orphan,” she said. “They had decidedly opened up the gates
to those who had always opposed the revolution.”

President Reagan ordered troops to invade Grenada on October 25. As
O’Shaughnessy wrote: “At 6:40 on the morning on Thursday 27
October 1983 a platoon of U.S. marines edged nervously past the main
branch of Barclay’s Bank in St. George’s, the capital of Grenada,
towards Fort Rupert. They need not have worried. No resistance awaited
them there.”

The arrival of the U.S. military brought a rain of bombings across the
forts and levelled a mental health hospital, killing 30 patients and
wounding many more.

The arrival of the U.S. military brought a rain of bombings across the
forts and levelled a mental health hospital, killing 30 patients and
wounding many more.

Neville Warner, a Tobago-born son of a Grenadian family, recalls to me
how the PRG had built a factory in St. George’s to begin producing
mango nectar on a large scale for local consumption and export, as
part of the government’s push to localize food production and reduce
dependence on imports. The factory was one of the locations bombed as
the U.S. troops landed. The space where it stood now hosts a factory
producing Coca-Cola.

During the invasion, Cubans were rounded up from the Cuban Embassy and
sent back to their homeland. In November, Fidel Castro would pay
tribute to the Cubans killed in Grenada during the destruction of the
airport. “The U.S. government looked down on Grenada and hated
Bishop. It wanted to destroy Grenada’s process and obliterate its
example. It had even prepared military plans for invading the
island—as Bishop had charged nearly two years ago—but it lacked
pretext,” Castro said in a speech in Havana
[[link removed]].
He lauded Grenada’s social and economic advances despite the U.S.
hostility.

“Bishop was not an extremist,” Castro continued. “Rather, he was
a true revolutionary—conscientious and honest…Grenada had become a
true symbol of independence and progress in the Caribbean.”

The events that unfolded in Grenada would echo throughout the
Caribbean and the world. With a quick military victory secured, the
emboldened Reagan administration doubled down on counterinsurgency in
Central America, supporting ruthless regimes in Guatemala and El
Salvador and backing the Contras in Nicaragua. Six years after landing
in Grenada, U.S. troops invaded Panama.

For La Grenade-Lashley, there’s more to be done in the work of
remembering 1983 and the Revolution that preceded it. “Rather than
lament the irretrievable, we can look to the future with optimism,”
she writes. “To teach and enlighten our youth, accurate and unbiased
information can be culled from the many books, articles and papers
written on the Grenada Revolution.”

“We have heard of Truth and Reconciliation Commissions around the
world,” she continues. “In Grenada, although we have had our own
Truth and Reconciliation Commission, it remains vital that we pay
closer attention to the ordering of these three words. Truth and
reconciliation. Truth precedes reconciliation.”

EDITOR'S NOTE: This article was corrected on November 8, 2023 to
remove inaccurate references to "Bloody Sunday." 

_AMY LI BAKSH is a Caribbean writer, artist, and activist based in
Trinidad and Tobago. Their academic background is in Caribbean history
and literature with a particular interest in postcolonial social
movements across the region._

_THE NORTH AMERICAN CONGRESS ON LATIN AMERICA (NACLA) is an
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* Grenada
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* Caribbean
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* U.S. intervention
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* Cold War
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