Grenada, then and now

Oct 16th 2003 | PORT-OF-SPAIN
From The Economist print edition

Remembering a theatre of the cold war
AS CHAPTERS in the cold war went, Grenada was a small one. In 1979, Maurice Bishop, an engaging radical socialist, and his New Jewel Movement staged a coup that rid the small Caribbean island of an unsavoury dictatorship. Twenty years ago this week, he was himself overthrown and killed by a hardline pro-Moscow “Revolutionary Military Council” as the NJM split apart. After six days in which the island suffered a 24-hour curfew, Ronald Reagan, the American president, sent in 6,000 marines, accompanied by a motley battalion from seven Caribbean democracies.

Although the Caribbeans provided a multilateral fig leaf, the Grenada invasion was condemned worldwide as pre-emptive unilateralism. It was, but it worked—even if Mr Reagan's fears of communism in the Caribbean were exaggerated. In a few hours of fierce fighting, 19 Americans died, and an unknown number of Grenadians and Cubans. Thereafter, the invaders were welcomed by all but a few of the 100,000 islanders. After a year, an election was held, and won by a centrist coalition.

Twenty years on, 16 members of the short-lived revolutionary council are still in jail. But the government, led by Keith Mitchell, includes former Bishop supporters. A Truth and Reconciliation Commission, chaired by an Anglican bishop, is soon to report on the troubled past.

The NJM's implosion killed socialist politics across the English-speaking Caribbean. Michael Manley's democratic socialist government in Jamaica had been defeated in a bloodstained election in 1980. Forbes Burnham's Co-operative Republic of Guyana was a deeply unattractive model. Former student radicals moved on to academia, or into grassroots groups or trade unions. Some, such as Ralph Gonsalves, now the prime minister of St Vincent, have moved to the centre.

Grenada itself has progressed, though debt, links to some dodgy investors, and dubious construction projects have all been worries. Investment from the United States was promised, but has amounted mainly to the expansion of the island's American university. Mr Mitchell has managed to be on good terms with both Cuba's Fidel Castro and with President George Bush. He plans to mark the anniversary with a rally at which he is expected to call (and go on to win) an election. If only, Americans must wish, Iraq was like Grenada.