Between Populism and Leninism

Abstract

A history sensitive to the tragedy of Grenada's revolution might begin a decade before its collapse and the U.S. invasion. On November 18, 1973, six activists of the nascent New Jewel Movement (NJM) opposed to the dictator Eric Gairy were beaten by his thugs, the Mongoose Gang. That day went down in local folklore as Bloody Sunday. An account records how one of the six cradled the head of another in his lap, staunching his wounds. They were Hudson Austin and Maurice Bishop. There is more than poignancy in the contrast between then and the revolution's collapse in October 1983, when Bishop was again the victim but Austin the apparent agent as head of the revolutionary army that backed the fatal coup against him. It underlines the question: Why? What split a revolutionary movement so forged by shared struggles and genuinely rooted in popular support, both before and since the NJM's eventual overthrow of Gairy, which Bishop and Austin led together in March 1979? One should not allow the obscenity of the U.S. eagle's vulturous attacks on the carcass of the revolution to overshadow the prior question of what occurred in Grenada. The image implicitly repeats it. The imperial hawk renewed its plumage not even by battling with a sparrow but by swooping and preening on its grave. The revolution had already died of internal, not external, causes. No doubt the latter, CIA and all, infected its wounds, but only when they were already deep within the revolutionary process. What inflicted them? Could it have been avoided? What now are the practical implications?