Abstract

One of Grenada’s most important slogans during the four-and-one-half-year life of its New Jewel Movement Government was “Forward Ever, Backward Never.” More than ever, that slogan should guide us now as we attempt to comprehend the tragic and complex events of October 1983. The death of Maurice Bishop is a great loss to the Caribbean, and to the world-wide movement of Third World countries. His youth, his leadership, his political capacities, can never be recovered, and we are impoverished by his loss. And the loss of the revolutionary government in Grenada is a second blow. The savage and racist invasion of U.S. Armed Forces, the decimation of its popular institutions, the destruction of its infrastructure and the obscene recolonization of Grenada with its inevitable destruction of human dignity, are repugnant and loathsome acts, universally condemned. The tragedy is compounded by the fact that the destabilization of Grenada was an apparent consequence of events occurring within the New Jewel Movement leadership itself. Since the U.S. propaganda machine has brought its major guns to bear on the issue—anti-communism and racism—it becomes even harder to isolate the nature of the conflicts that led to the disruption of the New Jewel Movement. How could Maurice Bishop, as Prime Minister of Grenada and a founding member of NJM, be deposed by its Central Committee? How could Bernard Coard, who had not been a member of the Central Committee of the NJM since 1982, wield so much influence? And how could the actions of the Central Committee of the NJM in arresting Bishop and others of his supporters and cabinet be so much at odds with the will of the Grenadian people? It is precisely the unpopular (in every sense of the word) actions and nature of the Revolutionary Military Council headed by Coard and Hudson Austin that brought about the destabilization of Grenada and its subsequent invasion by the U.S. By disarming the militia and placing curfew upon the people of Grenada, the Revolutionary Military Council disarmed its own revolution, psychologically and materially, and with it, its capacity to effectively resist invasion. The murder of Maurice Bishop as a consequence of his arrest and the brutal suppression of the subsequent popular uprising to support him was an inevitable consequence of faulty political processes that occurred within the NJM. One cannot rule out personal, psychological and cultural factors as well, in attempting to understand the nature of the struggle in Grenada. While much is known of Maurice Bishop—his personality, ideas, values—little is known of Bernard Coard or Hudson Austin. Coard has been characterized by the U.S. media as a “hard-line Marxist,” but what Coard’s line was is not known here. Bishop was accused of “one-manism” and blamed for the economic problems of Grenada, yet Coard was responsible for economic planning in Grenada, and the brief Source: The Black Scholar, Vol. 15, No. 1, The Struggle for Grenada (January/February 1984).

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