The invasion of Grenada finally gave the Reagan administration what it has been yearning for: a clear-cut military victory over communism. In this case the forces of communism were represented by 700 Cuban construction workers and military advisers.
For several years the bipartisan right wing in Washington has been bemoaning the "Vietnam syndrome," a malady that has supposedly prevented the United States from using its military forces in the far-flung arenas of real and imagined Cold War conflict. With the apparent success of the Grenada operation, both militarily and in the public opinion polls, many will consider the Vietnam syndrome cured at last.
The public accepted the Grenada invasion with relative ease, perhaps because it helped assuage the feeling, widespread after the massacre of Marines in Beirut, that we were under attack and powerless to respond. Also, the press and Congress labored under a surprising ignorance of Grenada's recent history, and still do.
The key to the administration's selling of the Grenada invasion, however, was probably the unprecedented curtain of censorship it dropped around media coverage of the brief war. By refusing to allow reporters onto the island until the fighting was essentially over, the administration was able to make sure that its version of events was the only one available in the first crucial days of the invasion. By the time reporters did reach the island and began to question administration claims, their stories were too little and too late to counter the first impression already imposed on the public mind.
The administration's version of events around the Grenada invasion is a tottering structure of small deceptions and half-truths built on a foundation of false assumptions and outright lies. It used the institution of draconian military rule after the execution of Prime Minister Maurice Bishop as the occasion to intervene in Grenada. But in fact the invasion had been planned and thoroughly rehearsed in well-publicized military maneuvers in 1981. From the time he came to power in 1979, Bishop and the revolution he led had received nothing but contempt from U.S. officials. They had long sought an opportunity to overthrow him.
The scenario for the 1981 mock invasion of Grenada used the abduction of U.S. citizens by island extremists as the occasion for intervention. Following this script almost to the letter, Reagan's first pronouncements on the invasion pointed to the possibility that some of the 1,100 Americans in Grenada might be taken as hostages in the chaotic political situation there.
The administration expressed special concern for the 600 U.S. students at the St. George's University medical school. Yet before the invasion, U.S. diplomats in the Caribbean had been assured by the Grenadan army and the Cuban government that the students would be kept safe. Indeed diplomatic efforts were under way to evacuate them temporarily.
Though it has been obscured by the returned students' effusive praise of their rescuers, the fact remains that in the days before the invasion, the Americans had received no threats. After the fighting began, however, the medical students had good reason to be afraid either of revenge from angry Grenadians or of being hit accidentally by the U.S. forces' heavy shelling of the island. Since the invading forces didn't seem to know where the medical school was located, the students could easily have met the same fate as the 20 Grenadians who died when the U.S. accidentally shelled Grenada's main mental hospital.
After the island was occupied, a new explanation for the invasion emerged. We were told that Grenada was about to become a Soviet-Cuban staging ground for spreading terror throughout the region. As it turned out, administration reports of the quantity and sophistication of the weapons stored in Grenada were grossly exaggerated, as were early estimates of the number of Cubans on the island. In the days after the invasion, even conservative Republican senators were emerging from administration secret briefings unconvinced that the Cuban presence in Grenada justified U.S. military action.
The vast majority of the Cubans in Grenada were assisting in the construction of a new airport. The United States has claimed that the airport, with its 9,000-foot runway, was intended to be a Cuban and Soviet military base. The only evidence to support these charges was Cuba's provision of some funds and a substantial number of skilled workers to aid in the project. Often unmentioned in the U.S. was that much of the airport's funding—50 per cent by some accounts—came from the firmly anti-communist countries of the Western European Common Market.
Grenadians and Cubans have maintained that the airport was intended solely for commercial use, and outside observers visiting the construction site have confirmed that claim. Grenada's sole operating airport is a small landing strip accessible only by a narrow and winding mountain road. It cannot receive night landings or accommodate large airliners and cargo planes, a serious problem for a country heavily dependent on tourism and hoping to expand its export of fresh produce.
Lacking both the capital and the skilled workforce to build a modern airport, the new government of Grenada sought outside aid. It initially approached the United States, among others, for help, but Washington turned the Grenadians away with an insulting offer of $5,000.
President Reagan's selling of the invasion also took up the time-honored theme of "restoring democracy," though what was actually being restored is open to question. Until 1974 the island was a British colony. From the time of independence until the 1979 revolution it had the external forms of parliamentary government but was actually under the one-man rule of Sir Eric Gairy. Gairy plundered the country's wealth, showed no interest in developing its resources or aiding its poor majority, and kept himself in power through rigged elections and political murder.
In March, 1979, the leaders of the popular New Jewel (Joint Endeavor for Welfare, Education, and Liberation) opposition movement learned that Gairy had ordered his men to kill them while he was out of the country. Before the murders could be carried out, the New Jewel took power in a coup in which one government soldier was killed.
After the coup Maurice Bishop was installed as prime minister, and the New Jewel began a remarkable experiment in grassroots economic development and social justice. The island saw free public education and health care for the first time. The literacy rate increased by 25 per cent, and the New Jewel instituted measures assuring equal pay and legal status for women. Unemployment dropped from 49 per cent in 1979 to 14 per cent in 1982. The government leased (not expropriated) unused and underused farm land to establish farm cooperatives. It initiated a drive to turn Grenadan agriculture away from growing cash crops, chiefly nutmeg, for export and toward self-sufficient food production.
Grenada's experiment was working, despite the fact that the U.S. withdrew all economic aid and blocked proposed International Monetary Fund and Caribbean Development Bank loans to Grenada. In 1982, despite a global recession and a sharp drop in income from tourism (partly the result of U.S. propaganda against the revolution), Grenada's gross national product grew by 5.5 per cent with an inflation level of only 7 per cent.
The Grenadan revolution did have its darker side. The government held about 90 political prisoners, mostly Gairy loyalists, and the island's only independent newspaper was closed in 1981 after the revolution's leaders became convinced that it was being used by a U.S. covert destabilization plot. And as Reagan administration officials never tired of pointing out, the revolutionary government had yet to hold the elections promised in 1979.
From its earliest days, however, the revolution instituted experiments in town-meeting-style direct democracy that were quite popular and successful. This year a team of lawyers began work on a new constitution for Grenada, and Bishop promised that after the document met public approval elections would be held under its provisions.
The United States did not carry out its campaign against the Grenadan revolution unaided. It received invaluable assistance from another great enemy of popular movements for justice in this century: the authoritarian and doctrinaire Marxist-Leninist approach represented in Grenada by Deputy Prime Minister Bernard Coard and his allies. Bishop and his brand of grassroots-populist socialism by all accounts had the trust and support of the majority of the Grenadan people. But Coard, Bishop's chief rival, had a "correct" doctrinal line that he sought to impose on the people at gunpoint. Popular support for the revolution was its only possible defense against U.S. intervention, and that support died with Maurice Bishop.
The fact remains that none of the violence, chaos, or tragic betrayal of the last days of the Grenadan revolution justified the U.S. invasion. Though Reagan tried to pin responsibility for the coup and the subsequent killings on Cuba, Castro had condemned both in very strong terms, saying, "No revolutionary doctrine [or] principle ... justifies atrocious methods such as the execution of Bishop." Cuba refused requests to reinforce the Grenadan army or its own presence on the island, even after the invasion was obviously on the way.
Grenada's former ambassador to the United Nations, Caldwell Taylor, delivered perhaps the best summary of this October's events in Grenada. Taylor angrily denounced the "butchers who savagely murdered" Bishop, but also condemned the U.S. invasion. He said that given time the people of Grenada would have ousted Bishop's killers themselves, and he warned the United States that "democracy is not something you can throw down like manna from heaven."
The U.S. invasion of Grenada had nothing to do with democracy. After all, many of the United States' closest allies in this hemisphere don't hold free elections. Grenada's real crime in the eyes of our government was to seek independence. Grenada had the effrontery to try to develop the economic system, political institutions, and foreign policy stance that best served its own interests, regardless of the opinion of the United States. That made Grenada a little island of hope to many people in the Caribbean, and black people elsewhere, who still chafe under U.S. domination.
The United States was compelled to punish Grenada to demonstrate to other peoples how heavy the consequences of straying from the U.S. orbit can be. The logic of the Reagan administration indicates that Nicaragua may be next in line for such punishment. Now that our government has tasted blood and victory, only the most determined public resistance at home is likely to quell its appetite for more.
Danny Collum was an associate editor of Sojourners magazine when this article appeared.
Got something to say about what you're reading? We value your feedback!