Pearls Airport doesn’t get a lot of incoming traffic these days. The only movement is that of goats who nibble the long grass that grows around the Cold War aircraft wrecks that litter this forlorn spot on Grenada’s east coast. Two captured Cuban-Soviet Antonov An-2 and An-26 airframes, located by the old terminal, are a physical reminder of one of the more bizarre moments in the era shortly before perestroika and glasnost became part of common political nomenclature. The 1983 invasion of this tiny Caribbean island by the United States military may seem comical in retrospect. Yet the build-up, and legacy of the conflict, was a deadly serious affair for a place more commonly known for its spices than its political struggles.
Grenada was never really suited for taking center stage in ideological proxy wars. One of the smallest nations in the Western hemisphere, the island was “discovered” by Columbus in 1498, though Arawaks and, later, Caribs, had been living on the island since at least 165 CE. As Beverley A. Steele noted in 1974, it was only in 1650 (twenty-four years after an aborted British attempt to gain control from the pugnacious Caribs) that the French permanently settled on the island, though not without encountering fierce resistance.
“The French under Duparquet landed 200 adventurers who purchased the island from the Carib Chief for ‘some knives and hatchets and a large quantity of glass beads, besides two bottles of brandy for the chief himself,’” Steele writes. Soon after the so-called purchase, however,
the Caribs began hostilities against the French. The French retaliated, subdued the Amerindians, killing many and driving the rest to the north of the island. The Caribs encamped on the summit of a steep cliff surrounded by high precipices, which could only be climbed by a narrow secret pathway. At last the French discovered the way up, and took the Caribs by surprise. A fierce fight took place before the French subdued the Caribs. Those of the Caribs who had survived the battle preferred to hurl themselves to death from the top of the cliff rather than surrender.
Grenada was ceded to the British again eventually, as part of the 1783 Treaty of Versailles that ended the American Revolutionary War. Enslaved Africans were brought in to work on the cotton, sugar, and tobacco plantations, some of which were still extant (albeit without the slave labor and with the addition of cocoa, nutmeg, and banana plantations) when the first rumblings of independence began to resonate in both Westminster and the island capital of St. Georges in the twentieth century.
In an article published in Anthropologica in 1994, Gail R. Pool introduces readers to Eric Gairy, who dominated Grenada in the pre- and postcolonial era.
“Gairy’s rise to power in the 1950s was nurtured by the poverty of the unionized estate workers,” Pool explains. “After leading dramatic and violent strikes followed by substantial wage increases in 1951, Gairy used his union base to launch the Grenada United Labour Party. Quickly moving to contest elections, Gairy and his party won six out of eight seats on the legislative council in 1951.”
Full independence didn’t come until 1974, when Gairy became the island’s first prime minister. It didn’t take long for his popularity to fade, though, both with the local population and with international observers.
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“Gairy turned from a benign leader to a demagogic and manipulative, even vindictive, force in Grenada,” writes Pool. In addition, he was perceived as “a symbol of ignorance since he was reputed to dabble in obeah magic and believed the world should be made aware of extra-terrestrials.”
Enter Maurice Bishop, a London-educated barrister, and his party, the New Joint Effort For Welfare, Education and Liberation (also known as the New JEWEL Movement, or NJM). The NJM seized power in 1979 in a revolution during which their supposedly left-leaning but neutral status was quickly revealed to be a pose that disguised what were actually deep ideological ties and growing economic links with the Soviet Union and Castro’s Cuba.
Bishop didn’t last long as Grenada’s new leader. A 1983 meeting of the Central Committee resulted in a coup, led by Bernard Coard. A week later, the Grenadian army executed Bishop along with many of his most loyal supporters. This level of political violence, conjoined with the fear of having yet another Communist Caribbean island on its doorstep, prompted US President Ronald Reagan to act, explains military historian Edgar F. Raines Jr.
“Popular revulsion at [the executions] led the [Grenada] Revolutionary Military Council that now proclaimed itself the interim government to decree a 24-hour curfew, in effect putting the entire island under house arrest,” writes Raines. The new government,
[h]eaded by General Hudson Austin, the minister of defense in the Bishop cabinet and now a Coard ally…also cut links to the outside world, closing to all traffic both Grenada’s port of St. George’s and its only operational airport at Pearls. The US government became concerned because there were about one thousand Americans resident on the island, of whom some six hundred or more were associated with the St. George’s University School of Medicine.
Along with six Caribbean nations, the US invaded Grenada on October 25, 1983. Around 7,000 American troops landed with a mission to protect the medical students, remove Coard, and restore order.
“The marines seized Pearls against minimal opposition,” writes Raines, but
the Rangers captured Point Salines [only] after a hard fight. They also secured the True Blue campus of the medical school without injury to any of the students or faculty. At almost the same time, the Grenadian Army repulsed special operations forces sent to capture Richmond Hill Prison and Fort Rupert.
Between ninety and 110 people were killed during the three days of conflict, including twenty-four Cuban soldiers and nineteen members of the US armed forces. The result was the swift return of the 1974 constitution and free elections. As Eldon Kenworthy opined in a 1984 issue of World Policy Journal, the invasion was deliberately constructed by the US as a “production” to boost patriotism and confidence among Americans.
“By keeping the press off the island during the critical first few days of the invasion,” Kenworthy writes,
the [US] administration was able to insure that the right images of Grenada would take shape in the public consciousness. […] The images of the invasion that remain with most Americans consist of repatriated students kissing the earth, Marines being welcomed, and the US military showing all the right stuff.
Grenada may have been a pebble in the boulder-strewn landscape of the Cold War, but Reagan knew a thing or two about public relations and perceptions, as you might expect from a former actor.
A decade after the fracas, the aftermath and the many remaining questions about the invasion were broached by Jenny Sharpe in the journal Transition.
the US government seized Bishop’s body as insurance against people’s rallying to the cause of their martyred leader. A body that was believed to be his had been taken away for positive identification. It was later declared to be a case of mistaken identity. The more widely accepted explanation, however, is that the bodies of all the executed party members were either burned or thrown into the sea as an attempt on the part of the Revolutionary Military Council to conceal the evidence of its crime.
The stories about the fate of Bishop’s body were a critical element of the discourse regarding the invasion’s legitimacy, Sharpe explains. Since
Bishop represented the Grenadian revolution to such a degree…the absence of a body permit[ed] V. S. Naipaul to read the revolution as simply a revolution of words. “The revolution blew away,” he declare[d], “and what was left in Grenada was a murder story.”
Nonetheless, Sharpe argues, while “[c]ritics like Naipaul may [have wanted] to believe that there was no substance to the revolution…the invading forces found that they had more than a murder story on their hands.”
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The last seven of the seventeen men convicted over the 1983 coup and Bishop’s execution were released from prison in 2009, nine years after a Truth and Reconciliation Commission was set up to examine the events of the “Revolutionary Years” between 1976 and 1983. Today, Grenada prefers to focus on its reputation as the “Spice Island” of the Caribbean, with a low-key but successful industry determined to avoid the mass-development projects for sun-seekers that have blighted some neighboring islands.
A typically quirky, off-beat attraction in Grenada today is the Molinere Bay Underwater Sculpture Park. Created in 2006 by the British artist Jason deCaires Taylor, the haunting life-size figures, including a man typing at a desk (entitled The Lost Correspondent), fishermen, market traders, and a ring of children holding hands, can be viewed by snorkelers and divers ducking beneath the bay’s surface. For the less adventurous, glass-bottom boats also offer a view of the undersea installation.
In describing his work, examples of which can also be found in the seas off Cancún, Lanzarote, Gili Meno, and elsewhere, Taylor says that he focuses on human forms “for many reasons.” He explains that
the shape of an object is rapidly changed underwater and if you begin with an abstract form it generally becomes completely unrecognizable very quickly. Also, I am trying to portray how human intervention or interaction with nature can be positive and sustainable, an icon of how we can live in a symbiotic relationship with nature. Finally, I believe we have to address some of the crucial problems occurring in our oceans at this moment in time and by using human forms I can connect to a wider audience.
This fusion of art and maritime conservation has a particular resonance for anyone old enough to remember Grenada’s revolutionary years. For now, at least, The Lost Correspondent can focus his reports on crustaceans, rather than conflict.
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