The Grenada Revolution: Reflections and Lessons

297 Pages·2015·1.881 MB·English

by  Wendy C. Grenade (editor)

THE GRENADA REVOLUTION
Anton L. Allahar and Shona N. Jackson
Series Editors
THE
GRENADA
REVOLUTION
Reflections and Lessons
Edited by Wendy C. Grenade
University Press of Mississippi / Jackson
www.upress.state.ms.us
The University Press of Mississippi is a member
of the Association of American University Presses.
Copyright © 2015 by University Press of Mississippi
All rights reserved
Manufactured in the United States of America
First printing 2015
∞
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Grenade, Wendy C.
The Grenada Revolution : reflections and lessons / edited by Wendy C.
Grenade.
pages cm. — (Caribbean studies series)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn 978-1-62846-151-0 (cloth : alk. paper) — isbn 978-1-62846-152-7
(ebook) 1. Grenada—History—1974–1983. 2. Grenada—Politics and
government—1974–1983. 3. New Jewel Movement (Grenada) 4. Coard,
Bernard, 1944–—Interviews. 5. Grenada—History—American Invasion,
1983—Causes. I. Title.
F2056.8.G79 2015
972.9845—dc23 2014029777
British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data available
CONTENTS
vii Foreword
xi Acknowledgments
3 1. Introduction
Wendy C. Grenade
PART I
Historicizing Grenada
13 2. Grenada, 1949–1979: Precursor to Revolution
Curtis Jacobs
37 3. Grenada: Socioeconomic Overview, 1960–2012
Kari H. I. Grenade
PART II
Insiders’ Perspectives on the Grenada Revolution
59 4. A Retrospective View from Richmond Hill: An Interview with
Bernard Coard
Wendy C. Grenade
87 5. Grenada Once Again: Revisiting the 1983 Crisis and Collapse of
the Grenada Revolution
Brian Meeks
114 6. Remembering October 19: Reconstructing a Conversation with
a Young Female NJM Candidate Member about Her Recollections
of October 19, 1983
Patsy Lewis
vi Contents
PART III
Theoretical Critiques of the Grenada Revolution
and Lessons for the Future
121 7. Grenada: Noncapitalist Path and the Derailment of a Social
Democratic Revolution
Hilbourne A. Watson
152 8. C. L. R. James and the Grenada Revolution: Lessons Learned and
Future Possibilities
Tennyson S. D. Joseph
179 9. The Challenges for Revolutionary Change in the Caribbean
Horace G. Campbell
PART IV
The Caribbean Left, Party Politics, and Political
Transitions in Grenada
213 10. The Grenada Revolution and the Caribbean Left: The Case of the
Guyana Working People’s Alliance
David Hinds
241 11. Exploring Transitions in Party Politics in Grenada, 1984–2013
Wendy C. Grenade
264 12. The Spirit and Ideas of Maurice Bishop Are Alive in Our
Caribbean Civilization
Ralph E. Gonsalves
275 Contributors
279 Credits
281 Index
FOREWORD
On March 13, 1979, Grenada’s New Jewel Movement stunned its Anglophone
Caribbean neighbors by summarily removing from office the country’s prime
minister, Eric Matthew Gairy, in the subregion’s first overthrow of an elected
government. Grenada had become legally independent from Britain in Febru-
ary 1974, and March 1979 came just after the end of the country’s fifth year as
an independent nation. Gairy had been accused of abusing the electoral sys-
tem, and the New Jewel Movement was generally considered, even by detrac-
tors, to have the support of a majority of Grenada’s voting-age population.
Four years after the overthrow of the Gairy government, what had come
to be known as the Grenada Revolution collapsed after bloody infighting and
the murders of prime minister Maurice Bishop, other ministers of govern-
ment, and members of the public. From the United States, the Reagan admin-
istration used the opportunity to invade and ensure the demise of a regime of
which it had become increasingly more suspicious. The Grenada Revolution
was over. The year was 1983.
Now, after thirty years during which many key participants in the Grenada
events have said little, Wendy Grenade brings together in this collection a
broad variety of contributors—key participants as well as scholars and com-
mentators on the events—to help us analyze not only what took place but
also, more importantly, what lessons might be learned from the triumphant
beginning and painful end of the Grenada Revolution. The perspectives are
varied. One major detail that all contributors appear to agree on is that brutal
executions occurred on October 19, 1983.
Contributors to this collection take differing approaches to analyzing the
nature of Grenada’s New Jewel Movement and the political process that it led
for four and a half years. One describes the end of the process as Stalinist;
another comments that there was nothing Stalinist about it. There are differ-
ences, too, when contributors interrogate the role of the vanguard party and
consider whether the collapse of the revolution indicated the failure in Gre-
nada of notions of the Leninist vanguard, or the failure of the NJM leadership
to fully understand the nature and meaning of vanguardism.
The varied approaches in this collection recall the responses to the 1983
collapse itself. They evoke the confusion and recrimination of the Caribbean
vii
viii Foreword
Left and the profound sadness and self-examination that the October 1983
choices of the Grenada revolutionaries brought to Caribbean political organi-
zation and to supportive political movements internationally. Each contribu-
tion to the collection, not the least of these the editor’s interview with Bernard
Coard, the surviving half of the Coard-Bishop duo most obviously at the cen-
ter of the 1983 tensions, arouses complex emotions and doubtless, for many,
disturbing memories.
The variety of perspectives is both informative and necessary, urging the
reader to consider themes of memory and history. In his book States of Mem-
ory: Continuities, Conflicts, and Transformations in National Retrospection,
Jeffrey Olick reminds his readers:
Stable images of the past are not always demonstrably true images. Sometimes
false ideas are transferred across generations and accepted as if they were true.
And sometimes we do not know whether an account of the past is true or not.
Truth value and its resistance to revision is plainly not the only source of the
past’s stability.1
Different versions of a painful story are to be expected, and the phenom-
enon of recording several different truths, which is obvious in this collection,
is not unique to the Grenada story. By engaging with memory and interrogat-
ing history, the collection challenges critics of Caribbean political processes
to be informed in their praxis by the lessons drawn from the errors and tri-
umphs of the Grenada Revolution. Throughout the collection, readers are
both informed by the recounting of memories and encouraged to analyze
by the outlining of historical and political circumstances. The juxtaposition
of the two makes fascinating and informative reading. Thirty years after the
end of the political process that came to be known as the Grenada Revolu-
tion, the reader might find it useful, when confronted with a recounting of
the emotions surrounding both the beginning and the end of those four and
a half years of Grenada’s story, to consider what Pierre Nora has to say about
memory and history:
Memory and history, far from being synonymous, are . . . in many respects
opposed. Memory is life, always embodied in living societies, and as such in
permanent evolution, subject to the dialectic of remembering and forgetting,
unconscious of the distortions to which it is subject, vulnerable in various ways
to appropriation and manipulation, and capable of lying dormant for long peri-
ods, only to be suddenly awakened. History, on the other hand, is the reconstruc-
tion, always problematic and incomplete, of what is no longer. Memory is always
Foreword ix
a phenomenon of the present, a bond tying us to the eternal present; history is a
representation of the past. Memory, being a phenomenon of emotion and magic,
accommodates only those facts that suit it. It thrives on vague, telescoping remi-
niscences, on hazy general impressions or specific symbolic details. It is vulner-
able to transferences, screen memories, censorings, and projections of all kinds.
History, being an intellectual, nonreligious activity, calls for analysis and critical
discourse. Memory situates remembrance in a sacred context. History ferrets it
out; it turns whatever it touches into prose. Memory wells up from groups that it
welds together, which is to say, as Maurice Halbwachs observed, that there are as
many memories as there are groups, that memory is by nature multiple yet spe-
cific; collective and plural yet individual. By contrast, history belongs to everyone
and to no one and therefore has a universal vocation.2
Some of the contributions to this collection suggest reminiscences and still
anguished analysis by key participants in the events. Some present perspec-
tives by those who had close alliances with key participants or with the New
Jewel Movement. Others suggest a complex engagement with memory and
history or an attempt to focus more on what historical and political processes
suggest. Participants and commentators appear more willing, in this thirti-
eth year, to discuss the triumph and the tragedy of the Grenadian and wider
Caribbean story and to suggest lessons for new generations. For those inter-
ested in examining the lessons of sociohistorical and political processes, this
is an excellent anthology.
—Merle Collins
Department of English
University of Maryland
2013
Notes
1. Jeffrey K. Olick, States of Memory: Continuities, Conflicts, and Transformations in
National Retrospection (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 102.
2. Pierre Nora, Realms of Memory: The Construction of the French Past (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1996), 3.