Maurice Bishop Speaks

Introduction: Grenadas workers and farmers
government: Its achievements and its overthrow

by Steve Clark 9
The long road to freedom
by Arnaldo Hutchinson 62
Speeches and interviews of Maurice Bishop
The struggle for democracy and
against imperialism in Grenada
August 1977 81
A bright new dawn
March 13, 1979 91
In nobodys backyard
April 13, 1979 94
Women step forward
June 15, 1979 102
Education in the new Grenada
July 2, 1979 114
Imperialism is not invincible
September 6, 1979 122
A permanent, standing commitment to
freedom of worship and religion
February 15, 1980 137
The fighting example of Sandino lives!
February 23, 1980 149
Contents
Maurice Bishop Speaks
Copyright 1983 by Pathfinder Press
Forward ever!
March 13, 1980 161
Cuba, Nicaragua, Grenada:
Together we shall win
May 1, 1980 182
The class struggle in Grenada,
the Caribbean, and the USA
July 15, 1980 188
Learning together, building together
July 27, 1980 212
If they touch Cuba, they touch Grenada
December 1980 218
Two years of the Grenada revolution
March 13, 1981 223
Together we shall build our airport
March 29, 1981 242
Freedom of the press and imperialist
destabilization
June 19, 1981 251
For greater Caribbean Community integration
June 29, 1981 273
The present stage of the Grenada revolution
July 1981 282
Imperialism is the real problem
July 13, 1981 314
The U.S. has embarked on a massive offensive
July 23, 1981 325
Education is production too!
October 15, 1981 336
In the spirit of Butler, Unionize! Mobilize!
Educate! Democratize!
November 18, 1981 349
Grenada is not alone
November 23, 1981 366
Three years of the Grenada revolution
March 13, 1982 385
The year of political and academic education
January 3, 1983 408
An armed attack against our country is imminent
March 23, 1983 416
Maurice Bishop speaks to U.S. working people
June 5, 1983 427
Appendices
1. Statement by the Cuban Government
and the Cuban Communist Party
October 20, 1983 460
2. The truth about Cubas role
October 25, 1983 466
3. Fidel Castro on the events in Grenada
November 14, 1983 479
Index 499
9
On October 12, 1983, Maurice Bishop, prime minister of Grenada
and founding leader of the New Jewel Movement, was placed un-
der house arrest at the orders of a clique of army, government,
and party officials organized by Deputy Prime Minister Bernard
Coard.
On October 19, Bishop and five other central leaders of Gre-
nadas revolutionary government and the New Jewel Movement
were murdered in cold blood, again at the order of Coards clique.
On October 25, thousands of U.S. Marines and Army Rangers
landed in Grenada to establish a military occupation of the island
and brutally reverse the far-reaching popular advances gained as
a result of the March 13, 1979, revolution.
In less than two weeks, the Grenada revolution had been be-
trayed, its workers and farmers government overthrown by ren-
Introduction
Grenadas workers and
farmers government:
Its achievements and its overthrow
by steve clark
Steve Clark is the managing editor of New International. He is also author of
The Second Assassination of Maurice Bishop printed in New International
no. 6, and coauthor with Jack Barnes of The Politics of Economics: Che Guevara
and Marxist Continuity, printed in New International no. 8.
10 / maurice bishop speaks
egades, and the island nation invaded and occupied by U.S. impe-
rialism.
Pathfinder Press is publishing this new collection entitled
Maurice Bishop Speaks because Bishops own words are the best
available record of the accomplishments and inspiring perspec-
tives of that revolution, which for four and a half years marched
forward arm in arm with revolutionary Nicaragua and Cuba.
Making this material accessible to the widest possible audience is
an elementary responsibility of all those engaged in the struggle
against world imperialism and for freedom and justice for the vast
majority of humanity.
Maurice Bishops speeches and interviews provide political
weapons not only for revolutionary-minded fighters in Central
America and the Caribbean, nor even just for those in other op-
pressed nations of Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, and Asia.
They also form part of the revolutionary continuity and political
arsenal of fighters for national liberation, democracy, peace, and
socialism throughout the world, including working people in the
United States, Britain, Canada, and other imperialist countries.
Bishop himself stressed this international significance of the Grenada
revolution during a July 1980 interview reprinted here from the
socialist newsmagazine, Intercontinental Press. The interview was
conducted by Andrew Pulley, Diane Wang, and myself.
Bishop told us that the New Jewel Movement understood the
importance of progressive forces worldwide joining together. We
see that struggle as being one struggle, indivisible. And what hap-
pens in Grenada, we recognize its importance for all struggles
around the world.
We certainly place a great deal of importance on the activity,
the potential, and the possibilities for the American working-class
movement, Bishop said. Not only its potential for solidarity with
national liberation struggles and opposition to Washingtons war
moves, but also in terms of the potential of doing mortal damage
to the international capitalist and imperialist system from within
the belly of the main imperialist power on earth.
Both in this 1980 interview, and again very forcefully in his
June 1983 speech to more than 2,500 people in New York City,
introduction / 11
Bishop emphasized the historic importance and potential impact
of the Grenada revolution on the Black population of the United
States. The island is 95 percent African in origin, he reminded the
New York audience, and it is also English-speaking, thus facilitat-
ing direct communication with U.S. Blacks.
What Bishop wanted to communicate above all was the indis-
soluble connection between the battles for national liberation and
socialism, and the worldwide interdependence of peoples engaged
in those struggles. He understood that the March 1979 victory in
Grenada, together with that in Nicaragua the following July, repre-
sented the extension of the American socialist revolution opened
two decades earlier in Cuba. He told a May Day 1980 rally in Ha-
vana that we recognize in Grenada just as the imperialists recog-
nize, that without the Cuban revolution of 1959 there could have
been no Grenadian revolution, nor Nicaraguan revolution in 1979.
Bishop also recognized what this meant for U.S. imperialism;
the stakes were very high, involving the preservation of the capi-
talist system of exploitation and oppression right on its own door-
step. Washington has certainly put Cuba, Nicaragua, and Grenada
as being the key countries to get at, Bishop explained during the
July 1980 interview.
Cuba for obvious reasons. It is obviously the vanguard in this
region. Nicaragua because of its tremendous importance for Cen-
tral America. Everybody in Central America wants to be a Sandi-
nista. And Grenada, in addition to the special reasons already cited,
because it was part of this unfolding revolutionary process.
As Fidel Castro put it, Grenada, Nicaragua, and Cuba were
three giants rising up to defend their right to independence, sov-
ereignty, and justice on the very threshold of imperialism.
The October 1983 U.S. invasion of Grenada marks the first
direct use of Washingtons own military forces in the new Viet-
nam-style war that the U.S. rulers have begun to carry out in
Nicaragua and El Salvador, as well. Rolling back the socialist revo-
lution in the region is top priority for the U.S. capitalist class, its
government, and its two political parties. That is why virtually all
Democratic and Republican politicians, both liberals and conser-
vatives, fell in line behind the Reagan administrations militarily
successful onslaught against Grenada, despite a few initial tactical
misgivings.
The world relationship of class forces has shifted further to the
detriment of the U.S. imperialists over the past decade. Since their
military defeat at the hands of Vietnamese liberation forces in
197375, and the break in one of the longest capitalist economic
booms, the U.S. rulers have sustained further blowsin Indochina,
Iran, and in Central America and the Caribbean.
These blows have increased the political price Washington will
pay at home and internationally when it directly uses U.S. troops
and planes against revolutionary struggles. Opposition to mili-
tary interventions abroad, which became widespread among U.S.
working people during the Vietnam War, will come more quickly
and go deeper as the deaths and setbacks of the next war unfold.
Recognition that this will occur has put important obstacles in
Washingtons path. It has already been of decisive importance to
the workers and peasants of Nicaragua, Grenada, El Salvador, and
Cuba. It has bought them precious time to consolidate their revo-
lutions and to prepare to defend their conquests against the inevi-
table escalation of Washingtons aggression.
The U.S. rulers, however, do not intend to wait until they have
achieved majority support at home before launching military ac-
tion against the Central American and Caribbean revolutions. They
cannot accept the extension of the socialist revolution to Nicara-
gua, then El Salvador, followed by other countries. For Washing-
ton, the events that opened wide the door to an invasion of Grenada
created a golden opportunity to make a first decisive move. The
prior beheading of the revolutionary forces and disarming of the
people there meant that military victory would come relatively
cheap in U.S. lives and dollars. The accomplished fact of the inva-
sion was then used to whip up greater support for Washingtons
political and military objectives. The justifications for the inva-
sion were presented after it had already taken place. The propa-
ganda of the deed came first, then propaganda of the word.
The response in the United States to the invasion showed that
such actions by the rulers can succeed, at least for a time, in spread-
ing confusion and even winning an important measure of accep-
introduction / 13
tance. At the same time, the polarized character of the response,
the debates and discussions in thousands of workplaces, and the
immediate nationwide protests against the invasion all testified to
the profound changes in consciousness of the U.S. working class
over the past decade. These changes are the result not only of the
Vietnam War, but also of escalating attacks on jobs, living condi-
tions, racial equality, and political rights in the United States.
Polls confirming majority opposition to U.S. military interven-
tion in Central America will not stop Washington from aiding the
counterrevolutionary war already under way against Nicaragua
and the Salvadoran freedom fighters. Nor will antiwar opinion
alone halt the steady buildup of U.S. military forces in Honduras
and throughout the region, or the use of these U.S. troops, planes,
and ships in what could escalate into a new Vietnam-style war.
But the changed political consciousness of the U.S. working
class and labor movement will play a much more decisive role
much more rapidly than even during the late stages of the Viet-
nam War in helping to ensure defeat of the U.S. invading forces
and victory for the workers and peasants of those countries.
That is one reason why Nicaraguan leader Toms Borge told
visiting Canadian trade unionists last summer that while he was
not optimistic in regards to peace, he was absolutely optimistic
in terms of victory.
Behind Borges confidence in victory is his conviction that the
armed workers and peasants of Nicaragua are determined to de-
fend their revolution, their social conquests, and their national
sovereignty.
Prior to the events culminating in the arrest and subsequent
murder of Bishop and other NJM leaders, this same conviction
about the readiness of the Grenadian workers and farmers to de-
fend their social gains gave reason for confidence that if imperial-
ism ever invaded, it could only conquer after a mighty battle. As
Bishop often warned, it would be far easier for U.S. invaders to
come onto Grenada than to get off it alive.
As we begin the fourth year of our revolution, Bishop told
the third anniversary rally on March 13, 1982, it is very clear
that the great strength of the revolution, first and foremost, lies
in the unbreakable link between the masses and the party; be-
tween the masses and the government; between the masses and
the state. That is what gives our revolution invincible force, be-
cause the masses see the party, see the state and the government
as theirs; not something foreign or strange, or apart or isolated
from them, but living, throbbing entities that embody their aspi-
rations, their interests, and their hopes.
When the U.S. invasion actually came October 25, however,
Grenadas workers and farmers government had already been
overthrown thirteen days earlier. On October 12, the Coard group
placed Maurice Bishop under house arrest and organized to use
whatever deadly force was necessary to establish its own total
domination. One week later, the revolution suffered another dev-
astating blow, when Bishop, five other NJM leaders, and other
Grenadians were gunned down by Coards supporters. The very
first proclamation of the new, self-appointed Revolutionary Mili-
tary Council was a four-day round-the-clock curfew, with the
warning that violators would be shot on sight. The entire popu-
lation of Grenada was placed under house arrest.
In our view, Coards group objectively destroyed the revolu-
tion and opened the door to imperialist aggression, President Fi-
del Castro explained to more than 1 million people gathered in
Havana November 14 to honor the Cuban volunteer construction
workers killed during the U.S. invasion of Grenada.
As soon as the internal dissensions, which came to light on
October 12, became known, Castro explained, the Yankee im-
perialists decided to invade.
As a result of these events, Castro said, the new Grenadian
government had become morally indefensible. And, since the
party, the government, and the army had divorced themselves from
the people, it was also impossible to defend the nation militarily,
because a revolutionary war is only feasible and justifiable when
united with the people.
The U.S. imperialists, Castro said, wanted to kill the symbol
of the Grenadian revolution, but the symbol was already dead.
The Grenadian revolutionaries themselves destroyed it with their
split and their colossal errors.
introduction / 15
We believe that, after the death of Bishop and his closest com-
rades, after the army fired on the people, and after the party and
the government divorced themselves from the masses and iso-
lated themselves from the world, the Grenadian revolutionary
process could not survive.
In its efforts to destroy a symbol, he said, the United States
killed a corpse and brought the symbol back to life at the same
time.
Imperialism brought the Grenada revolution to the attention
of millions of workers and farmers around the world. It had to try
to destroy the example of that revolution, to obliterate the sym-
bol it had become. But the lessons contained in this collection,
Maurice Bishop Speaks, prove that this example has importance
far beyond Grenada and the Caribbean. These are living lessons
for those committed to learning from and continuing the world-
wide fight that Maurice Bishop was part of.
Grenadas workers and farmers government
As Cuban journalist Arnaldo Hutchinson explains in the his-
torical review of Grenada that follows this introduction, the is-
land had been a colonyfirst of France, later Britainfor more
than 300 years prior to obtaining formal political independence in
1974. The French colonialists exterminated the native Carib and
Arawak Indian population, replacing it with slave labor shipped in
chains from Africa. Britain maintained Grenada as a source of ag-
ricultural products processed and packaged by British companies,
which walked off with virtually all the profits. Little industry was
permitted to develop on the island beyond tiny handicraft work-
shops, and the lush and fertile island was kept dependent on im-
ported food. A small number of plantation owners and prosper-
ous merchants served the colonial power as a base of local support
and stability.
Little changed for the people following independence. The neo-
colonial government of dictator Eric Gairy, already ensconced
under direct colonial administration, remained in power. In the
early 1950s, Gairy had won wide popular support as a leader of
the fight for independence and to unionize agricultural workers.
He had subsequently misused his influence, however, to sell out
Grenadas working people and build up his own holdings in real
estate, tourism, and commerce. His government served the profit
needs of a handful of wealthy Grenadians, above all his own. The
islands economy remained subordinate to British, Canadian, and
U.S. finance capital. Gairy used the government to gain an edge
on his local business competitors and advance his own personal
interests and eccentric obsessions. He pushed through antistrike
and other repressive measures. To defend his corrupt and exploit-
ative regime in the face of rising protests, Gairy unleashed the
thugs of his feared and hated Mongoose Gang to murder and
brutalize opponents.
In 1973 the New Jewel Movement was formed, primarily
through the merger of two organizations that had been estab-
lished the previous year: the Movement for Assemblies of the
People (MAP), whose best-known leader was Maurice Bishop, and
the Joint Endeavour for Welfare, Education and Liberation
(JEWEL), whose most prominent spokesperson was Unison White-
man. The new organization quickly showed its capacity to mobi-
lize mass support through two rallies of more than 10,000 people
each that same year. Over the rest of the decade, the NJM helped
initiate and lead repeated struggles for democratic rights, against
imperialist domination, and for improved conditions for workers
and farmers. NJM members won leading positions in several is-
land trade unions, as well as three seats in Grenadas parliament.
Maurice Bishop and Unison Whiteman explained the NJMs
political evolution and perspectives in a 1977 interview with Cubas
main weekly magazine, Bohemia, retranslated into English for this
collection. The initial political inspiration for the organization, Bishop
said, came from the ideas of Black Power that developed in the
United States and the freedom struggle of the African people in
such places as Angola, Mozambique, and Guinea-Bissau.
But unquestionably, Bishop added, through the Cuban ex-
perience we got to see scientific socialism close up. This, above
all, he explained, has been teaching us, on the practical level of
day-to-day political struggle, the relevance of socialism as the only
solution to our problems. Our party began to develop along Marxist
introduction / 17
lines in 1974, when we began to study the theory of scientific
socialism.
In the weeks leading up to March 13, 1979, NJM leaders learned
of a plot by Gairy to assassinate them while he was out of the
country. The revolutionists thwarted the planned massacre by
organizing a successful armed takeover of the True Blue army
barracks and of the islands sole radio station. An appeal for mass
support over the renamed Radio Free Grenada brought the people
into the streets by the tens of thousands, occupying the police
station and other strategic points and ensuring victory.
The revolutionary government born in this triumphant popu-
lar insurrection was politically independent of both the imperial-
ists and local Grenadian capitalists and plantation owners, basing
itself instead on the workers and farmers. The New Jewel Move-
ment took the initiative in establishing a Peoples Revolutionary
Government (PRG), composed primarily of NJM leaders but also
of representatives from other sectors of the anti-Gairy opposi-
tion, including some professionals and businessmen. Maurice
Bishop became prime minister.
The New Jewel Movement immediately carried out a measure
proven by history to be indispensable to the survival and advance
of every genuine workers and farmers revolution. As Bishop
explained in a 1981 interview with Cubas Granma Weekly Re-
view, It is our firm belief that no revolution has a right to call
itself that if it does not have or does not develop a capacity to
defend itself. This is why the Gairy army was disbanded and a
new army, the Peoples Revolutionary Army, was created. This is
also why we have been building the Peoples Revolutionary Mili-
tia so that the people of our country will themselves be involved
in the defense of what they have fought for and what they are
trying to build.
The March 1979 revolution was a radical popular uprising. In
its direct impetus and immediate tasks, it was a democratic, anti-
oligarchical, anti-imperialist revolution. Like the Cuban revolu-
tion twenty years earlier, and the Nicaraguan revolution a few
months later, however, the Grenada revolution was at the same
time profoundly anticapitalist from the outset. Deeply influenced
by the Cuban revolution, the NJM leaders recognized that consis-
tent efforts to carry out democratic tasks and throw off imperial-
ist domination would inevitably bring the workers and farmers
into conflict with the profit needs of both foreign and local capi-
talists.
Starting from the organization and mobilization of Grenadas
working people to combat imperialist oppression and establish
democratic liberties, the new government began laying the foun-
dation for working people to carry out the transition from the
domination of capitalist property relations to the establishment
of a workers state based on state-owned industry, economic plan-
ning, and a government monopoly of foreign trade. That was how
the Cuban revolution had developed, making possible enormous
gains for the Cuban workers and peasants in education, health,
life expectancy, elimination of discrimination against Blacks and
women, and growing democratic participation in administering
their own affairs.
That is what the New Jewel Movement set out to achieve on
March 13, 1979. With the working people we made our popular,
anti-imperialist, and democratic revolution, Bishop explained.
With them we will build and advance to socialism and final
victory.
The new workers and farmers government was an indispens-
able instrument at the service of the Grenadian masses to deepen
their mobilization, organization, education, and class conscious-
ness. It put an end to the political dictatorship of the imperialist-
backed capitalist minority in Grenada, replacing it with the open-
ing stage of what Marxists call the dictatorship of the proletariat
that is, political rule by, and in the class interests of, the workers
and poor farmers, the laboring majority.
The Grenadian capitalists, landowners, and some imperialist
interests retained substantial property holdings in agriculture, real
estate, commerce, tourism, and industry. But they no longer held
political power. They could no longer dictate that the government
and state in Grenada would act to defend profits over the needs of
the workers and farmers.
Still ahead of the revolution was the task of breaking the eco-
introduction / 19
nomic power of the remaining big capitalists and landlords. Bishop
and the NJM leadership correctly sought to lead this transition in
a manner that would maximize development of productive jobs
and social benefits, and minimize unnecessary hardship for work-
ing people.
Following the house arrest and subsequent murder of Maurice
Bishop, the big-business press in the United States and elsewhere
began peddling speculation that this course carried out under
Bishops leadership had been too moderate for more Marxist
figures such as Coard, and had not been to the liking of Cuba
either.
First, there is no indication that any explicit fundamental eco-
nomic or social policy question was at the root of the betrayal by
Coard and other NJM renegades. The factors behind their treach-
ery will be discussed shortly.
Second, there is no evidence that Cuban leaders disagreed with
the mixed economy course followed by Bishop and the NJM.
More importantly, the Cubans would not have meddled in the
internal affairs of the Grenadian government and party even if
such differences had existed.
As Fidel Castro explained in his November 14 speech, reprinted
as an appendix in this book, Socioeconomically, Grenada was ac-
tually advancing satisfactorily. The people had received many ben-
efits, in spite of the hostile policy of the United States, and Gre-
nadas Gross National Product was growing at a good rate in the
midst of the world crisis.
Bishop was not an extremist, Castro said. Rather he was a
true revolutionaryconscientious and honest. Far from disagree-
ing with his intelligent and realistic policy, we fully sympathized
with it, since it was rigorously adapted to his countrys specific
conditions and possibilities.
Those specific conditions and possibilities in Grenada involved
advancing the socialist course charted by the New Jewel Move-
ment in the face of enormous objective problems. Grenadas rev-
enues were largely dependent on the export of three agricultural
commoditiesbananas, cocoa, and nutmegand on tourism and
the wholesale and retail trade generated by it. The revolution met
intense economic and military pressure from U.S. imperialism right
from the outset. Moreover, Grenada is a very small island of some
110,000 people, with very little industry and a small working class.
All this created objective limits to the pace of economic devel-
opment needed to undergird permanent advances in social condi-
tions and to free the country from imperialist domination and the
legacy of colonial oppression. Moreover, the revolution came at a
time when the demand and prices for its agricultural products
were slumping on the world market, while outlays for needed
industrial, consumer, and energy imports were steadily climbing.
The NJM leaders understood that it would take organization,
education, and discipline for the working class to prepare itself
and its allies, the small farmers, to administer the entire society
and all the industrial, agricultural, and commercial enterprises that
made it up. It would take time for the new government to build up
an infrastructure of roads, new plant and equipment, state farms
and cooperatives, and administrative and scientific know-how to
lay a solid basis to begin development along socialist lines. Even
over the longer haul, there were no plans to expropriate small
shops or tourist homes, let alone small farms.
The revolutionary leaders of the Nicaraguan workers and farm-
ers government, too, have so far left many shops, factories, and
agricultural holdings in private hands, while declaring socialist
property relations to be their goal and taking important steps to-
ward a workers state as they consolidate their workers and peas-
ants government.
Of course, for a revolutionary leadership to follow this path
means facing the challenge and responsibility to organize work-
ing people to advance their own class interests in the ongoing
struggle between exploiters and exploited. Capitalists and land-
lords can be expected to engage in speculation, black-market op-
erations, and other profiteeringeven sabotage and decapitaliza-
tion. They will use their remaining economic clout to attempt to
rebuild their lost political power.
The question for a revolutionary leadership of the working class
in any such situation is not how quickly in the abstract to move
toward expropriation. The tempo and methods necessary for car-
introduction / 21
rying out a fundamental social transformation are determined by
objective material realities and class relations. Acting on a precon-
ceived schema could bring the economy to a screeching halt, send
potential allies of the workers fleeing to the counterrevolution,
and decimate and demoralize the working class and poor farmers
themselves.
A nationalized factory wont produce more than a privately
owned one if the skills dont yet exist to run it or if sufficient
resources have not yet been accumulated to invest in new equip-
ment, raw materials, upkeep, and wages. An expropriated foreign
bank wont marshal more funds for socialist construction if the
banks assets were largely kept outside the country and the im-
pact of the expropriation is to cut off access to grants and loans
from capitalist governments and financial institutions before al-
ternative aid has been secured. An expropriated plantation will
neither provide decent lives for the landless nor provide products
needed for export income until the government can provide the
credit, tools, fertilizer, and elementary farming skills to carry out
a successful agrarian reform. And expropriating the whole thing
will produce nothing but chaos until at least minimal methods of
control, accounting, and planning can be instituted from the indi-
vidual farm and enterprise up to the national level.
Even after the workers and farmers hold state power, in other
words, wealth is still produced by applying human labor to land,
machinery, and raw materials, not by applying signatures to de-
crees.
As Bishop explained in the July 1980 interview with Intercon-
tinental Press, it is wrong to think that a revolution is like in-
stant coffee; you just throw it in a cup and it comes out presto.
The challenge confronting the revolutionary leadership in
Grenada was how to prepare, educate, and organize the working
population to run that society given the existing material condi-
tions in that small country. The answers could only be deter-
mined by a concrete assessment of the level of Grenadas eco-
nomic and social development; the political relationship of class
forces at home and internationally; the prospects for economic
assistance from the USSR, Cuba, and other workers states and
from other sources; the class consciousness and organization of
the working class; and the firmness of its alliance with working
farmers and other nonproletarian working people.
That required political leadership capacity and experience, not
ultraleft haste and administrative methods.
Two years prior to the revolution, Maurice Bishop presented a
sober but optimistic assessment of the prospects facing Grenadian
socialists in the 1977 interview with the Cuban magazine Bohemia.
Socialism is the future we would like to see in Grenada, Bishop
explained in that interview. At present the reality is that the most
backward forms of capitalist exploitation exist in Grenada. We have
to remember that Grenadawith its small territory, high unem-
ployment, great poverty and misery, with the small size and low
level of consciousness of its working class, with all its commercial
ties to imperialism, and with a profoundly repressive govern-
mentmust accomplish democratic advances in step with the
march of the other countries of the region.
We know how poor and backward our country is, Bishop
said. And we know how difficult it would be to resist the general
economic and political pressures that imperialism would unleash
against Grenada if it tried to break the bonds of domination with-
out first making serious attempts to develop true and significant
links with the socialist camp.
However, despite all the difficulties, he concluded, we feel
that the perspectives for the cause of social revolution in Grenada
are good.
Two years later, the New Jewel Movement would begin to put
in practice the socialist course it had charted for Grenada.
Bishop, Whiteman, and other NJM leaders were quite aware of
the snares and traps involved in leading a social revolution in tiny
and poor Grenada. One conceivable response to this recognition
could have been to conclude, as many official Communist par-
ties have done in the colonial world, that the workers and farmers
are simply not ready to take power there. That the only realiz-
able goals must be limited to democratic reforms, and therefore
the capitalist class or some sector of it must still play the leading
role in any revolutionary government.
introduction / 23
That was not the response of the New Jewel Movement, how-
ever. Bishop and the other NJM leaders correctly saw the Grenada
revolution as part of the world struggle against imperialism, and
for national liberation and socialism. They had the courage to take
the power and chart a course toward the construction of socialism.
But they also had the political sense to understand the real condi-
tions and immediate tasks in Grenada, as well as the steps needed
to prepare the working class and its allies to rebuild their society
on the foundation of state property and democratic planning.
The Russian experience
The Grenadian revolutionists, of course, were not the first to
confront the difficult tasks of leading the working class and its
allies through the transition from the decaying capitalist social
system toward socialism. On a world scale, the workers first his-
torical experience in this regard was the Russian revolution.
In 1919 the new Soviet government took the initiative in
launching the Communist International. During its first five years
as a revolutionary leadership of the world working class, the
Comintern, as it was called for short, discussed the lessons of this
first experience in conquering and wielding power; it drew impor-
tant conclusions for revolutionary strategy and tactics. Extensive
discussions of this question were held at the Cominterns fourth
world congress in December 1922, and at a meeting of its interna-
tional executive committee the following July.
At the July 1923 gathering, a resolution on workers and farm-
ers governments was adopted. It stressed that following the con-
quest of power, the working class must remember the necessity
to harmonize its movements with the sentiments of the peasantry
in their respective countries, to establish a correct coordination
between the victorious proletariat and the peasantry, and to ob-
serve a rational policy in the gradual introduction of the economic
measures of the proletariat, such as was arrived at by the victori-
ous proletariat of Russia in that period of the Russian revolution
which is called the New Economic Policy.
What was Russias New Economic Policy? Why in his speech
to the 1922 Comintern congress did Bolshevik leader V.I. Lenin
say that the NEP was rich in important practical conclusions for
the Communist International and of first-rate importance to all
the Communist parties?
Lenin explained that following the October 1917 victory, the
new Soviet government had made an attempt to pass, as gradu-
ally as possible, breaking up as little of the old as possible, to the
new social relations. . . .
By mid-1918, however, the onslaught of imperialist invasion
and full-scale civil war had forced the Russian revolutionary lead-
ers to abandon this initial course toward as efficient and gradual
as possible a transformation of property relations. Faced with es-
calating economic sabotage by the capitalists and the imperatives
of producing food and industrial goods for the war, the Bolsheviks
carried out sweeping nationalizations and centralized virtually all
trade through the state.
By the end of 1920, however, both domestic counterrevolu-
tionary forces and imperialist invaders had been largely defeated
by the new Red Army. On the other hand, the capitalists else-
where in Europe had succeeded in defeating revolutionary strug-
gles in Hungary, Germany, and Italy, tightening the isolation of
the worlds first workers state. Moreover, the civil war had taken
a heavy toll inside Russia. Many of the most class-conscious work-
ers and poor peasants, who were the vanguard of the Red Army
soldiers, had fallen in battle or died from disease and starvation at
the front. The economic and social dislocation from the war was
exacerbated by drought and famine.
As Lenin explained at the Cominterns 1922 congress, after
we had passed through the most important stage of the Civil War
and passed through it victoriouslywe felt the impact of a grave
I think it was the gravestinternal political crisis in Soviet Russia.
This internal crisis, Lenin said, brought to light discontent
not only among a considerable section of the peasantry but also
among the workers. This was the first and, I hope, the last time in
the history of Soviet Russia that feeling ran against us among
large masses of peasants, not consciously but instinctively.
The source of this crisis, Lenin explained, was not just the war-
caused destruction. It was also a consequence of the too-rapid eco-
introduction / 25
nomic and social transformations that had been imposed on the
young workers and farmers republic by its struggle for survival.
While the peasants had supported this fight against the reimposi-
tion of landlordism and tsarism, their alliance with the working
class was now near the breaking point as a result of the policies of
the previous few years. And this alliance, Lenin stressed, was key
to the defense of the Soviet republic and its advance toward so-
cialism.
In this respect, Lenin said at the partys tenth congress in 1921,
we are very much to blame for having gone too far; we overdid the
nationalisation of industry and trade, clamping down on local ex-
change of commodities. Was that a mistake? It certainly was.
Lenin explained this again the following year at the fourth
Comintern congress. The reason for [the crisis], he said, was
that in our economic offensive we had run too far ahead, that we
had not provided ourselves with adequate resources, that the
masses sensed what we ourselves were not then able to formulate
consciously but what we admitted soon after, a few weeks later,
namely, that the direct transition to purely socialist forms, to purely
socialist distribution, was beyond our available strength, and that
if we were unable to effect a retreat so as to confine ourselves to
easier tasks, we would face disaster.
That was the origin of the New Economic Policy adopted by
the Russian revolutionists in early 1921. The NEP made it pos-
sible for peasants to sell a portion of their produce on the open
market inside Russia. Restrictions on private trade were relaxed
to supplement state-organized exchanges. To help revive indus-
trial production, the Soviet republic sought to lease nationalized
factories, mines, forests, and oil fields to foreign and domestic capi-
talists.
In introducing the NEP, a resolution adopted by the fourth con-
gress explained, the Soviet government is following an economic
path which it would doubtless have pursued in 191819 had not
the implacable demands of Civil War obliged it to expropriate the
bourgeoisie at one blow. . . . The resolution was drafted on be-
half of the Russian delegation by Comintern leader Leon Trotsky.
Such measures, Lenin pointed out, were even more important
for nations less economically advanced than Russia itself. In a 1921
letter to communists in Azerbaijan, Armenia, Georgia, and sev-
eral other nations oppressed under the old tsarist empire, Lenin
advised: You will need to practise more moderation and caution,
and show more readiness to make concessions to the petty bour-
geoisie, the intelligentsia, and particularly the peasantry. You must
make the swiftest, most intense and all possible economic use of
the capitalist West through a policy of concessions and trade.
In other words, Lenin explained, these allied soviet republics
must effect a slower, more cautious and more systematic transi-
tion to socialism.
On the basis of the NEP experience, Lenin drew some general
conclusions for Marxist revolutionists in an article written at the
end of 1921. True revolutionaries have mostly come a cropper,
he said, when they began to write revolution with a capital R, to
elevate revolution to something almost divine, to lose their heads,
to lose the ability to reflect, weigh and ascertain in the coolest and
most dispassionate manner . . . at what moment, under what cir-
cumstances and in which sphere you must turn to reformist ac-
tion.
The last two words of Lenins statement may appear a bit jar-
ring. What did he mean by recommending reformist action?
Lenin explained himself as follows:
Marxism alone has precisely and correctly defined the rela-
tions of reform to revolution, although Marx was able to see this
relation from only one aspectunder the conditions preceding
the first to any extent permanent and lasting victory of the prole-
tariat, if only in one country. Under those conditions, Lenin
stressed, the basis of the proper relation was that reforms are a
by-product of the revolutionary class struggle of the proletariat.
Throughout the capitalist world this relation is the foundation of
the revolutionary tactics of the proletariatthe ABC.
After the victory of the proletariat, however, Lenin said, if
only in one country, something new enters into the relation be-
tween reforms and revolution. In principle, it is the same as be-
fore, but a change in form takes place. Under such conditions, he
said, reforms can represent a necessary and legitimate breathing
introduction / 27
space when, after the utmost exertion of effort, it becomes obvi-
ous that sufficient strength is lacking for the revolutionary ac-
complishment of some transition or another.
Based on the experience of the worlds first proletarian revolu-
tion, the Cominterns fourth congress drew some conclusions about
the tasks of a victorious workers and farmers government, which
it defined as a government which is born out of struggle of the
masses, is supported by workers bodies which are capable of fight-
ing, bodies created by the most oppressed sections of the working
masses.
The overriding tasks of such a government, the congress reso-
lution on tactics explained, must be to arm the proletariat, to
disarm bourgeois, counterrevolutionary organizations, to intro-
duce the control of production, to transfer the main burden of
taxation to the rich, and to break the resistance of the counter-
revolutionary bourgeoisie.
Accomplishments of the Grenada revolution
How had Grenadas workers and farmers government mea-
sured up to these kinds of challenges during its first four and a
half years? The record shows that it had begun to do all this and
more. The steps by the New Jewel Movement to dismantle the old
state apparatus and army and replace it with a new government,
army, and militia have already been explained. What about other
political, social, and economic gains?
All of Gairys repressive legislation was wiped off the books.
New laws were adopted making it compulsory for employers to
recognize unions and ensuring the right to strike. As a result,
membership in the islands trade unions rose from about 30 per-
cent of the labor force before the revolution to some 90 percent.
Other organizations won thousands of members, as well. These
included the National Womens Organisation, the National Youth
Organisation, and the Productive Farmers Union.
Along with these organizations, other bodies were formed at
the initiative of the NJM leadership to begin the hard work of
increasing the democratic involvement of working people in de-
termining and administering the affairs of their country. Coun-
cils were set up in workplaces, parishes, villages, and neighbor-
hoods. These councils discussed and debated proposed government
policies, including the nations 1982 and 1983 budget and plan.
They had the power to summon government ministers and other
officials to appear before them to be held accountable for their
policies.
The New Jewel Movement leaders understood that these mass
organizations and councils could not work miracles. Given the small
size of Grenadas working class and the poverty and lack of educa-
tion bequeathed by centuries of colonial oppression, it would take
hard work and consistent attention to achieve effective participa-
tion by working people in running the affairs of their society. It
was not enough to set up councils, encourage people to attend,
and then hope the rest would take care of itself.
In order to focus attention on this important challenge, the
New Jewel Movement designated 1983 the Year of Academic and
Political Education. In his January 1983 speech launching this,
Prime Minister Bishop explained that our people must develop
in the new year a mental grasp on the true nature of the interna-
tional capitalist crisis which is holding back the progress of our
revolution and the development of all poor countries in the world.
They must know the causes and origins of this crisis. They must
see clearly the link between politics and economics, between im-
perialist exploitation and persistent poverty, between the mad
buildup of arms by imperialism and the economic crisis.
With their political consciousness raised and broadened,
Bishop explained, our people will better understand the neces-
sity to join and to strengthen those mass organizations and trade
unions that already exist. Political education will help to identify
from the ranks of our working people the future leaders of the
revolution and it will help to prepare the working class to assume
its historic role of transforming Grenada from backwardness and
dependency to genuine economic independence.
At his public meeting in New York City in June 1983, Bishop
announced that preparation of a draft constitution had begun, lay-
ing the groundwork for future island-wide elections. These elec-
tions, he stressed, would not replace but instead institutionalize
introduction / 29
and entrench the systems of popular democracy already estab-
lished. The goal was the involvement of our people in a partici-
patory way from day to day and week to week, not just the
right to put an X next to Tweedledum or Tweedledee every few
years, as in elections in the United States, Canada, Britain, or many
East Caribbean islands.
On the economic front, Grenadas workers and farmers gov-
ernment had also registered impressive achievements. In 1982 its
Gross National Product grew by 5.5 percent, for a total increase of
nearly 14 percent since the 1979 revolution. This was at a time
when the world capitalist system was suffering its worst down-
turn since the 1930s and the economies of most countries in the
Western Hemisphere, including other Eastern Caribbean islands,
were stagnating or declining.
Moreover, in line with the revolutions socialist goals, the state
sector was increasingly taking the lead in the islands economic
development. The single most ambitious government project was
the new international airport to promote tourism and expedite
export and import trade. Another priority was upgrading devel-
opment of the islands agriculture and related agro-industries.
This involved both crop rehabilitation and the construction of facto-
ries to process, package, and market these products. Other major
projects included new roads, including vital feeder roads to trans-
port farm produce; several dozen buses for the islands first public
transportation system; upgrading water, telephone, and electri-
cal services, now all state-owned; and hotel and tourism develop-
ment.
Whereas Gairy had spent only EC$8 million on such develop-
ment projects the year before the revolution, the PRG had laid
out EC$237 million since March 1979, which is equivalent to al-
most U.S.$88 million. In 1982, the thirty-two new state-owned
enterprises produced about one-quarter of all goods and services
on the island.
As Bishop cautioned in the July 1980 interview with Intercon-
tinental Press, however, the bottom line for the progress of a work-
ers and farmers government has to be measured, Not in terms
of how many industries you have or how many hotels you have
when the profits are going to a very tiny elite, but in terms of
what benefits are truly getting to the masses. The government,
he said, must meet the basic needs of the populationjobs, health,
housing, food, clothing.
Here, too, the Grenada revolution had important accomplish-
ments to its credit.
Real wages had risen by 10 percent over the 198182 period.
Living standards actually improved more than suggested by this
figure. For one thing, unemployment had fallen from about 50
percent to 12 percent during the first four years of the revolution,
bringing higher family income. Most important, there had been a
dramatic increase in the social wagethat is, the vital services
and commodities available free or at low cost, as a right, to the
population. In all, more than one-third of the countrys operating
budget went to health and education.
A land reform law empowered the government to take out a
compulsory ten-year lease on any land above 100 acres that was
underutilized to put it into production on a cooperative or state-
owned basis. The government had expanded the supply of low-
interest loans to small farmers and farm cooperatives and also
initiated programs to help guarantee markets for their produce. A
state-run tractor pool of forty-five machines was established, and
the government sought to advance modern farming by establish-
ing four new agricultural training schools, as well. These mea-
sures had begun not only to raise the income of farmers and agri-
cultural workers, but also to provide jobs for the unemployed.
Medical and dental care became free. Medicine was provided
without charge for hospital patients and at low cost for others.
Clinics were built throughout Grenada, the central hospital mod-
ernized, and the number of doctors and dentists more than doubled.
Secondary school became a right for all Grenadians; under
Gairy, tuition was required, making education a privilege for the
rich. Free books, school uniforms, and hot lunches were provided
to elementary school children from low-income families. In addi-
tion, hundreds of students received scholarships for university or
advanced technical education, never before available to any but
the wealthiest Grenadians. An adult education program had al-
introduction / 31
ready made strides toward combating illiteracy, with the aim of
wiping it out by 1985.
Free milk was distributed to thousands of families. Price con-
trols were imposed on basic imported items such as sugar and
cooking oil.
Some 75 percent of families had received interest-free loans
and low-cost materials to repair their homes. The newly opened
Sandino Housing Plant had gone into production with a potential
output of 500 prefabricated housing units each year.
Some 30 percent of workers were exempted from taxation al-
together, while new taxes and fees were imposed on local compa-
nies, import-export merchants, and profits of foreign-owned firms
not reinvested in Grenada.
A social insurance plan was set up, Grenadas first on a na-
tional scale, covering workers employed in both private and pub-
lic sectors. Benefits included retirement pensions, sickness and dis-
ability pay, maternity benefits, and payments to dependents of
the deceased.
Special attention was placed on upgrading the rights and op-
portunities of Grenadian women. Legislation was adopted and
implemented against sexual harassment of working women.
Women workers were guaranteed equal pay for equal work. A
maternity leave law compelled employers to give time off, most
of it at full pay, to women both before and after childbirth.
Social programs such as these were a political choice that fol-
lowed from the class interests the government defended. These
programs were vital to the well-being of Grenadian workers and
farmers. Since it is they who produce the islands wealth, their
improved health, education, and welfare was an investment in
Grenadas most important resourceits working people.
The costs and skills required for these social benefits and de-
velopment projects would have put them out of reach for many
years if Grenada had been limited to its own means. But it re-
ceived substantial foreign aid. The most generous contributors were
the government and people of Cuba. As Fidel Castro explained
November 14, Even though Cuba is a small underdeveloped coun-
try, it was able to help Grenada considerably, because our efforts
which were modest in quantity though high in qualitymeant a
lot for a country less than 400 square kilometers in size, with a
population of just over 100,000.
Castro reported that the total over four years amounted to some
$550 for every Grenadian. The biggest single Cuban contribution
came in the form of materials, equipment, designs, and skilled
volunteer construction workers for the Point Salines airport project.
But Cuba also provided doctors, teachers, and technicians; financed
and constructed the housing plant and other industrial projects;
helped establish a fisheries school and fishing fleet; and assisted in
training a professional army to safeguard the revolutions gains.
Other assistance came from Libya, Syria, the Soviet Union,
several Eastern European workers states, and North Korea. The
U.S. government not only refused aid to Grenada, but also sought
to prevent other capitalist governments and international finan-
cial institutions from providing any. Despite such sabotage, Gre-
nada did get considerable help from the European Development
Bank and from the Canadian and other governments.
Early on in the revolution, a U.S. diplomat offered Grenada a
paltry $5,000if the new government pledged not to develop eco-
nomic or diplomatic relations with Cuba. The Grenadian revolu-
tionists indignantly rejected this blackmail. Prime Minister Bishop
gave a speech to the islands working people explaining that while
the new government wanted cordial relations with Washington,
Grenada is no longer in anybodys backyard! Grenada was a
sovereign nation, he said, and would make up its own mind about
both its affairs at home and its friends abroad.
From the start, the revolutionary government pursued an in-
ternationalist course. It established the warmest fraternal bonds
with the government, leadership, and people of revolutionary Cuba
and Nicaragua. Despite its own pressing tasks and limited cadres,
the PRG sent young volunteer Grenadians to help with the lit-
eracy crusade on Nicaraguas English-speaking Atlantic Coast. It
mobilized and educated Grenadians in solidarity with liberation
struggles in the Caribbean and Central America, South America,
Africa, Asia, the Mideast, and throughout the world. It joined the
Movement of Nonaligned Countries. It established diplomatic and
introduction / 33
trade relations with Vietnam, the Soviet Union, the Eastern Euro-
pean workers states, and North Korea.
Because our own struggle is internationalist, Bishop said
during the July 1980 interview, we have over the years been giv-
ing our fullest support to all international causes that demand
such support. We see that as our internationalist duty.
Washington seeks to wipe out all vestiges
These accomplishments set an example for the entire Carib-
bean and Central America, for Blacks and other working people in
the United States, Britain, and Canada, and for the oppressed and
exploited everywhere. They vindicated Fidel Castros description
of Grenada as a big revolution in a small country. With each
passing year, not only did Grenadas achievements grow, but also
their power of attraction beyond its shores. Despite capitalist me-
dia efforts to blockade the truth, more and more people were learn-
ing about and being inspired by the Grenada revolution. Prime
Minister Bishops visit to the United States in June 1983 had a
political impact on a small but important layer of U.S. working
people, and a vanguard section of the Black population.
In order to stop the spread of this example, Washington was
determined from day one to crush the Grenada revolution by
armed might. The military and political groundwork for such ag-
gression began to be laid by Carters Democratic Party adminis-
tration and continued under the Republican Reagan. U.S. military
forces staged a trial run on a tiny island off Puerto Rico in 1981.
This mock invasion was transparently named Operation Amber
and the Amberdines, to echo the actual island chain of Grenada
and the Grenadines. Even the pretexts for the practice invasion
were the same as Reagans phony justification in October 1983
alleged danger to U.S. citizens, influence from a nearby Country
Red (clearly Cuba), and a government that had destroyed de-
mocracy on Amber Island and was exporting subversion
throughout the region.
Despite U.S. claims that it was invited into Grenada by the
Organization of East Caribbean States, Prime Minister Tom Adams
of Barbados admitted that the OECS governments were contacted
about the operation by U.S. officials at the time Bishops house
arrest first became known. The invasion would have been carried
out by the bipartisan cabal in Washington regardless of how many
East Caribbean states agreed to ask for it.
Having now carried out this invasion that has been in the works
for four years, U.S. imperialism is setting about to use whatever
force is necessary to dismantle every trace of the political, social,
and economic accomplishments of the workers and farmers gov-
ernment.
Several days following the invasion, Don Rojas, an NJM leader
who was Bishops press secretary, told a British newspaper that
Grenada would be rapidly colonized by the U.S. occupiers. I
think they will move very quickly to wipe out all vestiges of the
revolution, Rojas said. The local councils and other democratic
structures that we put in place will be dismantled and kept that
way by military force.
Washington intends to smash everything that remains from
the revolution and to reimpose a puppet government directly sub-
servient to U.S. imperialist interests. And thats exactly what it
has been doing.
The central targets have been the cadres of the New Jewel
Movement and mass organizations, whose consciousness remains
the most durable conquest of the revolution. The occupiers are
carrying out a systematic effort to intimidate and break these cad-
res, who numbered in the tens of thousands, especially in the work-
ing class and among the youth.
Support for the 1979 revolution and its gains remains strong
on the island, posing a big problem for the occupiers. Due to the
widespread disorientation caused by the Coard groups treachery
and murderous violence against NJM leaders and the Grenadian
people, many Grenadians mistakenly welcomed the U.S. troops as
liberators. Even the big majority of these Grenadians, however,
consider themselves supporters of Maurice Bishop and the Peoples
Revolutionary Governmenta fact that has perplexed reporters
for the capitalist press.
Will there still be free education in the schools? asked one
young Grenadian woman quoted by a U.S. newspaper. Will there
introduction / 35
still be aid to buy [school] uniforms and books?
Some people here are beginning to ask themselves who is
going to rescue us from our rescuers, another Grenadian reported.
The process of repression and dismantling began with the Oc-
tober 25 invasion itselfso much so that the U.S. government
slapped a ban on press coverage of these initial days of terror. That
has been followed by the arrest, detention, and grilling of more
than 2,000 Grenadians, who were held in small wooden crates
that they had to crawl into on their knees. Those who were re-
leased were given cards warning them to refrain from participat-
ing in any anti-government activities. An unknown number have
been jailed indefinitely.
Kenrick Radix, a leader of the New Jewel Movement who sur-
vived Coards murder machine, was picked up by U.S. authorities
and held for twenty hours in one of these isolation boxes. The
occupiers claimed that Radix had been acting as an instigator in
spreading bad will among the people in public places. In other
words, he had exercised his right to denounce the U.S. invasion
and to call for immediate withdrawal of the occupiers in order to
remove the heavy boot of U.S. imperialism from the neck of the
Grenadian people.
A purge and blacklist of government employees has begun,
based on CIA computer printouts. The U.S.-imposed puppet re-
gime of British Commonwealth Governor-General Paul Scoon has
curtailed political rights. The new government, allegedly needed
to restore democracy to Grenada, quickly announced that even
its trumpeted phony elections might not be held for several years.
The occupiers degrading treatment of Coard and Gen. Hudson
Austin, who are understandably hated by the Grenadian people,
is nonetheless also aimed at intimidating supporters of the revo-
lution. Coard and Austin were paraded half naked, blindfolded,
and manacled on the island. U.S. military propaganda teams plas-
tered Grenada with posters, printed in the United States, showing
Austin with just a towel around his waist; below it was an anti-
communist message. Coard and Austin deserve to be brought to
justice for their crimes, but by the working people of Grenada, not
in a kangaroo court set up by a U.S.-imposed puppet regime.
Along with this repression, initial steps have already been taken
to strip the Grenadian people of the social and economic gains of
the revolution. Free and low-cost distribution of milk and other
necessities has ended. Adult education centers are shut down.
Schools and hospitals have been deprived of teachers and doctors
by the expulsion of Cuban and other overseas staff people. Unem-
ployment has already doubled. And any remnants of mass orga-
nizations and democratic workplace and community councils are
being crushed.
This is what it takes to try to stamp out the vestiges of Grenadas
workers and farmers government and the popular revolution on
which it stood.
Coards treachery and betrayal
As already explained, Washington was able to carry off this
counterrevolutionary onslaught with such apparent ease because
the Grenadian workers and farmers government had been be-
trayed and overthrown. As surviving NJM leader George Louison
put it, the revolution was destroyed from within. Fidel Castro
devoted a substantial portion of his November 14 speech to ex-
plaining the significance of this fact to the Cuban people and to
revolutionists elsewhere in the Americas and throughout the
world.
Hyenas emerged from the revolutionary ranks, said Castro,
referring to Coards secret faction in the government, army, and
New Jewel Movement.
Were those who conspired against [Bishop] within the Gre-
nadian party, army, and security forces by any chance a group of
extremists drunk on political theory? he asked. Were they sim-
ply a group of ambitious, opportunistic individuals, or were they
enemy agents who wanted to destroy the Grenadian revolution?
History alone will have the last word, Castro said, but it
would not be the first time that such things occurred in a revolu-
tionary process.
Castro is correct. Many details of the secret plotting and moti-
vations of those involved may never be known. But Castro is also
correct to explain that the most important facts and lessons are
introduction / 37
already known, and do not depend on yet unanswered questions.
The fact is that allegedly revolutionary arguments were used,
Castro said, invoking the purest principles of Marxism-Leninism
and charging Bishop with practicing a cult of personality and
with drawing away from the Leninist norms and methods of
leadership.
Castro correctly condemned these charges as absurd. He ex-
plained how the capitalist press had made use of them to present
the events in Grenada as the coming to power of a group of hard-
line communists, loyal allies of Cuba. Were they really commu-
nists? Castro asked. Were they really hard-liners? Could they
really be loyal allies of Cuba? Or were they rather conscious or
unconscious tools of Yankee imperialism?
Look at the history of the revolutionary movement, Castro
said, and you will find more than one connection between impe-
rialism and those who take positions that appear to be on the ex-
treme left. Arent Pol Pot and Ieng Sarythe ones responsible for
the genocide in Kampucheathe most loyal allies Yankee impe-
rialism has in Southeast Asia at present?
In Cuba, ever since the Grenadian crisis began, he said, we
have called Coards groupto give it a namethe Pol Pot group.
Much of what happened in Grenada has been clarified in press
interviews with surviving NJM and PRG leaders such as Don Rojas,
Kenrick Radix, and George Louison, who have also given assess-
ments of these events.
*
*
Substantial quotations from interviews with Louison and Radix appeared in
articles by Edward Cody in the November 9, 1983, Washington Post and by
Thomas E. Ricks in the November 8 Wall Street Journal. Radix was interviewed
by Paul McIsaac for an article that appeared in the November 23 issue of New
Yorks Village Voice. Articles in the October 31 Washington Post and October
30 Sunday Sun of Barbados centered on interviews with Rojas, and a major
interview with Rojas appeared in the December 26 issue of Intercontinental
Press. Articles by Morris S. Thompson interviewing Louison appeared in the
November 6 and 7 issues of Long Islands Newsday. Articles based on inter-
views with Louison, Radix, and Lyden Ramdhanny, another PRG member, ap-
peared in the November 6 issue of the Sunday Guardian of Trinidad. In addi-
tion, Louison conducted an extensive but yet-unpublished interview with a group
visiting Grenada in mid-November sponsored by the Canadian University Ser-
vice Organization (CUSO).
A semisecret factional grouping or clique around Bernard Coard
had managed, especially since mid-1982, to strengthen its influ-
ence and control inside the government apparatus, the officer corps
of the army, and in the New Jewel Movement. It functioned more
and more as a party within the party.
This grouping thrived on seeking to pin the blame for the
revolutions very real difficulties on Bishop and other NJM lead-
ers not in their faction, rather than trying to solve these problems
and iron out differences in the course of loyal leadership collabora-
tion and common practical work. Instead of functioning on the ba-
sis of political, objective, frank, honest, and selfless relations inside
the leadership, the Coard group consolidated its position through
favoritism, buddyism, privilege, and administrative control.
Coards ability to carry out his catastrophic bid for power, if
only for a few weeks, was not a matter of Lucifer somehow run-
ning amok amid the heavenly host. A materialist explanation for
what happened in Grenada cannot rise or fall simply on an assess-
ment of the actions of a single individualeven an individual
whose role was unquestionably decisive. These events reflected
the social consequences of objective difficulties from imperialist
pressure, poverty, and small size already described. Coard exploited
these real difficulties to gain a hearing from layers of politically
inexperienced cadres in the NJM for his explanation that the prob-
lem is Maurice.
In any revolution confronting such obstacles, the resulting pres-
sures bear down with a different intensity and results on various
social classes and layers within the working class itself. A small
hotel owner is affected differently from a working person; a farmer
differently from a wage worker; a highly paid worker differently
from one who has more directly benefited from the revolutions
social achievements; and a person who has settled into a comfort-
able niche in the government apparatus differently from some-
one more closely attuned to the masses of the population. While
there is no mechanical correlation between such underlying so-
cial differentiations and the lineup that developed inside the party,
state apparatus, and army in Grenada, the strongest base of sup-
port for Bishop and the revolutionary government clearly came
introduction / 39
from working people, especially among the youth. Coard and his
followers had become divorced from the Grenadian people and re-
flected attitudes of bureaucratism, careerism, and individual ambi-
tion characteristic of the petty bourgeoisie, not the working class.
It is important to add that CIA agents were undoubtedly oper-
ating at every level of the Grenadian government, army, party,
and mass organizations, as they always do in any revolution or
revolutionary organization. Nonetheless, imperialism and its
agents did not create the divisions inside the revolutionary lead-
ership. Instead, they were able to take advantage of weaknesses
already there to exacerbate tensions and turn divisions to their
own advantage.
The petty-bourgeois and bureaucratic modes of functioning
by the Coard faction in the government, army, and partynot
any thought-out alternative political course for Grenadawere
at the root of this groups trajectory. Nonetheless, Fidel Castro
chose his words well November 14 when he spoke of this outfit as
the Pol Pot group.
The point is not to imply that Coard was hell-bent on a whole-
sale expropriation policy, let alone on the extraordinarily brutal
anti-working-class, antipeasant, and antisocialist measures imposed
by Pol Pot.
As Don Rojas explained, however, Bernard and his people . . .
said they were dissatisfied with the pace at which the process was
evolving. . . . Somehow the notion that this process was not go-
ing fast enough entered into the ideological discussion in the party
and led to a kind of cleavage. Some people said we needed to push
it forward more rapidly. Others argued for a more rational, scien-
tific, and less idealistic assessment of this question.
Rojas said that this criticism had emerged rather suddenly, and
that Coard himself had previously argued against such notions as
the governments chief economic planning official.
Rather than recognizing politically that objective material con-
ditions and class relations were above all responsible for the prob-
lems confronting the revolution in Grenada, Coards followers
acted as if it were somehow possible to leap over these factors in
an administrative way.
The Coard and Pol Pot groups also shared, to however differ-
ent an extent, a similar ultraleft, antidemocratic, and authoritar-
ian brutality toward the workers and farmers. Unlike Bishop and
other NJM leaders, Coards relations with the Grenadian workers
and farmers were not based on promoting their organization,
mobilization, and class consciousness, but on administrative dic-
tates and persuasion of the gun.
To justify its maneuvers against Bishop, Whiteman, Radix, and
other NJM leaders who did not share its penchant for dictates and
commands, the Coard group began a campaign of gossip alleging
that these individuals were less Marxist and less proletarian.
Suddenly, Rojas said, we hear Maurice Bishop accused of being
petty bourgeois. We hear Unison Whiteman accused of being so-
cial democratic, of representing the right wing within the party.
This was the first time we heard that there was a right wing within
the party.
Rojas explained that the Organization of Revolutionary Edu-
cation and Liberation, the name of the organization forming the
core of Coards faction, went back to before the NJM was founded.
In the early 1970s it had merged with Bishops MAP and White-
mans JEWEL to form the party, Rojas said, but always main-
tained a kind of clique, an OREL clique, within the New Jewel
Movement during the 1970s and even after the 1979 revolution.
In any genuine fusion of political organizations, it quickly be-
comes irrelevant who among the leadership and cadres of the new
organization had his or her origins in one group or another. No
one makes political judgments or assignments on the basis of
whether or not someone in the party used to be one of our people.
While the MAP and JEWEL cadres had carried out such a success-
ful fusion, it is now clear that Coards OREL grouping had never
adopted this attitude toward the New Jewel Movement.
Coards campaign against Bishop and other NJM leaders took
several concrete forms.
On one level, capable leaders of the revolution who were not
Coards kind of guy were pushed out of the leadership. Kenrick
Radix, for example, was removed from the Central Committee.
At the same time, Coard gradually managed to get more and more
introduction / 41
of his supporters onto the leadership bodies and into the appara-
tus of the party, the government, and the army. He did this in a
very systematic way, Rojas said, so that when he decided to make
his move for leadership of the party, he had already consolidated
quite a power base.
In mid-1982, Coard and those around him began to complain
about serious problems inside the party. In July 1982 Coard re-
signed from the Central Committee, attributing his decision to
slack and weak functioning of the CC and the Political Bureau.
He said that both leadership bodies were operating contrary to
Marxist-Leninist principles of party building.
Charges began to be heard that Bishops alleged political shal-
lowness, lack of Leninist organizational skills and discipline, and
insufficient grasp of party-building strategy and tactics were to
blame for the crisis in the NJM. Coard himself, having stepped
aside, never explicitly mentioned Bishop, leaving that to his col-
laborators. As Radix put it, What he did was to hide behind his
wife [Phyllis, who remained a CC member] and some of the
younger fellows to work his way. Coard used slander, rumor, and
deceit to slander Maurice. The worst of Stalinist tactics.
This campaign went on for more than a year. Then, in Septem-
ber 1983, an emergency meeting of the Central Committee was
called together by Maj. Liam James, a follower of Coard in the
army officer corps and a member of General Austins short-lived
Revolutionary Military Council. Bernard Coard was not there,
since he had resigned from the Central Committee.
Lt. Col. Ewart Layne, another Coard supporter in the army and
later RMC member, opened the meeting. Layne explained that
there was a big crisis in the countrylagging popular support,
problems in the party, bad roads and electricity services, a deterio-
ration of the revolutions international prestige, and so on. Phyllis
Coard and Minister of Mobilization Selwyn Strachan, who also
emerged as a Coard supporter, again spoke of the weakness in the
Marxist-Leninist ideological development of the Central Com-
mittee.
According to George Louison, the initial portion of the meet-
ing did not involve direct criticisms of Bishop, but discussion later
shifted in that direction. James, Layne, and Maj. Leon Cornwall,
also a Coard supporter and later RMC member, got the ball roll-
ing. Phyllis Coard chimed in that many NJM members were scared
to criticize Bishop, because he had been hostile to criticism.
According to Louison, however, it was not until the last day of
the two-and-a-half day meeting that out of the blue a proposal
came out: The main problem within the Central Committee is
Maurices weaknesses. No alternative political policies were put
forward by Coards supporters, Louison said.
Instead, Liam James placed a motion on the floor calling for
Bishop to relinquish part of his leadership responsibilities to Coard.
Bishop was to handle mass work and international relations; his
strengths were allegedly limited to those arenas. Bernard Coard
was to take over internal party work and overall strategy, since he
was the only person who could push the process forward.
Whiteman and Louison argued that the Central Committee
should take collective responsibility for the problems facing the
revolution, not attempt to place the blame on Bishop or any other
single comrade in the leadership. Along with Bishop, they pointed
to the material conditions in Grenada as the source of many diffi-
culties, and stressed the need for more systematic efforts to
strengthen relations between the party, the government, and the
workers and farmers in Grenada.
When Louison asked how such an important change would be
explained to the Grenadian people and to fraternal political par-
ties, Coards supporters answered that the decision would remain
an internal secret of the NJM. Nothing would be said to the Gren-
adian people or other parties.
Of the thirteen members of the seventeen-person Central Com-
mittee in attendance, nine voted for this so-called joint leadership
resolution; three abstained, including Bishop and Whiteman; and
oneLouisonvoted against.
Several more Central Committee meetings took place during
the latter half of September; Coard began to attend. It was agreed
that Bishop would take some time to consider the joint leadership
proposal, and he did not attend most of these late September CC
meetings. According to Louison, from that time on, Coard was
introduction / 43
actually calling the shots. At a September 25 CC meeting, Bishop
agreed to the joint leadership motion, subject to clarification,
Louison said.
Rojas, who although not a Central Committee member none-
theless worked very closely with Bishop, expanded on Bishops
attitude toward the CC proposal. His position to the Central Com-
mittee, Rojas said, and to the party was that he did not have any
problems with the proposal in principlethat if it was a majority
decision of the party, he would abide by the principle of demo-
cratic centralism and majority vote on this issue.
But he would have liked more discussion of the practical ap-
plication of this joint leadership proposal. He had difficulty un-
derstanding exactly how it was going to work, as did many mem-
bers of the party. . . . And he felt, quite frankly, that the way it had
been proposed would have effectively removed him from influ-
ence in the top decision-making organs of the party.
Bishops attitude to the Coard groups talk about more
Leninist functioning of the party was similar. Maurice and the
rest of the comrades had absolutely no difficulty in accepting the
concept, Rojas said, if it meant a more disciplined and more or-
ganized approach to party work; to the norms of party life; to
study; to the application of the fundamental principles on which
the party was built; to an understanding of democratic central-
ism, and so on.
But I think Lenin was being used as a cover, Rojas said. It
appears that the call for a more Leninist organization was mis-
used to cover up what was in its essence a bid for power.
At the end of September, Bishop, Whiteman, Louison, and Rojas
left for Hungary and Czechoslovakia to try to obtain some addi-
tional electrical power generators for the island. It was then,
Louison explained, that the Coard group took advantage of Bishop
being out of the country to begin systematically disarming the
militias. Coard and his followers knew what was coming, and they
also knew that their base was in the army officer corps and a few
trusted units, not in the armed workers and farmers of Grenada.
Bishop and the three other NJM leaders stopped in Cuba for a
few days on their return trip from Eastern Europe. Castro ex-
plained in his November 14 speech that during this stopover, In
spite of his very close and affectionate links with our partys lead-
ership, Bishop never said anything about the internal dissensions
that were developing. On the contrary, in his last conversation
with us he was self-critical about his work regarding attention to
the armed forces and the mass organizations. Nearly all of our
party and state leaders spent many friendly, fraternal hours with
him on the evening of October 7, before his return trip to Grenada.
Contrary to all previous practice, only one other leader of the
NJM and PRG was on hand at the airport to meet Bishop when he
landed in Grenada October 8. For the next two days, Bernard Coard,
who had served as acting prime minister during the trip, made no
effort to contact Bishop about developments in the country dur-
ing his absence.
When Coard learned of the meetings in Cuba with Castro and
other top CP leaders, however, he charged that Bishop, Louison,
Whiteman, and Rojas had taken internal NJM affairs outside the
party and had sought to obtain Cuban backing for their position.
The four NJM leaders denied this charge.
Coard and his backers went so far as to say Fidel had made
himself a little god in Cuba, Louison reported, implying that this
was happening in Grenada as well. This marked the opening salvo
of a new campaign against Bishop, this one centering on his al-
leged one-manism and the dangers of a personality cult.
That was perhaps the weakest charge of all, Rojas commented.
The people who knew Maurice Bishop knew him to be perhaps
the most modest and least arrogant of all the top leaders of the
party. He was the most accommodating and probably the number
one adherent to the principle of collective leadership.
As a result of these developments, according to Louison, Bishop
informed other members of the Central Committee that he would
like to schedule a review in the CC or the Political Bureau of the
joint leadership proposal and its practical application and conse-
quences.
Then, on October 12, a chain of events was set into motion that
would result, before the day was out, in a de facto coup and the
overthrow of Grenadas workers and farmers government.
introduction / 45
Those events began just after midnight, when Bishops secu-
rity detail was awakened and brought together for a meeting while
Bishop was sleeping. According to Louison, they were told that
Bishop was becoming a dictator and that their responsibility is
to defend the working people and not to defend any leader. This
was the set-up for Bishops house arrest, which was to come later
in the day.
At 7 a.m., the members of the New Jewel Movement in the
army met and passed a resolution claiming that Bishop and Louison
were trying to reverse the earlier Central Committee decision and
demanding that these opportunists be expelled from the party.
At 9 a.m., the New Jewel Movement Political Bureau met. The
two main points on its agenda were discussion of the armed forces
resolution, and a motion to expel Louison from the Political Bu-
reau and Central Committee for alleged violations of democratic
centralism.
Later in the day, the Central Committee met. It expelled George
Louison, and members leveled yet another charge against Bishop.
They claimed that Bishop was spreading a rumor that Bernard
and Phyllis Coard were plotting to kill him. Louison stated that
this was a complete lie . . . made up by Bernard in order to try to
justify his position. Rojas and Radix agree.
The Central Committee demanded that Bishop tape a radio
statement that the alleged rumor was untrue, which Bishop did.
At the end of the meeting, the CC voted to place Bishop under
house arrest. His phones were cut off, and any security guards
suspected of loyalty to him were disarmed and replaced. George
Louisons brother, Einstein Louisonwho as the army chief of
staff was the highest officer not lined up with Coards grouping
was also placed under house arrest.
As news of Bishops detention began to leak out to the workers
and farmers of Grenada, the walls began to be covered with the
slogan, No Bishop, No Revo. And that immediate and wide-
spread sentiment among the masses reflected the reality. The work-
ers and farmers government that they had established in March
1979 had been overthrown through a coup that day.
The next day, October 13, a meeting of 400 New Jewel Move-
ment cadres was held. Bishop was brought before it, confronted
with the false charges, especially the alleged rumor, and told to com-
ment on them. Bishop strongly denied having spread the rumor.
Coard, who attended the meeting, did not speak. Once again,
he let his supporters do the dirty work. One after another, they
took the floor to denounce Bishop. They called him a dangerous
individual, Louison recalled. Rojas reported that proposals were
made to expel Bishop from the party altogether, even to court-
martial him.
We all thought certainly the point of the meeting was to vote
on the question and come up with some consensus within the
party, Rojas said, some line of march to explain to the masses
why Maurice Bishop was being placed under house arrest.
But no vote was taken on the proposals. Coards group on the
Central Committee explained that the purpose of the meeting was
to inform the members of actions already taken by the CC so they
could begin taking these decisions to the population the following
day.
The atmosphere at the meeting was intimidating, really in-
timidating, Louison said. Maurices head has already rolled and
so has mine. These would be good deterrents to further offenses.
Bishop was returned to house arrest following the meeting.
On the next day, October 14, Coards supporters began meet-
ing with various groups from the mass organizations, workplaces,
and other sectors to justify their actions. Selwyn Strachan, for
example, tried to hold a public meeting in downtown St. Georges
to announce that Bishop had been replaced as prime minister by
Coard. A crowd gathered and chased Strachan off the street. A
little later that day, Radio Free Grenada announced that Coard
had resigned as deputy prime minister and finance minister in
order to clear the air of the rumor that he was plotting to assas-
sinate Bishop.
These events on October 14 were the first to be reported in the
international press. From then on, Bernard and Phyllis Coard and
Strachan evidently decided to lay low for a while, hoping to weather
the storm of popular oppositionthe depth of which they had
misjudgedbefore making further public appearances. They were
introduction / 47
not heard about publicly again until the U.S. invasion and their
subsequent arrest.
The following day, October 15, Kenrick Radix, together with
union leader Fitzroy Bain, led the first street demonstration de-
manding the release of Bishop and his reinstatement as prime
minister. And George Louison began a series of private meetings
with Coard, hoping to find some way to resolve the worsening
situation.
According to the Cuban government, Fidel Castro sent a mes-
sage to the NJM Central Committee that day, as well. It was deliv-
ered directly to Coard. While Cuba had no intention of interfer-
ing in Grenadas internal affairs, the message said, Castro expressed
his deep concern that the division that had arisen could do con-
siderable damage to the image of the revolutionary process in
Grenada, both inside the country and abroad, including in Cuba.
But Coard took no heed of the Cubans concerns.
This group of Coards that seized power in Grenada expressed
serious reservations toward Cuba from the very beginning, Castro
explained in the November 14 speech, because of our well-known
and unquestionable friendship with Bishop.
On October 16, Gen. Hudson Austin gave a speech over Radio
Free Grenada, attempting to diffuse and demobilize the mounting
protest evidenced by the reaction to Strachan and the street dem-
onstration. He now sought to reassure Grenadians that Bishop
was not being challenged as prime minister, and that Bishop was
just at home and quite safe.
Then Austin got down to the actual point of the radio address
to present the slanders against Bishop for the first time publicly.
The NJM, Austin said, had voted to expel Bishop from the party
in order to stop the steady growth of one-man rule in our party
and country. The lie about the rumor and the other false charges
were also repeated. Bishop had disgraced Grenada by these ac-
tions, Austin said, and had been expelled from the New Jewel
Movement. At the same time, Austin stressed that there has been
no dispute over the political and economic policies of the party.
On October 18, Radix led a second street protest, following
which he was picked up and jailed by Coards backers. Unison
Whiteman, who was foreign minister, returned to Grenada from
the United States, where he had spoken before the United Na-
tions General Assembly the previous week; he immediately be-
gan working with Louison, still in hopes of reaching a settlement
with Coard. But the uncontrolled as well as controlled forces set
in motion October 12 had already shattered that possibility.
Coard and his group were completely contemptuous of the
Grenadian people, Louison later said. They believed that no
matter what action they took, they could eventually explain it
away. The Grenadian people are bound to get tired and hun-
gry, Coard told Louison, and then they would stop marching and
go back to work. Things would return to normal. Gairy had let
people demonstrate every day for almost two months straight in
197374, Coard reminded him.
Up until that point, Louison said, I still believed a peaceful
solution was possible. On October 18, however, he became con-
vinced that the opposite was the case. There was a distinct wing
of the Central Committee that wanted a military solution, Louison
explained. That Im clear of because I discussed it with them.
Whiteman called a Caribbean press agency later that day and
announced that he, Louison, housing minister Norris Bain, and
education minister Jacqueline Creft had all resigned from the gov-
ernment. Shortly afterwards, George Louison was jailed.
Then came October 19Coards Bloody Wednesday. Unison
Whiteman and Fitzroy Bain led another demonstration, this one
of 5,000, while another 25,00030,000 waited in the market place
for Bishop to speak. That amounted to some 2530 percent of
Grenadas entire population, comparable to 6075 million in the
United States. The demonstrators went to Bishops residence and
managed to free him. Rojas spoke with Bishop, the last living NJM
leader to have done so. He reports that Bishop told him that those
criminals up on the hill were going to turn their guns on the
people and that the people must disarm them first.
Bishop asked Rojas to lead a contingent to the central tele-
phone exchange and to communicate several messages to the world.
He asked Rojas to call on Grenadians overseas and on trade unions
and progressive forces in the region to make known their support
introduction / 49
for the peoples mass outpouring that day.
Rojas said that Bishop was concerned about efforts by a small
handful of right-wingers in Grenada to use the protests against
his house arrest as an opportunity to spread anti-Cuban and anti-
communist propaganda. According to Rojas, Bishop wanted the
point made very clearly that President Fidel Castro and the Cu-
ban people had absolutely no involvement in this crisis, and that
nothing that might happen in Grenada should serve as a justifica-
tion for U.S. intervention.
The mass demonstration marched to Fort Rupert, the army
headquarters. Most of the soldiers in the garrison joined in the
protest, turning over their weapons to members of the militia in
the crowd. The plan was to arrange some kind of telephone hookup
from inside the fort by which Bishop could address the Grenadian
people over a public address system.
This was the last effort by Bishop, Whiteman, and other cen-
tral New Jewel Movement leaders to salvage the revolution and
restore a workers and farmers government to power. They sought
to appeal to the army to refuse orders and, together with the people,
to rise up and overthrow the illegitimate Coard regime that had
strangled the revolutionary government. The response of the sol-
diers at Fort Rupert showed that this might well have happened if
there had been sufficient time to get out Bishops call for resis-
tance and begin organizing on that basis. This attempt by Bishop
was the only possible revolutionary course under the circum-
stances.
Shortly after the crowd arrived at Fort Rupert, however, Coard
ordered three armored personnel carriers to the garrison. They
fired automatic weapons into the crowd, killing an unknown num-
ber of participants and wounding many others. Bishop, Whiteman,
Fitzroy Bain, Norris Bain, Jacqueline Creft, and union leader
Vincent Noel surrendered themselves peacefully, in order to avoid
a wholesale massacre. They were separated from the rest of the
crowd and summarily murdered inside the fort.
I am 100 percent sure [that Coard] ordered the killings,
Louison later said. Radix agreed. Despite the fact that Coard
dropped from public view hoping to deflect the Grenadian peoples
wrath, Radix said, I want to make clear that the RMC [the Revo-
lutionary Military Council officially headed by General Austin]
was an extension of Bernard Coard. . . . He devised the thing.
These are the events, to the extent they are known at this time,
that surrounded the overthrow of the workers and farmers gov-
ernment in Grenada. Coards secret faction had moved from am-
bition and cliquism, to open treachery and betrayal of the revolu-
tion, and then to the murder of the revolutionary people and their
leadership.
In the process, as Rojas put it, Coard handed Grenada on a
platter to the U.S. with all the trimmings. That is why the resis-
tance by Grenadians to the U.S. invasion was limitedalthough,
as Castro explained November 14, despite these adverse circum-
stances, a number of Grenadian soldiers died in heroic combat
against the invaders. Coards actions are responsible for the con-
fusion among many Grenadians about the counterrevolutionary
goals of the U.S. intervention, as well for the fact that some
Grenadians who had supported the revolution have now fallen
for the lie, peddled both by Coard and the imperialists, that the
betrayers were the real Marxists.
With the arrest of Bishop, the U.S. rulers immediately recog-
nized that this was the opening they had been waiting for, the
chance to crush everything that was left of the revolution and the
mass organizations. They had to move quickly to prevent a civil
war from developing and the emergence of a new leadership of
the New Jewel Movement that could topple the Coard regime and
reestablish a revolutionary government. Radix, Louison, and Rojas
are all convinced that the revolutionary majority in Grenada had
at least a fighting chance of doing just that had Washington not
invaded.
Of course, the United States government could have moved to
crush the revolution militarily even if these events had not oc-
curred. Perhaps it even could have succeeded, although that was
far from certain. But the strength of the revolution had stayed
Washingtons hands for more than four years, and an invasion
was not inevitable in the foreseeable future. Moreover, the politi-
cal and military price that U.S. imperialism would have paid for
introduction / 51
such an assault would have been very high. As anyone who had
visited Grenada and witnessed the popular commitment to that
revolution can testify, the workers and farmers would have put up
a mighty battle to defend their government.
But that government had been overthrown, and the people dis-
armed and demobilized. Coards factionalism and splitting opera-
tion threw a decisive and fatal weight into the balance, tipping it
toward Washington.
Cubas internationalist leadership and role
There is another important factor that would have weighed in
favor of the Grenada revolution had not Coard toppled the revo-
lutionary government. That is the help that Cuba could have ren-
dered in the event of a U.S. invasion. The Cubans had long made
clear their commitment to do whatever was necessary and possible
to defend Grenada. Bishop told the May Day 1980 rally in Havana
that, Certainly we in Grenada will never forget that it was the
military assistance of Cuba in the first weeks of the revolution that
provided us with the basis to defend our own revolution.
At a press conference in Havana late at night October 2526,
just after the U.S. invasion, and again more briefly in his Novem-
ber 14 speech, Fidel Castro explained how the Cuban government
had conducted itself in the days leading up to the aggression. Ear-
lier, on October 20, the day after the murder of Bishop, the Cuban
government had issued a public condemnation of the criminal ac-
tions by the so-called Revolutionary Military Council.
The Cuban revolutionists released these public statements not
only to make clear their own position, but also because they rec-
ognized their responsibility to lead the working class and oppressed
on a world scale, explaining these treacherous actions and laying
out a perspective for supporters of the Grenada revolution.
While explaining that Coards actions had made a U.S. inva-
sion virtually inevitable, the Cubans conducted themselves in such
a way as to make the U.S. imperialists pay the biggest possible
price for such aggression. They sought to place the workers and
farmers of Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Cuba in the best situa-
tion to defend their revolutions in the face of this escalation of
U.S. military intervention in the region.
Despite the avalanche of bourgeois press smears throughout
the Grenada events, the Cuban government and its leaders won
international respect and recognition for their exemplary conduct.
Many people today understand more clearly than before the revo-
lutionary character and importance of the Cuban leadership in
world politics. This has increased the authority of the Cuban revo-
lution in sectors of the Black movement in the United States, for
example.
Because of the significance of these October 20, October 25,
and November 14 Cuban documents, all three have been repro-
duced here as appendices to this collection, Maurice Bishop Speaks.
In these statements, the Cubans explained several fundamental
principles of their proletarian internationalist approach to world
politics.
First, the Cubans stressed that their international policy is based
on the principle of noninterference in the internal affairs of other
parties, governments, and countries. Whatever relations or agree-
ments they enter into are only at the request of those parties and
governmentswith no political strings attached. The Cubans do
not try to pick and choose among leaders, to pit them against each
other, or to impose policies. They give advice with generosity, but
only when it is asked for, and only as advice, never dictates.
It is to our revolutions credit, Castro explained November
14, that, in spite of our profound indignation over Bishops re-
moval from office and arrest, we fully refrained from interfering
in Grenadas internal affairs. We refrained even though our con-
struction workers and all our other cooperation personnel in
Grenadawho did not hesitate to confront the Yankee soldiers
with the weapons Bishop himself had given them for their de-
fense in case of an attack from abroadcould have been a decisive
factor in those internal events.
Those weapons, Castro explained, were never meant to be
used in an internal conflict in Grenada and we would never have
allowed them to be so used. We would never have been willing to
use them to shed a single drop of Grenadian blood.
Second, the Cubans explained that despite their own limited
introduction / 53
resources, they do whatever they can to aid peoples throughout
the world who are oppressed by imperialism or engaged in struggle
against it. In his speech November 14, Fidel Castro stressed that
despite Cubas attitude toward Coards government in Grenada,
We could not accept the idea of leaving the Grenadians without
doctors or leaving the airport, which was vital to the nations
economy, unfinished.
Especially after Washingtons dispatch of its naval armada to
the seas off Grenada, Castro said, the Cubans couldnt possibly
leave the country. If the imperialists really intended to attack
Grenada, it was our duty to stay there. To withdraw at that time
would have been dishonorable and could have even triggered ag-
gression in that country then and in Cuba later on.
Under the impossible circumstances created by Coards group,
however, the Cuban government made the correct and necessary
decision that Cuban personnel would fight only if attacked by U.S.
invading forces. On October 22, the Cuban government sent a
message with these instructions to its mission in Grenada, to be
communicated to the Cuban construction workers and other per-
sonnel on the island. We would thus be defending ourselves,
that message said, not the [new Grenadian] government and its
deeds.
That same day Cuba sent a message to the Revolutionary Mili-
tary Council, rejecting an appeal by General Austin for additional
military aid. In a message to its embassy in Grenada the following
day, the Cuban government explained its decision to reject this
request. It pointed out that the members of the Revolutionary
Military Council themselves are the only ones responsible for
the creation of this disadvantageous and difficult situation for the
revolutionary process politically and militarily. (Coards group
was spreading the slanderous charge that blame for the impend-
ing U.S. aggression lay with Cuba because of its October 20 state-
ment condemning the murder of Bishop.)
In its reply to the RMC leaders themselves, the Cuban govern-
ment stressed that while rejecting the military request, Cuba would
conduct a vigorous international political campaign to counter the
U.S. threats. If the invasion nonetheless took place, the Cubans
said, it would be the duty of the RMC officials to die fighting, no
matter how difficult and disadvantageous the circumstances may
bea duty they showed no inclination to carry out. It is note-
worthy, Don Rojas explained, that the fifteen members of the
RMC and Coard, Strachan, and Austin all either surrendered to
the Yankee invaders or were captured without resistance. This was
the same group who . . . called on the Grenadian people to fight
to the last man, woman, and child.
When the U.S. attack began, Cuban relations with the Coard-
Austin government were so strained that there was no coordina-
tion between the Grenadian army and the Cuban construction
workers. The Cuban volunteers, as instructed, began fighting only
when attacked by the U.S. forces, and then they fought heroically
and well. They gave their lives to provide Washington a small
example of what would happen if U.S. forces invade El Salvador,
Nicaragua, or Cuba.
Not the first time
As Fidel Castro explained in Havana November 14, what took
place in Grenada at Coards hands was not the first time that
such things occurred in a revolutionary process.
Cuban Marxists have had their own direct experience, in 1962
and again in 196668, with the types of methods employed by
Coard, and the dangers posed by them.
At the end of 1961, the July 26 Movementwhich had led the
workers and peasants to victory and to the consolidation of the
first workers state in the Americasfused with the Popular So-
cialist Party (PSP), the traditional prerevolution Communist Party
in Cuba, and with a third organization called the Revolutionary
Directorate. The fused party took the name Integrated Revolu-
tionary Organizations (ORI).
Anbal Escalante, a longtime PSP leader, became organizational
secretary of this new party. He abused his position by replacing
cadres in the party and state apparatus almost exclusively with
former associates from the PSP. Escalante then winked at the bu-
reaucratic practices and the privileges and even corruption of these
appointees.
introduction / 55
Escalante also started a rumor-mill belittling the July 26 cadres
and leaders. Fidel Castro, for example, was accused of not func-
tioning as part of a collective leadership and of not being suffi-
ciently Marxist. The popular support for Castro and other July 26
leaders was dismissed as signs of a developing personality cult.
The PSP cadres, it was alleged, were the real party builders and
Marxists.
To put a halt to these abuses, the ORI National Directorate
held a series of discussions, removed Escalante from his positions,
and instituted a number of other organizational changes. In March
1962, Castro presented a televised speech on behalf of the ORI
leadership to explain to the people of the world what had hap-
pened, what had been done to correct it, and the lessons that could
be learned from this experience. The speech became known in Cuba
and around the world by the title, Against Bureaucracy and Sec-
tarianism.
Castro pointed out that under Escalante, the party was being
converted from what it should be, an apparatus of the workers
vanguard, into a nest of privilege, favoritism, immunities,
and favors. The workers and party cadres, Castro said, were be-
ginning to ask: Was [the ORI] a nucleus of revolutionists? Or
was it a mere shell of revolutionists, well versed in dispensing
favors?
If the party did not reverse this process, Castro said, it would
no longer enjoy the prestige which a revolutionary nucleus should
enjoy, a prestige born solely from the authority which it has in
the eyes of the masses, an authority imparted to it by the example
which its members set as workers, as model revolutionists.
In light of the bourgeois propaganda campaign around Grenada,
it is interesting to note Castros reference in the 1962 speech to
similar disinformation efforts at that time. It is logical to expect
that the enemy will take advantage of these errors [by the Escalante
grouping] to sow confusion, to go about saying that the Commu-
nists have taken over in Cuba; that Fidel has been replaced by Blas
[Roca, another PSP leader] or Anbal, or someone else, and Ral
[Castro] by another.
Concerning the charge of a developing cult of personality, Castro
had this to say: Those evils have not been a threat in our country.
The only danger there was was the one that we did not see. How
blind we were! What a difference between theory and practice!
What a good lesson!
If we have one leader, two, ten with prestige, we should have
more leaders with prestige, Castro said. We should not destroy
those leaders who have prestige, which has been gained because
of what they have done for the revolution. That only ends up
destroying the prestige of the revolution itself, Castro said. The
task should be to develop more leaders known for their selfless
activity and hard work.
Escalantes campaign of rumor had taken a toll on the revolu-
tion, Castro said. Clearly this discouraged the masses, he ex-
plained. No, the masses did not turn against the revolution, he
said, theyre always with the revolution. . . . But this cooled the
enthusiasm of the masses; this cooled the fervor of the masses.
Whats more, Castro said, Escalantes factional activity fueled
anticommunism, which still had a foothold in Cuba in those early
years of the revolution. The leaders of the revolution had worked
hard to combat anticommunism through patient education and
experience, Castro said. But, confronted with the bureaucratic prac-
tices of the Escalante grouping, many people will ask: Is this
communism? Is this socialism? This arbitrariness, this abuse, this
privilege, all this, is this communism?
Castro also took up the charge that some ORI leaders were less
Marxist than others because of their political origins. The revo-
lution is irrevocably defined as Marxist-Leninist, he said. Let
no one suffer from any fantasies or engage in any illusions on
this score. Do not imagine that we are going to take a single step
backwards. No, on the contrary, we are going to move forward!
From this moment on, comrades, Castro said, all differences
between the old and the new, between those who fought in the
Sierra and those who were down in the lowlands, between those
who took up arms and those who did not, between those who
studied Marxism and those who did not study Marxism before,
we feel that all these differences between them should cease. That
from this moment on, we have to be one thing alone. That is,
introduction / 57
every party cadre was part of a common organization seeking to
advance the revolution based on studying and applying the Marxist
program and strategy in light of the living class struggle in Cuba
and worldwide.
Following Castros speech, Escalante was sent abroad to serve
as a minor diplomatic official. Over the next few years, imperialist
economic and military pressures against Cuba intensified, exacer-
bating shortages and other difficulties on the island. Attempts to
extend the revolution in Latin America through support to sev-
eral guerrilla war efforts failed, capped by the defeat of Che Gue-
varas forces in Bolivia, and some domestic measures aimed at
accelerating economic development proved to be overambitious
and ill-suited to the countrys actual situation.
In 1964 Escalante returned to the island to be with an ailing
relative. Later in the decade, amid the heightened social tensions,
he began to carry out renewed secret factional activity, using the
same methods of innuendo and slander.
Again reminiscent of Coards charges against Maurice Bishop,
the Escalante supporters began passing themselves off as heroes
of a battle against petty-bourgeois leadership, as Cuban leader
Carlos Rafael Rodrguez explained at a 1968 meeting of the partys
Central Committee called to discuss the matter. One of Escalantes
people complained to several lower-level Soviet officials in Cuba
that, Fidel wants Cuba to be the hub of the whole world . . . so
that he can achieve a stature greater than that of Marx, Engels,
and Lenin, and that in Cuba policy is made by no one but Fidel
Castro.
At the 1968 Central Committee meeting, Rodrguezhimself
a former central leader of the PSPexplained what was at stake
in combating Escalantes methods. The harm done by Escalante,
Rodrguez said, lies in the fact that he frustrated a process of
unity that began by being, and could have been, a joyous, frater-
nal process in which comrades from various organizations, who
had worked jointly or separately toward the same objective, were
beginning to unite. He turned that into a bitter process, one that
has since been painful.
The number of people involved in the second Escalante affair
was small, but in one respect their activities were even more seri-
ous than in 1962. Escalante and his supporters tried to capitalize
on strained relations that had developed between Cuba and the
governments of the Soviet Union and several Eastern European
countries over differences concerning aid to Vietnam and other
international issues. The Escalante grouping urged personnel in
the Soviet and Czech embassies to get their governments to bring
pressure on the Cuban leadership to change its policies. They
even went so far as to propose the withholding of economic aid
and military aid from Cuba as a factional club against the revo-
lutions leadership. Some officials from these two countrieswho
were later ordered to leave Cubacooperated with Escalantes ma-
neuvers.
In 1968 Escalante and the core of his grouping were tried for
violations of Cuban law committed in the course of their factional
activity; they were convicted and sent to prison.
From both these rounds of the battle against the Escalante
grouping, the Cuban leaders drew important lessons about lead-
ership methods, bureaucracy, and the relationship between the
party, the state apparatus, the army, the mass organizations, and
the workers and farmers.
During his March 1962 speech, Castro proposed a new proce-
dure for becoming a party member. From that time on, the major-
ity of nominees were accepted into party membership only after
having been elected a model worker by an assembly of their co-
workers. This included all the workers in a given workplaceparty
members and non-party members alikewho knew the individual,
and knew whether or not he or she was actually playing a leader-
ship role as part of the communist vanguard of the Cuban work-
ing class. At the partys 1980 congress, Castro reported that the
number of workers in the party had tripled since 1975, and that
the party and its leadership bodies also had more women, more
veterans of internationalist missions, and more peasants and agri-
cultural workers. As a result, Castro said, the party had become
more Marxist-Leninist and more revolutionary, as well.
The 1968 events, in particular, drove home once more the prin-
ciple that the Cubans have enunciated time and again in all their
introduction / 59
statements on Grenadano interference in the internal affairs of
other governments and other parties.
Combined with difficult objective circumstances, factional and

administrative leadership methods such as those of the Coard
grouping can split the vanguard party of the working class, sepa-
rate it from the masses of working people, and lead to destruction
of the revolution. In the process, the workers and farmers can be
left wide open to direct imperialist intervention and repression.
As the example of Cuba proves, however, such a development
is far from inevitable.
In his speech in Havana November 14, Fidel Castro warned the
U.S. imperialists not to let their victory in Grenada and their air
of triumph . . . go to their heads, leading them to commit serious,
irreversible errors. They will not find in El Salvador, Nicaragua,
and Cuba the particular circumstances of revolutionaries divided
among themselves and divorced from the people that they found
in Grenada.
Pointing to the determined resistance by Cuban construction
workers at Point Salines, Castro asked the crowd of more than
one million workers and farmers: If in Grenada, the imperialists
had to bring in an elite division to fight against a handful of iso-
lated men struggling in a small stronghold, lacking fortifications,
a thousand miles from their homeland, how many divisions would
they need against millions of combatants fighting on their own
[Cuban] soil alongside their own people?
Nicaraguan leader Humberto Ortega told a gathering of San-
dinista Youth in Managua, The Yankees wont find us with our
arms locked in storerooms. We have already distributed weapons
and millions of bullets throughout the country.
And Vietnamese President Truong Chinh, after condemning
the U.S. invasion of Grenada, warned that if Washington were
reckless enough to invade Cuba and Nicaragua, then many other
Vietnams would emerge in Central America and Latin America.
Washington will certainly not find the job easy when it sends
its troops and planes against the revolutionary peoples of Nicara-
gua and El Salvador, as it is right now preparing to do. As casual-
ties mount and reverses accumulate, the U.S. capitalists will quickly
find themselves fighting a second front at home, as well. U.S. work-
ers dont want another Vietnam-style war. And they are growing
increasingly angry over government and big-business attacks on
their jobs, on their living and working conditions, on the rights of
Blacks, Latinos, and women, and on democratic rights in general.
Whats more, U.S. troops and firepower cannot erase the ex-
ample and rich lessons of the Grenada revolution. Along with
revolutionary Cuba and Nicaragua, the workers and farmers gov-
ernment brought to power in 1979 by the Grenadian people re-
mains, as Fidel Castro once put it, one of the three giants of the
Caribbean. Nor can the imperialists sweep away the contribution
made by Maurice Bishop and the New Jewel Movement to the
process of constructing a new revolutionary leadership of the
working class and its allies in the Americas and internationally.
Imperialism is bent on destroying symbols, Castro explained
November 14, because it knows the value of symbols, of examples,
and of ideas. It wanted to destroy them in Grenada, and it wants to
destroy them in El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Cuba.
But symbols, examples, and ideas, he said, cannot be de-
stroyed. When their enemies think they have destroyed them,
what they have done is made them multiply. . . . Grenada has al-
ready multiplied the patriotic conviction and fighting spirit of the
Salvadoran, Nicaraguan, and Cuban revolutionaries.
Our aim in making available these speeches and interviews of
Maurice Bishop is to help multiply the example and the lessons of
the Grenada revolution as widely as possible among workers and
the oppressed throughout the English-speaking world.
december 1983

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Introduction: Grenadas workers and farmers

government: Its achievements and its overthrow

Combined with difficult objective circumstances, factional and

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