It is over ten years now since the last Cuban left Grenada. My wife and I happened to own a retirement property on the island less than a hundred meters from the huts put up to house the thousand-odd “freedom fighters” sent down by Fidel Castro (whom I met) to spread the Good Old Cause. During those four years (I979-I983) we maintained a round-the-clock occupancy of our house. hoping to prevent the expropriations that had overtaken others. More than one ex-pat had returned from shopping in the capital, St. George’s, to confront an “off-limits” guard outside his domicile. There was no American embassy on board and only a charge in Barbados. Today, with cruise ships pouring out passengers daily, many visiting the Ronald Reagan monument opposite our own abode, friends ask if we weren’t afraid during this period.

We were not. At least not of the Cuban day (and night) workers who kept a low profile and were policed by intelligence operatives from the celebrated DCI (Direccion General de Inteligencia). They were, alas, a cowed, glum lot, whose intent was to earn points, puntas, by such overseas assignments, whether in Grenada, Angola, Suriname, or South Yemen. These points made them eligible for perks on their return home, putting them at the head of the line for a toaster or whatever else in their local supermercado. What they desired, and surreptitiously acquired from us, was electronic gadgetry, transistors, calculators, and the like. A Grenadian on a work party would sell a digital watch to a Cuban trucker returning to Havana the next day. Being paramilitary the Cuban could avoid customs checks and sell his loot in his homeland for five times what he’d paid for it.

I watched batch after batch of these military engineers brought down to the Pointe Salines strip in Russian trucks, many still bearing Soviet insignia on their sides, such was their confidence. I sometimes walked through their dormitories to chat with friends and observed the AK-47s clipped beside each bunk, while down the road from us a shed openly displayed Soviet SA-9 Gaskin surface-to-air missiles and quadruple-barreled TSU anti-aircraft guns (whose chief firing site has recently been made into the swimming-pool complex of a luxury hotel). Having served in the military myself, I felt sorry for these prisoners of communism. If you could turn Havana into a tropical Moscow, and a habanero into the sort of torpid tractor driver who crossed the road to supplement his wretched rations (mainly pan y leche), you could presumably do anything in the field of “human engineering.”

But looking back, it is sobering to consider the power of the Brezhnev/ Andropov gridlock on the region at this time. Havana’s Central American Bureau was announcing triumph everywhere and pouring daily filth on America. Speaking at a “Working Class Against Imperialism” conference in East Bedin, Jesus Montane, foreign relations head of Cuba’s Central Committee, declared, “The revolutionary victories in Nicaragua and Grenada are the most important events in Latin America since 1959.” Eheu fugaces, indeed. The new “revolutionary” Grenadian government, established by a 1979 coup and to be eliminated by a bloody massacre in 1983, set up embassies in Cuba, Libya, Algeria, North Korea, Syria, and (later) Russia. Everything seemed to be running their way. The appeal sent to the British government by neighboring St. Lucia’s John Compton was ignored by Whitehall, pooh-poohed in fact, while in Dominica Patrick John (lately let out of prison) was doing his best to overthrow the eminently sensible Eugenia Charles. Daniel Ortega had brought Nicaragua into the fold; Trinidad and Venezuela and even Mexico were uncovering Cuban espionage rings trained (“studied”) at Moscow’s Patrice Lumumba University or at Pyongyang’s terrorist-training camp in North Korea.

I often wonder what has happened to all the mercenaries of this mistaken ideology, now that Russia has left center stage. Have they, in the Caribbean, all vanished into the thin air shadowing Jamaica’s Michael Manley, whom I saw shrieking “Viva la revolucion!” at a Non-Aligned Movement meeting and promising to construct “a new Caribbean”? Have they taken heart from the elected victory in Guyana of the Chicago-educated Marxist dentist Cheddi Jagan, more of a realist than all of them put together? The old comrades are still around, all right, like St. Lucia’s pro-Rasta George Odium, Dominica’s Oliver Seraphin, Alan Louisy, and many others. In Grenada, the heart of the Castroite movement itself, there are a few dispersed relics, like the MBPM (Maurice Bishop Patriotic Movement), feebly trying to retain some hold on the young, while Bishop’s assassins are still held in prison. An irony prevails, however, in that Cuba’s incumbency left a certain legacy in medical training on the island. I am told that a Cuban-trained dentist is quite excellent, and I do know that my wife and I prefer a similarly trained yet for our pedigree German Shepherds. He is truly skilled and caring in an enclave devoid of like people and seems uninterested in ideology despite having spent six months in Moscow’s elite Vystrel Academy.

Still, I wonder where the intellectual giants of the era are today, truly imbued men like Osvaldo Dorticos of Cuba’s Politburo or its Foreign Minister Isidorio Peoli (“The revolutionary awakening in Latin America and the Caribbean is an irreversible fact that is shaking the foundations of U.S. Imperialism”). What of the DGI honchos across the road from us, one the sophisticated second son of an Irish mother, who kept on trying to persuade me to visit Cuba? When I said I could not, being American, they guaranteed that nothing would appear in my passport. It was precisely against this enticement of their youth to “study” in the notorious Isle of Pines that Trinidad and Guyana had been complaining.

In the last year of Cuban Grenada, when the military nature of the airport became clear and the caudillo was showing his Stalinist filiation, my wife and I became a tad depressed. A high-ranking general in the GRU (or military intelligence of the KGB), Gennadi Sazhenev, was sent up to tiny Grenada from Moscow’s South American desk, in the Argentine no less. Him, too, I met, a handsome man with a full head of white hair and accentless English. He downstaged the Cuban ambassador (Rizo) on the island, rumored to have since been executed, and clearly came to apply the whip to the dragging airport construction, scheduled to be completed by March 1984, ten years after independence. Little mentioned in the press, Sazhenev brought with him a couple of hundred bullet-headed Spetsnaz commandos; the term abbreviates Spetsaznacheniya, groups dispatched to target countries under embassy cover. One of their missions had been to determine how to flood the London Underground. In Grenada they were rudely dealt with by the 82nd Airborne on intervention, and it was from that force that we obtained the list of houses to be taken over, ours preeminent among them as the future Russian embassy. Instead, it was used to shelter the Governor-General Sir Paul Scoon and his wife during the October 1983 hostilities.

Against this bleak background it was hard not to feel some sympathy for the rank-and-file Cubans we got to know in those days. One might want to sell us a fish he had caught, but the transaction would have to take place clandestinely, in the bush, and when the Russians came the secrecy intensified. Plus, the camp opposite us sprouted a multidecibel speaker system, blaring Castro’s speeches (colonialistas . . . imperialistas) to the snores of the companeros. Amid these memories, I especially treasure one of Pablo, a paunchy old bulldozer operator who used to puff up to our house for water. When he learned that I had been a literature professor, his eyes lit up and he began to produce grimy slips of paper from his pants pockets and to read me his poems thereon, all filled with alma and corazón. After one recitation he looked up at me with hope in his face and said, “So you see. Professor, I’m not a bulldozer operator. I’m a poet and you’re going to take me back with you to America when you go.”

Such, alas, was not to be. But wherever old Pablo may be today, I’d like him to know that the poems he pressed on me, together with that list bequeathing the house in which mv wife and I still live to Mother Russia, are safely lodged along with other Grenadian memorabilia in the Ronald Reagan Library in California.