“To conquer tumult, nature’s sodin force, War . . . was first devis’d.”
—Sir William D’Avenant

Grenada’s Communist interlude has become the subject of an intense postmortem by scholars of varying ideological hues. Historically, the small island is destined to be a symbol of the Reagan years. However much the US intervention of October 25, 1983 is vilified by the left, objective observers will remember it as the only successful manifestation of the Reagan administration’s policy towards Latin America and the Caribbean. Whatever your perspective on the “Grenada Rescue Mission,” there can be no doubt that the vast majority of the island’s inhabitants felt that the United States had truly liberated them from a Marxist-Leninist tyranny. A pluralistic political system, regardless of its many foibles, is today thriving in Grenada. Grenada represents the only proven demonstration of the Reagan Doctrine—rolling back communism through force of arms. Admittedly, the arms in this case were carried by American soldiers and not indigenous “freedom fighters,” but the policy was the same.

Grenada offers other lessons, though. The “Revo” of March 13, 1979 that brought to power the People’s Revolutionary Government (PRG) was a classic case of a communist coup d’etat. In fact, the takeover was staged in such a textbook fashion that a Soviet cruise ship was anchored off the Grenadian capital of St. George’s throughout the single day it took to render the island safe for socialism, giving the KGB operatives aboard a grandstand seat to this Marxist revolution with a Caribbean beat.

Cuba played the role of subversive vanguard for this revolution, establishing strong ties with Maurice Bishop and Bernard Coard’s New Jewel Movement (NJM) years before the 1979 coup. Cuban commandoes supported the NJM in its ridiculously easy hijacking of the island and its government, and Fidel Castro quickly sent hundreds of military trainers, technicians, and intelligence agents to Grenada in the “Revo’s” aftermath.

Castro obviously attached great importance to his relations with Grenada. His friendship with Maurice Bishop, the PRG’s prime minister, was genuine, and stemmed in large measure from Bishop’s unabashed hero-worship of Cuba’s maxima lider. The man sent as Havana’s ambassador to Grenada was Julian Torres Rizo, a senior intelligence officer from the Cuban Communist Party’s own intelligence arm, the Departmento America. After being booted out of Grenada by the US 82nd Airborne Division, Torres Rizo returned to a hero’s welcome in Havana and subsequent promotion to be an alternate member of the Cuban Communist Party’s Politburo. Such a fate was not shared by Colonel Pedro Tortolo Comas, the Soviet-trained officer sent to defend the island against Yankee imperialist aggression: the hapless colonel was broken to private and shipped to Angola.

Moscow’s relations with Grenada were deliberately kept low-key for the first two years following the coup. No Soviet subversion or covert political maneuvering was necessary to win influence with the PRG, for the Grenadians actively wooed the Russians, pressuring Cuba to champion Grenada’s “cause” with the Kremlin while seeking to enhance Grenada’s “importance in the Soviet scheme of things.” For their part, the Russians seemed wary of provoking a US backlash, counseling the PRG to present a moderate face to the world, and telling them that the USSR’s assistance “must never be provocative.” This did not preclude the signing of several secret military and technical assistance treaties between the two great socialist nations.

Only later, as Moscow concluded that Washington’s reaction to the Cubanization of Grenada would not go beyond rhetoric, did the Soviet presence increase. Ambassador Gennadiy Sazhenev—a former officer in the USSR’s long-range bomber forces who reportedly served subsequently in South America as an agent of the GRU (Soviet Military Intelligence)—arrived in Grenada with two Mercedes and a staff of 20 to establish an embassy in an expropriated hotel boasting one of the best views on the island.

The tons of PRG records discovered on the island after its liberation amply demonstrate that the USSR had big plans for little Grenada. The Kremlin was in the process of giving the PRG at least one and possibly as many as five military aircraft, and had offered to train young Grenadians as pilots in the Soviet Union. Marshal Nikolai Ogarkov, the Soviet Army’s chief of staff, told the PRG’s ambassador to Moscow that Russian specialists were being sent to Grenada “to conduct studies related to the construction of military projects.” These probably included the notorious Point Salines airport, a “seaport” planned for the island’s east coast, an Intersputnik satellite station, and a naval facility on the dependency island of Carriacou. A contingent of Russian teachers and their families arrived in Grenada only weeks before the US intervention; the Soviet news agency TASS had opened an office in Prime Minister Maurice Bishop’s heavily-guarded office complex (another expropriated hotel), and young Grenadians—children of the NJM party elite—were attending the Lenin School in Moscow.

It is interesting for students of imperialism to speculate how far the Soviet influence in Grenada would have extended had it not been nipped in the bud by Ronald Reagan. For keen observers such as Geoffrey Wagner—who had chosen to settle on Grenada when it had been a sleepy little British colony only a few years earlier—it seemed barely credible to witness teenaged members of the Grenada-Soviet Friendship Society giving clench-fisted salutes while chanting: “Long live the Soviet Union! Long live Proletarian Internationalism!”

Red-Calypso stands out from other books on Grenada’s revolution because its author, Geoffrey Wagner, actually lived on the island throughout the PRG’s reign, and for many years before the 1979 coup d’etat. Unlike the dozen or so other writers who have analyzed the “Revo,” Wagner was an eyewitness to Grenada’s Cubanization. Not only has Geoffrey Wagner analyzed history, he has lived it. Soldier, scholar, and poet, he has seen the decline of the British Raj and the expansion of the Soviet empire, has conversed with Cuban intelligence officers in Grenada and guarded Nazi Deputy Führer Rudolf Hess while serving as a subaltern in the British Army. As such, Wagner brings a unique verve and unusual detail to his study of the Grenadian Revolution.

His honesty is refreshing, especially after the roseate depictions of Maurice Bishop and the PRG by leftists in the US and Europe, and their jaundiced accounts of the American intervention. The Western left saw Bishop’s Grenada as a brave new experiment in socialism. Geoffrey Wagner shows it for what it really was—a sordid attempt by a collection of Stalinist thugs and incompetent Marxist ideologues to recreate what Maurice Bishop called “the land of Lenin” on a 120-square-mile piece of Caribbean real estate.

Geoffrey Wagner’s sense of irony surfaces throughout Red Calypso, especially in his accounts of the PRG’s eccentricities. As one who has also written extensively on Grenada’s history, I found particularly poignant his discussion of Maurice Bishop’s hero-worship of an 18th-century French-Grenadian revolutionary named Julian Fedon, who is best remembered for his cold-blooded murder of 50 British hostages, including the island’s governor. Bishop named one of his People’s Revolutionary Army (PRA) camps in Fedon’s honor, and it was here that his body, along with the bodies of more than 50 other people massacred by the PRA, was taken to be burned.

Red Calypso is unique in its account of the 1983 US intervention and its aftermath. Wagner corrects the faulty media accounts of the time, displaying an impressive understanding of US military tactics and hardware. He had a grandstand seat for much of the revolution’s most important events, for his island home was directly across the road from the Pointe Salines airport and the large Cuban camp surrounding it. As a result, Wagner found himself in the middle of the US 82nd Airborne Division’s encampment after the “Rescue Mission,” a factor which gave him access to stories and personalities unavailable to any other journalist or writer.

Regardless of the revolutionary mayhem documented so painstakingly in Red Calypso, the book’s most disturbing chapter is one aptly titled “Through a Glass Darkly: The Press in Grenada.” Having also resided in Grenada during the PRG’s reign, and having visited there afterwards, I have never ceased to be astonished at the Western media’s treatment of the Grenada drama as an unprovoked aggression against a peaceful Caribbean island of no strategic importance. The impression given was that the ordinary people of Grenada resented and resisted the intervention. In reality, an astonishing 97 percent of Grenadians polled believed that they had truly been “rescued” by “Papa Reagan,” while demonstrations were staged to protest the departure of US forces. A petition signed by 17,000 Grenadians (out of a total population of 89,000) was presented to the US Embassy, asking that Grenada be annexed by the United States. An estimated half of the island’s entire population came to hear President Reagan’s speech during his 1984 visit to Grenada.

Even as Grenada recedes into American history with the passing of the Reagan administration, the “Revo” and its aftermath will never be forgotten by the people of Grenada. In the same way that elderly pensioners in France and Belgium preserve fond memories of the American boys who “rescued” them from Nazi tyranny, Geoffrey Wagner and his friends and neighbors on Grenada know why the power of the US is a force for good in the world. This is the true lesson of Grenada. 

Ashby_Review

[Red Calypso, by Geoffrey Wagner (Chicago and Washington, DC: Regnery Gateway) 264 pp., $12.95]