Democracy, U.S. Gift to Grenada, Is No Cure-All

When the United States announced plans earlier this year to close its embassy here, the uproar shook this tiny Caribbean island state. Radio talk shows and the seven weekly newspapers were filled with debate.

Grenada, the site 11 years ago of America’s first major foreign-soil military adventure since Vietnam, felt abandoned.

“It was like having a friend pack up his bags and leave,” businessman Augustus Cruickshank said. “We felt left behind.”

Everyone from the prime minister to--oddly--the family of the man ousted in the 1983 invasion lobbied to keep the embassy open. They wrote to President Clinton and dozens of U.S. Congress members, and they were successful.

The embassy, built after the invasion just a short distance from the airport that then-President Ronald Reagan said was a launching pad for Cuban subversives, will remain. But the outcry over it reflected an emotional attachment--some would say a dependency--that continues today as one of the most concrete legacies of the U.S. takeover that ousted a leftist de facto government and ushered in a new period of American military interventionism in the region.

As more than 20,000 U.S. troops take up position in nearby Haiti, attention has focused again on Grenada.

“Haiti, Panama, Grenada, they’re all in the headlines--it reminds you,” said C. V. Rao, the dean of students at St. George’s University Medical School. In 1983, Rao was plucked off the white-sand beach at Grand Anse by U.S. helicopters that had ostensibly come to rescue endangered Americans.

Indeed, there is a similarity between Grenada and Haiti: Both military operations were launched to oust unwanted rulers who had come to power through force.

Grenadians, however, are the first to point out profound differences, such as Haiti’s utter lack of experience with democracy. In Grenada’s case, clear Cold War U.S. interests were involved, and, as in Panama but in contrast to Haiti, it was the elite that favored, even invited, the invasion.

Yet Grenada does highlight the limits of any U.S. effort to arrange the affairs of another country: Grenada today has many trappings of democracy, including political parties, elections and relatively free speech; the socialist politics that ultimately triggered the invasion seem as if they have been pushed to the margins, as was Washington’s goal.

Whether Grenada is substantially better off is another question.

The economic boom that Reagan and his Administration promised is still out there on the distant, sun-drenched horizon.

U.S. factories that opened after the invasion have shut down. There is widespread disenchantment and unprecedented unemployment and drug abuse. And Grenadians--reeling from decades of British colonial rule, plantation economics, a Cuba-inspired revolution, then the invasion--still struggle to define their national identity.

“We are still coasting in a colonial fog,” said Alister Hughes, a writer who was imprisoned by the revolutionary government and the right-wing government before it. “We still don’t know what it means to be independent.”

Probably the most revered political leader here has been dead for 11 years: Maurice Bishop, the man who headed Grenada’s leftist regime from 1979 to 1983 and who was assassinated by his former allies six days before the invasion.

And probably the second-most influential politician is Eric Gairy, an eccentric autocrat whose repressive rule in the 1970s helped provoke the leftist revolution and who today--75, nearly blind and a fan of flying saucers--is plotting his return to power.

Prime Minister Nicholas Brathwaite, while receiving glowing praise from U.S. officials, has a following that seems cobbled together from convenient political alliances more than heartfelt loyalty.

In fact, Grenada, a country of less than 95,000 people, has five mainstream political parties based largely on personalities rather than platforms and plans. Many Grenadians are fed up with the parties, which seem to spend more time on political squabbles than on problem-solving.

“After the U.S.-led intervention, we all heard about ‘democracy, democracy, democracy.’ Well, Grenada has not moved so much forward with this democracy,” said Carla Briggs, editor of the scrappy, independent newspaper the Informer. People’s expectations were raised by the revolution and the invasion but then dashed, she said.

Reagan, reeling from the deaths two days earlier of 241 U.S. Marines by a suicide bomber in Lebanon, dispatched 1,900 troops to Grenada on Oct. 25, 1983, to remove the pro-Cuba People’s Revolutionary Government and to send a message to the region’s other Marxist regimes, such as that in Nicaragua.

Grenada’s revolution had already started to crumble. Hard-liners in the government, led by Bernard Coard, had staged a bloody coup against Bishop on Oct. 13.

Bishop and 15 of his associates were arrested, lined up against a wall at Ft. Rupert--atop one of the many hills around St. George’s--and, on Oct. 19, were shot to death. Scores of civilian supporters were also killed.

The U.S. military action a week later was plagued by poor intelligence and other flaws, such as the inadvertent bombing of a mental hospital that killed at least 30 patients, but it was pointed to as a political success by the Reagan Administration.

Once the United States occupied Grenada, Coard and his fellow conspirators were convicted and sentenced to be hanged. The sentences were commuted in 1990, and a campaign is afoot to secure his release. Coard’s family members were among Grenadians lobbying to keep the U.S. Embassy in St. George’s open, apparently believing that, without the American presence, their case would fade from public view.

Immediately after the invasion, U.S. forces installed a friendly government, and the first elections were held in 1984. Roads were improved, and the United States spent $19 million to finish the airport the Cubans had started.

Grenada now has one of the best airports in the Caribbean.

Central to the U.S. plan was the dismantling of many of the social, educational, health and employment programs that the revolutionary leaders had favored.

Critics contend that Grenada’s trouble today is that few of those programs were replaced with anything concrete, leaving workers and Grenada’s poorest citizens with little hope for the future.

Even supporters of the U.S. policy and the intervention note that a sense of nationalism and self-pride generated during the revolution was lost in the aftermath.

“The American (forces) were here until 1986 or ‘87, giving and giving and giving,” a foreign official said. “People who had been told to pull themselves up by their bootstraps were now being told that, by being pro-American, everything would be done for (them). That is not useful for economic or political development.”

The result, observers say, is a political vacuum.

So many Grenadians look instead to the leaders of their past. Bishop has become something of a cult figure. A plaque memorializing him as a martyr who “will forever shine in glory” was erected last year, with government cooperation, at the site of his assassination.

“Maurice Bishop was my chief man,” said James Marchu, 34, seated at the counter of his roadside market. “He was the right man for Grenada. With Bishop, everyone had jobs, everyone could eat. We had more unity. No one can do what he did. Now everyone just talks.”

Marchu recalled fondly his days as a soldier in the revolutionary government. He is missing a right eye, which he lost, he said, when U.S. forces bombed their way into Grenada.

Lennox Mitchell was not a soldier, nor did he work for the revolutionaries. But he too remembers a government that taught the young to read, write and drive tractors.

“I thought it would be better after the invasion, that there would be more employment, but we only have more drugs,” said Mitchell, an unemployed shoemaker.

Nostalgia has not translated, however, into political power here. The Maurice Bishop Patriotic Movement, the only organized remnant of Bishop’s New Jewel Party, received a scant 4% of the vote in 1984 and even less in 1990.

As Grenada prepares within the next eight months to hold its third elections since the invasion, one of the most unlikely figures is Gairy.

Still revered for his role in the 1950s, championing Grenada’s liberation from Britain, he nevertheless oversaw a brutal, iron-fisted rule when he became prime minister in the 1970s.

His government’s corruption, plus his belief in visitors from outer space, eventually led to his downfall. He was ousted by Bishop in a 1979 coup. Today, Gairy is aged and nearly blind, yet last month, he announced that he was running again in the upcoming elections.

His party, the Grenada United Labor Party, routinely takes 20% to 30% of the vote. There is concern among many Grenadians that, if the other parties continue being fractured, Gairy could win again by default.

Brathwaite’s government maintains that it has placed Grenada on the road to economic recovery. The government has followed a program inspired by the International Monetary Fund, balancing its budget and reducing government spending.

As part of a privatization plan, the telephone company has been sold off, and the electrical company is being sold to a Florida company. Even the locally owned Carib beer brewery was sold this year to the Irish company Guinness; outnumbering the Coca-Cola signs these days are signs telling Grenadians to drink stout: “Guinness is good for you.”

“We have restored Grenada’s international credibility,” said George Brizan, agriculture minister and head of the ruling National Democratic Congress party. Brizan is widely considered a likely candidate for prime minister to succeed Brathwaite.

The economic program has salvaged Grenada’s credit rating but has generated political opposition, fueled unemployment and widened the gap between rich and poor.

Only tourism and construction are doing well and adding jobs.

Tourism is growing, with the number of stay-over visitors nearly doubling in six years, from 57,000 in 1987 to 93,919 last year. The number of first-class hotel rooms doubled to about 600 with the opening in December of two luxury hotels. And the post-invasion return of expatriates who are building tropical mansions also helped the construction sector.