Are we losing Grenada again?

A YEAR to the day after I had seen U.S. Tomcats whirl down the Point Salines peninsula, I watched the first commercial planes land on the runway originally rolled out by Cubans, where Colonel Hagler dropped his Rangers to rescue our island. At the ceremonies that completed what President Reagan had started, with a blessing by Monsignor Cyril Lamontagne and a hearty rendition of "Now Thank We All Our God," I asked myself what had happened in the year gone by. I was again touched by the American lives given on our behalf and happy that a permanent memorial to those men, most of them from the 82nd Airborne, is to be created on the campus of the St. George's University School of Medicine. Alas, however, my question had to be answered mainly by what has not been done since the intervention.

First, the self-styled Vanguard Leninists who killed Prime Minister Maurice Bishop, his pregnant mistress, and most of his ministers have not been brought to book. The so-called Coardites, the faction led by Deputy Prime Minister Bernard Coard and his Jamaican wife, have contrived from their prison cells, even without the offered assistance of Ramsey Clark, so to delay proceedings that nothing has happened to them by way of justice. Gruesome stories of the savagery on October 19, 1983, abound, some mothers claiming that their wounded children were taken from their hospital beds and buried alive to quash evidence of the massacre. The protection of the accused (after an initial assault as they entered a courtroom) has been such that even with a pass I had to go through six checkpoints to get into the original court of inquiry appointed by the governor-general. The present procrastination is such that the Grenada High Court is being challenged to prove itself the Grenada High Court. I hardly have to emphasize how frustrating this delay seems to West Indians.

Second, it is assumed that Grenada is enjoying a cornucopia of U.S. aid. A typical State Department release before me proclaims that all is well in this best of all possible worlds: "As soon as the fighting ceased, the U.S. Agency for International Development (AID) began to ferry emergency supplies by air, including generators, water tanks, medicine, food, and infant supplies valued at $475,000." As those first commercial carriers touched down one year after the intervention, Point Salines had no piped water (what it had was brought in by old Cuban trucks); it was lucky to get six hours of electricity a day, with Radio Grenada only operating intermittently as a consequence; the East German telephones are a joke, the roads absurd.

From beyond the Grave

THE STAFFS of these services were Bishop appointees whom the timorous interim government has not deposed; indeed, the head of the Central Water Commission was a power in the overthrown Ministry of Defense. In a speech to his New Jewel initiates on September 13, 1982, Bishop gloated: "We must assume total control of all public utilities--electricity, telephone, water, National Transport Service. And here again, as comrades know, we already in fact control those four." He controls them still from the grave, and his holdover functionaries have an interest in making American aid look inferior to Cuban aid (water overflowed my now dry tanks under the earlier dispensation). Nor does the attitude of the Idaho firm of Morrison-Knudsen, which has taken on the task of completing the white-elephant airport, help much either. These hard-hats seem to consider us a bunch of clods. So in almost every way except politically we are worse off today than a year ago. Goods are scarcer, life more difficult.

Admirable in intention as the U.S. AID program may be, it has had as little impact here as President Reagan's Caribbean Basin Initiative of 1982. Is Grenada to follow the Jamaican model? Only four years ago Edward Seaga won 51 out of sixty seats in the Jamaican parliament. Today Ian Williams of the London Times believes that Michael Manley could easily win Jamaica back.

Red Triangle

NEXT, THE Soviet Union looks as strong as ever in the region. True, Castro suffered a certain humiliation, but Moscow may not have minded that, and today its planned triangle over the oil lanes is not only back in place, but more menacing than ever. Guyana and Surinam now supply the legs of this red triangle, thus extending Soviet combat ranges into the Atlantic. In March 1983 Guyana assured Cuba and Russia of its continuing "socialist policies" and invited Cuban military to help train its army of more than six thousand. Arms arrive at a steady clip from North Korea, while no fewer than 11 airfields (the shortest landing strip is 6,500 feet long) are under construction, chiefly by Cubans, in the Essequibo area. With Guyana's economy on its last legs, its currency hemorrhaging, and its crime rate the highest per capita in the world, President-for-life Forbes Burnham, the man who leaked the news of the Grenadian intervention to Castro, is a desperate figure daily becoming more of a Soviet puppet.

In Surinam Colonel Desi Bouterse has conducted three bloodbaths of opponents. After the first, which followed a visit by Bishop, TASS expressed gratitude to "the young progressively minded military who overthrew the corrupt colonial regime and led the country onto the road of democratic transformations in the interest of the broad mass of the people." Anyone still awake after that sort of prose notes that the expulsion of a hundred Cubans after this incident seems to have been a feint to mollify Washington, with the Soviet ambassador, a senior KGB officer, remaining firmly in place in Paramaribo.

Finally, Nicaragua, at the apex of this bloody triangle, with its vast arms superiority over its neighbors, is hospitable to every form of anti-democratic subversion.

Still, Grenada enjoys freedom. The usurping Cubans have been seen off, their creatures detained on murder charges. However uneasily, the island awaits elections in December, in which even the Maurice Bishop Patriotic Movement will be allowed to field a slate, though it is rumored the remaining hard-core Jewel elements have been told to vote for erstwhile Prime Minister Eric Gairy, in order to discomfit the Americans and make a new coup, or, in the jargon, a Vanguard Leninist praxis, more likely. A free press exists, chiefly thanks to the likable Leslie Pierre, who languished in prison for years under Bishop for having tried to bring out his Grenadian Voice. It now comes out weekly, sabotage of machinery permitting. An excellent USIS office has been established in St. George's, with a bank of videos and a wide selection of magazines (excluding NR but including Ms.). The bonanza of Jewel documents captured by the 82nd's 519th military intelligence battalion from a Cuban safe house opposite my own home has percolated into USIS bureaus but does not really reach Grenadians. [See "From Out of the Rubble," p. 35.] One such document signally has: It is Bishop's "Line of March" speech to his party membership on September 13, 1982. This shows a stunning cynicism and naked vision of Communist dictatorship from the first ("In the case of the Socialist State, the majority will crush, oppress, and repress the recalcitrant minority").

Finally, there has been throughout the past year a flood of writing on Grenada. So far four books have appeared on the intervention, the best being Grenada: The Untold Story by Gregory Sandford and Richard Vigilante, and the worst, Grenada: Revolution, Invasion, and Aftermath by Hugh O'Shaughnessy of the London Observer. The latter is not a book so much as a stick to beat President Reagan with. Filled with errors of fact, it claims that life under Jewel was rosy. It even quotes, with apparent approval, the Coardite who said of the revolution, "If the people won't accept it, the people will have to be made to accept it." That is what's known as people's power in Vanguard Leninist circles.

Left-Leaning Footnotes

FROM THE river of ink poured out on our behalf I have salvaged a gem. The Report of the American Bar Association (Section on International Law and Practice) runs to 75 pages firmly set against the intervention. With law-school nicety the ABA argues that the request for help from the Organization of Eastern Caribbean States (OECS) was invalid since it was not unanimous, the member state of Grenada being absent (although, further on, the report admits that our governor-general was incarcerated in his house at the time). There is a suggestion that General Hudson Austin's bully boys, having just murdered Bishop and his minions, might have been properly considered the de facto government because they had been able to impose a 96-hour curfew--thus making armed force the criterion for sovereignty. Are we to assume that General Austin was about to have made an appeal to the OECS for his own annihilation? In 117 footnotes, which threaten to drive the text off the page in their scholarly zeal, the ABA relies almost uniquely on left-wing journals, in particular the Trotskyist British Guardian, while note 24 derives its authority from one F. Castro in "Gramma (the English-language organ of the Cuban Communist Party)"! Our learned lawyers refer, of course, to Granma (sic) so named after Castro's boat out of Mexico, and it is certainly not in the English language in the original. Anything but.

So, watching those first commercial planes touch down on the Point Salines airstrip, I wondered whether it would become another bridge over the River Kwai, passing from one power to another. The coming elections should give a hint--true democracy or another praxis?