The Grenada Revolution

"A PAGE-TURNING WHO-DONE-IT. A MUST READ!" (Horace Levy, Sociologist, University Lecturer, Civil Society activist and Journalist, Jamaica) Finally, the inside story: honest, self-critical, and based on a wealth of credible and independent documentation. Bernard Coard reveals in dramatic detail the factors, forces and personalities which cumulatively led to deepening crisis within the Grenada Revolution and ultimately to wholesale tragedy. Bernard Coard, United States and British trained economist and university lecturer, played a leading role in the NJM and in the People's Revolutionary Government of Grenada. His experience, including 26 years as a political prisoner, offers a unique insight into the causes, course, and finally the implosion of the Revolution.

The 1979 Grenada Revolution, orchestrated by the New Jewel Movement, culminated four-and-a-half years later in the execution of Prime Minister Maurice Bishop and the US-led military invasion which threw Grenada onto the international political stage. Though much has been written on the Revolution and its untimely and violent demise, the overwhelming majority of the authors have been non-Grenadian. All the contributors to this volume, except one, are Grenadian. In this regard, it is unique, and captures the voices of persons who were active participants, children, teenagers, young adults, and some yet unborn in the 1979 to 1983 period, illustrative of the continued influence of the Revolution on Grenadians. The essays examine the legality of the Revolution, the historical connections between it and the 1795 Fédon’s Rebellion, the nation’s collective memory of the Revolution by its second generation, the conflict between religion and the Revolution, the empowerment of women by the revolutionary process, and the role of poetry and art in raising salient and often difficult and painful aspects of the Revolution. This collection of essays captures the Revolution from a Grenadian perspective.

Grenada experienced much turmoil in the 1970s and 1980s, culminating in an armed Marxist revolution, a bloody military coup, and finally in 1983 Operation Urgent Fury, a United States–led invasion. Wendy C. Grenade combines various perspectives to tell a Caribbean story about this revolution, weaving together historical accounts of slain Prime Minister Maurice Bishop, the New Jewel Leftist Movement, and contemporary analysis. There is much controversy. Though the Organization of American States formally requested intervention from President Ronald Reagan, world media coverage was largely negative and skeptical, if not baffled, by the action, which resulted in a rapid defeat and the deposition of the Revolutionary Military Council. By examining the possibilities and contradictions of the Grenada Revolution, the contributors draw upon thirty years’ of hindsight to illuminate a crucial period of the Cold War. Beyond geopolitics, the book interrogates but transcends the nuances and peculiarities of Grenada’s political history to situate this revolution in its larger Caribbean and global context. In doing so, contributors seek to unsettle old debates while providing fresh understandings about a critical period in the Caribbean’s postcolonial experience. This collection throws into sharp focus the centrality of the Grenada Revolution, offering a timely contribution to Caribbean scholarship and to wider understanding of politics in small developing, postcolonial societies.

This book, first published in 1984, analyses the background to the revolution in Grenada and details the course of its progress, examining the reasons why it faltered and failed. International factors played no small part in these events, setting the agenda for the internal processes of the revolution and bringing it to an end. The book also examines closely the US-led invasion of this tiny island and its aftermath.

In 1979, the Marxist-Leninist New Jewel Movement under Maurice Bishop overthrew the government of the Caribbean island country of Grenada, establishing the People’s Revolutionary Government. The United States under President Reagan infamously invaded Grenada in 1983, staying until the New National Party won election, effectively dealing a death blow to socialism in Grenada. With Comrade Sister, Laurie Lambert offers the first comprehensive study of how gender and sexuality produced different narratives of the Grenada Revolution. Reimagining this period with women at its center, Laurie Lambert shows how the revolution must be recognized for its both productive and corrosive tendencies. Lambert argues that the literature of the Grenada Revolution exposes how the more harmful aspects of revolution are visited on, and are therefore more apparent to, women. Calling attention to the mark of black feminism on the literary output of Caribbean writers of this period, Lambert addresses the gap between women’s active participation in Caribbean revolution versus the lack of recognition they continue to receive.

The English speaking Caribbean's most unique recent political experiment, as chronicled in the pages of the Free West Indian, and other organs of the revolution.