GRENADA.
The "democracy"
Kenrick Radix, Grenada's former minister of justice and an opponent of the Austin-Coard coup, for example, has already been in and out several times. He has explained how the prisoners are being held in wooden boxes, similar to the Tiger Cages the U.S. forces and their allies the US is bringing Gerry FOLEY The U.S. rulers have never had, and are hardly likely to have again, such an opportunity to score a decisive political victory over a revolution as they got in
It was not hard to bring overwhelming military power to bear to intimidate such a small population.
In a country where the great majority lives from small farming, small trade, and tourism, it should not be too difficult to seduce a certain small business element, if only by the money spent by the occupa-
Most importantly, the population was confused and demoralized at the time of International Viewpoint 28 November 1983 the U.S. landing. The leaders of the revo lution had been murdered by former comrades. The guns of the revolutionary army had been turned on the Grenadian
Washington, therefore, had a golden opportunity to "rescue" Grenada from "leftist thugs," to demonstrate the virtues of "democratic law and order."
The U.S. rulers have not had a chance like that to present themselves as the champions of democracy since the second world war period.
Furthermore, the Grenadian peoples, like all peoples in the Western Hemisphere, have been deluged with anti-Communist propaganda for decades. Despite the strong hatred most of these peoples used to hold Vietnamese prisoners.
"You have to stoop right down to get into the cell. The opening is only about two and a half feet high. The roof is a piece of badly fitting plastic sheet. The rain came in during the night and I was drenched."
The British Guardian correspondent Jonathan Steele has written:
"Reporters who drove to the airport at Point Salines, the main American oper ations base, could see the detention camp from the outside. We were not allowed in. The new camp consists of roughly two dozen wooden crates, about 10 feet all round, set in two rows behind barbed wire. Each crate has one small window."
What is a large number of prisoners for Grenada is quite a small one in absolute terms. The U.S. command did not need to confine them in such conditions. It has, after all, had to house thousands of occupation troops, and it certainly has
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imperialism and people who take what very strong incentive for a section of the not put U.S. soliders in such accomoda-
The reason in fact for the "Tiger Cages" was the same as that which motivated the U.S. authorities to display Coard and Austin to the press half naked, blindfolded, and trussed up like captured
The U.S. military wants to degrade and humiliate its prisoners, to make them clearly become standard operating procedure for dealing with rebels in colonial
The methods show the fundamental reactionary character of U.S. military intervention in the underdeveloped world. To maintain imperialist exploitation, the population has to be kept terrified and
For example, Steele quoted in The Guardian the explanation given for Radix's detention by U.S. army spokesman Captain George White, who said that the ex-minister of justice was "picked up on the basis that he has been cited by the populace as an instigator...."
In every country in Latin America and the Caribbean where the U.S. has intervened a system of terroristic repression has been set up, in the recent decades usually accompanied by Ku-Klux-Klanlike death squads.
In fact, in an interview in the Philadelphia Inquirer in early November, the U.S. Commander on Grenada, General Farris, said that one of the tasks of the occupation forces was to set up a police unit that would ensure that revolutionaries would ever be able to get into power."
In view of the other examples of U.S. "help" in the Caribbean area - Guatemala, Somoza's Nicaragua, El Salvador -it mav easilv be imagined what any "police force" the U.S. army sets up on occupied Grenada is going to be like. creating a "Tropical Gulag" on Grenada, similar to the bloody repressive systems it has midwifed throughout the area.
The Grenadian revolutionary government could only survive in the face of imperialist pressures with the enthusiastic support of the overwhelming majority
The minute a section of the NJM turned on its comrades and then turned the army against the people, an imperialist triumph was inevitable.
Fidel Castro pointed this out in his speech at the memorial meeting in Havana for the Cuban interthemselves against the American invaders.
"The imperialists present the events [the Coard-Austin coup] as the coming to power of a group of hard-line Communists, loyal allies of Cuba. Were they really hard line? Could they really be allies of Cuba? Or were they conscious or unconscious agents of Yankee imperialism?
"Look into the history of the revolutionary movement and you will see more than once the connection between look like left extremist positions. Pol Pot and leng Sary, who carried out genocide in Kampuchea. Aren't they today the most loyal allies the imperialists have in Southeast Asia? After the events in Grenada, since we had to call these people something, we called them the 'Pol-Pot Group.' "
Fidel went on to say:
"In Grenada morally indefensible. A country where a split had occurred between the people the government and the army was militarily indefensible, because fiable only in unity with the people Justi.
The Cuban leader said that when a government put in power by a revolution turns its guns on the people, the revolu-
United states waited to kill the symbhi
that the Grenadian revolution represent-
But this symbol was already dead The Grenadian revolutionaries themselves had destroyed it by their division and
"In our opinion, after the death of Bishop and his closest comrades, after the army fired on the people, after the party and the government became separated from the people, the revolutionary process could not survive."
Fidel used the harshest terms in describing the Coard-Austin ferring to them as "plotters" and
As the only revolutionary team that has succeeded in making a revolution and maintaining it in the very shadow of U.S.
the Castro leadership obviously understands some basic revolutionary principles that became obscured by Stalinist degeneration in the Soviet
That is, the strength of a revolution on the power of its moral example, on the confidence it inspires in the activists and the masses.
Achieving a revolution in the face of reactionary repression and terror requires the strongest moral bonds among revolutionists. Those who betray those ties are the worst kind of traitors. why Trotsky referred to Stalin as "Cain." Apparently Fidel meant the same thing by the word "hyena."
The fact is that when degenerate elements turn on their former comrades and the people, they are inevitably driven to try to make deals with the enemy, the capitalists and the imperialists.
That is apparently what the programmatic statement issued by the Revolutionary Military Council in the days after the coup represented. It called for a bigger role for private initiative and better relations with the U.S.
The Coard-Austin coup is explained fundamentally by the pressure of imperialism on the Grenadian revolution and by the poverty of the country.
Given Grenada's tiny size and the fact that soldiers earned only 200 Eastern Caribbean dollars a month, there was a military to look for some solution that offer them better personal pros
There is no reason to look for any other sort of outside encouragement to explain the coup. After the story that Cuba was behind Coard fell flat, the international capitalist press came up with the line that the conflict in the NJM was between a "Soviet faction" and a "Cuban faction," the Coard-Austin senting "Soviet communism, roup repreSoviet bureaucracy would have any interest in crossing the Cubans directly in an area where they themselves are more than reluctant to get involved this line of a "Soviet" and Cuban faction has the hallmarks of a disinformation operation. more so since some of these stories include what can only be deliberate falsifications, such as the claim that the Soviet press took a different line from the Cubans or cut out the paragraph condemning the murder of Bishop from the October 25 statement of the Cuban gov-
Anyone who can read the Soviet press can see in a minute that there is no truth viously has no monopoly on the "big lie"
The New Jewel government clearly did not create an atmosphere of totalitarian intimidation, otherwise it would be hard to understand how thousands of people could mobilize so quickly to release Bishop or why the mood of the crowd was so festive and unafraid, as eyewitnesses say it was. The Grenadian people were used to expressing themselves.
After the shock of the shootings had passed, they would probably have made short work of the Military Council. But they did not get a chance. The imperialists forestalled this by invading
Obviously there had to be weaknesses in the system of mass direct democracy the NJM was trying to build. In fact, the events have shown that it is both extremimportant to build a real mass democratic process under the overwhelming pressure of im-
With whatever limitations it may have had, the NJM leadership clearly understood this, as do the Salvadoran revo-
And the same principle is reflected in Fidel's statement that when a government turns the army against the people, it can no longer be revolutionary.
The U.S. invasion and the repressive system the U.S. forces are now installing on Grenada shows clearly what fundamentally prevents peoples in the colonial world from solving their own problems and achieving meaningful democratic
Against that background the example of the Grenadian revolution will remain a continuing inspiration to oppressed peoples, as well as a model to be studied and perfected, like the Paris Commune or the Russia of the soviets.
International Viewpoint 28 November 1983
How the Grenadians tried a group of towns, and Zonal Councils were established.
As a result of the overthrow of the Gairy regime on March 13, 1979, and the setting up of the People's Revolutionary Government, the population got a workers government led by the NJM. gave a tremendous impetus to the development of various mass organizations and to