Steve Wattenmaker 1984

Interview with Don Rojas:
Grenada - What Went Wrong?

Source: The Black Nation. Vol. 4, no. 1; Summer/Fall, 1984; edited by Amiri Baraka;
Transcribed: for marxists.org by David Adams.

Don Rojas is one of the last leaders of the New Jewel Movement (NJM) still living to have spoken with Grenada's slain Prime Minister Maurice Bishop less than an hour before he was killed. Rojas was Bishop's press secretary, and prior to that editor of the island's main newspaper, the Free West Indian.

Later, I was able to ask Rojas a number of questions:

Question: You said in a recent interview that the events that led to the overthrow of the People's Revolutionary Government of Grenada represented a fundamental error of judgement and personal ambition. Can you go into the political evolution that led to the events of October 19?

Answer: I think that the roots of the crisis that overcame the party and the revolution can be traced as far back as July 1982. At that time, Bernard Coard resigned from the Political Bureau of the Central Committee of the New Jewel Movement. While resigning his party positions, he retained his state posts of finance minister and deputy prime minister. He resigned, according to him, because he was not satisfied with the style of work and the priorities the Central Committee was addressing itself to. He was not more concrete than that.

Then he was requested by the Central Committee to come up with a concrete and adequate explanation for his resignation. Apparently, he refused to do that.

This led some people on the Central Committee at that time to take the position that Bernard Coard could be allowed simply to refuse arrogantly to address or to elaborate on his resignation. Others on the Central Committee took a more soft-line approach on how to deal with Bernard's refusal to explain his position to the Central Committee.

You might say they even took a sentimentalist approach. It's ironic that these same elements accused people who were seen as supporting Maurice Bishop of taking a sentimentalist approach. Some of them even went so far as to say that Comrade Fidel took a sentimentalist approach in his response to the house arrest and murder of Maurice Bishop.

A number of those who took a more soft-line approach to Coard's resignation came out of the OREL, the Organization of Revolutionary Education and Liberation. They had in a sense been weaned by Bernard and saw him as a mentor of sorts.

OREL described itself as a revolutionary Marxist organization. I don't they characterized themselves as a party as such.

When the New Jewel Movement was formed in 1973, OREL merged with MAP and JEWEL and became an integrated part of the New Jewel Movement. But they always maintained a kind of clique, an OREL clique, with the New Jewel Movement during the 1970's and even after the 1979 revolution.

Between October 1982 and September 1983, Bernard used the opportunity to consolidate his influence and his authority within the party and to advance the OREL people within the Central Committee to very influential positions. Three of them were elevated to the Political Bureau.

In retrospect I think that Bernard very cleverly used that period to use his prestige and influence within the party to develop and line up forces behind him.

He did this in a very systematic way. So when he decided to make his move for leadership of the party, he had already consolidated quite a power base within the Central Committee within the full membership of the party.

Although this problem had it roots as far back as July 1982, the catalyst that triggered this crisis was a proposal presented by the OREL people in the party for joint leadership between Bernard and Maurice. This was proposed at a special meeting of the Central Committee in mid-September 1983.

There was absolutely no indication prior to this meeting that this proposal was in the works. None at all. Certainly the rank-and-file party membership did not know about it, nor did Maurice himself. There had not been the slightest hint that this proposal would be made.

And looking at it in retrospect, it had to do with the kind of game plan that had been worked by Bernard and his people. When Liam James introduced the resolution, it came as a complete surprise. The resolution called for Bernard to be invited to return to the Central Committee and the Political Bureau and to be part of the joint leadership.

At the Central Committee meeting of September 16 when the sudden proposal for joint leadership of the party was introduced by Liam James and support by other of Coard's people on the CC, it was stated by them that the "crisis" within the revolution was caused primarily Maurice's so-called weak leadership of the Central Committee. It is noteworthy that (Foreign Minister Unison) Whiteman and (Agricultural Minister George) Louison argued that collective leadership implied collective responsibility and that the blame should be shared by all and not be heaped on Maurice alone or on any other single comrade.

Furthermore, they correctly pointed out, along with Maurice, that an analysis of the problems in the revolution, in the party, and in the country in general must also take into account objective material conditions and the state of relations between the party and the masses. How much the problems in the material sphere had to do with weak management and planning of the economy, low levels of productivity and inefficiencies within the state sector, difficulties with the capital projects, etc. - aspects of the process that Coard was directly responsible for - was conveniently overlooked.

Then, after Maurice was put under house arrest, less than four weeks after the Central Committee meeting, they accused him of "one-manism" and "personality cultism," a charge diametrically opposed to the earlier one vacillation, indecision, and weak leadership. This inconsistency can only be interpreted as opportunism.

This joint leadership proposal, as originally presented in the Central Committee, would not have worked. Maurice saw that very clearly. His position to the Central Committee and to the party was that he did not have any problems with the proposal in principle - that if it was a majority decision of the party, he would abide by the principle of democratic centralism and majority vote on this issue.

But he would have liked more discussion of the practical application of this joint leadership proposal. He had difficulty understanding exactly how it was going to work, as did many members of the party. It certainly had no precedent in Grenada in our party or, as far as we knew, in any left party we had relations with.

And he felt, quite frankly, that the way it had been proposed would have effectively removed him from influence in the top decision-making organs of the party.

In my view, if the proposal had been implemented as originally outlined, it would not have meant sharing power or equal distribution of power between the two. It would, in fact, have meant that Bernard would have become the de facto leader of the party.

Under their second proposal, Maurice would remain as prime minister and Bernard would become leader of the party. But in our context the party is the instrumentality that leads public policy. The party is the force that charts the direction for the revolution. If the proposal had been put into effect, the real power in the country would be transferred from Bishop to Coard.

The office of prime minister would have assumed the kind of symbolic and ceremonial character that the office of governor-general (Paul Scoon) had on Grenada until the Americans appointed him the new petty dictator.

The joint leadership proposal was also impractical because the Grenadian people would not have accepted it, due to Bernard Coard's lack of popularity among the Grenadian masses. A lot of the image that the masses of workers and farmers had of Coard was in fact distorted, but some was also accurate; and Coard's image was a reality you had to deal with. It was something that could not have been changed very easily or quickly.

Bernard had an image as a very bright man, ruthless and not particularly compassionate, and not really the kind of political leader who had struggled for the masses and made sacrifices for them the way Bishop and Unison Whiteman and the rest had. In 1973, for example, Bishop and the others were brutally beaten by Gairy's Mongoose Gang, almost to the point of death. During the 1970's there were numerous acts of violence and harassment against them. Bernard was teaching at the University of the West Indies off the island and thus was not subjected to that, was not a victim of Gairy's terrorism in the way that Maurice and the others were.

During this period many Coard supporters in the party said that this new proposal would be strictly an internal party matter, that it would not necessarily be carried out to the streets.

Now, in my view, an issue as fundamental as who was to lead the New Jewel Movement could not conceivably be kept a strictly internal party matter. That would be a naive deception, and the Grenadian people would not have accepted such a proposal under any circumstances.

After that Central Committee meeting, in late September, Maurice, George Louison, Unison, and the other comrades on the official delegation left for the trip to Hungary and Czechoslovakia. Until Maurice returned from this trip I don't think he perceived the extent of the plot that was being prepared by people very close to him.

When we got back, indications were clear that the situation had deteriorated considerably and was perhaps out of Maurice's control by that point.

In Maurice's absence, Bernard Coard had been acting prime minister. He was running the state, running country, running the party. When Maurice returned to Grenada, contrary to tradition, members of the Central Committee failed to show up at the airport to welcome him back. On this occasion Maurice was met only by (Minister of National Mobilization) Selwyn Strachan.

We arrived back on a Saturday. Yet all day Sunday and all day Monday none of these comrades came to brief Maurice. Bernard Coard, as acting prime minister, had a responsibility to give Maurice a report on what had taken place during his absence. Liam James, as head of security, also had a responsibility to report in. But none of these people checked with Maurice.

Question: Could you comment on reports that what lay behind the differences in the Central Committee were deep ideological differences between Bernard Coard and Prime Minister Bishop?

Answer: I will try to clear the air on this question of ideological differences between Coard and Bishop and between those who supported Coard or were loyal to Coard and those who supported Bishop or were loyal to Bishop.

I am dismayed that there has been so much filth, so much simplistic interpretation on this question, mostly in the bourgeois press. It is not surprising that they would try to paint Maurice Bishop as the "moderate" and Bernard Coard as a so-called hard-line Marxist, pro-Soviet, and so forth.

This is clearly an attempt to use the overthrow of the Grenada revolution and the death of Maurice Bishop to taint the image of socialism, the image of revolutionary movements around the world.

These same elements who were describing Maurice as a moderate were a few months ago describing him as a dangerous Marxist, a totalitarian, a dictator. There's a lot of hypocrisy in that.

In my view, there was no fundamental ideological difference between Bernard Coard and Maurice Bishop. No fundamental difference on ideological principles, no difference whatsoever on the ultimate objectives of the revolutionary process - that is, to create a socialist state in Grenada.

There were, probably, some nuances or minor differences on approach and questions of methodology or tactics and maybe on leadership style. But there were no differences on fundamental issues.

In my view, the contradictions that existed within the party at the time were secondary contradictions, which could have been settled peacefully.

But somehow, in all of the obfuscation that took place, they became elevated to the point that the focus on the primary contradiction - which is the contradiction between the revolution and imperialism itself - was lost. And because the focus was lost, the dangerous consequences to the revolution itself of the approach that Bernard and his people were taking were either overlooked, ignored, or misunderstood. I'm not sure which of the three is the most accurate.

Bernard and his people said they were calling for a more Leninist orientation for the party. But there was no attempt to arrive at a consensus as to exactly what this meant. What did putting the party on a more Leninist footing mean in reality?

Maurice and the rest of the comrades had absolutely no difficulty in accepting the concept if it meant a more disciplined and a more organized approach to party work; to the norms of party life; to study; to the application of the fundamental principles on which the party was built; to an understanding of democratic centralism; to an adherence to the principle of criticism and self-criticism.

If that is what it meant, then I don't think it would have met with any resistance, certainly not from the rank-and-file party membership.

But I think Lenin was being used as a cover. It appears that the call for a more Leninist orientation was misused to cover up what was in its essence a bid for power.

Bernard and his people also said they were dissatisfied with the pace at which the process was evolving. That again was a debatable question. I don't think they were taking a dialectical, scientific approach to how the pace of a revolutionary process is determined. It is not determined only by the subjective factor. It is determined by a balance between the subjective and the objective, determined by that dynamic that plays out over time.

In my view, the pace of the revolutionary process was the correct one. There were numerous considerations that needed to be part of a serious and mature analysis of the present stage of the revolution, the pace at which the revolution was evolving, and so on.

We had to consider the question in the context of a phased approach to the construction of socialism - particularly in a country like ours with its legacy of colonialism, neocolonialism, and Gairyism.

We had to take into account that we were surrounded by hostile, pro-imperialist forces. We had to consider the geopolitics of a region that U.S. imperialism considers its backyard.

I believe that the revolution was still in its national democratic, anti-imperialist stage, and was moving into a socialist-oriented stage of development. With the party controlling state power in the interests of the working people, the process of transforming the property relations and production relations from capitalist to socialist had begun.

This was a process that was going to be protracted - just like the struggle against imperialism itself, just like the struggle for national liberation, just like the anti-Gairy struggle was a protracted struggle. So, too, the struggle to build socialism in Grenada would have to be a protracted struggle.

It would have to take into consideration such factors as the balance and correlation of forces within the region, the balance and correlation of forces in the world. The Grenada revolution could not be developed in isolation from what was going on around us, from what was going on in the world.

But somehow the notion that this process was not going fast enough entered into the ideological discussion in the party and led to a kind of cleavage. Some people said we needed to push it forward more rapidly. Others argued for a more rational, scientific, and less idealistic assessment of this question.

It is ironic that up to about a year ago, Bernard himself used to caution against the dangers of ultra-leftism. We had a saying in the party that ultra-leftism is the right hand of imperialism. He also used to point out - quite correctly - that ultra-leftism serves more to raise the class consciousness of the bourgeoisie than that of the working class.

In my opinion, ultra-leftism also transfers the initiative for advancing the class struggle away from the working class to the forces of reaction. It allows them an opportunity to become more overtly aggressive and place the working class on the defensive.

For example, in 1980 Coard correctly accused the Budhlall grouping of ultra-leftism.? (Those Budhlalls, by the way, are now rabid anti-communists. The two brothers are now walking the streets of Grenada spouting anti-communist and anti-progressive tripe.)

Bernard also used to champion the necessity at this particular stage in the revolutionary process of forming tactical alliances between the working class and certain patriotic elements within the urban and rural petty bourgeoisie. This was necessary because the fundamental class character of our society is petty bourgeois. Even the class composition of the party itself was petty bourgeois basically - radical petty bourgeois people who had evolved beyond their own class and became proletarianized.

Bernard himself used to push the position of the necessity to build these tactical alliances. This was, in fact, one of the five priorities in the line of march of the party for this period.

Then a few months later, we hear Maurice Bishop accused of being petty bourgeois. We hear Unison Whiteman accused of being social democratic, of representing the right wing within the party. This was the first time we heard that there was a right wing within the party. We never knew there was any sort of right wing within the party.

All these charges, none of which was substantiated with a shred of evidence, were being used in a kind of convenient, opportunistic, Machiavellian way to achieve Bernard's objective of becoming leader of the party.

They also accused Maurice of cultism, of one-manism, again without substantiating those charges. That was perhaps the weakest charge of all. The people who knew Maurice Bishop knew him to be perhaps the most modest and least arrogant of all the top leaders of the party. He was the most accommodating and probably the number one adherent to the principle of collective leadership.

On countless occasions, when proposals were brought to Maurice, he would say that before a decision was made he had to get the collective wisdom of the Political Bureau or the Central Committee. Or he would say, "'Why don't you bounce the idea off of Bernard and the other comrades," Unison and Strachan and so on. So this charge of one-manism was ludicrous. Party members just could not accept it. It didn't hold any weight at all.

The charge that he was becoming dictatorial was also totally false.

Question: Were these charges against Maurice Bishop ever presented to the party during this whole period?

Answer: The day after Maurice was put under house arrest a meeting of the entire party was called, presumably to discuss it. We all thought certainly the point of the meeting was to vote on the question and come up with some consensus within the party, some line of march to explain to the masses why Maurice Bishop was being placed under house arrest.

That was a very long meeting - five and a half or six hours. But unfortunately the meeting ended without a vote being taken on the proposals. And there were not only the proposals on joint leadership, but further proposals to expel Maurice Bishop from the party altogether, to court-martial him. Very serious charges were leveled against Maurice that were not substantiated by one shred of evidence during that meeting.

Also, the party was told that Maurice was put under house arrest because he had authorized the spreading of a rumor that Bernard was trying to kill him. He was not under arrest, they said, for violating a principle of democratic centralism by supposedly refusing to abide by a majority decision of the Central Committee, but rather because he had allegedly spread this rumor.

Maurice spoke in his own defense at that meeting for over 40 minutes. He accepted criticism, as he had on previous occasions, for a number of weaknesses within the party and within the process. I don't think I ever heard any of those other leaders - and I certainly never heard Bernard Coard - criticize themselves at a party forum. And this was in front of the whole party.

But Maurice said, to use his own words, "With every ounce of honesty that I can muster, I will not accept responsibility for spreading this rumor that you are alleging."

He said, "If I really wanted to cause dissension and confusion within the party, I could have chosen much more creative ways to do it than to spread such a vulgar rumor."

But no vote was taken, and there was no guidance given as to what the line should be.

We asked, "Even if we accept those charges to be correct - and there was a lot of evidence that pointed the other way - what should be the unified party line when we go out there tomorrow to explain to the Grenadian masses that their leader is under house arrest?"'

The next day, when party members themselves took to the streets - there had been no official announcement that Maurice was under house arrest - they found it exceedingly difficult to explain the situation to the masses.

The people's spontaneous reaction was general confusion, a state of dismay, a state of anger. That Friday morning, hundreds of people gathered around the Free West Indian office. They were in an agitated mood. It proved very difficult to convince the masses that Maurice had violated a Central Committee decision and so on.

The response from the masses was, "'Now look, man, don't give us all this crap. You lock up the man, why do you have him locked up? If you charge him with all these so-called crimes, then give him a chance to talk to us. We want to see him and hear from him. We know the man from along time ago. He struggled with us. He struggled for our cause. He was beaten up to the point of death by Gairy's Mongoose Gang in 1973. Where was Bernard Coard when Maurice was being beaten up in the streets? Or when Maurice's father was shot in 1974? If Maurice did anything wrong the masses will deal with it."

Selwyn Strachan went down there to try to talk to them and made the huge error - Selwyn has made many errors in the past - of announcing that Bernard was now prime minister of the country. Selwyn was literally chased out of town by the people. They were so angry.

He went the same day to the international airport to try to talk to the workers there. Their response was, "No, we don't accept what you say. We want to see and hear from Maurice Bishop himself, and don't come back unless you bring Bishop with you."

When they talked to the workers at the electricity plant they got a similar response.

Question: Do you think there were opportunities to avoid the ultimate out-come as these events you describe were unfolding?

Answer: What happened in the weeks before, during, and after Maurice's house arrest was that leftism ran amok. By that I mean that these comrades had completely lost any sense of connection between what they were doing, what they were saying, and objective reality.

Bernard could have put checks on this avalanche if he had acted in a responsible and mature Marxist manner. He could have cautioned that what was happening was threatening the very survival of the revolutionary process.

I think things deteriorated very rapidly in that two-week period. The party lost virtually all support among the masses. Many rank-and-file members of the party also became alienated and disillusioned. Many were bullied into silence by Bernard's demagoguery. It was a very tragic development in that respect.

It had become so mad that when Louison and Whiteman were trying to negotiate with Coard and Strachan for a peaceful solution to the impasse, Bernard went so far as to tell Louison that they were prepared to lose five years of the revolutionary process because they were convinced that losing five years now would gain them ten years somewhere down the line. I can't understand that kind of logic, but this was the line that was taken.

Louison said to Coard, "The people are going to continue to manifest their disapproval of this. What are you going to do? How will you respond?"

Coard answered, "Well, the people can march, they can demonstrate, and we won't stop them. But they'll get tired. Gairy let them march and demonstrate almost daily for two months in 1973 and 1974. The same happened in Trinidad in 1970. The masses will get tired, and life will return to normal. And we will continue the revolutionary process on a more Marxist, more Leninist footing."'

This was the kind of madness to which the situation had deteriorated.

Look, without the people there could be no revolution. If you don't have sections of the party and section sof the armed forces with you, and you don't have the working people with you, how will you conceivably continue to build the revolution? It defies logic. It defies history. And it defies the ideas of Marxism-Leninism.

I think the crisis could have been avoided to some extent if Bernard and the people close to him had exercised some common sense, some wisdom.

Coard had a lot of influence and authority within the New Jewel Movement. He was a very able man intellectually, very bright, an excellent organizer, a man in possession of good qualities. But he was also a man driven by a deep sense of personal ambition and a quest for power.

Maurice would never have made the kind of errors Bernard did about relations with the people. In retrospect were ally have to take a hard look at how ideologically developed Coard was. If he was really the kind of mature Marxist-Leninist he was purported to be, then I don't think he could have made such a fundamental error as to miscalculate the response or the mood of the Grenadian masses and take a position of contempt towards them.

Unfortunately Coard and his people did make these errors. They let their own ambitions, I suppose, and their egos get the better of rational analysis on this question. Bernard in particular allowed an avalanche of rampaging ultra-leftism within the party to grow out of control.

And it grew to the point where, objectively at least, it created the conditions for imperialism to find a convenient excuse to move in and crush the Grenadian revolution. Comrade Fidel correctly warned Coard, Strachan, (Gen. Hudson) Austin, and the others of this likelihood in his statement condemning the killings the very day after they occurred.

In my view, the massacre at Fort Rupert and the draconian curfew that followed were not acts of class warfare, justifiable on the grounds of principle or historical necessity. Instead, like the invasion itself, they were crimes against the Grenadian people and the Grenada revolution. But only the Grenadian people and not the occupation forces or their puppet have the right to dispense revolutionary justice to the perpetrators of those monstrous crimes.

Question: You said earlier that in your view the revolutionary process in general was developing at the proper pace. Do you think that was also true with respect to the development of the mass organizations, the parish councils, and so on?

Answer: As one of the central leaders of the party, Maurice himself was very strong on the question of creating institutions in the party, in the mass organizations, in the zonal and parish councils through which the rank-and-file workers and farmers, the women, the youth, the students would have an opportunity not only to express their views, but to contribute to the making of policy.

The system of councils, despite problems and difficulties, was working quite well up until the invasion. It was, of course, an experimental system. In the history of Grenada and the Caribbean there were no precedents. It was a system being closely monitored and subject to modification depending on how it was developing.

It was certainly Maurice's hope that this system of councils at the local level, the village level, the parish level would become institutionalized as organs of people's power. It was our hope to have it become part of the ultimate legal framework of the revolution as part of the new people's constitution we were preparing.

Organizationally there were still weaknesses in the organs of popular democracy such as the zonal and parish councils. Weaknesses not so much in terms of the willingness of people to participate in these organs, but more in the way they were structured. For example, in some cases there would be meetings without agendas. In some cases there would be meetings that were not chaired.

The people's reaction was, "Why should we come to this meeting, sit here, and do a whole lot of rambling? We can identify the problems in our community. Let's look for the solution in a structured way."

So these pressures were coming from the people themselves. It was very good, a very healthy development.

Looking at it in hindsight, the process of decentralizing power inside the community was moving faster than the process of decentralizing power inside the party itself. For example, as I said before, the proposals for joint leadership were never in fact voted on by all the rank-and-file party members.

Some of the problems in the party were discussed at the Central Committee meeting in mid-September of this year. The meeting analyzed a breakdown in the internal functioning and structure of the party, a breakdown in internal discipline inside the party.

There were feelings that comrades in the party were being overworked. Comrades were feeling that there were double standards operating in the party, that some comrades who deserved to be disciplined for not pulling their weight were not being disciplined because of who they knew in the party leadership.

These were all problems that did exist within the party. But I don't think the problems were insurmountable. I think a more rational approach to organization, to the distribution of tasks, to strengthening the key organs within the party - these kinds of measures could have been taken to eliminate many of the problems.

What ended up making that Central Committee meeting so extraordinary was not this examination of the state of affairs in the party, but the proposal for joint leadership that came out of the blue near the end of the meeting.

Question: How could the Coard faction even hope to continue to hold power after Bishop's house arrest and subsequent assassination?

Answer: I think that even if the invasion did not take place, Bernard Coard, General Austin, Strachan, (Ewart) Layne, James, and other members of the Central Committee who comprised that faction would not have been able to continue to develop the revolutionary process as we knew it.

The party by itself, as a numerically small party, could not have continued to build the revolution even if it had the support of the military. And even that was questionable after the events of October 19. There was such serious demoralization within the armed forces that a mutiny would have broken out in a matter of days.

They would not have been able to rule the country, because they would have had a country without people, without the revolution. A situation would have developed in Grenada where the working people abandoned all of the enthusiasm, the energy, the effort, and the voluntary labor they put out over four and a half years to build the revolution.

The Revolutionary Military Council could not have mustered more than two percent support after the events of October 19 and the curfew. The economy would have ground to a halt. Grenada would have been totally and completely isolated from the region. The sanctions that had been announced by CARICOM (Caribbean Community) and the Organization of Eastern Caribbean States surrounding Grenada would quickly have begun to have an effect in a small country like Grenada. All sea and air commercial traffic had been cut off. Grenada was isolated from the world.

There would have been more demonstrations, I believe, despite the threats. Working people would have gone to their work places. But I doubt very much if they would have produced. There would have been all kinds of passive resistance. There would have been no school. Perhaps students would have gone to school at the point of a gun, but certainly they would not have functioned in school.

So economically, socially, politically, and diplomatically the regime could not have survived. They certainly could not turn to Cuba for any assistance, because the Cuban Communist Party and Fidel had made it clear in the strongest possible terms that they disapproved of what took place on October 12 when Maurice was put under house arrest and when he was assassinated on October 19.

The regime would have been left without friends, without neighbors, and most fundamentally without a people.

It is noteworthy that the 15 members of the RMC and Coard, Strachan, and Austin all either surrendered Yankee invaders or were captured without resistance. This was the same group who, in a last futile attempt to rally the masses to resist the invasion on the morning of October 25, called on the Grenadian people to fight "to the last man, woman, and child."

Question: How would you summarize some of the most important lessons to be learned from the overthrow of the workers and farmers government in Grenada?

Answer: In my view the faction led by Bernard Coard made a number of fundamental miscalculations.

One of them was that they failed to correctly assess the mood and consciousness of the Grenadian people at that particular time. That is a cardinal error.

They fell victim to subjectivism in their approach to dealing with the people. One of the lessons we have to learn from this is that the class struggle cannot be carried out by a party or an army that - by its own actions - has alienated itself from the people.

Their unchecked, unscientific, infantile ultra-leftism also opened the doors to counterrevolution inside and outside the country. The right-wing forces inside the country had begun to manifest a certain boldness even before Maurice was killed.

This was made evident by the demonstration of students, for example, who went to the airport site on Tuesday, October 18, and shut it down for a brief period. Among the placards were slogans such as "'C for Coard, C for communism, C for Corruption."

This was a very dangerous indication that the right had begun to move and to seize the opportunity of Maurice's house arrest to stir up anti-Cuban, anti-socialist, anti-communist, and counterrevolutionary sentiments among certain sections of the masses.

In the spontaneous demonstration of Wednesday morning itself, when the people went to Maurice Bishop's house and liberated him, some of these right-wing provocateur elements were very active inside the crowd, trying to whip up anti-Cuban and anti-communist sentiments.

(Trade union leader) Vincent Noel, myself, and some other comrades picked this up very quickly and brought it to Maurice's notice as we were moving down Lucas Street to the fort. He was very concerned about this. This was less than two hours before he was killed.

Maurice told me that I should try to go to the telephone company and make some calls to the outside world. He wanted the point made very clearly that President Fidel Castro and the Cuban Communist Party had absolutely no involvement in this crisis and that the Grenadian people could solve these problems by themselves, without outside interference or intervention.

So it was clear that right-wing elements had in fact begun to mobilize very actively inside of Grenada from the day Maurice was put under house arrest. This is just to give some evidence of the theoretical point that Bernard's actions objectively provided the condition for rightist opportunists to misguide and mislead the Grenadian people.

There is just one thing I want to read for you. This is a quote from a speech Maurice Bishop made on Budget Day in 1982. I want this quote to be understood in the context of the charges of one-manism, cultism, and arrogance that were leveled against Maurice. And we can contrast it with the lack of public statements by Bernard Coard complimentary to Maurice Bishop over the years.

Here is what Maurice Bishop said:

'But I also want to say that it would not have been possible, certainly not in the Ministry of Planning, Finance and Trade, to have got this incredible amount of work, to have had these comrades come up with these tremendous amounts of energy, to have had them display all the creativity and initiative that they have had; none of that would have been possible if they did not have a really first class, a really extraordinary leader, a comrade there to guide them at all times, to help them with their conceptions at all times, to help ensure that they are staying within the broad framework of the policies and guidelines and programs elaborated by our party and government, a comrade there to ensure that when they were about to collapse that he could himself help to take up the slack because nothing that they were engaged in doing was strange to him. He, himself, was the greatest worker of all of them, a comrade who sleeps regularly two or three hours a night, and for that reason a lot of us in the party and government try to put little handcuffs on him, to restrain him without success, because of his total obsession with the economy, with the country, with building this country as rapidly as possible; and comrades now again I ask you to recognize the tremendous, outstanding work of Comrade Bernard Coard, our minister of finance."'

Finally, allow me to express some personal thoughts. on the priorities, tasks, and challenges that now confront Caribbean revolutionaries and progressives.

First, it is imperative that we begin a process of scientific and dispassionate analysis that would identify and explain the serious errors made by the NJM, separate the subjective and objective factors responsible for these mistakes, draw and extract lessons and conclusions from that analysis, and incorporate them into the ongoing refinement of revolutionary theory and its creative application to revolutionary practice.

We must let the positive symbols, achievements, and example of the Grenada revolution continue to guide and inspire us as we press on with the struggle against imperialism and its hand-maidens - racism, colonialism, neo-colonialism, and fascism.

We must not be demoralized by the tragic setbacks of October 19 and October 25. Rather, we must strengthen our resolve, our optimism, and our confidence as we continue to call vigorously for immediate withdrawal of all foreign troops from Grenada and for an end to the U.S. colonization of the country. We must demand an end to the campaign of harassment, intimidation, and victimization against the NJM and supporters and sympathizers of the revolution. We should also condemn the reactionary campaign throughout the entire Caribbean to exploit the Grenada events to crack down on every progressive force in the anti-imperialist and labor movements.

At the moment, we should put a lot of our energy into support work for our comrades in Nicaragua who face an imminent U.S.-backed invasion, perhaps even involving direct U.S. forces. Now is the time for unity of all revolutionary and progressive people around the world. It is a time to rise above factionalism and sectarianism and come together in a broad anti-imperialist united front for peace, justice, and social progress.

Grenadian Revolution Archive