The Dirty Secrets of Grenada

...The regime had already asked the Vietnamese to help set up re-education programs and assist in developing "methods to deal with lumpen elements...

...In reality, the mass organizations served as a screen to obscure the NJM's domestic agenda...

...The government volume, it should be noted, consists of photocopies of the original documents...

...The two volumes contain many of the same documents, but there are some important differences...

...The party, it was repeatedly stressed, must get closer to the masses...

...Finally, for those who generally find documentary histories tedious going, please be advised that the Grenada documents make for more interesting, even entertaining, reading than the speeches of Chernenko, Honecker, or Hoxha...

...The Sandinistas, like the New Jewel Movement, are engaged in a simmering war against the church...

...Among the suggestions advanced by the NJM commission studying the feasibility of forced labor was the need to restrict the right of Grenadians to leave their island...

...As certain details about the New Jewel period have become part of the public record, a tendency has grown to regard Bishop, Coard, and the others as nothing more than inept and pretentious buffoons...

...There was, for example, little industry, and the "proletariat"-such as it was-was concen-trated in the tourist industry...

...This should all be kept uppermost in mind the next time you hear Daniel Ortega insist on the Sandinista commitment to pluralism...

...The regime met with less success in its attempt to neutralize the churches, which throughout the New Jewel period remained a bastion of opposition sentiment...

...Fidel Castro himself labeled Bernard Coard, the man principally responsible for the murder of New Jewel Movement leader Maurice Bishop, as the Pol Pot of the Caribbean, and one suspects that many of Bishop's former admirers now Arch Puddington is executive director of the League for Industrial Democracy and editor of Workers Under Communism...

...Trade unions were a prime target, and within a few years New Jewel loyalists were ensconced in the leadership posts of all but one or two of Grenada's labor organizations...

...were primarily a tactic to induce a siege mentality among the Grenadian people...

...The Grenadians were also interested in propaganda...

...The New Jewel Movement faced two alternatives: muddle through and risk popular discontent over the deterioration of the economy, or travel the whole course by imposing a program of crash Sovietization...

...You get detained when I sign an order after discussing it with the National Security Committee of the Party or with a higher Party body...

...Although many factors, including Bernard Coard's hatred of Bishop, led to Bishop's execution and the NJM's collapse, the party's inability to forge a consensus over a soft or hard path to socialism provided a convenient justification for the removal of Bishop from the leadership...

...dominated entities...

...This perception, it should be stressed, arose only after the revolution's demise...

...The unions were also a valuable weapon in the ongoing campaign to harass and undermine private enterprise...

...It would appear, however, that we are to be spared a similar deliberation over the lessons of Grenada...

...Both volumes are edited by scholars well versed in the history of Communist affairs and both include helpful introductory and explanatory notes...

...And while it had to be conceded that the new regime was "suspicious" of the United States, the suspicions, we were assured, could be allayed through a policy of strict nonintervention coupled with generous offers of trade and aid...

...The NJM also considered removing any avowedly religious teachers from Grenada's schools...

...They conversed in a disjointed, pidgin Leninist dialect, with ritualistic references to the masses, democratic centralism, the dialectic criticism and self-criticism, the vanguard party, imperialism...

...The tragedy, however, is not that Communism devours its own but that it destroys the fabric of entire societies...

...if anything, they resented the fact that the Soviets excluded them from the inner circle of the "socialist camp," and gave support for the Sandinistas a higher priority than assisting the struggling NJM...

...In Grenada, this would not come easy...

...the government refused to deal with unions where recalcitrant leaders remained in power...

...The police also compiled minutely detailed reports on security in each part of the island, listing every individual in a particular parish who was considered hostile or potentially hostile to the revolution...

...The Seabury-McDougall volume includes a worthwhile section on the NJM's efforts to influence American opinion...

...Furthermore, the Cubans recommended that Grenada introduce formal registration for churches and other civic organizations, a totalitarian ploy used throughout Eastern Europe during the Communists' consolidation of power...

...Against all evidence, many radicalized Third World elites continue to view the Soviet model as the most expeditious way to modernize impoverished post-colonial societies...

...It is thus inaccurate to characterize revolutionary Grenada as a Soviet puppet state, the implication being that Soviet masters were pressuring or manipulating reluctant subjects...

...They are not part of our dictatorship because when they try to hold public meetings and we don't want that, the masses shut down the meeting...

...Moreover, it is regarded with growing cynicism by the elites of Eastern Europe and thoroughly detested by the people of those unfortunate countries...

...For the NJM, foreign affairs proved far more attractive than the burdensome chore of running the country...

...Even more enticing were the opportunities for' travel abroad, a not-to-be-underestimated fringe benefit of membership in the revolutionary elite...

...They are not part of the dictatorship...

...We don't go and call for no votes...

...Bishop's death was in keeping with a well-established tradition in the Communist world...

...Even now, many Grenadians continue to believe that Bishop was at heart a patriot engaged in a doomed struggle with Leninist hardliners Coard and Hudson Austin...

...At a minimum, this revelation would suggest a need to modify the widely maintained theory that Soviet-style Communism has exhausted itself as an ideological force...

...When they want to put out newspapers and we don't want that, we close it down...

...Although he would issue periodic warnings against the meddling of religious leaders in the political sphere, Bishop eschewed a frontal assault on church autonomy, recognizing that, eventually, a direct confrontation would be unavoidable...

...Bishop wrote Syrian strongman Assad asking for tapes and printed material recounting Syria's struggle for "true independence...

...Forced labor-of prisoners or free workers-is employed throughout the Communist world as a means of guaranteeing a supply of practically cost-free labor for the construction of roads, canals, hospitals, and other public-works projects...

...Thus the lesson of Chile is said to be the inevitable defeat of revolutionary governments which fail to gain firm control over the military, while the lesson of Egypt is the inherent weakness of the revolutionary impulse in regimes of a fundamentally nationalist complexion...

...For the left, that sorry episode is best forgotten, even though the outcome was determined by armed intervention of the imperial colossus from the North...

...At a time when we are told that the West has an "obligation" to bail out countries like Ethiopia, which remains, in the midst of famine, committed to Marxist economic policies and resolutely hostile to the United States, it would behoove Western observers to begin speaking the truth about the connection between Communist policies and economic crisis in the Third World...

...regard "revolutionary Grenada" as a grotesque embarrassment...

...Above all else, Grenada tells us a great deal about the nature of pro-Communist movements in the Third World...

...Finally, traveling the full course might well have meant the execution of opposition figures, as had recently occurred in the leftist dictatorship in Suriname, an action Bishop had publicly applauded...

...Enemies were never enemies...

...will only be possible with firm ties to the socialist world...

...Among other things, the documents reveal that the NJM relied to a surprising degree on the American Communist party for advice and logistical assistance...

...The problem with the latter option was that it implied much more than mere suppression of the press and the detention of the political opposition...

...On the other hand, Grenada holds a number of instructive lessons for the democratic world...

...they were counterrevolutionaries or petty bourgeois, sometimes shortened to "petty bourg" or occasionally just "p.b...

...And then that is what everybody in the country-like it or don't like it-has to follow...

...the report on the proposed forced labor program observed that "imperialism" would "well understand the significance" of the policy and capitalize on any resulting discontent in order to undermine the regime...

...Or consider how people are detained in this country...

...Collectivization was to be initiated by nationalization of the "large owners," and the resolution also spoke of the need to "win the peasantry gradually to socialism" through a program of "concessions...

...Typically, the regime proposed to compensate for the loss of American tourists through two equally ludicrous strategies: encouraging progressive-leaning Westerners to visit the island in order to drink in its revolutionary achievements, and promoting tourism among the nations of the Soviet bloc...

...Communism appeals to Third World radicals in part because it is the one ideology that still holds that people will work only if compelled to do so...

...There, too, a revolutionary government has begun to institute the usual array of repressive techniques perfected by the Soviets and Cubans...

...While compulsory labor was never actually introduced (the commission recommended implementation for 1985), the regime was rather more aggressive in securing control of the island's free institutions...

...A favorite diversion of the Marxist left, both here and abroad, is mulling over the lessons of its failures...

...There was, to be sure, an expectation that Grenada would be rewarded for services rendered...

...Today the lesson of Grenada is more appropriately applied to Nicaragua...

...An extreme example would be Vietnam's New Economic Zones...

...Bishop and the other principal NJM figures were convinced Communists, committed to the Sovietization of Grenadian society and to wholehearted support of Soviet global ambitions...

...Nevertheless, the number of Grenadians detained during the New Jewel era reached about 1,000, a considerable figure for a population of 100,000...

...Yet when a decision was reached to establish joint party leadership with the highly unpopular Bernard Coard joining Bishop at the top, the central committee voted overwhelmingly to withhold this interesting bit of information from the public...

...Like trade unions, schools, and civic groups, the churches were subjected to internal surveillance by security officials, who duly reported any statements containing political overtones...

...Bishop told gatherings of the nonaligned nations that the Third World should extend its "fraternal thanks" to the Soviets for their "assertive role" in assisting liberation movements throughout the world...

...Yet in the very same speech, practically the same breath, Bishop insisted that the working class must lead the revolution...

...There were complaints that the people were basing their political judgments not on what the party said but rather on broadcasts from the Voice of America...

...Many radicalized Third World elites continue to view the Soviet model as the most expeditious way to modernize impoverished post-colonial societies...

...Bishop and his associates were obsessed with American attitudes toward their revolutionary enterprise...

...Grenada was the only hemispheric nation (with the obvious exception of Cuba) to vote against a UN...

...with something approaching schizophrenia...

...In a few instances, the fraternal allies provided economic assistance, not that it always worked as intended...

...The police kept tabs on visitors to the church hierarchy and apparently tapped the telephones of church officials suspected of holding "counterrevolutionary" views...

...The Sandinistas are also reliable supporters of Soviet foreign policy, the most compelling proof being the numerous reports that Nicaragua is providing training facilities for the PLO and other Soviet-backed terrorist groups...

...The New Jewel Movement's final days resembled not so much the collapse of a government as a sectarian faction fight-except in this case one faction had guns and was more than willing to use them...

...The Catholic Church, for example, shortly after the NJM takeover, issued a series of pamphlets explaining the atheistic character of Marxism, and both Catholic and Protestant clergymen frequently emphasized human rights themes in their sermons...

...Bishop also sought the advice of the Cubans, who drafted lengthy reports on the "condition" of religion in Grenada and suggested that the NJM send a leading member to Cuba for training in the techniques of subverting the church...

...Given the fact that similar arguments are being registered in response to developments in Nicaragua, a retrospective on the history of the New Jewel era may, one hopes, dispel illusions about the native Sandinista "pluralism...

...Communism indeed holds little appeal for the people and political elites of the democracies...

...Maurice Bishop scored a perfect five in relations with the masses, but only a 2.5 in discipline...

...This strategy is reminiscent of procedures adopted by the people's democracies in Eastern Europe, where peasants were first given land expropriated from wealthy farmers and Nazi collaborators and only later herded against their will into state farms...

...Control of the unions was important in extending state power over the economy and essential in suppressing worker opposition to forced labor and other unpopular schemes...

...One cannot overemphasize the crucial nature of the debate over the future course of the "Revo...

...It is now beyond dispute that the perception of the New Jewel leaders as "nationalists-in-a-hurry" was a total misreading of their character and ideology...

...Perhaps the most striking theme to emerge from the documents of the New Jewel era-two volumes of which have recently been published1-is the seriousness with which the NJM took Marxist-Leninist doctrine...

...As might be expected, the vision of thousands of Bulgarians, East Germans, and Vietnamese spending hard currency in the newest outpost of revolution never materialized...

...Toward the end, when party discipline was falling apart, a chart was drawn up on which members of the central committee were graded on a one-to-five scale on such issues as "discipline," "ideological level," "relations with the masses," and' "functionability...

...This point may seem self-evident...

...Bishop in particular seemed to regard the U.S...

...Yet in his Line of March speech to party leaders in September 1982, he crowed about the efficiency with which the "dictatorship" was being enforced: Just consider, comrades, how laws are made in this country...

...And since many of the New Jewel "mass organizations" conducted meetings during working hours, participatory democracy also proved to be a drain on labor productivity...

...Once I sign it-like it or don't like it-it's up the hill for them...

...Aside from whatever minimal humanitarian sensitivities may have inhibited Bishop, a principal consideration was the reaction of the United States...

...It would have required the sealing off of borders, imposing collectivization, breaking strikes, instituting an internal passport system, and packing off the Rastafarians and other nonconformist groups to re-education camps...

...Laws are made in this country when Cabinet agrees and when I sign a document on behalf of Cabinet...

...When we want to hold Zonal Councils and we don't want them there, we keep them out...

...Grenada, at least, can be thankful for its geographic situation, and for the willingness of the United States to remove from power those who had betrayed their country in the service of an alien and inhumane ideology...

...Back home, party leaders were wont to behave like members of an obscure Marxist or New Left sect...

...Nor could the vexing issue of continued church autonomy have been ignored, raising the possibility of the imprisonment or deportation of priests...

...The Third World, however, presents a somewhat different picture...

...Wherever progressive forces were gathered, the New Jewel Movement was sure to be represented: at peace jamborees in Prague, meetings of the nonaligned in Havana, party congresses in East Berlin, revolutionary celebrations in Managua, Ulan Bator, or Pyongyang...

...We now know that these assertions amounted to a monumental fraud, no less so than similar claims advanced over the years by Cuba, Vietnam, Nicaragua, and other Marxist regimes...

...The NJM's fervent endorsement of every imperial design of the USSR brought economic repercussions, as Grenada's tourist trade declined after reports of the regime's radical course filtered back to the U.S...

...A fleet of fishing vessels sent by the Cubans, for example, sank almost immediately upon arrival...

...Grenada Documents: An Overview and Selection, edited and with an introduction by Michael Ledeen and Herbert Romer-stein...

...published by the Department of State and Department of Defense...

...On the other hand, he frequently complained that "imperialism" was not acting with sufficient brazenness, a sign that the regime's semi-hysterical denunciations of the U.S...

...We pretend we don't know what's happening and let the trade unionists do it...

...Not only were the NJM Grenadians eager servants of the Kremlin's global aims...

...We bring them in for what we want to bring them in for...

...But as the documents indicate, the major result of the overheated politicization was to irritate and bewilder the people...

...As a practical matter, the very idea of imposing a Communist framework on Grenada was absurd...

...While collectivization stands convicted as one of the more uniformly inane techniques of Communist social engineering, it was especially preposterous in Grenada, where a "large owner" might hold 75 acres, the distribution of land was highly egalitarian, and the marketing of farm products carried out by producer cooperatives...

...The regime imprisoned a substantial number of political opponents, although, in keeping with the gentler traditions of the English-speaking Caribbean, its treatment of dissidents was less harsh than in Cuba, Vietnam, or the countries of Eastern Europe during the period of Communist consolidation...

...Put simply, the Grenadian experience is a timely reminder that if the rulers of a country talk like Communists, introduce Communist-style social "reforms," and vote down the line with the Soviets at the United Nations and elsewhere, there is a good chance that they indeed are Communists...

...Yet during the New Jewel Movement's four-and-a-half years of rule (March 1979-October 1983),, many foreign affairs experts insisted that the opposite was true-that despite the anti-American rhetoric, despite the expressed contempt for "Westminster-style parliamentarianism," despite the muzzling of the press and the detention of political prisoners, Maurice Bishop and his comrades were really nationalists at heart...

...At times he appeared genuinely to fear CIA efforts to destabilize his government...

...As Bishop noted, if workers were to decide they wanted to seize control of a factory, "we support them, not through making noise because that would not be in our interest...

...resolution condemning the USSR for the invasion of Afghanistan, an action that damaged NJM credibility with sympathetically inclined European nations, and Bishop publicly lashed out at attempts to "roll back" the Afghan "revolution...

...Arch Puddington THE DIRTY SECRETS OF GRENADA They kind of make you wonder about the Sandinistas...

...When they want freedom of expression to attack the government or to link up with the CIA and we don't want that, we crush them and jail them...

...In speeches to party leaders and before gullible Western audiences, Bishop insisted that the people's lack of sophistication would be remedied through the introduction of a new, highly participatory form of democracy...

...Grenadians in fact were encouraged, cajoled, and compelled to participate in a dizzying array of committees, assemblies, rallies, youth organizations, women's caucuses, indoctrination classes, neighborhood patrols, and other such partyNJM gave favorable consideration to another undertaking: the establishment of a compulsory "labor army" patterned on the Cuban model...

...Indeed, the NJM's conduct of foreign affairs constituted an aggressive invitation to American hostility...

...In 1977, two years before the coup, he told a Cuban publication that the "victory of socialism...

...There is also the question of Grenada's alleged revolutionary achievements-the literacy campaigns, improved health care, liberation of women, economic modernization, and other "accomplishments" of which Bishop proudly boasted to delegations of starry-eyed Western visitors...

...Mandatory political indoctrination of teachers and primary-level students was proposed...

...The NJM placed a high priority on praising the Soviet Union in its propaganda material, and the Grenadians reached an agreement with Moscow to promote each other's "revolutions" in their respective organs...

...In the end, the Grenadian revolution reached the crossroads every Communist regime inevitably must confront...

...If man is by nature slothful, what better way to move beyond underdevelopment than through a wholesale transformation of the way people think and act...

...There was no hiding the threat the Grenadian revolution posed to the stability of the Caribbean democracies, nor any doubt about the actual coloring of the leadership's political views so skillfully concealed behind a facade of nationalist slogans...

...Bishop's pro-Sovietism was a matter of public record even before his coming to power...

...Committee meetings were often monopolized by windy discussion of such grave matters as the state of the world or Grenada's place in the worldwide liberation offensive...

...The government volume includes the minutes of the meetings of many of the principal NJM committees and a number of documents spelling out Cuban-NJM attempts to influence the Socialist International...

...Within a few months of seizing power Bishop was issuing venomous attacks on Zionism, an unmistakable sign of the country's direction...

...The Grenada Papers, edited by Paul Seabury and Walter A. McDougall, Institute for Contemporary Studies, $16.95...

...They are not part of our rule and control-they ate not part of it...

...The NJM achieved what Bishop described as "hegemony" over the unions through the usual methods: Meetings were packed...

...Unfortunately, Bishop and his friends regarded the Grenadian "working class" with a contempt worthy of a hardened colonialist...

...The East Germans, Cubans, and Soviets agreed to help train New Jewel cadres, and Cuba was to provide assistance in organizing public rallies and developing the mechanisms of propaganda...

...The list of revolutionaries consumed by the revolution is a long one, and growing longer by the year: Bukharin, Kostov, Slansky, Rajk, Patrascanu, the Afghan leaders Taraki and Amin...

...the documents are replete with New Jewelist requests for various forms of help from the Soviets, other Communist nations, and pro-Soviet Third World countries like Syria and Libya...

...When questioned about political repression by concerned-but nonetheless sympathetic-Westerners, Bishop evaded or downplayed the dimensions of the problem...

...Even Bishop admitted in a speech to party leaders that the prerequisites for socialism were lacking on the island...

...The Grenadians also agreed to coordinate positions with the Cubans at the United Nations, conclaves of the nonaligned, and other international forums...

...In the coded language routinely employed by the Grenadian revolutionaries, this character flaw was ascribed to a "low level of political consciousness...

...Bishop himself had premonitions of an "Afghan solution" being imposed on Grenada, with Bishop in the role of Taraki and Amin...

...A similar note of bravado runs through Bishop's description of the regime's dealings with the business class: It is also important to note, comrades, that while we are in alliance with sections of the bourgeoisie and upper petty bourgeoisie, they are not part of our dictatorship...

...Plans were made to extend socialist education classes, already compulsory for government workers, to the private sector...

...democratically chosen officials were harassed until they surrendered their posts or emigrated...

...At one point women party members, taking Bishop's speeches about sexual emancipation to heart, issued a manifesto demanding that men share equally in household chores and in child-raising responsibilities, whether they were at present living with the mother or not...

...As an NJM commission once observed, Grenadians were essentially petty bourgeois and "rebellious to any form of strict discipline and organization...

...In fact, if the truth is told, they have been repressed by the dictatorship...

...Hudson Austin, the security chief, began to see himself as Grenada's Jaruzelski, noting (according to the central committee minutes) that "the lesson of Poland showed that when the revolution was in danger and there was chaos in the party and society, it was only the Armed Forces that was able to rescue the Party and society...

...Thus a central committee resolution, for obvious reasons never made public, set forth the goal of farm collectivization, something quite different from the modest land reform proposals described by Bishop in his speeches to the Grenadian people and in interviews with the foreign press...

...By the time of the New Jewel Movement's self-immolation, the regime was making preparations to implement Soviet-style methods of regimentation and repression...

...It may well be that Bishop's most substantial legacy was his ability to obscure his real ambitions...