Grenada

...For that, most Grenadians remain grateful...

...assistance dried up and Grenada was left to the mercy of the International Monetary Fund (IMF...

...Back on the terrace, Freddy was ribbing Spencer...

...Since the 1980s Marryshow has promoted two causes: renaming Grenada's international airport—begun by Cuba and completed by the United States—for Maurice Bishop, and mounting a plaque there to honor the Cuban construction workers killed resisting the U.S...

...Mon, you need to check your real estate agent...

...Not exactly...

...economic embargo against Cuba...

...A giant hotel and marina complex will be constructed in its place, financed by an East European tycoon whose influence on this tiny island may in the end rival that of Fidel Castro and Ronald Reagan...

...The Yugoslavia mafia ha' come and buy your house...

...Out of Castro's visit, Marryshow managed to get the plaque...

...The Coards hated Bishop because he stood in the way of Bernard's ambition to take full control of the NJM and the state...

...DISSENT / Summer 1999 25...

...Coard and company were arrested by the Marines, convicted of murder in a Grenadian court and now are serving life sentences...

...Names on the boards of his various financial groups include or have included former U.S...

...After being fined a pittance by bumbling Czech authorities, Kozeny absconded to the Bahamas to become one of the growing number of global buccaneers and offshore hustlers taking advantage of the economically vulnerable Caribbean...

...The Blue Lagoon hotel and yacht club, which is to rise from the rubble of Butler House, is being financed by Viktor Kozeny, the Czech-born, Harvard-educated entrepreneur nicknamed the "Pirate of Prague" by Fortune magazine after he allegedly looted the Czech Republic's privatization program and, in the process, the life savings of tens of thousands of small Czech investors...

...Up a flight of buckled stairs, past a landing reduced to a skeleton of rusting steel rods, we found ourselves in what Freddy said had been a dining room...

...Kozeny is to plow $140 million into Blue Lagoon, the equivalent of nearly half Grenada's annual gross domestic product...

...Many are less sanguine about the restoration of vote-buying democracy, what Bishop scorned as "rum and corned beef politics...

...With agriculture in decline generally, wracked by swings in the global commodities casino, island governments have been left to scramble for the tourist dollar...

...George's to where he was held and freed him...

...In return, Mitchell last August named Kozeny an ambassador at large, which, according to Mitchell's personal letter of confirmation, grants Kozeny "all normal diplomatic privileges and immunities," furnishing a thicker coat of protection than the ordinary passport Kozeny acquired from Ireland in exchange for investments there...

...by mobilizing investors, tourists and aid for our country...

...Last winter, shouldering past curtains of vines and jagged chunks of concrete, I came across the kidney-shaped swimming pool, still blue beneath a layer of glistening slime, wedged into the hillside beneath a sun-parched, circular terrace...

...Senator George Mitchell and former White House chief of staff John Sununu...

...You want a quick sleep, you come on up and weeze out"—and the thickly bearded Spencer, who lives beneath the terrace in an abandoned security bunker from where, he says, Grenadian soldiers fired back at the Cobras...

...George's, a once compact town of church spires and orange-tiled roofs that over the years has climbed into the surrounding foothills...

...24 DISSENT / Summer 1999 Two weeks before Kozeny's appointment, Fidel Castro toured the Caribbean to thank governments for condemning the U.S...

...That was small consolation for the struggling Maurice Bishop Patriotic Movement (MBPM), a handful of former NJMers led by Cuban-trained physician Terry Marryshow...

...Before it became Butler House the now-gutted hulk was The Islander, Grenada's first tourist hotel, which catered to stray countesses and other European prodigals after World War II...

...Marryshow is a decent man and a fine doctor whose fundamental problem is that he is not Maurice Bishop...

...DOUGLAS W. PAYNE is a New York-based writer...

...Others believe it was set deliberately to keep the Marines from seizing official records...

...Ideologically opposed to the parliamentary system, Bishop did not hold an election during his four and a half years in power...

...Now, Grenada and the other small island-nations in the region find themselves whipsawed between giant commercial blocs in North America and Europe...

...The prime minister, who spent the revolution excoriating Bishop and the Cubans from his perch at Howard University in Washington D.C., then took the opportunity to poke the Clinton administration in the eye by hailing Castro as "one of the most distinguished and dedicated leaders of the twentieth century...

...Structural adjustment meant fewer goodies to pass around at election time, and in 1995, Keith Mitchell, a right-leaning populist reminiscent of Gairy, squeaked into office...

...Freddy accompanied me to Bishop's old office, where he fell silent, running his sinewy hands up and down his forearms until I was ready to leave...

...Ironically, he is the only Grenadian politician who could ever have won one without spending a nickel on a campaign...

...He was referring to its most notorious inmates: Bernard Coard, the chunky, Stalinist intellectual, his wife, Phyllis, the Jamaica-born heiress to the Tfa Maria fortune, and their cohorts in the Revolutionary Military Council, who in October 1983 put Bishop under house arrest after denouncing him for "right opportunism" and, in Phyllis's words, displayDISSENT / Summer 1999 23 ing "too much humanitarianism...

...At the unveiling, Mitchell noted the importance of the facility to the tourist industry...

...Some Grenadians say the fire that engulfed the government compound high upon the bluff at the mouth of St...

...From there we could take in all of St...

...Meanwhile, another notable makeover appeared to be underway up at Richmond Hill, where Bernard Coard and his collaborators have been campaigning for an early release...

...Now, more than a decade and a half later, Butler House is slated for demolition...

...When word got out that Bishop had been detained, thousands marched through the streets of St...

...No one knows for sure, just as nobody knows what happened to the body of Bishop, murdered six days earlier by rivals in the New Jewel Movement (NJM) as the Grenadian Revolution devoured itself...

...They hung close, chanting "No Bishop, no revo," when he and loyal aides sought to regroup at Fort Rupert—renamed for Bishop's father, killed by Gairy's police—just across the harbor from Butler House...

...The MBPM, with few resources, received a few hundred votes in the recent elections, which were won in a landslide by Mitchell and his now well-heeled political machine...

...In an open letter published by a local newspaper, they expressed "profound regrets," endorsed "constitutional rights," and, to show that they were wise to the state of play in today's Grenada, vowed that if freed they would "assist our country in whatever way possible, e.g...

...By then, the English-speaking Caribbean was no longer on Washington's screen— "After all, you're talking about a market of only six million people," a State Department official said to me not long ago...

...And thousands more were still streaming down from the mountains when units of the People's Revolutionary Army controlled by Coard overran the fort, lined up Bishop and his associates in the inner courtyard of the citadel, and executed them with automatic weapons...

...With the end of the cold war, U.S...

...Freddy told me that when he heard that, he said to Spencer, "Comrade Coard, mon, he lookin' for a job with that Yugoslavia mafia...

...He has pledged a few million more for "tourism marketing," and in 1998 flew Prime Minister Mitchell and his entourage to Europe on his Challenger jet...

...But he had those people around him," Freddy said, cocking his head at the Richmond Hill Prison, the dull yellow, slab-like structure built on a towering ridge by the British two centuries ago...

...Cuba now is no less dependent on tourism than its newly found friends, and where Castro once sought to promote revolution, he now advocates developing "multidestinational aspects of our main tourist resources...

...Bishop's headquarters were named for Tubal Uriah "Buzz" Butler, a founder of the Caribbean labor movement who in the 1930s led strikes by fellow Grenadian oil workers in Trinidad and was jailed for five years by the British colonial authorities...

...George's harbor was ignited by the strafing of Cobra helicopter gunships...

...I N THE FIRST elections after the invasion, the conservative-led coalition favored by Washington coasted to victory on a blanket of U.S...

...There I met Freddy, an unemployed carpenter with a bouquet of rasta locks held by a rubber band atop his head—"It's nice here...

...Maurice was alright, mon...

...They hated him, too, because so many Grenadians loved him—not because Bishop was a Marxist or a personal friend of Castro but because he walked among them, ate at their tables and imbued them with a sense of dignity and national belonging that had been denied by Eric Gairy, the UFO-obsessed autocrat overthrown by the NJM in 1979...

...The latest manifestation is the trade war waged by the Clinton administration—on behalf of Carl Lindner, the deep-pocketed Chiquita honcho and Lincoln Bedroom guest—against the European Union's preferential treatment of Caribbean banana growers...