REAGAN'S ISLAND
Steif, William
REAGAN'S ISLAND BY WILLIAM STEIF S ix days after the Marines landed on Grenada, I approached two men at the Carenage Market on the waterfront of St. George's, the island's capital. Before they...
...American, Canadian, and West European visitors, seeking sun, sand, sailing, snorkeling, and lovely vistas, keep these islands afloat...
...Croix, he was singing Bishop's praises, pointing out that Bishop had nationalized only the power company and the telephone company and had scarcely interfered with private enterpise...
...Radix considers the invasion a violation of international law...
...And he instituted a minimum wage, primarily for agricultural workers, amounting to about $19 a week...
...Croix, St...
...George's, is one of the Caribbean's finest...
...His advisers voiced worries about the possibility of Soviet MIGs using the airport to cut off Persian Gulf oil tankers en route to Caribbean and Gulf of Mexico refineries that feed the United States...
...John—with the same area as Grenada and almost the same number of people—welcomed 1.2 million visitors in 1982...
...The combination of the frightening airport and the treacherous northern road has kept tourism to a minimum...
...Everywhere I went that first Sunday after the Tues-: day invasion, Gren- : adians stopped to tell : me their versions of '¦ the events of Octo- '¦ ber: the house arrest of Maurice Bishop and his Education Minister and mistress, Jacqueline Creft...
...The new steel and concrete terminal, replacing the wooden snacks at Pearls, exceeds the terminal at Havana's Jose Marti Airport...
...We gonna get higher prices for nutmeg and bananas," said George St...
...No criticism...
...Bishop was eager to build his island's feeble industry, counting on tourism to help pull the country out of poverty...
...RADIO report from Pacific News Service, October 19, 1981: "The idea of U.S...
...Before they could tell me how they felt about the invasion, six or seven more Grenadians gathered around and everyone began speaking at once...
...I spent an hour or so poking around the fort and found Cuban and Soviet technical manuals, hundreds of rounds of ammunition, a defunct freezer full of stinking fish and a side of beef, EnglishDESCRIBING the invasion, an American diplomat told The New York Times, "This was the most thoroughly planned crisis I've ever participated in...
...Under the communists, you can't talk all you want," said a youth named Michael Felix...
...It was good for them to see all these black Marines, and let me tell you, if they ever let these Marines loose on this island, a lot of our girls would be very happy...
...The airport project provided 400 to 500 jobs for Grenadians—no trifle for a work force in which two of every five were unemployed...
...The trip takes an hour and a half to two hours and provides glimpses of the island's highest peak, Mount Saint Catherine, 2,757 feet up, as well as plenty of views of nutmeg, cocoa, bananas, sugar cane, goats, chickens, skinny dogs, and dense underbrush...
...By and large, Grenadians don't consider themselves conquered...
...In early November, a hand-written schedule of daily arrivals and departures—seven or eight in all—was still tacked to one of the wooden shacks that constitute the terminal at Pearls...
...George's you take a narrow, rutted road dipping back and forth into Grenada's mountains...
...After being spurned by the United States, Bishop turned to Cuba for help and Castro came through, sending construction workers and engineers to help build a modern, 9,000-foot airport five miles south of St...
...the twenty-four-hour, shoot-to-kill curfew imposed by General Austin's Revolutionary Military Council...
...With all the propaganda, they thought America was all white colonialists...
...The tiny Grenadian tourist industry is concentrated in the South—perhaps 1,000 beds in small hotels, guesthouses, and cottages...
...He started a free public health program...
...helicopter gunships still buzzed overhead and Navy Corsairs made occasional passes at what U.S...
...The admiration, even love, most Grenadians have for the slain Bishop is unshakable...
...On one hill east of town is Fort Frederick and the mental hospital that was attacked by U.S...
...There are also many Anglicans and Seventh Day Adventists, and some Protestants...
...George's, close to Grand Anse beach...
...The United States provided some typesetting equipment for the newspaper and flew copy for it aboard military transport planes to Barbados for printing, then back again for distribution...
...After the invasion, Reagan reiterated his charge: The new airport could have been used as a staging area "to export revolution" to Latin America...
...As far as we're concerned, it was a rescue," said Pitt, who runs a successful wholesale liquor company...
...A little further south on the escarpment is Richmond Hill Prison, where Bishop's government and its short-lived military successor kept dozens of political prisoners...
...The exceptions tend to be officials of the Bishop government, such as Industries Minister Kendrick Radix and Agriculture Minister George Louison, who took refuge in the Cuban Embassy when Coard and Austin took over...
...Caribbean Task Force Commander Admiral Robert McKenzie added fuel to the flames by referring to Cuba, Nicaragua, and Grenada as 'practically our country,' and saying the U.S...
...i ADMIRAL : Joseph Metcalf, '. commander of ' the American-led task force, was quoted as saying the invaders had seized "a list of names, addresses, and telephone numbers of people believed to be communist sympathizers living in the United States...
...No one on the island speaks ill of the leader who, until martyrdom, was President Reagan's bete noire in this area of the Caribbean...
...REPORT from Grenada by Dan Sewell of the Associated Press: "This has really been good for our young people," says Genty Jacobs, a hotel owner whose nephew is Grenada's ambassador to the Soviet Union...
...invasion was mounted...
...Hopkin and his sons, owners of two of Grenada's better resort hotels, talk fondly of Bishop and what he was trying to do...
...William Steif, a former national and foreign correspondent for the Scripps-Howard newspapers, reports occasionally from abroad for The Progressive...
...I'd rather be an American than a communist," he added...
...Naipaul and Graham Greene below the waterfront Nutmeg Restaurant...
...We want to live in a democracy," said Martin Antoine...
...The U-shaped harbor curls into the center of town, and freighters normally load and unload along the seaside street...
...Among all the islands of the Lesser Antilles, only Dominica is poorer...
...The hospital was far from adequate in peacetime, and in the days after the invasion it was pathetically overburdened by the seventy-five to one hundred casualties...
...The road's high point is 1,910 feet above sea level, and ditches along the way are strewn with carcasses of trucks and cars that didn't quite make one of the many turns...
...We couldn't laugh before," summed up Celia Brathwaite...
...officials called "pockets of resistance...
...There was a courtyard fenced in by barbed wire to prevent prisoners from escaping, and the walls of the fort held such hortatory revolutionary slogans as Education is Production, Too...
...Marines storming ashore on one of the tiniest islands in the Caribbean may seem laughable, but not to the leftist government of Grenada, which claims a U.S...
...During his three years in power, Bishop extended the education system so that youngsters could go to school free beyond the age of fourteen...
...finally, the landings of the 5,000 U.S...
...Alan Frederick, sitting on the same front stoop, said, "You don't know how we feel better...
...Last spring, when I first met Pitt at a Caribbean Chamber of Commerce meeting in St...
...But he had no infrastructure for tourism...
...Below Fort Rupert on one slope is the general hospital, to which most of the Grenadians injured in the invasion eventually were taken...
...In the late 1970s, Grenada drew about 32,000 tourists a year...
...Thomas, and St...
...the tropical rains will wash underneath...
...The language is West Indian English, often accenting the last syllable of words, and remnants of Creole used further north can be detected...
...John...
...I nomas to I nnidad...
...They cheered U.S...
...Tiny villages appear unexpectedly along the road...
...George's has a population of33,000, if you can believe the proprietor of the little bookstore selling paperbacks of V.S...
...According to the United Nations, Grenada's gross national product for 1981 was $97 million, equivalent to a per capita yearly income of $882...
...Since the 1960s, tourists bound for Grenada have had to go to Barbados first, transfer to a small plane operated by LI AT (Leeward Islands Air Transport), and fly into Pearls Airport on Grenada's northeast coast...
...The northern two thirds of Grenada has few beaches...
...We need good homes, facilities, schools for the youth...
...The airport is remote, even though it's only ten miles as the crow flies from St...
...No," she shouted...
...Pearls, near the town of Grenville, has no lighting and a 4,500-foot runway unsafe for anything but light planes...
...He knew Grenada's climate was attractive, cooled by trade winds in the Caribbean's southeast corner and sheltered from the hurricane threat facing the more northerly islands...
...By comparison, Barbados attracted some 303,000 tourists that year, who dropped $250 million on an island only thirty-three square miles larger than Grenada and only 150 miles away...
...Marines and Army Rangers on October 25...
...invasion...
...Up a street from Market Square, I asked a Grenadian named Monica Thomas if she had any criticism of the U.S...
...By this time, hand-painted signs saying "God Bless America" had begun to appear on walls and vehicles all over St...
...In a frontpage editorial, the newspaper— the Grenadian Voice—offered President Reagan what it called its Order of Valor...
...Tourism is the life's blood of any economy in the Lesser Antilles...
...the fatal march to the square inside Fort Rupert, where two armored personnel carriers suddenly appeared at the only exit and began firing...
...Reagan mentioned it publicly last spring, citing it as a threat to U.S...
...must be prepared 'to interfere where possible and install a government friendly to the way of life we espouse.'" But the airport was an obsession for Ronald Reagan...
...the crowd that gathered October 19, led by Foreign Minister Unison Whiteman, to free Bishop and Creft...
...They consist, for the most part, of wooden houses propped up on concrete blocks so ASSOCIATED Press report from Grenada, November 20, 1983: "Free press returned to Grenada Saturday with the revival of a newspaper whose editors were jailed in 1981 by the government of Prime Minister Maurice Bishop...
...Atop another promontory overlooking the town is Fort Rupert, where the People's Revolutionary Army massacred Bishop's followers on "Bloody Wednesday," October 19...
...Pitt still maintains that Bishop was "a good guy," and like most Grenadians, he blames Coard and Austin...
...language pamphlets from Novosti, the Soviet press agency, and a case of striped Canadian regimental ties...
...bombers at a loss of at least eighteen Grenadian lives...
...The islands do grow some sugar cane, make a bit of rum, and export some bananas and spices, but for the big bucks, tourism is the ticket...
...Curtis Hopkin, a wealthy Grenadian who owns the Ross Point Inn, says Bishop was "a close friend...
...There was still a glow among the Grenadians that Sunday...
...G renadians are patient and conservative, like most people of the Lesser Antilles, the 500-mile arc of islands that stretches from St...
...I don't mind the invasion...
...Some in Washington claimed Cuba could use the new airfield as a base to shuttle troops and arms to Angola and other points in Africa...
...invasion is imminent...
...We can laugh...
...Rocky cliffs plunge into the sea, clouds brush the trees, and Grenadian women do their wash in the streams...
...Bryan Pitt, in his mid-thirties and a director of the Grenada Chamber of Commerce, didn't fret over international law...
...About 60 per cent of the 110,000 Grenadians are Roman Catholics...
...Maurice Bishop"— the first name is pronounced "Morris" in the English-speaking West Indies—"was a kind man, all right, but [Bernard] Coard is a fucking dog...
...We happy now...
...We glad...
...the subsequent execution of Bishop, Creft, Whiteman, and Norris Bain, the Housing Minister...
...To get from Pearls to St...
...Bishop knew that Grand Anse, a white sand beach that stretches for miles south of St...
...Bishop's coup sent that number downward, and despite a major effort by the Bishop government to bolster the industry, the total number of tourists in 1982 was barely 26,000...
...security...
...All the good beaches are on the other side of the island from Pearls airport...
...U.S...
...troops passing by in jeeps and trucks, and sometimes ran out to the vehicles with cold drinks for the sweating soldiers...
...The three Virgin Islands, St...
...It was on his mind long before the U.S...
...The Cubans, working with a British construction firm, Plessey, had completed about 70 per cent of the work by November...
...The town's whitewashed, red-roofed buildings, one and two stories high, line narrow, potholed streets that wind steeply up hills...
...We really have to thank America...
...Now there is talk of naming the new field the Ronald Reagan Airport...
Vol. 48 • January 1984 • No. 1
