Abstract
By the summer of 1983 the tension in US-Grenada relations had decreased. However, simultaneously, the People’s Revolutionary Government’s (PRG) internal problems had grown increasingly insurmountable: a faltering economy, waning popular support, and an internecine party power struggle that culminated in the PRG’s implosion in October and its replacement by a Revolutionary Military Council (RMC), which was then overthrown by a multilateral US-Eastern Caribbean military force. This chapter will trace the decline of the PRG and the subsequent arrest of Prime Minister Maurice Bishop and his death on Wednesday, October 19, and the US and Caribbean reaction to these events which laid the foundations for a military intervention.
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Notes
Brian Meeks, Caribbean Revolutions and Revolutionary Theory: An Assessment of Cuba, Nicaragua and Grenada (London: Macmillan, 1993), 173.
Jiri Valenta and Virginia Valenta, “Leninism in Grenada,” Problems of Communism 33 (July–August 1984): 16.
Anthony Payne, Paul Sutton, and Tony Thorndike, Grenada: Revolution and Intervention (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1984), 111.
Kai Schoenhals, “The Road to Fort Rupert: The Revolution’s Final Crisis,” paper presented at the conference on Democracy, Development and Collective Security in the Eastern Caribbean: The Lessons of Grenada, (The Caribbean Institute and Study Center for Latin America of Inter American University of Puerto Rico, San German, Puerto Rico, October 17–19, 1985), 1.
Jorge Heine, “The Hero and the Apparatchik: Charismatic Leadership, Political Management, and Crisis in Revolutionary Grenada,” in A Revolution Aborted: The Lessons of Grenada, ed. Jorge Heine (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1990), 241.
Manning Marable, African and Caribbean Politics: From Kwame Nkrumah to the Grenada Revolution (London: Verso, 1987), 225.
Heine, “The Hero and the Apparatchik,” 221. The Line of March speech can be found in The Grenada Papers, ed. Paul Seabury and Walter McDougall (San Francisco: ICS Press, 1984), 59–88.
Carl Feuer, “Was Bishop a Social Democrat?” Caribbean Review 12, no. 4 (Fall 1983): 39.
Grenada Foundation, An Interview with George Louison and Kendrick Radix (New York: Grenada Foundation, 1984), 25.
George Brizan, Grenada: Island of Conflict (London: Macmillan, 1998), 434.
John Walton Cotman, The Gorrion Tree: Cuba and the Grenada Revolution (New York: Peter Lang, 1993), 211.
Fidel Castro, “Nothing Can Stop the Course of History,” quoted in John Walton Cotman, “Cuba and the Grenada Revolution: The Impact and Limits of Cuban International Aid Programs,” 2 vols. (PhD diss., Boston University Graduate School, 1992), 501.
John Quigley, “The United States Invasion of Grenada: Stranger Than Fiction,” The University of Miami Inter -American Law Review 18, no. 4 (Winter 1986–1987): 338.
John Ventour, “October 1983: The Missing Link,” in The Grenada Truth and Reconciliation Commission Report on Certain Political Events which Occurred in Grenada 1976–1991, vol. 2 (St. George’s, Grenada: Government Printery, 2006), Appendix 14, 22. Ventour was a trade union leader and later a member of the Political Bureau.
Gordon Lewis, Grenada: The Jewel Despoiled (Baltimore, NJ: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), 57.
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© 2007 Gary Williams
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Williams, G. (2007). Death of a Revolution: Prelude to an Intervention. In: US-Grenada Relations. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230609952_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230609952_6
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