Sunday, October 19, 2025

Grenada 19 October, 1983

1983 Coup D'état - Grenada

By Everton Obi Powell

Maurice Rupert Bishop (29 May 1944 – 19 October 1983) was a Grenadian revolutionary and the leader of the New JEWEL Movement (NJM) – a party that sought to prioritorize socio-economic development, education and black liberation. The NJM came to power during the 13 March 1979 revolution which removed Prime Minister Eric Gairy from office. Bishop headed the People's Revolutionary Government of Grenada (PRG) from 1979 to 1983. In October 1983, he was deposed as Prime Minister and executed during a coup engineered internally by Deputy Prime Minister Bernard Coard.

In September 1983, simmering tensions within PRG leadership reached a boiling point. A faction within the party, led by Deputy Prime Minister Bernard Coard, tried to make Bishop either step down or agree to a power-sharing arrangement. Bishop rejected the proposal.

In response, the Coard faction in conjunction with the PRA placed Bishop under house arrest on 13 October. Large public demonstrations gathered to demand Bishop's release and his return to power. The protesters numbered as high as 30,000 on an island of 100,000, and even some of Bishop's guards joined the protests. Despite the sizable support, Bishop knew the determination of the Coard faction. He confided to a journalist: "I am a dead man."

On 19 October, a crowd of protesters managed to free Bishop from house arrest. He made his way, first by truck, then by car, to army headquarters at Fort Rupert (known today as Fort George), which he and his supporters were able to seize control of.

At that point, Coard dispatched a military force led by Hudson Austin from Fort Frederick to retake Fort Rupert. Bishop and seven others, including his cabinet ministers and aides, were captured.

A four-man PRA firing squad executed Bishop and the others by machine-gunning them in the Fort Rupert court yard. After Bishop was dead, a gunman slit his throat and cut off his finger to steal his ring. The bodies were transported to a military camp on the peninsula of Calivigny and partially burned in a pit. The location of their remains is still unknown.

Partly as a result of Bishop's murder, the Organization of Eastern Caribbean States (OECS) and the nations of Barbados and Jamaica appealed to the United States for assistance, as did Sir Paul Scoon, Governor-General of Grenada. Within days, President Ronald Reagan launched a U.S.-led invasion to overthrow the PRG.

US invaded within 6 days with 8000 soldiers. Bernard Cord and Hudson Austin were captured and sentence to death but sentences were commuted to Life.

Austin was release in 2008 and died from cancer in 2022. The final U.S. report claims 19 killed and 116 wounded; the Cubans to have had 25 killed, 59 wounded and 638 "combatants" captured; the Grenadians to have suffered 45 killed and 358 wounded.

Violence and death surrounded Bishop family. In 1974 his father Rupert was shot in the back and killed at by Eric Gairy Mongoose Gang during a protest. Maurice himself was shot and killed during the 1983 execution. His son's mother and girlfriend was killed during the 1983 execution and his only son Vladimir was stabbed to death in a Toronto nightclub at only 16.

Source / Comment

Sunday, December 8, 2013

Russia had no stomach for the Grenadian revolution

By EVERTON PRYCE

IT is often said that the marginal Marxist-Leninist Caribbean state of Grenada under Maurice Bishop's New Jewel Movement (NJM) of 1979-1983 was a satellite of Russia. But many readers of this column may be surprised to learn that Moscow had no desire to aid the spice island economically or otherwise, at levels the native revolutionaries expected.

Shortly after seizing power on March 13, 1979, the NJM's expectation of fraternal assistance from Moscow went into overdrive based on the assumption that communist countries had a greater concern than the West for the plight of Third World peoples.

BISHOP… seized power on March 13, 1979

And given the large cache of Russian-made guns, ammunition and military hardware that found their way in the control of the People's Revolutionary Army (PRA), the outside world also formed the impression that Russia was backing, unconditionally, the aims and objectives of the revolution.

But documents on Grenada-Russian relations released by the United States, after the 1983 invasion which it dubbed 'Operation Urgent Fury', tell an interesting story: Moscow did not want, nor could it afford, any more Cubas in the Caribbean.

Though somewhat dated, the documents referenced the deep involvement in the revolution of several prominent middle-class Jamaicans who are today comfortably ensconced in academia and the private sector with possible knowledge of how Bishop and some of his Cabinet colleagues were murdered and the location of their remains.

The documents also show Moscow's reluctance to commit itself to the Grenadian revolution to the same extent it did for the Cuban revolution 20 years earlier. This means that the Grenadian revolution was running on ideological fumes only for much of its existence.

"The Soviet Union is very careful, and for us sometimes maddeningly slow, in making up their minds about who to support," the Grenadian ambassador to Russia at the time is quoted as saying in the documents.

We can only imagine how disappointed Bishop and his band of revolutionary leaders must have been on learning of this Russian foreign policy attitude towards their country, given that in capturing State power they clearly felt that they qualified for Russian aid and support far beyond the levels that were actually forthcoming.

After all, the NJM had modelled itself on the Soviet Communist party even before it took State power, and in the United Nations, Grenada's voting pattern under the NJM favoured Moscow on important issues, more than other Third World Socialist-oriented states.

Even the NJM's party structure followed a Leninist pattern: a Politburo, Central Committee and the rest. The ruling party also had overriding control over the army, and imposed strict censorship on the media.

So, what could have prevented a major injection of Russian aid and support for revolutionary Grenada? Why wasn't Grenada benefiting from Russian developmental aid to the same extent as Cuba, which was estimated then at US$6 million per day?

Truth be told, the Grenada revolution came about at the wrong time, because the cost of Cuba was a price Moscow paid as a result of Russian policies in the Third World under Kruschev. In the post-Kruschev era in the early 1980s, the Russian leadership was far more cautious and selective in choosing the recipients of Russian economic aid and had become increasingly more cost-conscious and economically more self-interested. On reflection, Russian foreign policy was about concentrating on the problem of protecting established Soviet positions.

Russia's lack of involvement in the construction of the Point Salines International Airport (renamed appropriately the Maurice Bishop International Airport in 2009) bears this out. The airport project was the NJM's major economic preoccupation, and was the priority heading on the agenda of most Central Committee meetings, as well as being the main plank of the first Five-Year plan. The ruling party had hoped that the airport would go a long way in boosting the island's tourism trade and foreign exchange reserves.

But when Bishop, in a meeting with Russian Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko in April 1983, appealed for a Russian grant of US$6 million toward the airport project, the Russians turned down the request. Ultimately, the NJM had to turn to western donors for the funds to boost construction of the airport.

Bishop had even expected the Russians to purchase 1,000 tons of nutmeg on an annual basis. But the Russians replied that Moscow was only willing to import what it consumed each year, about 200-300 tons, and then "only at the world market price or below".

What is clear from all of this is that post-Kruschev Russia was not prepared to bail out the Grenadian economy, despite the fact that trade relations between the two countries had increased slightly. Neither was Grenada, under Bishop, blessed with observer status in the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (CMEA) — a status Mexico had enjoyed for a number of years.

Kruschev clearly had global ambitions for Russia in a practical sense: he considered the support of nationalist Third World leaders as a way of increasing Russia's role in the international political system outside Eastern Europe. Hence, by 1956, Moscow had begun to establish diplomatic relations with all Latin American states on the basis of non-interference in each other's domestic affairs and to develop a broad range of economic relations on the principle of equality and mutual advantage.

In the final analysis, Russia did not support hardline policies in Grenada during the period of the counter-revolution when Socialism became equated with murder and mayhem.

To be sure, it did not condemn the Bernard Coard faction, as explicitly as did Castro, for its part in provoking the split in the NJM's leadership and putting Bishop under house arrest.

Such was the character of Russian foreign policy towards Grenada in the early 1980s. Moscow was able to provide loose political and ideological support for the NJM while not committing itself to providing assistance in the reconstruction of the Grenadian economy or in defence of the revolution from counter-revolutionary forces — home-grown and foreign.

December 08, 2013

Jamaica Observer

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Sunday, October 19, 2025

Grenada 19 October, 1983

1983 Coup D'état - Grenada

Sunday, December 8, 2013

Russia had no stomach for the Grenadian revolution

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