The brutal killings of Maurice Bishop and a number of his closest friends and supporters, and the subsequent us invasion of the island in October this year, brought a sudden and tragic end to the Grenadian revolution. Coming at a time when the Sandinista regime in Nicaragua is embroiled in armed conflict with us-backed counter-revolutionaries, and in the midst of dissension within the ranks of the Salvadorean revolutionary movement due to the political stalemate in that country, it is a major setback for progressive forces throughout Central America and the Caribbean. In the English-speaking Caribbean, the events in Grenada are being used by rightwing regimes to launch a vicious anti-communist campaign, paralleled only by that which was carried out at the height of the Cold War in the 1950s. The invasion of Grenada has provided the us with its first clear-cut counter-revolutionary victory since the invasion of the Dominican Republic in 1965. It has also boosted Ronald Reagan’s standing in the polls and increased the possibility of direct us military intervention in Nicaragua. This short essay provides some biographical information on Maurice Bishop, briefly discusses his role in carrying out the Grenadian revolution, and lists certain achievements of, and problems faced by, the four-year experiment in revolutionary transformation that he led.
Born in 1944, the son of a Grenadian merchant who made his money working in the oilfields of Aruba, Maurice Bishop began his political career as a student activist at Presentation College, one of the main secondary schools in Grenada. In 1963 he went to London to study law and continued his political involvement with the West Indian Students Union and the Standing Conference of West Indian Organizations. In this formative period of his political development he was influenced by the writings of Kwame Nkrumah, Frantz Fanon, Malcolm X, Fidel Castro and Che Guevara. The Black Power revolts in the us in the late 1960s and the Black Power uprising in Trinidad and Tobago in 1970 created a lasting impression on the young lawyer, and the New Jewel Movement (njm) that he founded in March 1973 adopted many themes of the international Black Power movement. During the popular unrest which took place in late 1973 and early 1974 against the Gairy regime in Grenada, Rupert Bishop, Maurice’s father, was shot dead by Gairy’s henchmen. In addition, Maurice Bishop and several other njm leaders were brutally beaten. Some time afterwards Bishop began to embrace a more overtly Marxist ideology as the njm consistently and unequivocally opposed the repression and idiosyncracies of the Gairy regime. By 1979 the njm had managed to win the support of senior officers in the army and police force, and on 13 March of that year, with the assistance of these sympathisers, carried out a popular insurrection in which only three people lost their lives.