The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Travel
‘It was like carnival... until I heard these booms and shots’
Forty years on from the US invasion of Grenada, this strange chapter in Caribbean history still resonates with locals, says Mark Stratton
Astrange anecdote lingers in Grenada about the American invasion here 40 years ago. It’s said that when the US military stormed this verdant Lesser Antillean dot at dawn on October 25, 1983, the only maps they possessed were ones prepared by Grenada’s ministry of tourism. It’s peculiar to imagine the US Navy Seals being directed to follow the white sand beach, turn right at the historic cocoa plantation and then head towards the scenic castle. (Although, for clarification, communist revolutionaries were indeed holed up behind Fort Matthew’s doughty stone walls, built by the French in 1779.)
Utilising tourist maps wasn’t necessarily about poor preparation on the part of the Americans. It was more to do with Grenada’s backwater anonymity, which even today means it flies beneath the tourist radar of Caribbean neighbours such as Barbados, the island from which I arrived, after a short hop of 35 minutes in the air.
Its undeveloped beaches, bright coastal villages and bird-rich rainforest are a delight to explore, particularly for holidaymakers seeking a glimpse of real Caribbean life. But there’s an added spice, and I’m not talking about its ubiquitous nutmeg, of discovering an enthralling past that saw Grenada make global headlines when America landed its troops here.
The New Jewel Movement (NJM) had swept into power in 1979 led by the charismatic London-educated Maurice Bishop, who possessed Fidel Castro’s rhetoric and Che Guevara’s revolutionary good looks. Bishop began modernising Grenada with electrifying pace – building schools, a new airport and launching universal healthcare. The NJM courted Cuba and suppression was rife, but Bishop was popular until a split in the movement saw him executed in 1983. Alarm bells rang for the US, already at odds with Left-leaning regimes in the region at the time. And after Bishop’s death unleashed chaos as a new hard-line Revolutionary Military Council (RMC) emerged, thousands of American troops were sent to sort things out, with President Reagan using “concerns over the 600 US medical students on the island” as a pretext. Operation Urgent Fury lasted barely three days.
There was no parachuting out of a Blackhawk helicopter for me. I arrived into Maurice Bishop Airport as daylight was waning; a taxi took me along the coast northwards, past rum-shack bars pumping out Calypso-inspired soca. A white-cassocked preacher on an outdoor platform bellowed salvation as we drove through Gouyave.
My destination was Mount Edgecombe (mountedgecombegrenada.com), near Victoria. A small 18th-century plantation set in riotously fragrant grounds, it harvests visitors these days rather than the cocoa and spices that the one-time Scottish owner, John Copland, planted after slavery was abolished here in 1838.
A thunderous clear-the-air downpour woke me the next morning, sending peacocks on the lawn scurrying for cover, after which I set out on a tour of the beautiful north of the island with local guide Roger Woodruffe. Our first stop was the Diamond bean-to-bar chocolate factory, still utilising French buildings from 1774. I was offered its 70 per cent cocoa bar infused with bois bande medicinal bark. “It’s good for men’s issues,” said the attendant. I settled for 70 per cent with ginger.
From there we headed to River Antoine rum distillery, which has seen little investment since opening in 1785. There was a heady smell of molasses in the air; the still-functioning machinery dates back to 19th-century England.
Beyond Duquesne Bay’s magnificent clifftop views towards St Vincent lay the abandoned Pearls Airport, where the floodgates of Roger’s 1983 memories opened. Two decaying Russian planes remain where the 8th Marine Regiment neutralised them on the invasion’s first day: the fuselage of the former Cubana Airlines turboprop reads Aeroflot in Cyrillic script and a smaller crop-duster is marked CCCP.
“During the revolution, people were happy. We had new schools, Cuban doctors and jobs,” said Roger. On October 19 that year he was one of the thousands who marched to free Bishop from house arrest. “It was like a carnival heading to Fort George until I heard these booms and shots. I ran home scared.”
Six days later the Americans arrived. “I call it a liberation, not invasion, because we needed help. They stayed a couple of years and I went on a school trip to Barbados on their battleship.”
Grenada’s finest beach – two miles of brilliant white sands – is to be found at Grand Anse, which is also home to S Beach Resort, Grenada’s classiest all-inclusive. My whitewashed beachside villa, called Sea Grape, was set amid bouffant foliage and exited directly onto the sand. It was a 50ft walk to the placid Caribbean, where I swam each morning before a breakfast menu featuring salt fish and bakes.
American warships harboured offshore here in 1983, said Spice Island general manager Brian Hardy, adding that the last real invasion required the repelling of the paparazzi from longlensing the visiting Lewis Hamilton.
Taxi driver Terence Louison collected me for a half-day tour of 1983’s key sights. With us was historian Michael Jessamy. He’d never met Terence. “You’re a Louison, aren’t you,” he said. “Yes, Uncle Einstein was chief-ofstaff during the revolution and a good fast bowler,” said Terence. “He was quick,” agreed Michael.
We drove to Fort Frederick and Fort Matthew, both thick-walled structures constructed from mauve-coloured volcanic stone by the French after briefly usurping British rule in 1779. The view offered a wondrous sweep across all of Grenada’s palm-fringed south-west coastline, yet Fort Frederick lay in ruins. The Americans mistakenly bombed it on the invasion’s first day, said Michael. “The People’s Revolutionary Army was actually occupying Fort Matthew, from where they shot down an American helicopter.”
Later, in St George, a pretty capital of red corrugated rooftops with narrow streets built for 19th-century horse-and-buggies, we passed Mount Wheldale, where – in the chaos before his execution – Bishop was briefly freed from house arrest. We followed the route a buoyant crowd took with him to Fort George. Cannons bear King George’s royal crest inside the fort’s upper tier of this thick-walled bastion and below is the wall where Bishop and his cabinet ministers were eventually executed by firing squad. A plaque recalls the 16 lives lost.
“People were at their wits’ end as everything collapsed and they mostly celebrated the Americans arriving,” said Michael.
Those days of turbulence seemed very distant now. During my last days on the island, I sailed on Captain Ronald’s catamaran, Starwind V, and snorkelled amid cobalt-blue grouper fish and an underwater sculpture park of life-sized human statues.
I also visited the Tower Estate (thetowerestategrenada.com), for afternoon tea. Surrounding the Slinger family’s Edwardian mansion are scented gardens of ylang ylang, gardenia, and patchouli, and the bright blue tea is made from pea-vines. It’s rather zesty and refreshing.
Isabelle Slinger’s family has resided in Grenada since 1723. “The house was a love story,” she told me. “Charles Renwick was a lawyer and a ‘jab neck’ – someone who made a pact with the devil because he never lost a case. But he was a drinker and gambler and built this house to win back his sweetheart as she tired of his cavorting. Our family purchased it in the 1940s when his debts caught up with him.”
I wondered how they’d held on to this decadent pile during a Marxist-Leninist revolution.
“Times were peaceful under Bishop, and my father was a political friend of his,” Isabelle told me. “After he fell, the RMC came looking for my parents. Fortunately, we were overseas.”
The events of those years clearly still resonate for those that remember them. Happily, it seems likely that the only invasion the island will face in the future is from visitors such as myself, drawn to this enchanting, peaceful speck in the Caribbean Sea.