People’s opposition in people’s prison

Press, 9 March 1982, Page 20

People’s opposition in people’s prison

By

LAN BALL

who recently visited Grenada

for the “Daily Telegraph,” London.

In matters of natural design, the Commonwealth State of Grenada is one of those richly blessed green dollops in the tropics. When it comes to man’s design — politics — the Caribbean island has been unlucky since independence in 1974.

Individuals on both the Right and Left of the political stewpot have taken turns lately to stir into the mixture some alarmingly piquant stuff. First there was the patently corrupt Prime Minister Sir Eric Gairy with his Mongoose Gang of secret police and his fervent belief that intelligent beings from outer space were hovering over his island and other parts of the globe. It was on one of his trips to New York to pursue his campaign to involve the United Nations General Assembly in the hunt for Unidentified Flying Objects that his erratic Government was overthrown before dawn on March 13, 1979, by three dozen men with light arms and a heavy belief in Marxism. It was the first successful military coup d’etat in the British Caribbean. With help from Moscow, Havana, East Berlin, Prague and Managua, the men who led it are now so

firmly entrenched that it would take a mini-Bay of Pigs invasion to dislodge them. Their new propaganda machine tells Grenadians daily that this invasion is under consideration in the American State Department, the C.1.A., the Pentagon, and among exiles in Florida. For the last three years, Grenada has been the British Commonwealth’s only People’s Democracy. It has a People’s Revolutionary Government composed of a seven-man polit-

buro and a central committee, a People’s Revolutionary Army, a People’s Militia and a growing body of People’s Laws. It seems an awful lot of peopling for an island of 133 square miles and 110,000 people. Alas, there have been no people’s elections and those

who have tried to establish a people’s Opposition are today in jail, in exile or otherwise regretting their rashness. The changes are apparent when one steps from an ageing Hawker Siddeley turbo-prop airliner at an airport of far more’ spectacular decrepitude. Pearls Airport was built by colonial adminstrators 45 years ago. It calls to. mind a prefabricated Victorian railway station which has been improbably reassembled in the -West Indies beside a glorious surf beach. “Welcome to Free Grenada” is one of two signs which catch the eye. To ensure tnat Grenada remains “free,” in '■ the new Marxist sense of the adjective, there, is a soldier beside the sign in Cuban-style olive-drab fatigues. The second sign announces the presence of Cubana, Fidel Castro’s airline which offers direct service between Havana and Grenada.

When Cubana was ferrying troops to Angola by way of Barbados, the charter flights arrived filled with young Cubans in grey flannels and white opennecked shirts. They were “tourists” swapping the sunshine of the Caribbean for the sunshine of southern Africa. Their uniforms and field weapons were in the bellies of the planes. When the Cuban Ministry of Transport and East German technical advisers complete next year an impressive new

import at Point Salines in the south of the island, there presumably will, be no need for such dissembling in military movements.

It is an $BO million project — 95 miles from the South American mainland — and virtually all the money for it has come from’.the strained economy of Cuba, from MoscowZand East Germany, as well as from Colonel Gaddafi’s? Libya and from his fellow Arab radicals.

Mr Haig, American Secretary of State — “Attila the Haig” as Radio Free Grenada referred to him recently in a skit about his boss “President Neutron” — has fumed about this project since its inception. “A facility big enough to handle every aircraft in the Cuban Soviet inventory,” he says. Why, he; ask§, does an island with just 750. hotel beds for tourists need an airport big enough to handle the heaviest jets? Two jumbo-loads would fill up the place. In St George’s, the political and propaganda blueprints for Grenada are being drawn up in a spacious white office block which looks down from a headland on to the picture-postcard harbour. In pre-revolutionary days, the building which now houses the offices of “Comrade Prime Minister” Maurice Bishop and other key Government Ministries was a resort hotel, the Islander. From the Grenadian Prime Minister’s offices if is. possible to see the forbidding outline of Richmond Hill Prison, a for-tress-like, stone, colonial-era structure which stands on the highest ground above the amphitheatre of the port. Unhappily. in this People’s Democracy, the holding- pen is still formally known as “Her Majesty’s Prison, Richmond Hill.”

Imprisoned there are the men and women detained for “political offences” and held

without charge or court appearance, some since their arrest two years and 11 months ago. The total prison population is about 300. The Government has never revealed how many are political prisoners, but local estimates range from a low figure of 100 to a high of 200.

Mr Bishop estimated for a Cuban Communist party magazine that “hundreds” of political undesirables had been rounded up in the first days and weeks of Grenadas revolution.

Most of those jailed had subsequently been released after displaying improved political attitudes and only a “few dozen more” had taken their places in Richmond Hill Prison for involvement in counterrevolutionary intrigue. Plotting against his Govern-

ment remains at high pitch, he insists, both inside Grenada and beyond. He has even named the arch-plotters — “Messrs Wills and Rossyn, the C.I.A. chief of station and his deputy in the American Embassy in Barbados” and, on home ground, “plutocrats, lawyers, businessmen and saltfish journalists.” (The latter, I was told, are journalists who will write anything for a handout of saltfish.) At the moment, Grenada’s shops have saltfish and an ample range of consumer goods. A small private sector is being tolerated — just at it was for a time in Cuba — if only to make sure the crucial tourist industry does not collapse entirely. But the Comrade Minister for National Mobilisation, Selwyn Strachan, whom I inter-

viewed in his impressivelyguarded home (Kalashnikovs, 12-foot-high steel-mesh fences, a sentry box and plain-clothes men), made' no secret of the pohtburo’s plans radically to re-shape the island’s economy along lines which would leave the State the master of all.

Elections? One is given Lenin’s remark about the fatuity of “two seconds in the voting booth every five years.”

And the guns and constant military alerts? The official explanation is that the C.I.A. is out to nip the Grenadian revolution in the bud. I suspect, though, that these determined young men ruling Grenada today never forget for one moment how easy it was for them to seize power in a troubled Caribbean.