NEW YORK — “I was part of the revolution and it’s important to remember,” Angela Gabriel told Socialist Workers Party member Willie Cotton who was helping to staff the Pathfinder book booth at this year’s Grenada Day Festival in Brooklyn Aug. 20. She was referring to the 1979-83 revolution in Grenada, a small English-speaking Caribbean Island, that brought to power a government of workers and farmers led by Maurice Bishop.
The revolutionary government began carrying out land reform, organized 90% of workers into trade unions, involved working people in determining the affairs of the country, made medical and dental care free, organized a militia made up of workers and farmers and carried out other measures to increase working-class consciousness, discipline and self-confidence.
Bishop, who was prime minister throughout the revolution, linked Grenada’s working-class course with Cuba’s socialist revolution. He told a May Day 1980 rally in Havana, “We recognized in Grenada just as the imperialists recognize, that without the Cuban Revolution of 1959 there could have been no Grenadian Revolution.”
But Bishop and five other central leaders of the revolutionary government were assassinated on Oct. 19, 1983, by a Stalinist secret faction of army, government and party officials organized by Deputy Prime Minister Bernard Coard. The Coard clique’s coup destroyed the revolution. Washington seized the opportunity to invade and occupy the island a week later.
“We were so young then and we still don’t know what happened,” Gabriel said. She bought two copies of New International no. 6 with the article “The Second Assassination of Maurice Bishop” by SWP leader Steve Clark to share with others. “I want to be able to explain it to people.” The article by Clark explains the roots of the coup and the living legacy of the revolution today.
Grenada Day participants bought 19 copies of New International no. 6 and 14 Maurice Bishop Speaks, which contains 27 of his speeches and interviews.
As the worldwide capitalist crisis deepens, more working people are looking to find a road forward. Among the more than $700 worth of literature sold at the Pathfinder booth were seven subscriptions to the Militant, and copies of The Low Point of Labor Resistance Is Behind Us: The Socialist Workers Party Looks Forward; The Jewish Question: A Marxist Interpretation; and Thomas Sankara Speaks.