Since the U. S. invasion of Grenada in October 1983, at least 15 books have analyzed and documented the affairs of the first socialist revolution in the eastern Caribbean. Lewis’s Reform and Revolution in Grenada, 1950-1981 is not a significant addition to the literature. It has a certain minor interest because it was published in Havana and won a prize for best essay from Cuba’s Casa de las Américas in 1984.
Lewis’s book is a straightforward analysis of political dynamics in Grenada. It traces the rise to power of Eric Gairy, his dominance of the island’s politics for almost three decades, the appearance of the New Jewel Movement (NJM), the struggle over Grenadian independence, and the first years of the NJM in power.
Lewis reminds us that Gairy, whose interest in UFOs made him a bizarre figure in the 1970s, had in the 1950s been a social revolutionary who displaced the old planter class and, with the aid of universal suffrage (1951) and wage increases, won the affection of the islands neglected agrarian workers.
By the 1970s, a new generation of black professionals and intellectuals had come of age. Influenced by the Black Power movement, the Cuban revolution and the Vietnam War, they formed the NJM and collided with Gairy and his “Mongoose” gang in a series of sometimes violent (“Bloody Sunday”) encounters. The NJM seized power on March 13, 1979.
According to Lewis, while the NJM was socialist in outlook and radical in its internationalist rhetoric, its domestic policies were quite moderate in many respects. The NJM was kept from taking Marxist-Leninist measures, he avers, because of its need to cooperate with the business class and the church, and by the NJM leaderships bourgeois origins.
Lewis’s book is in fact his senior honors thesis at Brandeis. It depends heavily on a few sources, and is tedious, repetitive, and informed with a jejune Marxism which has interesting parallels in the minutes of the NJM’s Central Committee.
Perhaps Lewis’s greatest weakness is his failure to grasp the nature of post-1970s relations in the Caribbean. The colonial era in which the periphery (colonies) financed the metropolis and accepted its excess population is over. Today, the game has been reversed. The periphery, whether it be Grenada, Martinique, and Guadeloupe, Cuba or Puerto Rico, depends on the metropolis to finance it—through loans, grants, investments, and transfer payments—and to accept its excess population in exchange for political and strategic benefits.
