It is not the least tragedy of Grenada that, as Patrick Solomon has pointed out, the history of the revolution will be written by the United States Information Services, since the U.S. invading forces sequestered all of the People’s Revolutionary Government (PRG) regime’s accumulated documentation, including Prime Minister Bishop’s private papers, notes, and diaries. Much of that documentation, including the minutes of the Central Committee meetings held during the crucial summer period of 1983, has already been leaked to “friendly”journalists.

It is immediately suspect, for everybody knows the record of the U.S. security and psychological warfare agencies, and their capacity to use deceit, espionage, character assassination, and even planned murder in their global anti-communist destabilization exercises. As much as the vaunted Hitler diaries, much of this leaked documentation, if not indeed all, could be plain forgeries.

Even if they are not–which can only be proved once independent informational sources appear–it is still the dismal truth that the Caribbean has been thrown back yet once again into the old colonial condition, where its history is composed from the archival centers of the dominant metropolitan powers.It is therefore altogether fitting and proper that American friends of Maurice Bishop have put together in this volume a selection of his public addresses as prime minister and political leader. Since like everybody else, he is entitled to his day in court, he must be heard in his own words, not just through the mouths of enemies or apologists; justs as Paul Sutton has allowed us to hear Dr. Eric Williams in his own words in his recently published anthology, Forged from the Love of Liberty: Selected Speeches of dr. Eric Williams. Too much of the post-October commentary on Grenada has come, first, from all of the so-called liberals who have written their “I told you so” articles and, second, from the Johnnies-come-lately who have suddenly discovered that all along they were friends of the revolution, although they were never to be seen in St. George’s during those years. For those of us who were there, and knew the main actors of the drama, it was not a simplistic morality play with Coard the Macbeth-villain and Bishop the “moderate” hero, but rather a complicated interplay of personal ambition and ideological confusion which take on the truly heroic dimensions of a classical Greek tragedy.Be that as it may, we have here in this volume the literary report of the leading actor. There is a variety of themes. We hear Bishop acclaiming, with justifiable pride, the social and economic achievements of the revolution. There is the public health record: free milk distribution, a new eye hospital, a new maternity clinic, with dental clinics increasing from one in 1979 to seven in 1982. There is the educational record: the school-day program, the inservice teacher training program, the literacy campaign (assisted by the famous educator Paulo Freire), free secondary education, and an enlarged higher education program (in 1979 only three persons had obtained university scholarships, for study abroad, while in just one year’s time that had risen to a total of 109). To this there must be added the serious effort to build up the economic infrastructure, including fish-selling centers with deep-freeze facilities, 67 new feeder roads to help the small farmer-producer, the production of local jellies and jams to offset the colonial taste for imported foods, a much improved water supply system, and the planned dredging of the St. George’s harbor to accommodate larger ships for the newly planned tourist sector.The PRG regime has been throughout attacked as a Cuban-Soviet satellite pursuing communistic policies. The record is different. Despite the radical rhetoric of the revolution, its social programs were no more radical than those of Roosevelt‘s New Deal or of the British Labor government after 1945. It was a planned “mixed economy,” supported as much by Coard (who was always a responsible and hard-headed finance minister) as by Bishop. It is true that it sought out new friends in the world market and trade structure, including the Eastern European economies. But all Caribbean governments have done that, for they have all been trapped in the “enforced bilateralism” or a global structure dominated by the advanced capitalist economies, and have all attempted to replace it with a viable multilateralism.It is true, too, that in the foreign policy area the revolution adopted a pronounced Marxist-Leninist anti-imperialist stand, as many of these speeches show. But there are two things to be said about that. First, every new regime, simply out of prudence, separates its domestic policy from its foreign policy. It has been said of Elizabeth Tudor that she was Protestant at home and Catholic abroad, simply to ward off the hostile Spanish attack, which finally came with the Armada of 1588. In a somewhat different way, the Grenada regime was moderate at home and revolutionary abroad. Second, every new regime, again out of prudence, must seek out new friends. From the very beginning, the Grenada regime was under siege, and so naturally it developed a siege mentality. This was not paranoia, for we now know from the record that the U.S. administration was determined to destroy it: the 1981 U.S. naval operation on the Puerto Rican island of Viegues was a dress rehearsal for October 1983..