I ran with the comrades of the NEW JEWEL MOVEMENT through London to the American embassy. ‘Forward Ever Backward Never’ we chanted. The USA had invaded Grenada. Maurice Bishop executed on the orders of Bernard Coard. It didn’t make sense then or now. A revolutionary tragedy. Yesterday I saw that Bernard Coard had been released from prison in 2009.It did not fill my heart with joy.
Along with Maurice Bishop his partner Jacqueline Crefft was executed……..leaving their baby son an orphan. Their son was named VLADIMIR LENIN. He was stabbed to death age 16 in a Montreal nightclub. What a fucking awful outcome to a promising revolution. Can anyone make sense of it for me?
Ian Bone 
What a tragedy. Another ‘victory’ for democratic centralism. It’s a familiar enough dynamic – sexual abuse in the little cults, murder and torture in the bigger ones. If memory serves Bishop voted against centralization/militarization, arousing the wrath of the more Stalinist, ‘Coard Cadre,’ who swiftly took revenge. Seems that Coard was simply another obsessive control freak, on the lookout for power and privilege.
Coard has now ‘given up’ politics.
http://www.cigionline.org/articles/2009/09/return-bernard-coard
The New jewel movement led by Maurice bishop was a revolutionary movement which seized power in 1979 in Grenada overthrowing the corrupt leadership of Sir Eric Gairy a British stooge. Over the next few years the new jewel movement set about eliminating illiteracy, granting free health care to its citizen embarking on land reform, nationalisation and an independent foreign policy. In 1983 tensions in the leadership led to the overthrow of bishop and his replacement by the Stalinist figures of Bernard Coard and Hudson Austin. The Americans intervened on the pretext that their citizens on the island were under threat, as well as lying stories about the Cubans building a military airport on the island for soviet bombers, (it was in fact an airport build by the Cubans and a British company called Plessey for tourist purposes) Coard and Austin were overthrown and a stooge us backed US government took its place which reversed the gains or tried to of the new jewel movement. All very sad really.
The initial author, as well as the responses, are entirely wrong. Coard was not a Stalinist. Bishop was a dissolute and frequently dishonest, if charismatic, leader. Coard ran the economy and was praised by the IMF and World Bank. Stalinist? Really. Absurd. I can speculate about the end of the revo, probably better than or equal to, anyone. But see what Chalky Ventour had to say in the “Missing Link.” It’s online. It WAS the Cubans. Follow his analysis by googling General Ochoa and his role in Grenada. Check what Coard did when he took over control of Grenada’s ports. Check where Gail Reed is now. Who was with Bishop in Cuba? Who met him at the airport? Only those who want to strip the revo of its history make an icon of Bishop–a move which even he might have objected.