SARGASSO


 No Bishop, no revo. No Bishop, no revo.
 (Spontaneous slogan of the 10,000 Grenadians
 who released Maurice Bishop on 19 October 1983.
 All citations from Grenada: The Jewel Despoiled.)

 More than four years have passed since the October
1983 events that marked the end of Grenada's short-lived
(1979-1983) socialist revolution: the brutal murder of
popular leader Maurice Bishop, the brief establishment
of a military government, and perhaps most numbing, the
massive U.S. military operation undertaken to "rescue"
and rehabilitate an island nation of 100,000 inhabitants
and measuring 120 square miles. Perhaps because so
compressed by time and place, the action has been
variously interpreted as a grade-B movie with Ronald
Reagan and the Cavalry arriving just in time, Victorian
melodrama pitting the popular hero, Maurice Bishop,
against the scheming villain, Bernard Coard, the
Shakespearean passion play of an ambitious Macbeth-Lady
Macbeth--the Coards--plot against the unsuspecting leader
or of Bishop cast as the noble Othello and Coard as the
spiteful lago, farce or comic opera--know-nothing-nobodies
from nowhere trying to be somebodies from somewhere--as
expressed in the cynicism of V. S. Naipaul, and the
spy-novel mentality of Caribbean leaders such as Edward
Seaga (Jamaica), John Compton (St. Lucia), Eugenia
Charles (Dominica), and Tom Adams (Barbados), who
apparently saw potential revolutions under their own
beds and were prepared to enter into whatever political
commitments necessary to prevent them.

 In Grenada: The Jewel Despoiled, political scientist
and historian Gordon K. Lewis sees the process as the
working out of a Caribbean tragedy:

 Taking place within a period of weeks, the
 various stages of the drama--the house
 incarceration of Prime Minister Maurice Bishop,
 his release by the Grenadian crowd, the march on
 Fort Rupert, the confrontation between the people
 and the soldiers, the murder in cold blood of
 Bishop and his loyal ministers, the imposition
 by the Revolutionary. Military Council of a harsh
 curfew, the U. S. invasion--took on the character
 of a classical Greek play, with all of its