Book Reviews


 dramatic personae acting out their predestined
 roles, at times out of conscious design but
 trapped at the same time in the stranglehold of
 Fate and Chance.

But what happened in Grenada was reality and not play,
and it seemed to usher in an entire new epoch in inter-
Caribbean and U. S.-Caribbean relations. If, as Lewis
claims, Grenada in 1983 was the "aborted child" of the
dead West Indian Federation of 1962, indicating the
consequences of the failure of regional authority, then
it perhaps also demonstrates exactly what Washington's
1981 Caribbean Basin Initiative was all about from the
very beginning--the passage of neo-colonial authority
for the entire Caribbean area to the United States.

 Why Grenada? What makes the case different from
the U.S. invasion of the Dominican Republic in 1965,
the Cuban missile crisis and the Bay of Pigs invasion
in the early 1960s, the occupation of Haiti earlier in
the century, the invasion of Puerto Rico and Cuba in
1898, or adventures in Mexico, Panama, Nicaragua, and
Guatemala during the past 140 years? First, as Lewis
clearly points out, "something drastically new" happened
in the English-speaking or formerly English Caribbean
subregion, and in that context, Grenada was different
even before 1983:

 . .Grenada, of all the islands of the archi-
 pelago, was chosen to become the rendezvous of
 new elements. Gairyism, before 1979, marked the
 intrusion into the region of the habits of Latin
 American caudillismo. The overthrow of Eric
 Gairy in March 1979 marked, in turn, the intrusion
 of the Latin American habit of the golpe de
 estado, breaking for the first time the tradition
 of West Indian constitutionalism.

There were other West Indian firsts as well: the first
time that political assassination became a tool in the
struggle for state power, and the first time that the
United States intervened militarily in an internal
dispute in an independent Commonwealth Caribbean island-
nation: "regional leadership had passed, irrevocably,
from London to Washington." Thus, because the Grenada