Lautaro Rivara
Grenadian Prime Minister Maurice Bishop (center) with a woman of Grenada’s Carriacou island.
On March 13, 1979, on the island of Grenada, one of the most hopeful and unknown revolutions of our region began. This is the story of the small country that dared to make a great revolution.
Grenada, or How to Make a Revolution with Nutmeg
Grenada is a Caribbean and insular country, small or tiny depending on how you look at it. With its meager 344 square kilometers of territorial extension, only neighboring St. Kitts and Nevis is smaller than Grenada in our continental extension. Colonized by France until 1762, and then by Great Britain, the island achieved a discreet formal independence in 1974, which only changed the legal status of the Grenadian subjection to British, American and Canadian capital.
Its history, like that of the Caribbean, is the history of the indigenous genocide of the Carib and Arawak peoples, which involved even more tenacious resistance here than on other islands. It is important to note the inscription of Grenada in the historical unity of the Caribbean. Island dispersion, cultural diversity, linguistic singularities and multiple colonial trajectories under the impact of nations as diverse as Spain, France, England, Holland, Denmark, the U.S. and even Sweden and Scotland, do not negate its unitary character.
The history of Grenada is also the history of the black diaspora of African populations, slavery as a regime of exploitation and the plantation as a form of production and subordinate insertion in a world capitalist market then in full gestation. Like the northeast of Brazil, like Haiti, like the Dominican Republic, like Barbados, like Cuba, and like so many other territories, Grenada was also cursed from the day the first sugar cane sprouted vigorously from its soils, already introduced on the island of Hispaniola at the beginning of the 16th century.
Grenada is, among other things and because of all these vicissitudes, an English-speaking and black country, with a 95% Afro-descendant population. But it is also still an agro-exporting nation, with some tourism development and a rickety industry.
It was on this unsubmissive island that Maurice Bishop fought his battles. He was a politician and lawyer who led the so-called “People’s Revolution” between 1979 and 1983. Son of Grenadians but born in the neighboring island of Aruba, he was intellectually formed in a Catholic school reserved for middle and high sectors, which allowed him to pursue his higher studies in Great Britain, as most of the privileged Creoles did. Despite this, Bishop was, like the vast majority of the island’s population, a descendant of slaves.
His political inspiration came from Marxism, sifted by the nearby Cuban experience, from the so-called Black Power developed in the U.S. by black communities, and from various African national liberation movements such as those of Mozambique, Angola and Guinea-Bissau. According to Peter David:
“On his return from England he had become a leader of the Black Power movement, then became involved in more class-based discussions and deepened his studies on Marxism, with a strong anti-imperialist and anti-colonialist influence. It was a dynamic period, not only in Grenada, but internationally; where students and workers from all continents led anti-colonialist and anti-imperialist struggles, a juncture in which Maurice was becoming the natural leader of the Grenadian people.”
“[Bishop’s] political inspiration [came] from Marxism, sifted by the nearby Cuban experience, from the so-called Black Power developed in the U.S. by black communities, and from various African national liberation movements.”
It was Bishop, together with other leaders, who led the process of opposition to the military dictatorship of Eric Gairy. And he did so through a political instrument called the New Jewel Movement (NJM), which emerged in 1973 from the merger of two pre-existing organizations. The first, headed by Bishop himself, was the People’s Assembly Movement (PAM). The second, by Unison Whiteman, was the Joint Effort for Welfare, Education and Liberation (JEWEL). The NJM had a prominent political participation in the opposition to the Gairy dictatorship and its shock force, the mangoose gang, achieving an important trade union influence and a more modest parliamentary presence.
Without foreign blood: the revolutionary triumph
The Grenadian Revolution was a singularly smooth, well-orchestrated, bloodless event. Initiated as a putsch led by barely half a hundred militants, the movement managed to take over the army barracks and the only radio station on the island. From there, a precise appeal to the Grenadian masses, the enormous prestige enjoyed by Bishop and the total discredit of the Gairy dictatorship, managed to congregate tens of thousands of people who occupied the rest of the strategic locations to achieve the triumph of the revolution. This managed to anticipate four months before the revolution led by Sandinismo in Nicaragua, in a convulsive context in which Central America and the Caribbean were radicalizing with the coexistence of three socialist revolutions and with the rise of the guerrillas in El Salvador and Guatemala, the government of Torrijos in Panama, the electoral advance of leftist forces in Jamaica and the Dominican Republic, etc. The social base of the movement was made up of workers and peasants and a small bourgeoisie of teachers, bank employees and health workers.
However, the peaceful consummation of the coup did not imply that the Grenadians had renounced the violence demanded by the exceptional nature of the revolution as a historical process. Thus, when Bishop referred analogously to the American revolution, he pointed out that even “when the falsifiers of history pretend that the American revolution was nothing more than a get-together in Boston, it was a very bloody get-together”. And although Grenada chose to avoid special tribunals or executions, it did not delay in creating militias capable of defending the process militarily, having a clear balance with respect to the Chilean experience of the Popular Unity. In Bishop’s words, “the first law of revolution is that the revolution must survive”.
The People’s Revolution defined itself, in its immediate tasks, as democratic, anti-oligarchic and anti-imperialist, but soon (and especially from 1981 onwards) it began to develop a nationalist and socializing policy, oriented towards economic planning, industrial state property and the nationalization of foreign trade. However, unlike the dialectic of the Cuban revolutionary process, Grenada opted not to carry out massive expropriations, and a de facto regime of mixed public-private economy was established.
Like any revolution, the Grenadian revolution expressed the creative synthesis of diverse emancipatory traditions relegated in their related and contradictory elements: Marxism, black power, Pan-Africanism, Third Worldism, anti-imperialism, and even an incipient and never before known specifically Grenadian nationalism. In the words of one of its leaders:
“The Revolution in which we walked with Maurice taught the world about its firmness and our principles. It left us with the pride of being Grenadians and waving our flag with love in any part of the world (…) When Maurice spoke for the first time he told us about the place of Grenadians in the world, about the fact that we were a small island with great ideas and a great revolution, that the size of the country does not determine its place in world history”. And even more: “People used to do volunteer work on weekends (…); they just hoped to do something in their community. During the Revolution we were all Grenadians working for Grenada”.
Like Brazil, Grenada did not have a portentous liberation movement that emancipated it from its metropolis: independence was rather a bureaucratic process, organized from above, executed during Gairy’s presidency through a referendum, and which counted on the tutelage and approval of the United Kingdom. It is in that sense that the NJM also came to forge a somewhat unprecedented national identity and pride for the island. As Bishop said:
“Our people have always had a visa mentality. The important thing was to be able to get on that next boat or plane going overseas.” It is the same thing the authors of “In Praise of Creolity” were referring to when they stated that Caribbean people “were deported from ourselves.”
“The People’s Revolution defined itself, in its immediate tasks, as democratic, anti-oligarchic and anti-imperialist, but soon (and especially from 1981 onwards) it began to develop a nationalist and socializing policy.”
The cultural colonization, which sought to turn the Grenadians into “little black Englishmen”, reached such levels of exasperation that the school children had to go every year to the central park of the capital St. George’s to celebrate the birthday of the Queen of England, standing all day under the scorching sun of this torrid zone.
How to make a revolution with nutmeg?
The history of a revolution is always the history of its difficulties. Some are inherent to the continuity of capitalist and colonial socio-economic structures which, despite the deployment of an organized political will, cannot be swept away overnight. Others have to do with external pressure from the imperial powers, which by all means try to suffocate the contagion effect and discipline bad examples. To account for the colossal difficulties that a radical process has to go through in a national formation of these characteristics, and to appreciate the achievements of the People’s Revolution, it should be emphasized that Grenada depended first of all on the export of a derisory condiment: nutmeg. But it also depended on other agricultural products such as cocoa and bananas, and on the commercial animation that produced a scarce tourism. The low national population (barely 110,000 inhabitants at the time), and the historical and colonial constitution of the island, relegated it to have a rickety and artisanal industry that generated a small and not very structured working class. If we add to this the decreasing trend in the prices of agricultural products, and the relative increase in the price of imported inputs, we can understand why Bishop said in 1980 that “the revolution [is] not like instant coffee [that] you just put it in the cup and that’s it”.
That is why perhaps, from this distance, the achievements of the Grenadian Revolution may seem somewhat modest, but we must not forget that merit always runs parallel to circumstances. Among them we can mention the almost total unionization of the working class; the construction of a protagonist democracy based on councils in the neighborhoods, parishes and workplaces; and the creation and promotion of mass organizations of women, youth, peasants and workers.
On the other hand, we can mention a not inconsiderable economic growth in a global recessive context; the reduction of unemployment from 50% to 12%; the increase of the direct salary and the indirect social salary; the practical literacy of the entire population in just one year; an agrarian reform that affected large units of land that were put into production under the figure of state cooperatives; free medical care; the first national social security in the history of Grenada; and progressive legislation towards women’s rights, which established equal pay for equal work, maternity leave and began to punish various forms of sexual violence. In this regard, Catherine Mapp, then a 22-year-old girl from the village of L’Esterre, said: “Above all, the Revolution is a revolution for women. Women should definitely see it as a change in their direction, something that could directly benefit them. Free secondary education, free milk distribution, electricity in our town and the Maternity Law.” The unanimous popular support for Bishop’s charismatic leadership, and the repudiation of the internal coup that displaced him from power and ended his life, would be a clear sign of the appreciation of the process by the Grenadian workers.
Believing in small countries: geopolitics of the revolution
Fidel Castro defined the Grenadian revolution as “a big revolution in a small country”. And the Martinican intellectual Édouard Glissant once wrote that he believed in small countries, in their possibilities of making a place for themselves in this world of gigantism, of great magnitudes in conflict. It is from this philosophy that the Grenadian revolution arrogated to itself the right to establish a sovereign international policy. Bishop once stated in the capital St. George’s that the Grenadian revolution was an “internationalist revolution”, that “as a revolution it is either accepted or not accepted” and that it did not differentiate “between big and small in terms of the right of peoples to determine their own path”. In relation to U.S. aspirations, he was even more emphatic:
“Grenada is no longer in anyone’s backyard”.
The peculiar geopolitics of the revolution gave the Grenada of the People’s Revolution various orientations in its foreign policy. Despite a cautious beginning and without any hint of anti-Americanism, naturally the revolution, socialist in its conception, began to approach the USSR and the countries of the Soviet bloc, within the framework of the polarized global organization characteristic of the Cold War. However, the enthusiasm between Grenada and the USSR was not exactly reciprocal. While for Cuba the Caribbean and continental projection of the revolution was a vital necessity, in the framework of the distancing of the Breznhev period, meddling with the Grenadians represented a direct offense to the U.S., which in the debit and credit side had little strategic value for the Soviets.
From left to right: Daniel Ortega, Maurice Bishop and Fidel Castro, leaders of the Nicaraguan, Grenadian and Cuban revolutions, respectively.
If Breznhev’s USSR and Bishop’s Grenada were distant cousins of dissimilar generations, much deeper historical, cultural and geographical ties linked the Cuban and Grenadian revolutions, best expressed in the intimate friendship that united Fidel Castro and Bishop until the latter’s tragic assassination. And that is because the Grenadian revolution was also a Caribbean revolution, given that it confronted with its regional geopolitics the Balkanization to which the Caribbean was subjected by the myriad of colonial powers that have disputed that imperial frontier since 1492.
Relations with Nicaragua were also close and significant after the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) seized power. Interestingly, Grenada was not only a recipient of international solidarity from the Cuban and Sandinista revolutions, the USSR and the Soviet bloc, or the “non-aligned” Third World countries. In turn, it accompanied the Nicaraguan process, sending educators to the National Literacy Crusade, particularly to the area of former British colonization. It should be noted that the tension between the pro-Cuban emphasis and the pro-Soviet emphasis of foreign policy was one of the main reasons for the internal divisions in the revolutionary movement between the wing represented by Bishop and that represented by Bernard Coard, of whom we will speak in due course. Friendly relations were also developed with the Cooperative Republic of Guyana.
The flip side of these foreign relations and cooperation among revolutionary nations was the predictable isolation of Grenada by the Caribbean nations that remained completely subordinated to Washington’s policy in what they always considered their “inland lake”, particularly the English-speaking islands organized since 1981 in the Organization of Eastern Caribbean States (OECS).
“…the Grenadian revolution was also a Caribbean revolution, given that it confronted with its regional geopolitics the Balkanization to which the Caribbean was subjected by the myriad of colonial powers that have disputed that imperial frontier since 1492.”
Regarding Grenada’s historical ties, Peter David stated, “The Revolution brought about interesting changes in our foreign policy. The first was to broaden our relations, which prior to 1979 were limited by the demands of several countries, principally Britain, Canada and the US.” Naturally, these old subordination links were not changed overnight, but at least they were recalibrated under new correlations of forces in a context much more favorable to the island’s sovereignty demands.
On the other hand, it is worth mentioning that Grenada’s revolution was also a black revolution, the second victorious one in the continent after Haiti’s triumph in 1804, and as such it was part of a Pan-Africanist turn coinciding with the national and social liberation processes of the African continent. It was for this reason that, in a historic event, in the mid-1980s, Presidents Samora Machel of Mozambique and Kenneth Kaunda of Zambia visited the island. As such, Grenada also became a full member of the Non-Aligned Movement.
Looking back, it is interesting to note that beyond the gigantism of the great revolutions of the East, such as the Chinese and Russian revolutions, in Latin America and the Caribbean the leading role has been played by small countries, from Haiti to Grenada, from Cuba to Nicaragua. While the weakest links there were the colossal countries afflicted by enormous distances, here it has been above all the small Caribbean and Central American nations that have been the main centers of radicalism and political productivity.
The inevitable question seems to be: is a revolution viable in a country of little more than 300 square kilometers? To answer this question, it is interesting to recall the size of England, which ruled the world for two centuries, barely four times as large. What threatens the viability of a small nation is in any case capitalism and imperialism, which require the constant addition of equivalent magnitudes to discourage the irrepressible expansive tendencies of capital. It is this tendency that produced the Cold War and that today shapes a new multipolar scenario. But the fact that there are more poles does not mean that the peripheries disappear, but rather that they are regionalized: the North American periphery, the Chinese periphery, the European periphery, etc. It would seem that, returning to Juan Bosch, new and multiple imperial frontiers are emerging in the world, according to the imperious needs of the laws of value.
Perhaps the synthesis of a simultaneously national, Third Worldist and global vision is the main legacy of Granada, as expressed by Bishop in his speech of April 13, 1979: “We are a small country, we are a poor country, with a population descended from African slaves, we are part of the exploited Third World, and we definitely have the challenge of seeking the creation of a new international economic order that gives rise to an economy at the service of the people and social justice and for all the oppressed and exploited of the world. We do not believe in an economy at the service of a minority of humanity, but at the service of those who were exploited and those who are exploited today.”
In our own blood: the betrayal of the Stalinist fraction
Perhaps the greatest of the Grenadian paradoxes is given by the fact that the revolution that did not shed other people’s blood, shed its own blood in a tragic and abundant way. In the words of Fidel Castro, “hyenas emerged from the revolutionary ranks”. Contradictorily, the “hyenas” that aborted this outstanding revolutionary project did so under the argument of forcing the march towards socialism, neglecting the most elementary readings on the material conditions of the island and on the precarious location of Grenada in the Caribbean and global geopolitics.
An encirclement around the figure of Bishop was formed by the second figure of the process, Bernard Coard, and by General Hudson Austin. Under the accusations of abandoning “Marxism-Leninism” (in its pro-Soviet formulation and according to the DIAMAT manuals, of course), and with an insistent criticism of Bishop’s alleged cult of personality, this faction, while demanding a shared leadership, conspired until reaching a majority within the very leadership of the process. On October 13 Bishop was dismissed and imprisoned. The bases of the New Jewel Movement and the majorities framed in the new structures that organized the workers, the peasantry, the women and the youth, began to agitate declaring “we want Bishop, not Coard” and under the slogan “no Bishop, no revo”, that is to say, without Bishop there is no revolution.
Young combatants of the revolutionary process in Granada
If we are to quantify the unanimous support of the Grenadian leader, suffice it to say that on October 19, some 25 or 30 thousand people mobilized to demand his release: no more and no less than a quarter of the island’s population. Bishop was preparing to give a speech from the emblematic Fort Rupert, and had even made the necessary arrangements with Radio Granada Libre for his transmission. In the face of the isolation that was descending on Coard’s faction, in a swift and confusing episode Bishop and other members of the government’s frontline were shot: in particular, important figures such as Jacqueline Creft, Minister of Education and Minister of Women’s Affairs, the aforementioned Unison Whiteman, who was serving as Chancellor, and the trade union leader Vincent Noel. Fidel Castro would be in charge of the final assessment of the mournful end. He would be lapidary: “According to our criteria, objectively, Coard’s group sank the revolution and opened the doors to imperialist aggression. Whatever their intentions, the atrocious assassination of Bishop and his most faithful and close comrades constitutes an act that can never be justified in this or any other revolution”. The foreseeable result was the demoralization of the people, the demobilization of the organized subjects, the strategic confusion and the disarmament of the militias, an important defensive reassurance of the Revolution.
The U.S. invasion: a low, cruel and disproportionate blow
Allow us to return once again to the speech of Fidel Castro, who on November 14, 1983 stated that: “The imperialist government of the United States wanted to kill the symbol that signified the Grenadian revolution, but the symbol was already dead. It had been destroyed by the Grenadian revolutionaries themselves with their division and their colossal errors”. This is the withering judgment of perhaps the only moral authority to evaluate something as thorny and contradictory as a defeated revolution. “The United States, wanting to destroy a symbol, killed a corpse, and at the same time resurrected the symbol,” he would add. Grenada had the sad privilege of constituting the first case of application, through the direct use of U.S. forces, of the post-Vietnam war military doctrine, the same one that was outsourced in Nicaragua through the use of the “contras”.
In order to try to understand the reasons for the invasion, we must pay attention to both the real motivations and dismantle the propaganda ploys. Regarding the former, it is evident that the US administrations were concerned about the shift of the axis of political radicalization from the Southern Cone to the Central American and Caribbean region, and wanted to contain at all costs the expansion of sui generis socialist revolutions already taking place in Cuba, Nicaragua and Grenada, with the certain possibility of replication in other countries such as El Salvador and Guatemala.
The other motivation was the danger posed to the empire by the example of a black revolution for the United States’ own Afro-descendant populations. During a tour of the Grenadian leader through the country, he congregated 2500 people in New York, among them some influential black and Latino personalities from the political, trade union, religious and intellectual fields. In Bishop’s words: “it may be that we discover in the United States more Grenadians than the entire population of Grenada”. Only in this way can it be understood that a confidential State Department report pointed to the Grenadian revolution as even more threatening than the Cuban or Sandinista revolutions, given that its leaders spoke English and could communicate directly with the people of the United States, and that they were black and could identify themselves and be identified by the Afro-descendant community.
Finally, even in the shadow of the resounding defeat of Vietnam and in the heat of the future presidential elections of 1984, the warmongering adventure was used, as it is today, to cohere American society under reactionary leaderships. As a presidential advisor commented to the New York Times on October 9 of the year of the invasion: “We need a major victory somewhere to show that we can handle foreign policy. It’s not about any particular issue, like building confidence in the President’s competence in foreign affairs.” In fact, the subjugation of Grenada served to taboo public interest in endogenous problems, boosting the image of Reagan, who would go on to win the 1984 election by a landslide.
Considering the real motivations, let us review the axes on which the propaganda was based to prepare and justify the invasion at the domestic and international level. In the first place, the alleged military use of the civilian airport that Grenada was building with the support of Cuban engineers and with sources of financing that came from as far away as Europe. Nothing could be further from the truth: the real purpose was the construction of an international airport, which the island did not have, to receive large aircraft and develop the strategically planned tourist industry. Like the “weapons of mass destruction” of George W. Bush’s administration in our century, the “USSR airport” would be nothing more than a clumsy ideological cover that would eventually fall under its own weight.
Soviet postage stamp in homage to the Grenadian leader.
It was common to hear the argument, no less laughable because it was used, that tiny Grenada represented a “threat to national security”, identical to the one used to sustain to this day the blockade against Cuba, and to justify the United Nations occupation of Haiti in 2004. This, let us remember, in the ideological framework of the polarization of the Cold War and the “fight against communism” and the rapprochement of Grenada with Cuba and the Soviet Union. It was also commonplace to talk about the alleged threats and risks to the 600 or so American citizens who were peacefully residing in Grenada, most of them studying medicine. It is worth mentioning that their number was barely less than the total number of Grenadian soldiers that the Americans faced after the internal liquidation of the process. Nor can we leave aside the preparatory and coercive work of international financial organizations such as the IMF and the World Bank, which through their policy of asphyxiation financially isolated dependent Grenada, preventing it from any possibility of accessing loans in the global capital market.
“The argument […] that tiny Grenada represented a “threat to national security” was common, identical to the one used to sustain the blockade against Cuba to this day, and to justify the United Nations occupation of Haiti in 2004″.
The excuse used for the invasion was the request for military deployment by U.S. partners in the OECS. However, the Reagan administration had already made the necessary preparations in an operation called “Ambar and the Ambardinas” in 1981, an unequivocal allusion to the island of Grenada and the small Grenadine islands that spread out like a string of pearls to the south of its territory. Furthermore, as mentioned by relevant figures of the Revolution such as George Louison, Don Rojas and Kenrick Radix, the CIA was already infiltrated by then in the government, the party, the army and the popular organizations.
To illustrate the disproportionate nature of the invasion, which would finally be baptized “Operation Urgent Fury”, the United States used 7,000 marines and 300 OECS soldiers to confront a reduced, demoralized and disbanded army and militias. On the other hand, the 784 cooperating Cubans, among civilians and military, offered an active and haughty resistance wherever they were attacked by the invaders. The cautious UN, as always, condemned the invasion without any result or incidence by 108 negative votes against 9 favorable ones. Once again, Fidel Castro’s judgment is conclusive: “Neither from the political, nor military, nor moral point of view, did the United States obtain any victory. In any case, a Pyrrhic military victory and a profound moral defeat”. To date, the body of Maurice Bishop and the other revolutionary leaders have still not been found. Bernard Coard himself, who was released after several years in prison, affirms that it is the US authorities and the CIA who know his exact whereabouts.
Making revolution, converging the Caribbean
Our aspirations for Latin American and Caribbean integration have not always converged in the history of the territories that José Martí defined as “Our America”. To the existence of nationalisms without a region, of regionalisms without a national substratum, of phenomena of internal colonialism, of scarce but painful fratricidal wars, we must add curious phenomena of myopic Latin Americanism, by escape, that look without seeing our entire territorial extension, skipping nations, cultures, languages, regions and even entire revolutions. Our Latin Americanism has to include and link the Southern Cone, the Brazilian giant, the Andean peoples, the nations of the Central American isthmus, all the Caribbean islands from the great Antilles to the small islands, the black and indigenous nationalities and plurinationalities, the sovereign territories and the colonial enclaves. And also, it is worth the provocation, to the United States itself, given that in the “belly of the monster”, by voluntary or forced migration, live more than 30 million of our compatriots.
As has become evident, only Revolutions can give our nations a regional projection, and a firm and dignified platform from which to confront this world unhinged by capital. Grenada, after the defeat of its Revolution, lost all geopolitical significance and returned, in the words of the lawyer Peter David, to become “a small island among many in the Caribbean”. The same happened with Haiti. The same would happen to Cuba if the most solid of our revolutionary attempts were defeated.
Grenada also reaffirms that revolutions are total and multidimensional events, and that only their irruption is capable of guaranteeing the advancement of multiple agendas that would never come to fruition through dispersed paths, fragmented in sectorial claims, domesticable rebellions or corporative tantrums. The demands of workers, peasants, students, professionals, youth, women, migrants, blacks or indigenous people, will be able to do “everything with the revolution, and nothing against the revolution”.
“Grenada, after the defeat of its Revolution, lost all geopolitical significance and returned, in the words of lawyer Peter David, to become “a small island among many in the Caribbean”. The same happened with Haiti. The same would happen to Cuba if the most solid of our revolutionary attempts were defeated”.
On the other hand, there is no doubt that the Caribbean was and still is the place of condensation of the most fabulous political and social experiments, the sharp frontier of numerous empires and the geostrategic region where the weak links of coloniality do not stop exploding. Those who turn their backs on our great sea will be naively turning their backs on the enemies to the north and east, who have been preaching disunity and discord for 500 years. We must honor the amphictyonic efforts of the Liberator Simón Bolívar, so that the Caribbean becomes again the hinge of the different regions of Our America, turning it into a convergent sea, of cultural encounters, migratory embraces, fair trade, linguistic understandings, and full solidarity.
Someday we will write, next to the revolutionary history of Haiti the unthinkable, of Cuba the heroic, of Nicaragua the beautiful, the history of Grenada, the worthy revolution of the nutmeg. In the meantime, as Grenadians used to say and still remember: Forward ever, backward never. Forward always, backward never.
Translation by Internationalist 360°
REVOLUTIONARY STRATEGIC STUDIES 