Hands Off Grenada! supplement (misprinted cover)

next step the • On 25 October a force of 3000 US marines and paratroopers stormed the Caribbean island of attack by the world's most powerful nation on one of the smallest the heroism of those Grenadians and Cubans who have fought back against overwhelming odds.

TINY GRENADA has lived under the threat of invasion by its neighbourhood superpower for the last four years.

October assault was the culmination of a American interference in Central nada's small and ill-equipped militia has been crushed by thousands of US marines backed up by naval gunships and equipped with the latest in years the people of Grenada have been - where will Reagan The world recession has ravaged Central A menica arn pean. sugar, coffee, cotton and bananas have been devastated by a decade of declining prices on the world's commodity markets.

Central America has been hardest hit every country suffers mounting trade deficits and debts and burgeoning unemthe economy of El Salvador shrank by 10 oer cent manufacturing sector of Puerto Rico the bauxite mines of Jamaica and Guyana and the oil wells of Trinidad, as well as Tourism, which provided foreign exchange and some jobs in the 'sixties and 'seventies.

quarter and a half of all workers in the region are now out of work. Deepening poverty has generated growing hostility among the masses against the imperialist system that dominates their lives.

From Guatemala to Guyana popular resistance has erupted against foreign domination and the local agents who enforce the imperialist order through repression and The chain of events which led to the IS intervention in 1979. In that year two incidents shook the region, threatening the domination of New Jewel Movement overthrew Grenadian Prime Minister Eric Gairy in a popular coup that ended a corrupt and repres sive dictatorship. In July the Sandinista review of the Revolutionary Communist Party complicity in the rape of Grenada, whether in the form of diplomatic approval, military suggestions of la Commonwealth role' in imposing a new form of domination over the people of • We condemn the British Labour Party for beating its breast on behalf of Britain while American backed dictator Anastasio Somoza whose Nicaragua run sunce dangerous precedents for US influence The New Jewel Movement had staged the ever radical coup in the Englishpulled off the first successful popular revolt in Latin America for decades.

imitation throughout the slump-stricken The USA is acutely sensitive to instability on its fourth border' to the south economic threat to mighty America indeed the whole of Central America and the Caribbean is of minor importance in the USA's total trade and investment set- Yet the region is of central strategic importance as the gateway to the major economies of Latin America and as an avenue for oil imports from Nigeria and was the USA's first imperial domain and small shifts in the local balance of power can have far-reaching consequences at The USA has a long history of gunboat diplomacy from its expulsion of Spain in 1898 to its attempt to take Cuba In recent years the USA has held back and the. Caribbean. outing was to the Dominican Republic in 296 Seventush the rest the les interests through dollar-financed client states, diplomatic manoeuvres and CIA intrigue. For a period President Carter posed as a benevolent reformer dispensing aid programmes and homilies on human rights to the USA's favoured dictators.

By the late 'seventies even a rapprochement with Cuba seemed possible. But the revolts of 1979 brought the USA's softly The threat of popular rebellion alarmed the US authorities and their local puppets.

The Sandinistas' victory ignited guerrilla war in neighbouring El Salvador which threatened to spread and engulf Honduras ment's triumph over Eric Gairy terrified the ruling cliques on the neighbouring Hands off Greneda! imperialism rampages through the Prime Minister and the Queen.

withdrawal of all foreign troops Grenadian fight for freedom.

imperialist movements in Iran with develooments in the wall posters in Guyana asked 'Shah gone.

Gairy gone, who next? The Trinidad oilworkers' paper ran a front page headline gone. which caused some distress to Prime Minister Eric Williams.

Within months of Bishop's takeover in Grenada riots swept Dominica and St.

Lucia combined counter-offensive To justify further US intervention, the USA invented the notion of a triangle of communist subversion': Cuba, Nicaragua The prospect of better relations between the USA and Cuba and Fidel Castro's hopes of a relaxation of the crippling economic blockade ended with Carter's 'discovery' of a Soviet batallion on Cuba in 1979.

and Reagan have accused Cuba of channelling Soviet weapons and supplies through Nicaragua to the guerrilla movement in satellite photographs which were supposed to reveal the construction of a military airfield in Grenada for use as a Cuban- Soviet base; it subsequently emerged that the British firm Plessey and a substantial EEC loan were involved in a joint project with a number of Arab countries and the marginal influence of the Soviet Union in the area and the virtual economic collapse of Cuba, the USA has carefully cultivated the notion that they are engaged in sponsoring a network of bases in Nicathe bogey of communism in these coun tries which have little in common and few connections TO leottimise the USA tightened the economic screw on the radical regimes in Central America and the worked flat out to block loans to Nicaragua and Grenada from the IMF and World Reagan's Caribbean Basin Initiative for aid and preferential trade explicitly countries. times been used to help the CIA in its introublesome regimes. The CIA stepped in during Jamaica's 1980 election campaign Specia supplement November 1983 the USA, not because of America's crimes against Grenada, but because call for the immediate to try and get rid of Prime Michael Manley, who had remained too friendly with Grenada for American tastes.

The unrest stirred up by a well-timed IMF austerity programme for Jamaica helped the CIA ensure Manley was defeated and replaced by the pro-Western Edward Seaga.

encouraged Grenada's hostile neighbour provided the invitation' for the October a vaso mats attempted to have Grenada kicked out of the Caribbean Common Market The USA has used Canada and Venezuela manipulated the leaders of Jamaica and vention provide the sharp end of US strabacked genocide in Guatemala, mass terror in El Salvador and the Contra counter- This month 4000 US troops are practising a full scale invasion of Central America in Honduras, the latest in a series of similar exercises. The Grenadian invasion has had a number of dress rehearsals. In 1980 1800 US marines staged a mock landing at the Guantanamo Bay base in Cuba. In August 1981 120 000 US and NATO troops, 250 ships and 1000 aircraft participated in an object of seizing power and installing a were named Amber' and 'Amberdine' a grim warning of things to come for 1 TC The invasion of Grenada takes the USA a bloody step further into a struggle to assert its power over the masses of Central careful ideological, political and military preparations indicate its determination to enforce the imperialist order whatever the The continuing popular resistance and indirect, in throughout the region shows the resilience of the forces fighting American barbarism.