“He who hesitates is sometimes saved.”
— James Thurber, 1894-1961, US cartoonist, writer, journalist, and playwright
“History doesn’t repeat itself but it does rhyme.”
— Unclear (often mis-attributed to Mark Twain)
Imagine if you will: The President of the United States decides it’s a good idea to take military action against another American nation. Maybe there are some valid reasons for doing so; maybe he simply needs a diversion to take the focus off other headlines dogging his administration (especially given an upcoming election cycle)—maybe it’s a little of column A and a little of column B.
Despite the US War Powers Resolution of 1973, Congress is not consulted and the Commander in Chief sends 7,000 troops into a sovereign Caribbean nation.
The news of early-January, 2026, right?
Think again: It was a mere 43 years ago, the president was Regan, and the nation was Grenada. Closer to home (“home” being Hazel James), the Maurice Bishop International Airport that Rhett and I recently flew into to rejoin Hazel was a focal point of Regan’s stated rationale for the invasion. Also closer to home, Sunny will soon be visiting the veterinary clinic at St. George’s University for a rabies titer test required for entry into other Windward Islands nations. St. George’s is an international university was founded in 1976 and offers programs in medicine and veterinary medicine. It is very close to the airport, and many students are from the United States.
The reason I started this post with the Thurber quote is that last January when I made landfall in Grenada, I learned of the 1983 US invasion and was immediately inspired to write a post about it. However, I hesitated…for 12 months…and luckily was saved. Now, with the recent US invasion of Venezuela, the rhyme of the poem of history reveals itself.
When I was at home in Florida last summer the two sailing questions I’d get most frequently were, “What are you looking forward to the most about sailing in the Caribbean?” and, “What will you miss most about sailing in the Mediterranean?”
My stock answers were, “I’m looking forward to sailing the consistent trade winds of the Caribbean.” (as compared to the fickle Mediterranean) and, “I’ll miss the history.” (referring to the millennia of Greek, Roman, Ottoman, and European history in the Old World). After a couple of weeks in Grenada, it seems like my first answer was accurate but my second was way off. There’s history here in the New World, and it’s still being made.
There are loads of online sources about the invasion, chock full of details and neither will I repeat them verbatim nor have some AI write me a summary that I claim as my own. Instead, I’ll offer my thoughts on the invasion, informed some by online research, but mostly by talking to Grenadians to understand their perspectives. After reading this post if you’re interested in more detail, or (God forbid) want to fact-check me, start with this Wikipedia link—it’s very good.
Saying that, “The US invaded Grenada in 1983,” is kind of like summarizing the movie Titanic by saying, “The ship sank.” While the summary isn’t wrong, it isn’t right either
The best analogy I can come up with for the 1983 invasion is this: You’re in the produce section of the grocery store buying several onions. As you inspect each, you notice one is a bit irregularly shaped. No matter…no soft spots, smells fine. It’s in your sack and you move on with the grocery run. Days later when slicing onions, you find it’s actually a double onion.
A common business phrase to describe getting to the bottom of a multi-layered problems iss, “Peeling the onion.” However, understanding the 1983 US invasion of Grenada is not just a process of peeling the onion, it’s peeling the double onion. While both the US and Grenadian halves of the are inexorably linked, they each have their own distinct layers.
In this part-one blog post I’ll describe the layers the Grenadian half of the onion from inside-out:
1) The seed of a family vendetta is planted. Grenada gained its independence from the United Kingdom in 1974. Sir Eric Gairy served as Grenada’s last Premier (under British rule) and its first Prime Minister post-independence. His term as Premier was 1967 to 1974, and as Prime Minister from 1974-1979. Although known as the country’s father of independence, he and his GULP party (Grenada United Labor Party) maintained power by threat, intimidation, and fraudulent elections. His private army enforcers, were dubbed the Mongoose Gang. On Grenada’s January 1974 “Bloody Monday” Gairy’s Mongoose Gang shot and killed prominent businessman Rupert Bishop in the back. At the time of Rupert’s shooting, his 30 year-old son Maurice was a rising activist on the island—and the seed of a family vendetta was planted.
2) A bloodless coup begins. In 1979 Maurice Bishop and his Marxist-Leninist vanguard NJM (New JEWEL Movement) Party staged a nearly bloodless coup and deposed Eric Gairy while Gairy was out of the country. Maurice Bishop installed himself as Prime Minister becoming the second Prime Minister of Grenada. (Interestingly, the reason Gairy was out of the country was to address the UN—makes sense on the surface. Until you find out that the subject of his address was—wait for it—UFOs.) In Gairy’s words, “I have myself seen an unidentified flying object, and I have been overwhelmed by what I have seen.” I can only guess what the highly intelligent aliens in the UFO thought of Gairy’s Mongoose Gang.
The “JEWEL” in Maurice Bishop’s party name stands for Joint Endeavor for Welfare, Education, and Liberation. Times Caribbean Online characterized the younger Bishop’s views as follows: “His vision for Grenada was bold: to make education free, health care accessible, and the island a beacon of black pride and economic self-reliance in the postcolonial Caribbean.” The younger Bishop was a powerful speaker and also appealed to black US citizens during the 1970s heyday of the Black Panther movement.
3) Bishop and Grenada look to Cuba for assistance. After taking power Bishop established a partnership with Cuba, which obviously caught the attention of the US in the late-Cold War world of the 1970s and 80s. He made good on many of his promises to the people and in his short tenure, free public healthcare was established, sex discrimination was made illegal, and illiteracy dropped from 35% to 5% and unemployment from 50% to 14%. However, a political Achilles’ heel was that many islanders thought he had not sufficiently promoted tourism on the island. (My personal opinion here is that the always-meddling US was probably doing everything it covertly could to stifle Grenada’s tourism and gently force a regime change.)
Bishop’s response to tourism criticism was to revive plans to build a proper international airport on the south of the island, and he asked his friend Fidel Castro for help. (At the time the only Grenadian airport was on the north of the island. It was too small to land large planes and constrained by mountains and the sea so could not be extended.) In addition to helping finance the project, Castro sent 600 Cubans to help with the construction. In early 1983 Ronald Regan (first elected in 1981) began to warn that the airport’s tourism rationale was facade was for a future Soviet airbase.
A quick flash to today, the airport (which eventually started commercial operations in 1984) is now named the Maurice Bishop International airport.
4) A coup within a coup. While the US was increasingly concerned with the potential military uses of the new airport in Grenada, a schism was forming within Maurice Bishop’s PRG (People’s Revolutionary Government). What I’ve heard from locals is that while Maurice Bishop was committed to a socialist agenda for the islands he was also in favor of rapprochement with the US (establishing friendlier relations). Meanwhile a faction of the PRG lead by Deputy Prime Minister Bernard Coard favored closer alignment with Cuba and the Soviet Union. In September 1983, Coard tried to make Bishop either step down or agree to power-sharing. After a fortnight of deliberation, Bishop refused and, with the military’s help, Coard placed Bishop under house arrest on October 13, 1983. Bishop confided to a journalist, “I am a dead man.”
5) Bishop is freed by the people…for a short time. Although Coard’s faction tried to keep Bishop’s house arrest on the down-low, news leaked and soon a public demonstration of 15,000-30,000 people demanded Bishop’s release and return to power. To put 15,000-30,000 in context, with the island’s population of 100,000, that’s 15-30% of the population protesting. For comparison, the October 18, 2025 No Kings protests in the US had 5-7 million attendees across the US—that’s about 2% of the US population of 340 million.
On October 19th (1983) the protesters freed Bishop and escorted him to army headquarters to regain power. While initially successful in seizing Ft. Rupert (named for Maurice Bishop’s father). Bernard Coard dispatched a military force from another fort. Bishop and members of his cabinet were captured in the coup-within-a-coup melee, and later executed via firing squad. After Bishop was dead, one of the execution squat slit his throat and cut off his finger to steal a ring. His body was burned (probably so that the crowd wouldn’t have relics to venerate the popular leader). His remains have never been found.
And that is my perspective of the salient layers of the Grenadian story. In addition, I believe the history portion of this blog has reached its Plimsoll line so I’ll wrap here and pick-up this “Thanksgiving Day” story in a soon-to-follow part two.
In part two we’ll focus on the US side of our double onion.
From a sailing and cruising perspective it’s almost comical how little ground we’ve covered despite me being in-country three and a half weeks and Rhett and Sunny two and a half. No matter, in 2024 and January 2025 we sailed 6,600 nautical miles so we’ve got nothing to prove to anybody. This season we’ve decided to measure out progress in smiles and not miles.
After a busy week getting Hazel prepped to launch, Rhett, Sunny, and Rhett’s bestie Maria flew down together and the four of us enjoyed a daysail/shakedown sail on HJ and several nights of resort pampering.
After Maria’s departure from Grenada, Rhett, Sunny, and I moved onto Hazel and, in order to see our “progress,” you have to zoom way way in on our homepage tracker. Again smiles not miles and we’re going deep on the people, the food, the music, and yes—the history—of this beautiful island nation.
One fly in the ointment (and as hinted above regarding Sunny and the St. George’s University Veterinary Clinic) is that we’re now discovering that other Windward islands to the north are not nearly as welcoming to pets as Grenada is. We’re trying to work out what that means to our cruising season, more to follow there.
Fair winds and following seas!
Dan! What an interesting post. I confess that when I started reading it and realized you would be talking about the Grenada invasion I rolled my eyes. So long ago and so inconsequential, I thought. But you revealed an unexpected side of it that I am glad to have learned. Thank you! Also, I’m sure sailing in the Caribbean is not as blissful as we might imagine it but you certainly seem to be living the dream life.