When voodoo failed to stop a revolution
Everyone in Grenada suspected that the island's Prime Minister, Sir Eric Gairy, 56, was a black-magic nut as well as a UFO freak. Still, Grenadians were astonished last week by the cache of bizarre objects Sir Eric left behind when he went to the U.S. earlier this month. His well-timed departure came just before a coup that ousted him after twelve years of oppressive rule over the Caribbean island. On display at his residence atop picturesque Mount Royal last week were a donkey's eye, indigo, saltpeter and a mysterious white powder. Presumably these had been part of the spooky, voodoo-like rituals that the deposed Prime Minister is said to have practiced to help keep himself in power.
Huge stacks of books and magazines on UFOs and other astral bodies were reminders of the Grenadian leader's principal foreign policy concern. On three separate occasions in the past five years, he had proposed that the United Nations undertake studies of UFOs, which he insisted were space vehicles used by aliens of extraterrestrial origin.
The revolutionaries managed to oust Sir Eric's warlockracy with the loss of only three lives. On the morning of March 13, 45 members of the opposition New Jewel movement (Joint Endeavor for Welfare, Education and Liberation) stormed Sir Eric's True Blue Defense Force barracks; they arrested 100 soldiers who were sleeping and unarmed. At the same time, Sir Eric's government ministers were routed out of bed and confined in the garden of the local prison.
The fire station quickly ran up a white flag of surrender—actually, a shirt borrowed off the back of a friendly passerby. During the ten-hour uprising, the island's radio station, which had been seized by revolutionaries, broadcast calypso and reggae songs. After the coup, the music was interrupted by such pleas as "Will the people who kept animals on Mount Royal come back and feed them" and "Will whoever borrowed the keys of the police wagon please return them." Three boatloads of tourists, including a group off a Soviet cruise ship, scarcely noticed that anything was going on, though a few were annoyed that they could not buy stamps at the tightly shuttered post office.
The leader of the coup, Maurice Bishop, 34, a British-educated lawyer, immediately set up a 14-member Revolutionary Council, which is committed to achieving moderate socialist reform. Bishop promised to hold free elections soon and guaranteed Grenadians a constitutional government and full human rights.
Few of Grenada's 110,000 citizens are likely to mourn Sir Eric's hasty departure. His popularity as the island's foremost labor leader in the 1950s was soon dissipated by his authoritarian methods when he became Prime Minister in 1967. Following Grenada's independence from Britain in 1974, Queen Elizabeth knighted Gairy, though he had given himself the title of Sir Eric years before.