Blackwell Reference Online

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Born in Aruba on May 29, 1944 to the son of a Grenadian nationalist and populist leader, Maurice Bishop was a revolutionary leader and prime minister of the island nation of Grenada, located in the southern Lesser Antilles, in the Southeastern Caribbean Sea. Growing up in Grenada in abject poverty, he was drawn to political life through the British disregard for the island's Afro-Caribbean working class and peasant population. Like a growing number of Caribbean nationalists, Bishop was drawn to Marxist-Leninism as a means to create independence and class and racial equality. To achieve this goal Bishop helped form the New Jewel movement in 1973 and was critical to the organization's growth through advancing a Marxist democratic political program of nationalization of the island's sparse economic resources and the formation of an equalitarian society. Bishop's connection to communist governments, especially Cuba, alarmed the US, and historians have found documentary evidence that the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) orchestrated a political crisis in Grenada through supporting opponents of the Bishop government in 1982 and 1983. The CIA coordinated a coup d'état against Bishop by arming military supporters of Bernard Coard, former deputy prime minister. On October 13, 1983 Coard, Bishop's former law partner, seized power and six days later mass demonstrations against the military ... log in or subscribe to read full text