GRENADA: Let Them Eat Bananas

The Caribbean island of Grenada has always been too good to be believed. With its beautiful beaches, verdant mountains, balmy climate and charming Old World atmosphere, it was "the one small island," Novelist Alec Waugh once wrote, "that provides everything a preconceived picture of the tropics has led a visitor to expect."

Waugh's words now sound ironic. As it celebrated its independence last week after 324 years of first French and then British rule, tiny Grenada (pronounced Gre-noy-da) and its two sister islands were wracked by disorder and threatened by civil war. Telephone and electric service have been out since the beginning of the year, and a general strike has crippled the country's economy. Bananas, one of Grenada's major exports, lie rotting in the fields, and nutmeg and cocoa, the two other principal crops, are piled up in warehouses with no one to load them onto ships. Britain prudently cancelled the scheduled visit of Prince Richard of Gloucester, a representative of the Queen, to the independence ceremonies and alerted a warship to stand by to evacuate foreigners in case of violence. The U.S. State Department advised Americans to look for another tourist paradise. Tourism, which used to bring in 130,000 visitors each year, has totally evaporated.

The trouble began last November when antigovernment demonstrators, protesting the one-man rule of Prime Minister Eric Gairy, 51, and an unemployment rate of 50% or more, began marching through the streets of St. George's, the island's capital. Gairy's police, a roughneck band derisively called "the Mongoose" by opponents, retaliated by beating up opposition leaders. Their attacks culminated last month in "Bloody Monday," when the Prime Minister's bullyboys broke up a protest rally and killed the father of one of Gairy's chief critics. Since then they have been looting shops owned by those who oppose the Prime Minister. In fear, most businessmen have shuttered up their stores. All but two of the island's 25 hotels have closed, and hundreds of Grenadians have fled to other countries to escape the ruthless secret police.

Many islanders worried that once Britain let go altogether, Gairy would set up a miniature dictatorship with himself as a pocket Napoleon. "There could be massive bloodshed in a few days," warned Maurice Bishop, one of the opposition leaders beaten in the first attacks last year. "The population is not prepared to be ruled by any madman, and it is very clear the 'jackal'-as the populace now calls him-is simply not prepared to resign. I think he is certifiably mad."

Gairy contemptuously dismisses his opponents as "hot and sweaty, impetuous and overambitious youngsters fresh from universities, who preach bloodshed and are tainted by a bit of Communism." In fact, he maintains, his opposition is based on what he calls the "plantocracy," the big plantation owners who have never forgotten that he was the one who got wage increases for their field hands in the '50s. The landowners cannot forgive him, he insists, for never having gone to secondary school.