ST. GEORGE'S, Grenada — Armed revolution never goes over well with hedonistic sun-seekers or the rum-punch crowd, and it wasn't long after the 1979 Marxist coup here that visitors began taking their sandals, cocktail shakers and sailboats elsewhere.
"They would harass everybody," American Peggy Lambert, then a medical student, recalls of the gun-toting killjoys who had taken to boarding yachts putting into Grenada's scenic harbors to search for pornography or other evidence of social exploitation.
"After four years of this government, the boats had left. Tourists weren't coming because they'd brought this grim face to the island," Lambert said of the Marxists.
On Oct. 25, 1983, their dour grip on this country was broken by a U.S. military invasion.
Leaders of the repressive regime -- who had just viciously ousted their more moderate colleagues -- were swiftly captured, tried and convicted. People cheered their U.S. liberators, then set to work rebuilding their country into a monument to the potential of private enterprise and free people.
As U.S. troops wrestle with an intervention in Iraq, the success of the Grenada invasion 20 years ago might be seen as inspiring evidence of long-term payoffs for determined campaigns to put a troubled world in order.
But even here, where military action was a comparative cakewalk once troops got past 800 Cuban construction workers, deep divisions persist over the value of that Cold War-era intervention.
Lambert, now an administrator at St. George's University, where she and several hundred other Americans were studying medicine at the time of the invasion, believes that it was best for the country. "They were gotten rid of forever. There were no more guys around with AK-47s," she says of the Grenada she returned to after the short-lived U.S. occupation, which she opposed at the time. "When you look at it in the cold light of history, it was a good thing."
Although most Grenadians agree they are better off as a result of the American action, they tend to see the storming of their tropical shores not as a rescue mission to evacuate students from the U.S. medical school, as the Pentagon claimed, but as an aggressive strike to thwart the spread of communism in the Caribbean.
"The students got onto the planes carrying their tennis rackets over their shoulders. They were looking very relaxed," recalls Kecia Lowe, a Grenadian physician who was in high school when U.S. planes and warships arrived to evacuate the 600 Americans, then went on to topple the fractious communist leaders.
