"Since the intervention, the country has developed tremendously. More Grenadians are coming back here from abroad to retire," he says of a diaspora thought to exceed this nation's 100,000 population. "I don't think the people of Grenada were ever really yearning for socialism."
For Grenadians too young to know the Cold War implications at the time, the U.S. invasion was more frolicking than frightful.
"Oh, it was fun! Especially for kids in the village where nothing ever happened. There were planes flying overhead and ships on the horizon, and we didn't have to go to school for days," Prudence Greenidge, now in public relations, reminisces gleefully about the drama she experienced at age 7.
Taxi driver Mitch Charles likewise remembers the invasion as great excitement for a 14-year-old, and cause for spurning parental admonishments to stay far from the fracas. Like most Grenadians who came of age after Bishop's revolution was scuttled, he subscribes to the official view that the invasion was justified to rid Grenada of a leadership likely to push living standards down to the level of communist Cuba.
Grenada's U.S. occupiers gave Cuban collaborators the bum's rush after the invasion and severed the island's diplomatic ties with the entire Soviet bloc to shield the tiny country from further communist recruitment.
But in a development those now in power acknowledge was ironic, Cuba and Grenada reestablished diplomatic relations in 1992, and current Prime Minister Keith Mitchell and Cuban President Fidel Castro have developed a warm friendship.
Cuba's leading role in the construction of Point Salinas Airport was viewed 20 years ago as a military buildup to funnel weapons to communist revolutionaries in Central America. The 800-strong building force, many of its members armed and flanked by Coard's soldiers, put up fierce enough resistance to cost the lives of 19 Americans and 59 Cubans. Forty-five Grenadians died in the October violence.
No such fears of ideological contagion linger over more recent collaborations, such as the Cuban-built hospital and the dozens of Cuban doctors engaged in public medicine throughout the country. Sixteen university professors are also teaching Spanish, engineering and irrigation skills to help Grenada.
Twenty years on, some here note that there was almost as much naysaying and second-guessing over Grenada's invasion at the time as there is about the U.S. effort in Iraq today.
For a presentation being prepared for 20th anniversary observances of the invasion, Calum Macpherson, the university's director of research, has gathered newsmagazine covers that posed the same questions editors are asking about Iraq. "America at War" and "Counting the Costs," blared two Newsweek issues after the Grenada invasion. Time magazine demanded then, as many media do now, to know if intervention was "Worth the Price?"
C.V. Rao, a university professor 20 years ago and now dean of students, says his experience of the Grenada conflict provides him with a yardstick to measure the value and legitimacy of other U.S. military incursions.
"The key to post-invasion economic development here was the gratitude of the Grenadian people," he said. "I hope we will see that happen in Iraq, but that is so much bigger and more difficult."
