Touching down at Grenada’s international airport, few visitors to the tiny Caribbean island may be aware that the 900-metre runway on which they have landed played a central role in one of the country’s bloodiest episodes. In 1983, US President Ronald Reagan sent thousands of US troops to ‘liberate’ the island, claiming that the Cubans were constructing an airbase.
Grenada’s insistence that it was building a commercial airport (with Cuban help), and not a hub for shipping arms to Marxist insurgents across Latin America, failed to prevent the invasion. Over 280 people were killed, including Grenada’s charismatic young leftist leader, Maurice Bishop, shot by firing squad along with many of his ministers. The last of those jailed for the murders were released from prison in 2009 but the country’s revolutionary past remains very much part of its present – the airport is now named after the slain leader.
