The US invaded the island of Grenada 40 years ago. The legacy of revolution lives on

Photograph: Bettmann/Bettmann Archive. Retrieved from theguardian.com

You wouldn’t have guessed he was in enemy territory. Addressing 2,500 people at New York’s Hunter College one June night in 1983, Maurice Bishop won the crowd over with ease, covering everything from the Palestinian struggle to Ronald Reagan’s Medicaid cuts. At one point, the 39-year-old prime minister of Grenada described a “secret report” from the US state department warning that the revolution he fronted was even worse for US interests than the Cuban and Nicaraguan ones.

Why? Because its leaders were young, black, socialist and, most crucially, English-speaking. The thousands of people who chanted: “Forward ever! Backward never!” with Bishop on that night showed the outsized importance that events on the tiny island of Grenada had taken on.

The scene recalled the reception Fidel Castro got on his first visits to New York. Shunned by the political establishment, he found a warm welcome from workers in Harlem and the Bronx. These new “Cubans” would be just as troublesome.