Grenada: Few in Grenada want to talk about the US intervention 20 years ago. As Hugh O'Shaughnessy reports from St George's, it hardly merits a mention in the current election campaign
Today, the 20th anniversary of the massive US invasion of this tiny eastern Caribbean state of 100,000 people on the orders of President Ronald Reagan, the waters have not settled.
The ghosts of the left-wing "Revo" are to be sensed still in this poor but extravagantly beautiful town.
The revolution was created in this former British colony by Maurice Bishop, an admirer of Fidel Castro, and his supporters when they overthrew the petty tyrant, Sir Eric Gairy, in 1979. It was crushed four years later by Washington.
The mementos of the revolutionaries remain and of their murderous falling out in 1983 which gave the green light to the US action. The toy fort dominating St George's harbour where Bishop, his pregnant girlfriend, Jacqueline Creft, and their comrades were shot by a clique of Grenadian Leninists is still there.
Facing it a few hundred metres across the bay are the burnt remains of the building which I saw being attacked days later by US troops, who carted away the national archives as booty of war.
But today few want to talk about those times. General elections have just been called, and the candidates orate about anything except the events of 20 years ago.
"All my friends think Bishop's revolution was necessary", says Jack, a young science student. "Gairy had to be overthrown, but none of the politicians wants to discuss it. Politics is so boring today!," he adds.
Dermot Nolan, a missionary priest from Carraroe, Co Galway, says his parishioners never even bring the subject up. The conservative and pro-business Prime Minister, Keith Mitchell, seeking a third successive term in office is keen, as one would expect, to minimise the past and present the best picture of a thrusting modern Grenada, whose citizens remain grateful for the US action in 1983.
As I sit with him in his modern office on jungle-covered hills with a spectacular view over the town, he balks at the use of the word "invasion". Like most bien-pensants here he emphatically prefers the euphemism "intervention".
He is specially angry at the report issued on Thursday by Amnesty International which likens the treatment of some of those involved in the events of 1983 to that in the US concentration camp at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba now.
The simile could raise questions about the parallels between Grenada in 1983 and Iraq in 2003.
The treatment of those who have come to be known as the Grenada 17, says Amnesty, was "a shocking catalogue of human rights violations" including confinements in cages, torture and denial of elementary legal practice in a kangaroo court.
Twenty years after their putsch against Bishop, 16 of the 17 still sit in prison in an ancient fort on Richmond Hill, the findings of the Grenadian Court of Appeal about their case still kept secret.
Mitchell is unabashed. He dismisses Amnesty's report as "a shoddy piece of work". Yet the questions will not go away. The condemned men are still "up the hill" in a prison built on an eminence overlooking St George's and constantly in the sight of Grenadians below.
If Mitchell wins a third term next month it will be because of the disarray of the opposition to his new National Party, which has close links to the US Republican party.
Einstein Louison, trained in Cuba and the Soviet Union, was once chief-of-staff in Bishop's tiny army. Now he is a senator and a junior minister in the Mitchell government.
There remains some left-wing activity by a number of lawyers in the Siboney group, named after the chambers where they practised.
Once, like Louison supporters of the Revo, today they run the National Democratic Congress and are making peace with their enemies who backed the former Gairy regime.
One has the feeling that the tiny society that is Grenada still has to come to terms with the cataclysms of revolution, coup d'état and foreign invasion that it has experienced since independence from Britain three decades ago.
In spite of US influence, Grenada clings to its British connections. Despite the late Maurice Bishop's partiality for Fidel Castro and the USSR, Grenada always remained a monarchy with Queen Elizabeth as head of state.
Her head appears on the coinage and bank notes; there are still red telephone boxes bearing the British imperial crown; order is kept by the Royal Grenada Police Force; traffic still drives on the left; the electric plugs have square pins from Carraroe to Canterbury.
Sir Paul Scoon, Queen Elizabeth's long-lasting representative under Gairy, Bishop and the post-invasion governments and a former local school teacher, has adopted the vowels affectations and body language of the Duke of Edinburgh.
"Grenadians, especially the older ones, still feel protected by the British connection," says Nicholas Brathwaite, a former prime minister. Certainly the boom in US investment promised here 20 years ago has not materialised.
As Grenadians prepare for next month's elections the outcome may turn on financial finagling rather than politics. Despite the fact that Dr Mitchell has been obliged by the world's monetary authorities to close down many suspicious offshore banks which were seen as a prime source of financial corruption, strange figures flit in the depths of Grenadian public life.
"The smell of financial scandal is worrying", says Brathwaite.