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Caribbean Islands Regional Security Threats, 1970-81
The relative stability characterizing the Westminster-style
democracies of the Commonwealth Caribbean began to crumble in the
late 1960s and early 1970s when Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago
were shaken by political violence. Until they began achieving
independence, the Commonwealth Caribbean islands had been
relatively immune from subversion because of the efficient
protection provided by British security and defense guarantees. The
Black Power movement (see Glossary) was behind much of the social
disorder, although criminal violence also rose to unprecedented
levels. Black Power activists almost succeeded in overthrowing
Prime Minister Williams in Trinidad and Tobago in 1970, but
government troops finally suppressed the revolt with the assistance
of a planeload of arms and ammunition purchased from the United
States and Venezuela (see Political Dynamics, ch. 3). Another small
Marxist group continued to carry out terrorist attacks on the
island for a few years.
The leaders of most of the Marxist-Leninist-oriented opposition
groups in the region were known to have had close contact with
Cuba. Barbados and Trinidad and Tobago were particularly concerned
about Cuban involvement in the indigenous Black Power movement.
Virtually all of the Commonwealth Caribbean islands had at least
one small extremist group that was an occasional security threat.
Eastern Caribbean security concerns were heightened in the
1976-78 period as a result of a major terrorist attack and two
abortive mercenary actions in Barbados. A Cubana Airlines DC-8
airplane exploded shortly after it took off from Grantley Adams
International Airport in Barbados on October 6, 1976; all seventy-
three passengers and five crew members were killed in the incident,
a bombing attributed to Caracas-based anti-Cuban terrorists. Only
5 days earlier, then-Prime Minister Tom Adams had announced that 2
United States citizens had plotted to overthrow his government with
the assistance of a 260-member mercenary force. In December 1978,
Barbados thwarted a coup plot by an expatriate arms dealer and a
mercenary force.
Revolutionary activities in Grenada in early 1979 stunned
Commonwealth Caribbean capitals, as well as London and Washington.
For the first time in the history of the Commonwealth Caribbean, an
elected government was overthrown in an armed coup. Grenada had
been ruled for most of the decade by an autocratic-leaning prime
minister, Eric Matthew Gairy, whose increasingly unpopular Grenada
United Labour Party government was widely regarded as corrupt,
incompetent, and an embarrassment to the region. On March 13, 1979,
a group of supporters of Grenada's main parliamentary opposition
party, Maurice Bishop's NJM, overthrew the Gairy regime in an armed
coup while the prime minister was in the United States. Meeting in
Barbados on March 14 and 15, 1979, the concerned leaders of six
Eastern Caribbean countries discussed security implications of the
coup. At a meeting held in Antigua and Barbuda five days later,
leaders of Antigua and Barbuda, Dominica, Montserrat, St. Kitts and
Nevis, St. Lucia, and St. Vincent and the Grenadines decided to
examine the feasibility of establishing a regional defense force
empowered to intervene in future rebellions "by armed and trained
revolutionaries" against any of the governments concerned. Despite
the initial alarm, the region established diplomatic relations with
the de facto People's Revolutionary Government (PRG) because Gairy
was widely disliked and ridiculed while Bishop was known regionally
and liked and because of "a West Indian regional identity and sense
of solidarity." Regional leaders also took note of Bishop's
assurances that free and fair elections would be held.
The new Bishop government soon gave the region cause for
concern. Within two weeks of opening diplomatic relations with Cuba
on March 16, 1979, Cuban arms shipments and advisers began arriving
on the island. The PRG regime replaced the entire professional
police force and army with the political People's Revolutionary
Army (PRA), arrested many political opponents, and suspended the
Grenadian Constitution. By mid-April 1979, the PRA, with Cuban
weapons and training assistance, had grown to a 2,000-member force,
including the People's Revolutionary Militia (PRM), outstripping
the combined forces of Grenada's OECS neighbors. (The PRA and PRM
later became part of the People's Revolutionary Armed Forces--
PRAF.)
On April 30, 1979, Barbadian prime minister Adams met with
Trinidad and Tobago's prime minister Williams and issued a
memorandum of understanding that noted the "growing complexity of
the security problems of the Caribbean region," which they
identified as "terrorism, piracy, the use of mercenaries, and the
introduction into the region of techniques of subversion." Only a
week later, on May 5, the government of Antigua and Barbuda claimed
that it had foiled a Cuban-backed coup plot organized by the ACLM
in collaboration with Kendrick Radix, then-attorney general of the
new PRG government in Grenada. The Bishop regime's reneging on its
promise to hold free and fair elections and its increasingly close
ties to the Soviet Union and Cuba added to the growing regional
anxiety.
The Carter administration responded to the Caribbean
developments in 1979 by sending a special envoy on an emergency
tour of the English-speaking islands. That October, the envoy held
the third in a series of meetings in London to plan joint United
States-British responses to Caribbean economic and security
problems, including a proposed multinational seaborne patrol force
in the Eastern Caribbean. The susceptibility of the Commonwealth
Caribbean islands to a seaborne attack had been demonstrated by
various incidents in which mercenaries were involved. Britain,
already sensitive to charges that it had abandoned its former
colonies, sent a naval team to the region to make recommendations
for a joint coast guard facility in Barbados, St. Vincent and the
Grenadines, and St. Lucia. In early 1979, Britain agreed to provide
coast guard training and support for Barbados and St. Vincent and
the Grenadines to "knit together" the smaller island forces.
The United States began a small International Military
Education and Training program, primarily coast guard training, in
Barbados in 1979. The United States also began providing coast
guard vessels and some coast guard assistance to the region after
the governments of Antigua and Barbuda, Barbados, St. Kitts and
Nevis, and St. Lucia agreed to engage in joint coast guard patrols.
This informal security arrangement helped to establish the basis
for a future regional security system.
A precedent for regional security cooperation was set in early
September 1979, after militant Rastafarians (see Glossary) led by
Lennox Charles seized Union Island in St. Vincent and the
Grenadines. R. Milton Cato of the center-right St. Vincent Labour
Party, who had taken office as prime minister two days earlier,
requested military assistance from neighboring Barbados. The
Barbados Labour Party (BLP) government of Prime Minister Adams
responded by sending detachments of the Barbados Defence Force
(BDF) to St. Vincent on December 16. While the BDF troops guarded
Kingstown, Vincentian security forces were able to capture the
insurgents (see St. Vincent and the Grenadines, National Security,
ch. 4).
Cuban activities in the Commonwealth Caribbean region in 1979-
80 also were a source of increased regional security concerns. One
incident that made Cuba look belligerent to its northern
Commonwealth Caribbean neighbor, the Bahamas, and may have served
as an act of regional intimidation took place on May 10, 1980. On
that date, the Royal Bahamas Defence Force patrol boat
Flamingo took two Cuban fishing boats in tow on charges of
poaching in Bahamian territorial waters south of Ragged Island.
Before the clearly marked Bahamian patrol boat could return to home
port, Cuban MiGs strafed and sank it, killing four crewmen and
wounding three others. The next day Cuban MiGs engaged in prolonged
buzzing of Ragged Island in the Bahamas. Moreover, Cuban troops
were transported by helicopter to the same island in pursuit of the
surviving crew members of the sunken patrol vessel. In a statement
issued on May 12, Cuba claimed that the MiGs were responding to a
reported act of piracy. Bahamian prime minister Lynden O. Pindling,
calling the attack "an atrocious act of aggression," said his
government was "particularly appalled by the inhumane act of firing
on defenseless men struggling in the water" and claimed that the
MiGs also had made "simulated rocket runs" over Bahamian territory
at treetop level. The Bahamian government threatened to take Cuba
before the UN Security Council for aggression, but Cuba apologized
formally on May 29 and agreed to pay compensation (see The Bahamas,
Foreign Relations, ch. 6).
Cuban military and political relations with Grenada and Cuba's
growing subversive activities in Jamaica also contributed to a
marked deterioration in Cuba's relations with the Commonwealth
Caribbean islands. Cuba suffered serious political setbacks in the
region in 1980 as a result of the dramatic shift in the regional
climate caused by the electoral victories of Ronald Reagan in the
United States and Edward Seaga in Jamaica, the latter representing
the conservative Jamaica Labour Party (JLP). Leftist pro-Cuban
candidates lost elections in Antigua and Barbuda, St. Vincent and
the Grenadines, Dominica, and St. Kitts and Nevis. On taking office
as prime minister in 1981, Seaga expelled Cuban ambassador Armando
Ulises Estrada, a known Cuban intelligence agent, because of his
role in coordinating the smuggling of arms and ammunition into
Jamaica through a Cuban front corporation. By early 1981, Cuba was
without any allies in the Caribbean other than Grenada. Cuban
activities in the Commonwealth Caribbean suffered an additional
setback when the Seaga government broke relations with Cuba on
October 29, 1981, after the Castro regime ignored Jamaican warnings
to withdraw all of its intelligence operatives from Jamaica.
The continued vulnerability of the democratic governments in
the Eastern Caribbean was demonstrated again in March 1981, when an
armed mercenary group of North American white supremacists and neo-
Nazis attempted a coup in Dominica. The mercenaries wanted to
replace Mary Eugenia Charles's Dominican Freedom Party government
with the pro-South African administration of former Prime Minister
Patrick John (see Dominica, Government and Politics; Dominica,
National Security, ch. 4). The island government was able to thwart
the plot, however, without calling for assistance from the BDF. The
Charles government subsequently adopted stringent security laws:
the Prevention of Terrorism Act and the State Security Act.
Data as of November 1987
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