6 The Hampton Roads Messenger


Volume 8 Number 3


30 Years Later, Remembering Grenada's 'Socialist Experiment'


November 2013


Dominican Republic Revokes Citizenship for Ethnic Haitians


BY EURASIA REVIEW The Constitutional Court of


Pictured above: The late Maurice Bishop, prime minister of Grenada, led a coup in 1979 in an attempt to change the social and economic fortunes of the tiny island nation. Photo by Nancy Shia.


BY BARRINGTON M. SALMON Don Rojas didn’t know that when


he accepted Maurice Bishop’s offer to become his press secretary that he’d end up being an eyewitness to a coup, and an invasion of Grenada by the U.S. military.


Rojas, 64, said he served as press


secretary in the years prior to and including the 1983 invasion.


“The prime minister invited me to


come back in 1979 to rebuild media,” said Rojas, a St. Vincentian native who owns and operates a progressive media relations firm in Randallstown, Md. “My first assignment was editor of the Free West Indian, and then he appointed me.”


Radio documentarian Amina


Hassan spent a year in Grenada while working on a public radio series detailing the religion, politics and culture of several Caribbean countries including Jamaica, Suriname, Guyana and Puerto Rico.


“I was 40 when I went,” said


Hassan, a Los Angeles native. “Personally, one of the things about Grenada was that I wanted to see if I could take care of my children out of the country by myself. I did that. I didn’t take any handouts. I raised money, put on presentations and wrote to foundations.”


“We didn’t have a lot. Peanut


butter and muffin cakes would be like a treat. The rent was paid, everything was taken care of. It was important to me to do that on my own. My children saw that.”


Hassan, 72, said she and her four


children lived in the neighborhood with Grenadians.


“I got there in 1982. We made


good friends down there at the time,” she recalled. “We were integrated and the neighbors were nice.”


Hassan described Grenada as being severely underdeveloped.


“It was a little backwater. The


government’s Xerox machines didn’t work and the government was trying to build a power plant to deal with the frequent outages,” she said.


She said people enamored by the


revolution came down to the island, intrigued by being able to see the socialist experiment unfolding.


“We were openly sympathetic.


We were living our lives,” Hassan said. “We did have good relations with the government. We didn’t have to pay our electric bills. We began to train some people so we didn’t have to pay tariff when we brought in equipment.”


“He was pretty charismatic and


handsome too. He was well-liked and I always saw him around. Here was someone attempting to [develop] socialism so people sort of flocked there.”


Bishop seized control of the


government in a bloodless coup in 1979, toppling the corrupt and brutal government of Eric Gairy. Gairy ruled by fear and used a group of thugs called the “Mongoose Gang” to beat, threaten, intimidate and murder dissidents and rivals, real and imagined.


Bishop and his New Jewel


Movement advocated and espoused a milder brand of socialism that sought to improve the lives of the 100,000 residents of the tiny island-nation.


In a March 1979 speech, Bishop outlined his vision of the future.


“Let me assure the people of


Grenada that all democratic freedoms, including freedom of elections, religious and political opinion, will be fully restored to the people,” he said. “People of Grenada, this revolution is for work, for food, for decent housing and health services, and for a bright future for our children and great grandchildren.”


Bishop had a commanding


presence. Those who knew him spoke of a handsome, 6’ 3" tall man who was an excellent speaker with an arresting oratorical style.


“He was a very brilliant person,


charming and had great people skills, Rojas recalled. “He was a compassionate guy, had a love for the region and people, and was a very charismatic leader and a great orator. He was just a very likeable human being and connected with people across racial, gender and other lines.”


“The revolution enjoyed the


majority support of the people in Grenada. If it didn’t, they wouldn’t have come out in such great numbers to free Bishop from house arrest.”


The Bishop government


developed close ties with the Soviet Union, with Fidel Castro of Cuba, Michael Manley of Jamaica and Daniel Ortega, president of Nicaragua. Bishop, like Manley, Ortega and other Caribbean and Latin American leaders found themselves in the middle of the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union. Either you towed the line of U.S. policy or you were assumed to be in the Soviet orbit.


While Manley, Tanzania President


Julius Nyerere and dozens of other leaders of developing countries were instrumental in creating the non-aligned movement, they still ended up running


SOCIALIST EXPERIMENT PAGE 11


the Dominican Republic ruled Sept. 23 to retroactively strip citizenship from people born in the country after 1929 whose parents had an irregular migratory status. The sentence refers to the case of 29-year-old Juliana Deguis Pierre, the daughter of Haitian parents who according to the court does not fulfill the requirements in order to be registered as a Dominican citizen. The regulatory action will affect around 210,000 people of Haitian origin born in the Dominican Republic who due to this measure would face statelessness and restriction of their rights.


Amnesty International appealed


to the Dominican government not to apply the sentence of the Constitutional Court.


"The full implementation of this Health


This National Diabetes Month, Remember to Keep an Eye on Your Eyes


If you are one of more than 25


million Americans with diabetes, you may already know the importance of watching your diet and keeping track of your blood sugar. But did you know it’s also important to have regular eye exams?


In the United States, diabetic


eye disease is the leading cause of vision loss among working-age adults. Diabetic retinopathy is the most common form of this disease, and affects about 28.5 percent of Americans with diabetes age 40 and older. That’s more than 7 million people, and the number is expected to reach more than 11 million by the year 2030.


The condition can creep up


quietly. It gradually weakens small blood vessels in and around the retina, the light-sensing layer of tissue at the back of the eye. If the disease progresses, these vessels may rupture and leak blood into the eye; they can also spread and grow on the surface of the retina and cause scarring.


Typically, diabetic retinopathy


has no symptoms until it reaches an advanced stage. But the disease can be detected early through a comprehensive dilated eye exam. In this procedure, an eye professional will put drops in your eye to dilate (widen) the pupil, which allows a closer look at the retina.


The good news is that with


early detection, timely treatment, and appropriate follow-up, the risk of severe vision loss from diabetic retinopathy can be reduced by 95 percent. There are several effective treatment options including laser surgery and injections of anti-VEGF drugs. These drugs block the actions of a protein that can cause abnormal blood vessels to grow and leak fluid.


A comprehensive dilated eye


exam can catch diabetic eye disease early, before symptoms appear.


November is National Diabetes


Month. If you have diabetes, it’s a good time to remember these health tips:


• Get a comprehensive dilated eye


ruling will have a devastating impact on the lives of hundreds of thousands of people whose identity documents would be cancelled and, therefore, would see many of their human rights -- freedom of movement, education, work and access to healthcare -- totally denied," said Chiara Liguori, Amnesty International researcher on the Caribbean, who added that the ruling is the last of a number of administrative, legislative and judicial decisions that since the early 2000s have had the effect of retroactively depriving Dominicans of Haitian descent of their Dominican nationality.


The ruling, Amnesty International


says, also violates the Dominican Constitution which clearly prohibits the approval of retroactive measures. Nevertheless, Dominican authorities like the president of the Senate, Reinaldo Pared Pérez, consider it "an act of full sovereignty."


exam at least once a year.


• Control your blood sugar, blood pressure and cholesterol levels. By controlling your diabetes, you’ll reduce your risk of diabetic eye disease.


• Talk to your eye care professional about diabetic retinopathy.


• Learn more about diabetic eye disease from the National Eye Institute, part of the National Institutes of Health.


• Learn more about preventing and managing diabetes from the National Diabetes Education Program.


NEI’s Diabetic Retinopathy


Clinical Research Network (DRCR. net) conducts large multi-center trials of new therapies for diabetic eye disease; it comprises nearly 1000 investigators at sites in 48 states. Many of the sites are private practice eye clinics, enabling the network to quickly bring innovative treatments from research into community practice. An ongoing trial is comparing three anti-VEGF drugs for macular edema, a complication of diabetic retinopathy that causes central vision loss. For more information, please see trial NCT01627249 at www.clinicaltrials. gov.


The National Eye Institute, part of


the National Institutes of Health, leads the federal government's research on the visual system and eye diseases. NEI supports basic and clinical science programs that result in the development of sight-saving treatments. For more information, visit www.nei.nih.gov.


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