From an account by Roger Franklin:
Bored with the beach and curious to learn how the war there had unfolded, I hired a cab driver to tour the tiny island's battle sites and taken my son along for the ride. The driver had shown us where the Cuban engineers held out, where the bleached carcass of a shot-to-pieces Soviet transport plane still sat by a tropical clearing, the beach where SEALS slipped ashore."So you must really dislike the Yanks," I said to the cabbie.
The look he shot me said that I was mad.
"Please, don't call it an invasion," he began. "It was a rescue mission. Mr. Reagan saved us." For the rest of the tour, he recounted horror stories of life and death under the Marxist academics and petty thugs whose best efforts had produced a bloody coup. He told of terror and mutilations, the rule of the machete, hunger, shots and screams, neighbors disappearing in the night.
Every other Grenadan echoed the same thoughts. "Ronald Reagan," said a service manager at our hotel, "bless him for a saint." Even the tourist-trap touts at the waterfront had only good words to say. "Reagan, bless the man," was the common refrain. Somewhere on Grenada there may have been someone on Grenada who didn't like Reagan, but I couldn't find him.
Comments