by Jada Bullen
My family had never shared the full story about the bloody day atop Fort Rupert that forever changed Grenada’s history and their lives. Thirty-eight years later, I finally started asking questions, and the stories they shared changed mine.
The Silence
I faced the arched, stone entrance of Sendall Tunnel and peered into the darkness with anticipation. My siblings, restlessly standing nearby in the midday heat, watched my father. He had insisted on spending Christmas morning taking his children on a drive around his hometown of St.George’s, Grenada. Then, he had insisted on stopping here, where he stood at the threshold of the tunnel, gazing up toward the sun and the steep, hillside above. He was telling a story in the meandering way he often does, important events interwoven with winding tangents. I let the words hover around me like a pleasant hum, and waited for the point. Staring into the tunnel’s shadows, I took the time to inhale Grenada’s spiced air, fragrant with nutmeg, cinnamon, bay leaf, and just a “tinge of good weed,” according to my mother.
I had spent most of the ride up to Sendall Tunnel clutching the front seat and laughing nervously with my sisters, as we hurtled along uneven, cliffside roads and narrow, mountain turns at breakneck speed. My father seemed totally at ease at the wheel of the rented van—delighted, even. With each plea for caution from me, his eldest daughter, or my brother and two sisters, he would just cackle and say, “I’m at home!”
Sendall is a one-way tunnel in St. George’s, Grenada, that connects the inner and outer harbors of the island; it also runs directly under Fort Rupert, the fort named after the father of the Grenada revolution’s leader, Maurice Bishop. My father looked towards the looming fort now, and a shift in his tone drew my attention. I turned to see that he had withdrawn into retrospection, and his words—no longer jovial and energetic—became heavy.
“This is where the fall of the revolution happened, and where my Uncle Evelyn died,” he said. “I remember people jumping down this hill and running into the tunnel.”
My siblings and I, so talkative and playful during the car ride, fell into a strange silence. I looked away from the fort, back toward the tunnel’s cool shadows. A chill crept over me upon hearing this sudden mention of a trauma in our own family history. My father said it so simply, with such finality, that there was no obvious way to follow up. No easy thread that my siblings and I could grasp and begin to pull apart the words and unravel the story.
So, we did not try. At least not on that Christmas day. I have not, and I may not ever, forgive myself for letting that moment pass.
Truthfully, I had missed many opportunities in my life to investigate the details of the Grenada Revolution. The words my father had said, I had heard before.
Throughout my childhood, my parents occasionally mentioned the 1979 Grenada revolution and the 1983 U.S. invasion. I caught buzzwords like “house arrest,” “curfew,” “execution,” and “intervention,”especially when different Grenadian family members or friends sat around our kitchen table during their visits to Florida.
Passive listening offered fragmented facts. I knew my mothers’ family was on house arrest during the invasion while my fathers’ family had been more involved with the revolutionary government. My mother would mention that my dad saved my paternal grandfather in 1983, while my great uncle was not as lucky. I didn’t really understand what they needed saving from.
The accounts felt incomplete, out of context, like soundbites pulled from a larger conversation and played on a loop. Maybe the details were fading, maybe it was too difficult to divulge the full story, maybe they were waiting for the day when their children might ask for more.
I am embarrassed to say that I did not probe as a child. I chalked up the stories as perplexing family facts from my parents’ homeland—the tiny isle of spice with a name that none of my friends could pronounce correctly anyway…
But the history of Grenada’s Revolution that I learned from the American perspective did not feel complete either. I did not hear anyone mention Grenada in an academic setting until I was in a U.S. politics course at Georgetown University.
One professor gave the briefest of historical summaries, which was ironically, the longest time we spent on the lead-up to the U.S. invasion of Grenada. In summary, he said that on March 13, 1979, a leftist group, led by Maurice Bishop, staged a coup and took control of the government. In 1983, Grenada’s increasingly hardline communist leadership ousted Maurice Bishop, turned on protestors, and executed Bishop along with his close allies. The island was under military junta rule for less than a week when the U.S. invaded the island, sacked Grenada’s leaders, and freed the civilians from communism.
The clinical recitation of facts instinctually made me uneasy. The protestors, the close allies, and the civilians were my family members. They were uncles and aunts, by blood or friendship. Grenada is a small Caribbean island of little more than 112,000 people. Everyone knows each other and everyone likes to talk. Yet, many Grenadians have not fully shared their stories about October 1983—out of fear, or out of shame. It took a graduate writing class for me to finally ask the questions I neglected for years.
My father’s cousin, my Auntie Pam, said she was glad I finally asked. She had been in the center of the violence on October 19, 1983, and she has only begun to share her story now. An entire generation has grown up and they do not know the history behind the U.S. invasion, nor its impact on Grenadians and the world. She believes it is time to document the truth and she is depending on the next generation to tell the story.
Her husband, George Cherebin, a soldier in 1983, was also at the center of the revolution. He exudes passion about the events, even if he often gets stuck when trying to express himself in words. He has been writing his memoir, A Soldier’s Story, for almost twenty years and is yet to publish the book. After years of writing and editing his own story, however, he sees himself as “essentially a journalist.” He could not resist telling me how I should share the accounts that follow.
“Make it personal,” he said. “This is a story where your daddy’s favorite uncle was killed. But then, share each person’s perspectives objectively. A good journalist keeps themselves out of the story.”
I heeded his advice, but only partially. The stories below are vignettes from four perspectives, four out of hundreds that remain untold. I wrote them down, not only as they were told to me but also as I received them. The more I pulled on the threads, the more entwined I became with each story. I hope that together they help to weave a tapestry over the gaping holes in a human experience that has defined a generation of Grenadians.
The Voices
Pamela Cherebin
(A Military Nurse, Auntie Pam to me)
My Auntie Pam lost her father, Evelyn Bullen — and nearly her own life — on October 19, 1983. Barely twenty‒three years old at the time, she laid face down on the hard floor of Fort Rupert’s windowless operations room and prayed to God.
Rounds of bullets from an armored car tore through the four walls of Fort Rupert, flying over Pam’s head and cutting down comrades around her. Her whole body trembled with fear. Her father was in the room, as was her fiancée, Pogie Cherebin, and the Prime Minister Maurice Bishop—for whom the armored car of soldiers had come.
During the Grenada revolution, from 1979 to 1983, my mild and unassuming Auntie Pam had been become fully involved in the Grenadian People’s Revolutionary Government (PRG), led by Prime Minister Maurice Bishop and the New Jewel Movement (NJM), a leftist group of young lawyers, trade unionists, and other young community leaders backed by Cuba and the Soviet Union.
On March 13, 1979, the NJM took over the country in a “bloodless” military coup and established the People’s Revolutionary Government (PRG), based on a platform of national self-determination, education, and infrastructure development. They promised a form of “democratic socialism” where the common people would have a voice.
Pam told me that she was never particularly swayed by the rhetoric—she just loved Grenada and wanted to serve. “My father was in the militia and told me I should join, so I did,” she said. “My boyfriend was in the militia and told me to join, so I joined.”
She became a military nurse and her boyfriend, who would later become her husband, George “Pogie” Cherebin, was an officer in the PRG’s army. She spent years training with and tending to soldiers.
“I knew them by name and cared for their injuries,” she told me. “They were my friends. I spent three days at a time in the car with these people traveling around the island.”
So, when the Revolutionary Government leadership became more militant, ousted Prime Minister Bishop, and placed him under house arrest, Pam, her fiancé, Pogie, and her father, Evelyn Bullen, stayed within the ranks, loyal to the PRG’s institutions rather than the individual leader of the government.
“We were naive,” she said.
On October 19, 1983, Pam still carried that naiveté when she joined the crowd that freed Maurice Bishop from house arrest and marched peacefully into the operation room of Fort Rupert, located atop Sendall Tunnel in St. George’s, Grenada.
When I asked her how she found herself in the fort, she told me, “Our plan was to get him away from where they had him and bring him up there hoping that he would get him in touch with the world and they would let him be the Prime Minister.”
In less than an hour, however, the dissenting military leaders, called the Revolutionary Military Council (RMC), sent an armoured car from another fort to disperse the crowd and ensnare Bishop’s supporters.
“Grenadians. . . they didn’t even have weapons to fight. They weren’t in a fighting mood.” I sensed frustration laced with incredulity—at the cruelty of the military leaders or the innocence of protestors, I could not tell.
“Grenadians,” she said, “Once they saw that armored car, they would run.”
But, my Auntie Pam could not run.
“We were all in this room, no windows, two doors. They were firing at us,” she recalls. “Maurice Bishop said, “My God they have turned the guns against the masses.”’
In the midst of gunfire, Pam managed to escape from Fort Rupert’s operations room with her fiancé, Pogie, and make it to the General Hospital. Her father was forced to stay behind with Bishop. For hours afterward, she waited restlessly at the hospital, anxious that her father would appear among the wounded but hopeful, nonetheless, because it meant he escaped from Fort Rupert. Her father, Evelyn Bullen, never appeared.
“Daddy was in the room with us,” she told me, “and from what I heard from other friends he actually was escaping from the fort, but I felt in my heart that he knew I was in that room.”
The last time Pam glimpsed her father, before she escaped, he had been crouched down in Fort Rupert’s operations room with Maurice Bishop and a few remaining supporters, surrounded by bodies of the fallen.
“All of them were lying down alive—there was no crossfire. They were waiting for soldiers to come and take them,” she said. “All the men left in that room were lined up against the wall and shot… Something just hit me in my heart, and I knew Daddy was dead.”
She paused in her story. Over the phone, I heard the scraping of silverware against wood; she called out to Pogie to lower the television volume, then gently instructed her daughter, Ifeoma, to set the table. Preparations for Sunday lunch for her family continued as usual.
Minutes passed before she resumed. “I always felt: Am I responsible for my father’s death . . .? You know that feeling?”
I didn’t have any words for my aunt.
Five days after the RMC deceptively announced that Pam’s father and the others had died in the crossfire and placed the whole island on a curfew, the Americans invaded. But, for Pam, the U.S. invasion was as hellish as the days that preceded it.
“Imagine, Jada, the day after the intervention, you go outside your house and the bush starts to move and you see a man appear with a gun in his hand,” she said. “That’s how we saw them.”
After the U.S. defeated the Grenadian resistance and imprisoned the leaders of the RMC, American soldiers marched single file through the hills of Grenada and searched every house. Somehow they had gotten a hold of her father’s ring and pendant and asked the family to confirm they were Evelyn Bullen’s. But they never told Pam’s family where his remains were. Pam even agreed to be a primary witness in the criminal case against the RMC leaders captured by U.S. soldiers, in exchange for more information about her father. To this very day, she is still waiting for the U.S. government to tell her the location of her father’s remains as well as the remains of others who were executed alongside Maurice Bishop.
When I asked her how she felt about the invasion now, she told me, “I realized that they didn’t come to save us. They came to squash a revolution.”
Robert Bullen
(A student, Daddy to me)
Outside Fort Rupert, my father saved his own father’s life on October 19, 1983. At least, that has been the family legend. My father, Robert, was seventeen during the 1983 fall of the revolution, or “Revo,” as he calls it.
When the protestors had freed Maurice Bishop, Robert had been hanging out with his friends in St. George’s market square, waiting for Bishop to come down to speak to the crowd assembling there.
He knew his uncle, Evelyn Bullen, and his cousin, Pam, were up at the fort with Maurice Bishop. Robert did not know that his own father, Winston Bullen, a former military general and friend of Bishop’s, would soon be on his way up the hill towards the fort as well.
An hour passed, the sun rose higher, and Robert grew impatient in the midday heat. He had already decided to find his way home to eat lunch when he saw his father, alone, walking towards the fort. Robert, knowing his father likely parked his car nearby, called out and asked for a ride.
His father, Winston, was conflicted. He wanted to join his brother, Evelyn, and the rest of Bishop’s supporters at the top of the hill. But, he chose to return home with his son. Together, they walked towards Winston’s parked car outside Sendall Tunnel. They had barely reached the car doors before the sounds of gunshots punctured the air. Injured and bloody demonstrators who fled Fort Rupert recognized Robert’s father and screamed the words that he remembers clearly to this day, “Mr. Bullen! They shooting people!”
Robert, my father, says that day and the subsequent U.S. intervention were a “rude awakening.” Given the Bullen family’s proximity to Maurice Bishop and the People’s Revolutionary Government that took power in 1979, many of Robert’s friends in grade school were the sons of the military leaders who would then turn on Bishop. Robert spent his weekends devouring books that he got from his friend, Sinclair Austin, one of which was called “Northern Neighbors,” a Soviet publication.
“I remember I had been so indoctrinated by the Soviet novels that I read,” he told me.
I can almost hear my father shaking his head as he says this over the phone. I imagine his eyes —big, brown orbs like mine—widening as they always do when he is in disbelief or frustrated. “I was entranced by the society presented, where there was no rich or poor,” he said. “The Soviet nation was so idyllic.”
Those notions of communism crumbled before his eyes as he watched students, like himself, scramble from the fort, tumbling as they tripped over the thick brush and rocks that scattered the rough hillside. Evelyn Bullen, his favorite uncle, was not among those who escaped that day.
He sighed into the phone receiver. “I learned then that communism is an idea that can never be realized,” he said. “I believed in my core that the army would never turn the guns on the people.”
When an “earthshaking noise” awoke him before dawn on October 25, 1983, and flashes of cannon fire streaked across the sky, my father told me it, somehow, did not feel like the dreaded American invasion that his communist leaning magazines had warned him about. While his large dogs cowered his bed during the three days of battle, Robert lay still with calm.
“My feelings at the time, even during this onslaught,” he admitted to me, “were strangely those of relief and anticipation of a brighter future.”
Gillian Bain Roberts
(A Protestor, Auntie Gillian to me)
Gillian Roberts, a student in her late teens at the time, also found herself at Fort Rupert on October 19, 1983. She was one of the protesters who had freed the “beloved” Prime Minister Maurice Bishop from house arrest up the hill towards the fort.
She remembers that people up there were peaceful, but confused as to what would happen next. She joined the crowd deliberating whether Bishop should be taken to safety or brought food, but they were all dangerously unaware of the decision that the Grenada Ruling Military Council (the RMC) had already made about their fate.
“I had not been there for more than five minutes when the place started to vibrate,” she said. “Pandemonium broke out. People were crawling on the ground and many were bleeding.”
The RMC had sent the armored vehicle filled with soldiers, who were now shooting indiscriminately at civilians and into the fort where her friend, Pam, was inside the fort’s operation room with her father, Evelyn Bullen, and fiancée, Pogie. The armored car blocked the only exit out of the fort.
Gripped by fear, Gillian tried but failed to throw her body under a parked car to avoid bullets. She made the decision to follow the crowd again, this time by hurtling over the twenty foot wall of the fort and tumbling down the hillside toward the center of St. George’s.
As she ran, she felt the warm dampness of blood sliding down her back. She had been shot. But, she did not stop running until she made it home. Her father immediately drove her to the doctor, who managed to stop the bleeding and told Gillian she was lucky the bullet had only grazed her. Gillian did not feel entirely lucky. Later that night, when the RMC leaders announced the “shoot to kill” curfew, she remembers that “the whole country felt numb and afraid.”
When the floor vibrated under her again, five days later, her numb body flooded with relief. The sound of U.S. planes flying overhead and the flares lighting up the dawn sky signaled the rescue mission that she and her family were waiting for.
“Although it was an extremely scary time and we felt like we were living through a war movie, most Grenadians welcomed the U.S.A. and Caribbean coalition intervention,” Gillian told me.
Thirty eight years later, Gillian is a finance executive who splits her time between her New York and Florida homes. I’ve spent sunny, summer afternoons splashing in the pool with her children—unaware of the scar down her back, unaware that there was ever a time her warm, raspy laugh could be twisted into frantic gasps for breath as she ran for her life on October 19, 1983.
Gillian believes that both she and her homeland have rebounded from this “sad period in our beautiful Grenada.”
“Today my scar down the middle of my back from the shooting in the fort remains,” she shared with me, “and reminds me of the isle of spice’s history. I pray it will never be repeated again.”
George ‘Pogie’ Cherebin
(A Duty Officer at Fort Rupert, Uncle Pogie to me)
Pogie Cherebin was the duty officer in charge of Fort Rupert on October 19, 1983. He surrendered twice that day. First, he surrendered Fort Rupert to the Prime Minister Maurice Bishop, and the peaceful protesters, his fiancée Pam among them. He laid down his weapons and welcomed the Prime Minister into the fort. An hour later, Pogie was on the floor of the fort’s operation room with Pam and others, praying for his life as officers with whom he trained now shot at him.
He surrendered again—this time by crawling across the room of broken bodies and begging the RMC’s soldiers for mercy.
Pogie managed to escape from the fort and hid for hours in a hospital toilet while his comrades hunted him down. From the hospital, he heard the ricochet of bullets that killed his father-in-law, Evelyn Bullen, and Prime Minister Bishop in cold blood.
The events from October 19, 1983—the betrayal, the loss—left Pogie reeling.
My own father, Robert Bullen, told me everyone in St.George’s knew that Pogie was unwell for years. Pogie admitted it to me himself when we spoke over the phone for an hour—the longest conversation I have ever had with a man I have known since childhood.
Listening to my uncle felt like listening to crackling fire, popping with emphasis and hissing over words—especially as he recounted the events of the U.S. invasion.
“Your granddad, Rawle Charles, would also call it an intervention,” he said to me teasingly. I thought I heard a hint of laughter, but then his tone became fervent again. “My own mother told the Americans that they took too long to come. But my age group and ideology would call it an invasion.”
Like many other Grenadians, Pogie awoke on October 25, 1983 to the explosive sounds of American airplanes and bombs. “I looked outside; the war was on,” he said. “The skies were filled with the rumbling and tumbling of warplanes.”
Initially, Pogie didn’t know whether to cower or fight. Everything he had been taught since he was eleven years old in the Cadet Core about revolution, liberation, and freedom had become distorted, mangled at the hands of his friends.
In his own words: “I was demoralized.”
Yet, with each American bomb dropped onto Grenadian soil, even his family members’ pleading voices faded. Pogie said his despair was overshadowed by that “part of me that still wanted to fight, that part of me that wanted to defend Grenada, and that part of me trained for obedience to duty.”
Pogie ignored the pleas of his family and left the safety of his home to join the RMC’s fight against the Americans.
“As my mother would recount to me later,” he said, ‘like a crazy-man, I was gone . . . begging for my death.’ On the road, I couldn’t help but think how saddened Pam would be to learn I was out fighting alongside those who had recently murdered her Daddy, and had almost killed us both. My heartfelt hope was that I would live to explain the contradiction.”
“It was more a patriotic effort than a revolutionary effort to fight off Americans,” he continued. “I didn’t have the motivation. I didn’t support what happened on October 19, but deep down I was always anti-American invasion.”
Pogie was captured by the Americans and spent weeks in St.George’s prison, alongside the same men who had turned on him and my family.
“I was fighting alongside folks that I wanted nothing to do with in life after that … There are moments when I think there was reconciliation, but I still very much feel that way.”
The four decades that have lapsed have brought Pogie four children, grandchildren, and a peaceful house in the lush mountains of Grenada, but the fiery indignation towards the invasion remains.
“Based on my personality I may just do it again. I have absolutely no regrets, I regret how it ended, but no regrets of being involved.”
The Truth
When my family members first presented their stories to me, it felt as if my whole history had ripped wide and gaped open, foreign and dark, just how I remember Sendall Tunnel.
These many little truths laid bare in my hands, undefined and unresolved. Of course, I know each of my loved ones has tried to grasp resolution in their own way. My mother and her sisters continue to gather around tables and repeat the fragments they know. My father remains an avid reader to this day, searching for new worlds and utopian societies only in fantasy novels. My Auntie Pam has found peace in forgiveness. She continues the lonely fight searching for her father’s remains, but has welcomed the RMC leaders who executed him into her home for Sunday dinners. Her husband, Pogie, resolute and fiery, continues to write his book and process his experiences. After many years of encouragement, he told me that just before the Covid-19 pandemic, he completed his first nine weeks of counseling.
“It took me a lot of years,” he said to me, “and I don’t believe I’m back to where I should be.”
Pogie believes that the entire nation of Grenada needs collective counseling.
Nearly forty years have passed since the fall of the Grenada revolution, and healing has not begun for this island of 112,519 people. There has been no reconciliation or national dialogue initiated by any of the democratic governments that followed the American invasion, nor is it taught in schools. In the small island of Grenada, former opponents now have children and grandchildren that go to the same schools. My Auntie Pam admitted that she only shared her story with her adult children a few years ago, because she wanted them to live a normal life, free from ostracization. People remained silent rather than admit they were in a war that left the country economically decimated and morally depleted.
“We are hurting people,” said my Aunt Pam. She believes the cycle will continue with the next generation if Grenadians do not come together to establish the truth.
The collective pain comes not only from mourning the individuals lost but also from mourning the Grenada that could have been. Who exactly is to blame for the usurping of Grenada’s potential has slowly crept into international debate—especially as it relates to the United States.
Some Grenadians, like Pogie and Pam, believe documenting the truth of 1983 may alter the narrative of contemporary, global history.
“Grenada is bigger than Grenada,” Pogie said to me. The end of each word cracked like a whip. “Grenada, when it triumphed, it was considered a big revolution in a small country, and the invasion was a mighty invasion in a tiny island.”
It’s not an understatement that the Grenada Revolution reverberated beyond its shores. Black power activists from New York to San Francisco Bay took notice of Grenada’s swift development under Maurice Bishop from 1979 to 1983. In 1982, American activist Angela Davis took her family to Grenada to witness the successes of the “People’s Revolution.” In June 1983, only months before Maurice Bishop would be placed under house arrest and then assassinated, he traveled to New York to deliver his final speech to a large crowd at Hunter College. He spoke with pride about Grenada’s economic gains but warned of the increasing pressures of U.S. imperialism on his country.
Pogie believes it is not a coincidence that Bishop met a fatal end and Grenada’s economic trajectory plummeted shortly after that U.S. speech. My Auntie Pam echoed thoughts that many of my family members share.
“Grenada being a black country,” she said to me, “I mean, to see Grenada doing all these things independent of its ‘godfather’ the U.S.? They wanted to keep us back into slavery again.”
In recent years, academics and journalists have begun to contemplate the U.S.’s motives for making Grenada the most significant military action undertaken by the U.S. since the Vietnam War. Two major narratives emerge: One story about Ronald Reagan and the U.S. anti-communist containment strategy in the midst of the Cold War era, and the other story of Black power and transnational resistance.
Pogie says if the second and third generations like myself take up the burden of “intellectualizing,” the Grenadian revolution and the subsequent U.S. invasion could become as important to analyze as Afghanistan or Syria. After being ignorant of my own history for so long, I feel obligated to enlighten myself and carry this torch for all of them. But, first, the complexity of our past must be examined openly and collectively.
It is my honor to bring these experiences into the open. These may be their stories, but they are also mine to hold now too.