Introduction

Abstract

If the black power movement of the late sixties, which culminated in the mutiny and state of emergency in Trinidad, was baptism by fire for an independent anglophone Caribbean, the recent United States invasion of Grenada completed the initiation rites. From the safe but stuffy repression of the colonial era the islands have found themselves propelled into the real world of Latin American politics, where assassination, military coup and US occupation are on the agenda. Haiti passed through a similar stage almost two hundred years ago, though the process of decolonisation was somewhat more traumatic.