Flip-Flop

It was scarcely any surprise that the violence in Grenada angered Desi Bouterse, the paranoid dictator of Suriname (pop. 350,000), about 600 miles away on the coast of South America. What raised eyebrows was that Bouterse, a self-styled Marxist, directed his wrath not against the U.S. but against his ally Cuba. Last week he abruptly expelled Havana's Ambassador, giving him six days to get out of the country, and suspended all Cuban cultural and education agreements. Bouterse's explanation: "The leadership of the Suriname revolution is convinced that a repetition of developments in Grenada should be prevented here."

He was probably telling the truth. Bouterse may have feared that he would surfer the same fate as his friend Maurice Bishop, the Marxist Prime Minister of Grenada who was deposed and killed. Bouterse hinted that he suspected Cuban complicity in Bishop's overthrow. Perhaps too, Bouterse, who seems motivated primarily by a desire to maintain his repressive regime, did some political recalculating in the wake of the U.S. invasion of Grenada. He may have concluded that leftist revolution is no longer the wave of the future in the Caribbean and that he should make himself less obnoxious to the U.S. This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.