ABSTRACT
In Guyana, where the Cuban mission took up nearly half a city block, Cuba's multiple involvements had long been the talk of Georgetown. Williams gladly traded open praise for Cuba for Cuban neutrality in the struggle within Trinidadian politics, especially within the opposition party, in which a battle was unfolding between moderates and radicals. The Cuban card was used as political leverage in some instances, as a protective shield in others, and in more and more cases as a straw man. In the cases discusses the Cuban role was fundamentally that of providing a mantle of revolutionary legitimacy to regimes that had both achieved and retained power through less than revolutionary means. Richard Jacobs, Grenada's first ambassador to Cuba, and the USSR, although a citizen of Trinidad and Tobago, belonged to a prominent middle-class family which covered the Eastern Caribbean. This educated and well-travelled elite shared middle-class Grenada's dislike of Gairy's working-class origins, and he returned the favour.
