Discussion Meeting on Santo Domingo Forty Years After the Uprising
The Socialist Party is hosting its monthly discussion meeting this Wednesday, May 11, in the Glass Room, lower level of Bangs Center (downtown Amherst) at 7:00 pm. Susan and Eric will be reporting back on their trip to Santo Domingo and connecting current events in the Dominican Republic with the uprising in 1965 which the United States quashed through a military occupation.
Below is an article Eric has submitted to Peaceworks magazine on the Dominican Republic. It should provide a good background for discussion.
Santo Domingo: Forty Years Later
I recently returned from the Dominican Republic, having been invited to Santo Domingo to deliver a lecture as part of a series commemorating the fortieth anniversary of the uprising. The revolt was crushed when President Lyndon Johnson dispatched a flotilla to Santo Domingo. Johnson’s decision to intervene sent shock waves through Latin America, and the events of April 1965 remain a turning point for United States relations with the Americas. The fortieth anniversary provides us with an excellent opportunity to reassess the events of April 1965, and to understand their impact on both the Dominican Republic and the United States. In the Dominican Republic the revolt has become an important part of the national heritage, a rare circumstance in which the Dominican people stood up to the local oligarchy and to the Yanqui marauders.
Twentieth century Dominican history is dominated by the grotesque figure of Rafael Trujillo. One of the most vicious and greedy dictators to grasp power in Latin America, his rule lasted more than three decades. Trujillo retained the support of the United States for most of these years. Only in the end, after Fidel Castro came to power in Cuba in 1959, did Washington decide that Trujillo had become an intolerable embarrassment. In May 1961, Trujillo was assassinated with the help of the CIA.
During the later years of the Trujillo era, a fragmented opposition launched several abortive attempts to overthrow him. One of the organizers of this underground movement, Juan Bosch, came to symbolize the democratic opposition. A charismatic figure, Bosch still looms over Dominican politics, nearly a decade after his death. A nationalist and a social democrat in his political perspective, he was also a pragmatic politician who sought to mollify the United States, and to win its backing. In the spring of 1961, Bosch taught at a school in Costa Rica that trained high level officials of his party, the PRD (Dominican Revolutionary Party). The CIA secretly funded the school, with Bosch’s knowledge.
After Trujillo’s assassination, Bosch returned to the Dominican Republic to win the first democratic election in that country’s history. As president from February 1963 to September 1963, he sought, unsuccessfully, to implement a program of social reform. In particular, Bosch proposed to expropriate the large landholdings, and then backed off after his proposal drew the enmity of the United States. Although little was accomplished, Washington soon came to the conclusion that Bosch was unreliable, a loose cannon in a volatile situation. The Kennedy administration gave the green light to a military coup, and Bosch was once again forced into exile. For the next thirty years, Bosch would repeatedly try to convince the United States of his reliability, but his efforts always failed. Only those politicians who could be counted on to be totally subservient would be permitted to hold office in the Caribbean, a zone the United States has consistently viewed as within its direct sphere of influence.
While president, Bosch won the allegiance of a group of younger army officers. In April 1965, with a sham election in preparation, several army units rebelled, demanding that Bosch be returned to power. The military revolt turned into a popular uprising, as the disaffected units began distributing arms to neighborhood militias. Soon afterward, this rag-tag force of ill-equipped soldiers and civilians, led by Colonel Francisco Alberto Caamaño, defeated the elite troops of the Dominican military, a force supplied with tanks and supported by air force bombers. The battle of Duarte bridge, fought in one of the poorest barrios in Santo Domingo, has become a vital part of the popular folklore, a heroic moment in Dominican history. The victory of the popular uprising stunned Washington, as it reverberated throughout Latin America.
For Lyndon Johnson, the April revolution was a disaster. If a popular uprising could return Bosch to power, similar revolts might spread throughout the region. With the revolution consolidating power in Santo Domingo, the president opted to send more than 40,000 paratroopers and Marines to the Dominican Republic. In April 1965, there were more U.S. troops stationed in Santo Domingo than there were in South Vietnam. U.S. forces quickly created a quarantine cordon around the center of the city, isolating the rebel leadership from the rest of the country. As Washington slowly tightened the screws, the uprising lost momentum and its leaders were finally forced to concede defeat.
A provisional government created by the United States then organized an election of dubious validity. In June 1966, Joaquin Balaguer, a Trujillo henchman, defeated Bosch under suspicious circumstances. In the end, the popular uprising of 1965 was overwhelmed, and yet the memories of those heady days remain alive in the popular barrios. Caamaño continues to be the most popular personality in the Dominican Republic. (Forced into exile in 1966, he returned to the Dominican Republic in 1973 as a member of a small guerrilla unit that had embarked from Cuba. He was quickly captured and killed by Balaguer’s forces.)
Balaguer held on to power for most of the three decades following the 1966 election. Although he cultivated the support of the United States, he too had become an embarrassment by 1996, just as Trujillo had thirty-five years before. Under pressure from the Carter administration, Balaguer moved into the background in 1996, and since then the Dominican Republic has observed the outward forms of a democratic country.
Presidential elections are held every four years, with two major parties contesting for power. Both mainstream parties trace their origins to Juan Bosch. (In 1973 Bosch left the party he had formed in exile, the PRD, to form a new party, the PLD, the Dominican Liberation Party.) The current president, Leonel Fernández was elected by the PLD, the more liberal of the two parties.
Thus, on a superficial level, the April revolution was ultimately victorious. Certainly, the current regime frequently advances this argument. Yet as one looks beneath the surface, it becomes clear that the goals of the April revolution have not been fulfilled. Genuine democratic rights remain elusive, while the Dominican economy remains subservient to the United States and the International Monetary Fund. Dominican society is still rigidly class stratified. Those in the elite seek to emulate their counterparts in Western Europe and the United States, while the great majority of people struggle to survive. Unemployment is pervasive, with the poor shoved together in barrios composed of decaying shacks. Many Dominicans must subsist on an income of 5000 pesos a month, about $160 at the current exchange rate.
The brief period of hope following the assassination of Trujillo in 1961 came to an end with the U.S. occupation in 1965 and the fraudulent election of 1966. Yet Balaguer, ruthless and authoritarian as he was, could not reproduce the totalitarian control of the Trujillo era. As a result, Dominicans began flocking to the United States, using Puerto Rico as a way station. There are now a million Dominican immigrants residing in the United States, 500,000 of them in New York City. Since roughly nine million people live in the Dominican Republic itself, this means that a substantial minority of those in the prime of their working years has emigrated.
Remittances from the United States keep the Dominican economy from collapsing. This further reinforces the dependence of the Dominican Republic on the U.S. economy. In addition, tourism has developed into the biggest industry, with half the tourists coming from the United States. Building an economic infrastructure that can sustain an expanding tourist industry has been adopted as the primary objective of the current regime. While I was in Santo Domingo, the government announced that it would be spending the equivalent of twenty million U.S. dollars on an expansion of the international airport on the outskirts of the city. This is a considerable commitment of resources in a poor country in desperate need of schools, hospitals and low-cost housing.
Dominican economic dependence is reinforced by the acute impact of the high price of oil. Totally dependent on the production of foreign crude oil, the Dominicans find themselves owing large sums to foreign creditors. The International Monetary Fund therefore sets guidelines for Dominican economic policy, and behind the IMF stands the United States. This represents Third World economic development at its worst. Santo Domingo demonstrates the cruel reality behind the glib phrases we here so often extolling ‘free trade’ and a globally integrated market economy.
Needless to say, the enormous disparity in income and wealth has provided fertile ground for radical politics. Although President Fernández likes to present himself as a progressive social democrat, the reality remains that only a narrow range of political opinion is tolerated. There are no radical newspapers available on the streets of Santo Domingo. The only signs of an organized politics sharply to the Left of the government were scrawled messages on scattered walls in the barrios.
Traveling to Santo Domingo during the celebration of the fortieth anniversary of the April uprising sharpened the discrepancy between rhetoric and reality. The ruling party, the PLD, sees itself as the culmination of the 1965 revolt, and of Bosch’s tradition of social reformism. In this context, the government organized a screening of a documentary on the revolution in a main square in the heart of the city. Four thousand people attended, some of them perched on the ledges of an adjacent building that had been heavily damaged during the fighting in 1965. Throughout the showing, the audience hooted when Lyndon Johnson and U.S. officials appeared, and cheered when rebel leaders, particularly Colonel Caamaño were on the screen. Interestingly, Bosch drew only polite applause. As the movie ended, several people shouted “Viva Caamaño.” Quickly, dozens of police officers and soldiers moved through the crowd, making sure that everyone in the square left without further incident. Some of the police were carrying rifles and machine guns.
The spirit of the Dominican people remains unbroken. They remember April 1965, and they know that an organized, militant mass movement can defeat the repressive forces of the oligarchy. In 1997, the celebration of the events of 1965 sparked a sequence of strikes and militant demonstrations throughout the country, as the people demanded a break from the rule of the IMF. The army was brought in to crush the revolt, with upward of one hundred demonstrators killed. In January 2004, a general strike shut down Santo Domingo for two days.
Throughout Latin America, left-wing popular movements are in the streets demanding fundamental change. In the streets of Santo Domingo, the slogan ‘Another April is Possible’ can be seen It is up to us who oppose U.S. imperialism from within its center to help make this potential a reality.
Below is an article Eric has submitted to Peaceworks magazine on the Dominican Republic. It should provide a good background for discussion.
Santo Domingo: Forty Years Later
I recently returned from the Dominican Republic, having been invited to Santo Domingo to deliver a lecture as part of a series commemorating the fortieth anniversary of the uprising. The revolt was crushed when President Lyndon Johnson dispatched a flotilla to Santo Domingo. Johnson’s decision to intervene sent shock waves through Latin America, and the events of April 1965 remain a turning point for United States relations with the Americas. The fortieth anniversary provides us with an excellent opportunity to reassess the events of April 1965, and to understand their impact on both the Dominican Republic and the United States. In the Dominican Republic the revolt has become an important part of the national heritage, a rare circumstance in which the Dominican people stood up to the local oligarchy and to the Yanqui marauders.
Twentieth century Dominican history is dominated by the grotesque figure of Rafael Trujillo. One of the most vicious and greedy dictators to grasp power in Latin America, his rule lasted more than three decades. Trujillo retained the support of the United States for most of these years. Only in the end, after Fidel Castro came to power in Cuba in 1959, did Washington decide that Trujillo had become an intolerable embarrassment. In May 1961, Trujillo was assassinated with the help of the CIA.
During the later years of the Trujillo era, a fragmented opposition launched several abortive attempts to overthrow him. One of the organizers of this underground movement, Juan Bosch, came to symbolize the democratic opposition. A charismatic figure, Bosch still looms over Dominican politics, nearly a decade after his death. A nationalist and a social democrat in his political perspective, he was also a pragmatic politician who sought to mollify the United States, and to win its backing. In the spring of 1961, Bosch taught at a school in Costa Rica that trained high level officials of his party, the PRD (Dominican Revolutionary Party). The CIA secretly funded the school, with Bosch’s knowledge.
After Trujillo’s assassination, Bosch returned to the Dominican Republic to win the first democratic election in that country’s history. As president from February 1963 to September 1963, he sought, unsuccessfully, to implement a program of social reform. In particular, Bosch proposed to expropriate the large landholdings, and then backed off after his proposal drew the enmity of the United States. Although little was accomplished, Washington soon came to the conclusion that Bosch was unreliable, a loose cannon in a volatile situation. The Kennedy administration gave the green light to a military coup, and Bosch was once again forced into exile. For the next thirty years, Bosch would repeatedly try to convince the United States of his reliability, but his efforts always failed. Only those politicians who could be counted on to be totally subservient would be permitted to hold office in the Caribbean, a zone the United States has consistently viewed as within its direct sphere of influence.
While president, Bosch won the allegiance of a group of younger army officers. In April 1965, with a sham election in preparation, several army units rebelled, demanding that Bosch be returned to power. The military revolt turned into a popular uprising, as the disaffected units began distributing arms to neighborhood militias. Soon afterward, this rag-tag force of ill-equipped soldiers and civilians, led by Colonel Francisco Alberto Caamaño, defeated the elite troops of the Dominican military, a force supplied with tanks and supported by air force bombers. The battle of Duarte bridge, fought in one of the poorest barrios in Santo Domingo, has become a vital part of the popular folklore, a heroic moment in Dominican history. The victory of the popular uprising stunned Washington, as it reverberated throughout Latin America.
For Lyndon Johnson, the April revolution was a disaster. If a popular uprising could return Bosch to power, similar revolts might spread throughout the region. With the revolution consolidating power in Santo Domingo, the president opted to send more than 40,000 paratroopers and Marines to the Dominican Republic. In April 1965, there were more U.S. troops stationed in Santo Domingo than there were in South Vietnam. U.S. forces quickly created a quarantine cordon around the center of the city, isolating the rebel leadership from the rest of the country. As Washington slowly tightened the screws, the uprising lost momentum and its leaders were finally forced to concede defeat.
A provisional government created by the United States then organized an election of dubious validity. In June 1966, Joaquin Balaguer, a Trujillo henchman, defeated Bosch under suspicious circumstances. In the end, the popular uprising of 1965 was overwhelmed, and yet the memories of those heady days remain alive in the popular barrios. Caamaño continues to be the most popular personality in the Dominican Republic. (Forced into exile in 1966, he returned to the Dominican Republic in 1973 as a member of a small guerrilla unit that had embarked from Cuba. He was quickly captured and killed by Balaguer’s forces.)
Balaguer held on to power for most of the three decades following the 1966 election. Although he cultivated the support of the United States, he too had become an embarrassment by 1996, just as Trujillo had thirty-five years before. Under pressure from the Carter administration, Balaguer moved into the background in 1996, and since then the Dominican Republic has observed the outward forms of a democratic country.
Presidential elections are held every four years, with two major parties contesting for power. Both mainstream parties trace their origins to Juan Bosch. (In 1973 Bosch left the party he had formed in exile, the PRD, to form a new party, the PLD, the Dominican Liberation Party.) The current president, Leonel Fernández was elected by the PLD, the more liberal of the two parties.
Thus, on a superficial level, the April revolution was ultimately victorious. Certainly, the current regime frequently advances this argument. Yet as one looks beneath the surface, it becomes clear that the goals of the April revolution have not been fulfilled. Genuine democratic rights remain elusive, while the Dominican economy remains subservient to the United States and the International Monetary Fund. Dominican society is still rigidly class stratified. Those in the elite seek to emulate their counterparts in Western Europe and the United States, while the great majority of people struggle to survive. Unemployment is pervasive, with the poor shoved together in barrios composed of decaying shacks. Many Dominicans must subsist on an income of 5000 pesos a month, about $160 at the current exchange rate.
The brief period of hope following the assassination of Trujillo in 1961 came to an end with the U.S. occupation in 1965 and the fraudulent election of 1966. Yet Balaguer, ruthless and authoritarian as he was, could not reproduce the totalitarian control of the Trujillo era. As a result, Dominicans began flocking to the United States, using Puerto Rico as a way station. There are now a million Dominican immigrants residing in the United States, 500,000 of them in New York City. Since roughly nine million people live in the Dominican Republic itself, this means that a substantial minority of those in the prime of their working years has emigrated.
Remittances from the United States keep the Dominican economy from collapsing. This further reinforces the dependence of the Dominican Republic on the U.S. economy. In addition, tourism has developed into the biggest industry, with half the tourists coming from the United States. Building an economic infrastructure that can sustain an expanding tourist industry has been adopted as the primary objective of the current regime. While I was in Santo Domingo, the government announced that it would be spending the equivalent of twenty million U.S. dollars on an expansion of the international airport on the outskirts of the city. This is a considerable commitment of resources in a poor country in desperate need of schools, hospitals and low-cost housing.
Dominican economic dependence is reinforced by the acute impact of the high price of oil. Totally dependent on the production of foreign crude oil, the Dominicans find themselves owing large sums to foreign creditors. The International Monetary Fund therefore sets guidelines for Dominican economic policy, and behind the IMF stands the United States. This represents Third World economic development at its worst. Santo Domingo demonstrates the cruel reality behind the glib phrases we here so often extolling ‘free trade’ and a globally integrated market economy.
Needless to say, the enormous disparity in income and wealth has provided fertile ground for radical politics. Although President Fernández likes to present himself as a progressive social democrat, the reality remains that only a narrow range of political opinion is tolerated. There are no radical newspapers available on the streets of Santo Domingo. The only signs of an organized politics sharply to the Left of the government were scrawled messages on scattered walls in the barrios.
Traveling to Santo Domingo during the celebration of the fortieth anniversary of the April uprising sharpened the discrepancy between rhetoric and reality. The ruling party, the PLD, sees itself as the culmination of the 1965 revolt, and of Bosch’s tradition of social reformism. In this context, the government organized a screening of a documentary on the revolution in a main square in the heart of the city. Four thousand people attended, some of them perched on the ledges of an adjacent building that had been heavily damaged during the fighting in 1965. Throughout the showing, the audience hooted when Lyndon Johnson and U.S. officials appeared, and cheered when rebel leaders, particularly Colonel Caamaño were on the screen. Interestingly, Bosch drew only polite applause. As the movie ended, several people shouted “Viva Caamaño.” Quickly, dozens of police officers and soldiers moved through the crowd, making sure that everyone in the square left without further incident. Some of the police were carrying rifles and machine guns.
The spirit of the Dominican people remains unbroken. They remember April 1965, and they know that an organized, militant mass movement can defeat the repressive forces of the oligarchy. In 1997, the celebration of the events of 1965 sparked a sequence of strikes and militant demonstrations throughout the country, as the people demanded a break from the rule of the IMF. The army was brought in to crush the revolt, with upward of one hundred demonstrators killed. In January 2004, a general strike shut down Santo Domingo for two days.
Throughout Latin America, left-wing popular movements are in the streets demanding fundamental change. In the streets of Santo Domingo, the slogan ‘Another April is Possible’ can be seen It is up to us who oppose U.S. imperialism from within its center to help make this potential a reality.
posted by Matthew Andrews at 8:53 AM
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