By Gary Oswald.
This is the sixth article in this series and the previous five have all been about how the Cuban Revolution and the rise of Fidel Castro as Cuba's military dictator effected the other nations of the Caribbean. In all of those articles, he has hung over the piece as a boogieman of the west, used to justify American and British actions. Fear of Castro motivated the American installation of a pirate radio on Great Swan Island, the British invasion of Anguilla, the American invasion of Grenada, Patrick John's appeal to American mercenaries in Dominica, and Western opposition to Jagan in Guyana. But from Cuba's point of view, none of those countries really appeared on their radar. Castro was not close to the leaders of Guyana, Dominica, Honduras or Anguilla, and he only paid attention to Grenada after a communist government had been declared, not before. He almost certainly hoped for socialist leaders to come to power in those places and did work with them when they did but these were not countries where Cuban foreign policy was focused.
This was not true about the two nations of Hispaniola, Haiti and the Dominican Republic. From the moment Castro gained power he was deeply concerned about those two countries and organised attempts to overthrow their two dictators: Rafael Trujillo, who ruled the Spanish speaking side of the Island, and 'Papa Doc' François Duvalier, who ruled the French speaking side. All three of these men, Castro, Trujillo and Duvalier, came into power as reformers, promising a break from the government brutality of the past and a transition to open democracy. And all three, at least to some extent, backtracked on those promises, running undemocratic governments which cracked down on protest, tortured and killed enemies of their state and so remained in power for decades. Moreover, their histories were heavily entwined thanks to the close proximities of their countries.
Haiti and the Dominican Republic are the two oldest independent states in the Caribbean, predating Cuba by decades. Haiti gained its independence from France in 1804 as the result of the Haitian revolution, making it the second oldest country in the New World after only the USA. The Dominican Republic first declared its independence from Spain in 1821, hoping to join Bolivar's Gran Colombia, but would have a more troubled route to independence. Haiti invaded the newly declared Republic of Spanish Haiti and annexed it, where, desperate for money, their leaders stripped many of the land owners of land, raised huge new taxes and introduced forced labour to pay for it, confiscated church property, and closed down the University.
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In 1844 the Dominicans, understandably put off by this treatment, rose in rebellion and regained their independence, but the threat from Haiti remained. Multiple further Haitian invasions of the Dominican Republic happened, all unsuccessful, and as a result the Dominicans looked for other foreign allies. In 1861 Pedro Santana negotiated for his country to re-join Spain as a colony, something that lasted four years before the Spanish were driven out again. In 1869, Buenaventura Báez agreed for his country to join the United States but that bill was voted down in the US Senate. France were also approached about taking over but refused.
The fact that nobody in charge of the Dominican Republic seemed to have any genuine confidence in it actually existing as an independent state is somewhat remarkable but the country was a war torn mess. There were bandits everywhere, political exiles crossing backwards and forwards from Haiti, and large areas with no effective government control. In a 20-year timescale around the 1860s, the country had seen 50 military revolts and 21 coups. Haiti, also racked with large scale violence, was not much better off.
In this environment of politicians having short violent careers as Presidents, reaching out to foreign patrons who might give you that edge against your opponents made sense; and if that meant you sold them economic interests in your country, that was a small price to pay. By the early twentieth century, the USA had huge economic interests in both of the deeply unstable states of Hispaniola and as a result in 1915, they stepped into to occupy both countries to stabilise them. The Haitian occupation lasted 19 years, the Dominican occupation lasted 8 years. Both were marked by consistent violence between rebels and the occupying troops and increasing American economic domination that did little to alleviate the deep poverty within the countries. Both also marked the emergence of violent undemocratic leaders that relied on US backing to stay in power.
Rafael Trujillo had been trained by the US marines and his entire reign from 1931 to 1961, whether he was officially President or not, was marked by brutality against both perceived and real opponents, of whom he killed tens of thousands. He was a classic megalomaniacal post-colonial dictator, even going so far as to rename the capital city after himself. And by and large, he had good relationships with the various Haitian dictators whose country he bordered, with them signing multiple agreements for Haitians to work as contracted seasonal labourers in the Dominican Republic in return for money being paid to the Haitian governments, a scheme criticized for being essentially modern slavery. In 1936 Haiti and the Dominican Republic finally agreed on the border between their two countries, something that led Trujillo to seek the Nobel Peace Prize, though he was never seriously considered.
In 1937 however, things got darker. For reasons never really established, Trujillo ordered the massacre of estimated 17,000 to 35,000 Haitian men, women, and children living in the border region of the Dominican Republic over around five days, as part of what he called the Dominicanisation of the frontier but is better known as the Parsley Massacre. This was probably the worst act of racial violence seen in the New World since the abolition of slavery and yet, the Haitian government didn't really react to it. The relationship between the two states continued as it had before (with eventually the US demanding that Trujillo pay Haiti some compensation) and, despite this clear sign that their seasonal workers were not safe, Haiti kept sending more and more to work on Trujillo's fields, more than that, they copied Trujillo in leading a campaign against the Vodou religion in the borderlands. From the Haitian point of view, this was yet another clear sign that their intellectual lighter-skinned leaders did not care about the average dark-skinned peasant.
That disconnect would eventually lead to a campaign of violence by that underclass orchestrated by François Duvalier, a dark-skinned follower of Vodou, which would lead to him becoming President in 1957. Like Trujillo, once he got in, he was keen to stay in and used brutal and indiscriminate violence to maintain that, killing and torturing thousands of opponents of his regime. He also, despite being a black nationalist on paper, kept up the good relationships with Trujillo and the deals for seasonal workers. Both leaders wrecked their countries' economy while profiting hugely from it themselves and both protected themselves from the USA by playing up the threat of internal communists. They did this both by painting internal opposition as communists (as Trujillo once put it, of course the people he killed were communists because why would anyone but communists want to overthrow his government?) but also crucially by bringing communist or left wing intellectuals into their government, thus discouraging the USA from supporting other candidates within their governments.
None of this prevented both Trujillo and Duvalier from being deeply unpopular with the Latin American left. In 1947 over a thousand leftists, including a young Fidel Castro, formed the Caribbean Legion which aimed to invade the Dominican Republic and overthrow Trujillo, though the force was arrested in Cuba before it could set sail. Upon Castro's seizure of power, he attracted Haitian and Dominican rebels who likewise used Cuba, this time with government support and assistance, to launch attacks on Hispaniola. Trujillo in response harboured Cuban rebels who attacked Cuba. Neither achieved much of anything, beyond landing rebels who were promptly killed by the other government but it meant that Trujillo hated Castro and was deeply embarrassed that he had sold him weapons during his war against Batista (though, in all fairness, he had supplied a lot more weapons to Batista who had more money to buy them).
But Castro was not Trujillo's only enemy. He was, as the Americans kept discovering, far more unpopular than Castro among the heads of Latin America. Every attempt the USA made to turn states against Cuba was hindered by the fact that as far as those states were concerned, the real threat was in the Dominican Republic. In particular, Rómulo Betancourt of Venezuela repeatedly denounced Trujillo as a tyrant and a murderer. In 1960 Trujillo tried to have him killed in response. This was enough for economic sanctions to be placed on the Dominican Republic and for the USA to break relations with him. The CIA, eager to remove Trujillo so that the Organization of American States could be convinced to expel Cuba (which finally happened in 1962 after Duvalier, the casting vote, was promised billions of aid money which he duly stole for himself) put out a bounty on Trujillo's head.
In 1961, in response to that bounty, a group of Dominicans dissidents killed Rafael Trujillo. His son had the assassins captured, tortured, and killed but without Rafael the regime was in trouble. Rebellions against the Trujillos by the armed forces meant the family fled into exile and new elections were held in December 1962.
The man to win them would be Juan Bosch.
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Bosch was a poet and a novelist who had fled into exile in 1939 and formed the Dominican Revolutionary Party as a focus point for anti-Trujillo exiles. It was he who had organised the Caribbean Legion attacks in 1947, though he left Cuba for Costa Rica in 1952 and publicly condemned both Castro and communism. He was however still left of centre, and as such faced strong opposition within the country from the landowners, the military and the catholic church. He was also not hugely popular in the USA, who worried that he wasn't a competent enough statesman to hold the country together.
Perhaps his biggest enemy however was François Duvalier. In April 1963, someone attempted to kidnap Duvalier's children. Duvalier purged and killed dozens of possible culprits, including one who sought refuge in the Dominican Embassy. In response, Duvalier invaded the Embassy. To Bosch this was an act of war and he asked the Dominican Army to move to the Haitian border. Bosch had broken the secret alliance Trujillo had with Duvalier and had invited Haitian rebels to openly set up stalls in his country; he had been looking for an excuse to stabilise his only land border by removing Duvalier. (He was particularly worried by the fact Duvalier had told him that if anyone shot him, his men had orders to kill any light skinned person they could find in Haiti).
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Bosch asked the United States for their support against Duvalier if he chose to invade. They moved their navy close to the island and stopped aid but were reluctant to act further. Their plan had been to only act against Duvalier in the summer, not this early. The US man on the spot, without the knowledge of President Kennedy himself, twice told Bosch not to invade. Bosch, unsure about the loyalty of his Army, decided not to go ahead anyway. In May, Kennedy called off any US action and by June he had restored economic and diplomatic relations. He was primarily worried that any war between Haiti and the Dominican Republic would give Castro an excuse to get involved himself.
Duvalier acted anyway, burning land around the Dominican border to make an invasion more difficult. But he was distracted by two internal rebellions that had started, hoping to taken advantage of the war with Bosch. The largest one, the one that had in the first place attempted to kidnap his children, was led by Clément Barbot, the first leader of the Tonton Macoute, Haiti's secret police, who Duvalier had turned against and arrested. If Bosch had gone ahead with the invasion, there is a good chance whatever leftist exile he wished to place in Port-au-Prince would be challenged by Barbot, who would be in a better position to gain the loyalty of Haiti's militias and rule as a continuity Duvalierist.
Instead, Barbot was captured and executed and Papa Doc cemented himself in control. The same could not be said for Bosch, as his government had attempted land reform which had annoyed the elite without delivering anything to the peasantry and was quickly crippled by a general strike called for by the church. In September 1963, he was overthrown by the Dominican military who established a right-wing junta. Bosch asked for American support against this junta, both before and after he fled into exile, but was refused both times. The junta however was initially, to their surprise, refused recognition or support from the USA, as part of Kennedy's campaign to separate himself from dictatorships in Latin America.
However, JFK himself died in November 1963 (something Duvalier claimed he caused through cursing his American enemy). The response towards the Dominican situation would be dictated largely by his success, Lyndon Johnson, and Johnson was far more less picky about what kind of anti-communist he supported. As a result, full relations between the two countries were restored in December as long as the junta agreed to hold elections before 1966. Likewise, more aid was promised to Duvalier despite him becoming President-for-life in June 1964.
The first big test for Johnson's favoured regimes in Hispaniola was a rebellion in the Dominican Republic in April 1965. Discontent with the junta – which had enacted harsh austerity, anti-corruption campaigns, and reduction in the numbers of the military – had been growing since their original coup, and rumours that they intended to delay elections another year resulted in an uprising. Reformist officers and civilian combatants loyal to Bosch staged a coup and quickly seized the national palace.
The junta consulted with the US embassy and were told that the US wished that anything possible should be done to prevent a popular revolution. They took them at their word, and what had started as a coup had become a civil war. The one side was known as the Constitutionalists and represented the military and civilian aspects who wished to restore the democratically elected Bosch to power; the other were the Legalists who did not. Both sides were, at least nominally anti-communist, as Bosch had refused to welcome any communist members into his movement. But a lot of the men who had followed Castro were nominally anti-communist, the USA had bad memories of a popular rebellion that started as a broad coalition but became increasingly openly communist once in power. Bosch himself was the man who had first recruited Castro to fight a war. He was, Johnson was told, not a communist himself, but was surrounded by people who might be and so might become one.
As a result, the US embassy told the Constitutionalists that the USA would not enforce a ceasefire, only accept a total surrender, and because of that many moderates abandoned the Constitutionalist cause. But not enough abandoned it, so the fighting still continued. And so, Johnson ordered 23,000 US troops into the country. Officially they were there purely to keep order, but they were told in no uncertain terms that order required Bosch to not end up as President. A ceasefire was brokered in May 1965 but fighting broke out between the Constitutionalists and US forces once more in June before those forces were withdrawn in September. Whether the US occupation had prevented a quick Constitutionalist victory or a long drawn-out war is a matter of opinion, but certainly it vastly weakened the Constitutionalist position.
When elections were held in 1966, Legalist forces controlled the state and as such, harassment and vote fixing meant that Bosch lost. Instead, the new President would be JoaquÃn Balaguer, a Trujillo loyalist. Balaguer fixed elections in his favour and used violence against his opponents, with around 3,000 people with centre-left leanings were murdered during his first 12 years in power. But he knew that brutality alone wouldn't save him without visible improvement, and, thanks to US aid, he managed to partially rehabilitate the public finances and pushed through a modest program of economic development and land reform, which proved very popular. He lost power in 1978 but ran in four more elections after that, winning three of them, even though he was blind and in his 90s, thanks to controversial voter counts. He was not a Trujillo reborn, nowhere near as powerful and not as nasty or as corrupt, but he was certainly in that mould and a lot closer to him that to Bosch.
Duvalier, newly reassured by the fall of his enemy Bosch, governed largely without opposition until his death in 1971, where he handed over power to his 19 year old son, Jean-Claude, with the US Navy blockading Haiti during the transition of power so no exiles could take advantage of it to prevent Jean-Claude coming to the throne. The family left of legacy of brutality and corruption and appalling poverty. Both father and son were given millions of dollars in aid from the USA, as a bulwark against Castro and the vast majority of that money was stolen by a corrupt government.
Bosch either drifted to the left or became more comfortable revealing his true opinions after the coup. He left the Dominican Revolutionary Party to found the more explicitly Marxist (though still social democratic) Dominican Liberation Party which competed against Balaguer in various elections but never won (possibly due to vote fixing). Francisco Caamaño, the soldier who had led the first Constitutionalist revolt, drifted even further left, breaking Bosch's rule of no alliance with Castro and fleeing to Cuba, where he would return from in 1973, with a small army of guerrillas, who were eventually tracked down and killed by Balaguer. It was the last serious attempt of the Cuban government to install a friendly government in Hispaniola.
Which all begs the question, what happens if Duvalier doesn't curse Kennedy and Lee Harvey Oswald misses that day in Dallas?
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Kennedy had been a hawk against Castro in the Caribbean but he also sincerely believed in attacking non-democratic non-communists so that his rhetoric about freedom meant something. It was under Kennedy that Trujillo had been killed and Duvalier embargoed. His brother Robert, who had likewise been a hawk on Castro, publicly disagreed with the decision to not support Bosch. Nor was there much military pressure for US intervention of the kind Johnson authorised; that was mostly a Johnson decision to prove he wasn't soft.
Given the other problems a surviving Kennedy would have to deal with, while suffering a declining personal life, severe health problems, and routinely taking brain altering drugs, it is difficult to know the full circumstances he would be facing. For a start, as covered on this blog, Allied Vegetable Oil had just filed for bankruptcy after it had been revealed that a lot of their oil was actually just water. And without the distraction of the death of a President, that probably becomes a panic and an economic crash.
But I think Kennedy, who’s privately been arguing that they'd pushed Castro into the hands of the USSR by not giving him a chance, would want to support Bosch if possible. Whether Bosch can hold onto his presidency after that is more questionable. If Kennedy tries to talk down the legalists, do they agree to stand down or does the war continue and if it does go on for longer without US troops on the Island, do the Legalists call in Duvalier, the other man who hated Bosch?
Gary Oswald is the editor of the Grapeshot and Guillotines, Emerald Isles, and If We'd Just Got That Penalty anthologies.