The U.S. in Latin America-A Reckoning of Shame
Friedenberg, Daniel
Most Americans react indignantly when the U.S. is accused of following a path of world conquest. Comparisons with Hitler, with Stalin, and with the imperial machinery of England and France in...
...The Pentagon will still be obsessed with threats to U. S. hegemony...
...Nevertheless, the following summary probably gives a fair picture of the feelings of many intelligent Latin Americans about AngloSaxon history in the Americas...
...But, said Welles, the Grau regime "did not fill any of the conditions which the United States government had announced as making possible recognition [for it lacked] support of the commercial and financial interests in Cuba...
...And New York's Senator Jacob Javits, when visiting Chile last year, told reporters that "either an Inter-American military force would have to be established to combat Communism or there would be future unilateral actions such as occurred in the Dominican Republic...
...The National Guard, under three different Somozas, still runs the country...
...Though Cuba was now relatively peaceful, Welles categorized it in his dispatches to Washington as the "quiet of panic...
...In a matter of days Roosevelt recognized the new regime, though he had refused such recognition to Grau over four months...
...America is ruled by an elite with a frozen interpretation of democracy, party structure, and stability...
...America expanded where it could in the nineteenth century until it became, with Russia and China, one of the three most important land powers in the world...
...A device had to be worked out to smother the invasion in a rhetoric of Peace and Pan-Americanism...
...to meet on the question of the Dominican Republic...
...he attacked decrees for reflecting "seemingly Communistic tendencies in the present regime," and blocked the British Minister in Havana from recognizing Grau...
...Furthermore, most of the men who guide policy in Latin America not only emotionally distrust any social agitation based on the aspirations of the poor, but also have important personal financial interests at stake...
...A brief review of American expansion in the Western Hemisphere from the point of view of a Latin American may bring light to this question...
...The instruments were members of his own entourage...
...Whether creating a colonial empire, protecting investments, or out of fear of Communism, the American nation assumes the Western Hemisphere is its personal preserve in which there can be no poaching...
...China absorbed border peoples over many hundreds of years, and a strong government has renewed the habit in the last decade...
...Three days after his arrival, Caffery had assured the Cubans their government would not be recognized...
...from 1961 to 1964...
...And more recently, General David M. Shoup, retired Commandant of the U. S. Marine Corps, put it just as bluntly: "I believe that if we had and would keep our dirty, bloody dollar-crooked fingers out of the business of these nations so full of depressed, exploited people, they will arrive at a solution of their own...
...Juan Jose Arevalo claimed in his famous anti-American diatribe, The Shark and the Sardines, that the State Department, the Pentagon, and Wall Street were three faces of the same repressive force and—putting aside certain exaggerations in style—there is much truth to the assertion...
...Instead, it armed and launched a mercenary force of Cuban refugees, whose defeat sent Castro all the way into passionate avowal of Marxism-Leninism...
...And no pressure was put on the ringleaders of the coup, all proteges of the Pentagon, to stop their action.* Yet President Kennedy deplored the overthrow, broke off diplomatic relations, and halted aid...
...A schema would look somewhat as follows: PERIOD AIM METHOD RATIONALIZATION 1818-1903 More Territory Direct Aggression Manifest Destiny 1904-1926 Financial Control Temporary Direct The American Aggression Century 1927-1965 Investment Protection Control of Local Good-Neighbor Military and Civilian Elite Policy 1966- National Security Aggression through Inter-American Control of Latin-American Peace Force Dictatorships It is obvious that U.S...
...But taking this logic one step further, if a Communist country like Cuba could contemplate such a measure, it followed that a nonCommunist leader like Juan Bosch, if not under the direct thumb of the Pentagon, was a mortal danger to U. S. security...
...Put at its simplest, there was one rule for the United States and another for the rest of the world...
...The most effective way to do this was by dominating the elements that held power in the society...
...Suddenly, the scales were turned...
...In May, 1965, Averell Harriman was sent to Latin America to explain U.S...
...The O.A.S...
...Ironically, the success of Coolidge in Nicaragua ushered in the third stage of U.S...
...The famous words of Marine General Smedly Butler (Common Sense, November 1935) still bear repeating: "I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank to collect revenue in...
...In August, 1966, Ramon Mejias Castillo, an important Bosch political leader, was assassinated three blocks from his house...
...Fidel Castro marked the end of an epoch...
...The only question is who shall be the next Trujillo...
...A Thousand Days, p. 769...
...We your spiritual children, veterans of the campaigns you fought during more than 30 years to make great and to stabilize the Fatherland, will look forward toward your sepulcher as toward a towering symbol...
...Ah, but those who think that U. S. policy is as easy as all that do not know their United States...
...The Cuban case is most instructive...
...ushers, June 1965...
...Joseph Farland, former Ambassador to Santo Domingo, was a board member of the South Puerto Rico Sugar Company, which owns 300,000 acres of land in that country and is considered the largest employer on the island...
...What Theodore Draper took for indecision was not a sudden impulse toward sweetness and light, but rather an interval while U. S. policy-makers were casting about for the best method of achieving their objectives...
...foreign policy toward Latin America has gone through several phases, and though the above schema cannot be rigidly applied in each and every case, it summarizes the general movement...
...missiles) was "good," while that of anybody else was "bad...
...The smaller fry were knocked off (without publicity in the United States...
...Ambassador Welles was shocked to his roots—he wanted to get rid of Machado in order to return to a stable conservative regime, not to invite social revolutoin...
...As usual, a native constabulary was organized under the Marines to assure "stability...
...recognition...
...Two days after the failure of this counter-coup, Ambassador Welles called for a talk with Sergeant Fulgencio Batista...
...Theodore Draper, "The New Dominican Crisis," The New Leader, January 31, 1966...
...Such a foreign policy is dominated by negative thinking...
...He publicly supported Bosch after his election but continued to subsidize the old military leaders...
...In 1812, the War Hawks again pushed America into war with England in their unsuccessful campaign to conquer Canada...
...Just who engineered the assassination of Trujillo in early 1961 we will probably never know...
...There was no nonsense about "Old Hickory...
...Pro-Jackson sentiment was so strong, Spain was forced to cede Florida, in turn receiving a pledge whereby the United States renounced all claims to Texas—a pledge, incidentally, broken within the generation...
...Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., another liberal, quoted with approval Kennedy's "realistic" view of the situation resulting from Trujillo's assassination: "There are three possibilities in descending order of preference: a decent democratic regime, a continuation of the Trujillo regime, or a Castro regime...
...The next morning, the woman took out the kittens and called them biscuits...
...FACTS RELATING TO CUBA Foreign Relations of the United States, Vol...
...Following this logic, President Kennedy opposed the election of Juan Bosch in 1962...
...This was Washington's final choice...
...The leader of the soldiers was Sergeant Fulgencio Batista, backed by a radical junta of civilians...
...Inheriting the old Trujillo armed forces, he was a prisoner from the beginning...
...Into this breach stepped Juan Bosch, returning in October, 1961, after 24 years in exile...
...Putting aside the exact ratio of patriotism to economic self-interest involved, it is a fact that expansion increased as soon as the colonists became Arhericans...
...In 1933, when President Franklin Roosevelt had been in office only four months, Cuba exploded in violence...
...It reshaped itself in the two decades between Woodrow Wilson and President Hoover, slowly creating new goals by trial and error...
...This web of self-interest is not unique to the Dominican scene...
...might...
...From April, 1965, to November, 1966, the American taxpayers poured $138 million into Balaguer's sty to keep him afloat...
...Ambassador to Santo Domingo more recently, that free elections were a mockery without the existence of a middle class and a standard of living at that irreducible minimum, where people would rather live in peace than die in revolt...
...Juan Bosch, "A Tale of Two Nations," The New Leader, June 21, 1965...
...But the events that led to the 1965 intervention in the Dominican Republic must be set against 50 years of American manipu lation of that state...
...The reverse is true in the foreign service...
...President Johnson preferred not to take chances and brought the matter to its ultimate conclusion by conquering the country...
...his staff member Adolf A. Berle, Jr., preferred the description "passive anarchy...
...Commenting on this divergence, Draper states the case of the optimists: After all this, after the support of Wessin, the instigation of Benoit, the backing of Imbert, the doublecross of Guzman, and the promotion of Balaguer, it should have been easy to predict whom the United States would in the end settle for—a reactionary puppet of a reactionary power, of course...
...But the Cuba of 1958 was not the Cuba of 1933, and Castro was not Grau...
...Undersecretary of State Thomas Mann publicly attributed the * According to Sam Halper, former head of Time magazine's Caribbean Bureau, theDominican generals decided to dump Bosch "as soon as they got a wink from the U. S. Pentagon...
...May 2: President Johnson now charged that the Bosch group had been taken over by "a band of Communist conspirators...
...Likewise, Trujillo violated all the rules of what is called civilized conduct...
...leaders in 1954 at the time of the crisis in Guatemala...
...May 19: U. S. soldiers shot to death Colonel Rafael Fernandez Dominguez, the original military organizer of the revolt of April 24...
...The leaders in the Dominican Republic refused to pay certain debts in 1914, and President Wilson occupied the country...
...It was preferable to intervene without direct aggression...
...The clearest example is the Dominican situation...
...President Wilson was even more aggressive...
...The first is that Welles and Caffery had succeeded in maintaining the pre-1930 social and economic r1oZ] class structure in Cuba, including, of course, the dominance of U.S.-held enterprises...
...The New York Times: a) June 24, 1965...
...In any case, his death plunged the Dominican Republic into chaos...
...The original English interest was very minor on the American mainland, the initial focus being on the sugar-rich islands of the Caribbean...
...Though considered the work of President John son, the policy was in fact born under President Kennedy in a defiant and chauvinistic speech following the defeat of his Bay of Pigs expedi tion in 1961...
...This culminated in his first successful campaign for the Presidency in 1940, followed by his dictatorship...
...for this was—admitting the limits of all historical analogy— much like picking Rudolf Hess, Hitler's old crony, to become Prime Minister of Germany after the Nazi defeat...
...The Dominican Republic is a classic example of these forces at work...
...The AngloSaxon settlers believed themselves to be superior to the Indians they exterminated, to the black men they enslaved, and to the Popish Latins...
...An interim government in Cuba was deposed after only one month by a mutiny in the Army...
...Welles talked with Roosevelt and must have been most persuasive...
...In that same year, the Platt Amendment was abrogated and a new preferential trade agreement was signed for Cuban sugar...
...The thread that binds the different stages of U. S. relations to Latin America is the relation of master to servant...
...This process bottled up social reform to the point where moderate change may no longer be possible, as Cuba has shown...
...This is the true meaning, to quote again from deLesseps S. Morrison, our former Ambassador to the O.A.S., of the statement that the "democratic Left" will "open the door" to Communists...
...Morrison wrote that Juan Bosch, former Costa Rican President Jose Figueres, former Puerto Rican Governor Luis Munoz, and former Venezuelan President Romulo Betancourt (all anti-Communists) "open the door" to Communists because they are of the "democratic Left...
...In 1853 America broke off a final piece of Mexico, the so-called Gadsden Purchase...
...Not why the American troops were there, but how they could be called InterAmerican was the agenda...
...The process might work in America, with all its attendant difficulties...
...The message is clear...
...when the war is over, we must keep what we want...
...Adolf A. Berle, Jr., who vigorously defended the Dominican aggression, was chairman of the board of the Sucrest Coinpany, large importers of molasses from the Dominican Republic...
...Now Batista realized he must move...
...In early January Batista bluntly asked Caffery what the U.S...
...Aids to industry become additional largesse for the present vested interests...
...The cynicism which motivated many U.S...
...A Peace Force was then proposed, under which U. S. troops would operate...
...In Shakespeare's Pericles a young fisherman asked how the fish live in the sea...
...Theirs was a true religion, a superior racial stock, and a higher culture...
...In practice, of course' this meant maintaining the status quo...
...By late May plans were afoot as to how to follow up the U.S...
...U. S. policy leaders refuse to recognize that it is impossible to manufacture an American-type middle class out of a vacuum: what is worse, at the same time while they are pumping for an economic Common Market among the Latin-American nations, they resist all efforts to lower the high-tariff wall by which the raw materials and agricultural products from these nations are kept from being sold in the U. S. The same senators who whoop for invasion also represent domestic fruit growers, cattle herders, and sugar-beet planters...
...Unlike the earlier stages, direct aggression was ruled out, or would be used only under the most aggravated conditions...
...Because these Americans—and not least in Congress—insist on identifying patriotism with their own pocketbooks, we are involved in continual conflict with the countries south of the Rio Grande...
...The second was that Batista, who ruled the army, had become the most powerful man in the land by deliberate American policy...
...The names faded away on close analysis to only two persons of minor authority in the entire Bosch movement...
...necessity for landing the Marines to the "virtual collapse" of the "regular forces...
...The United States, as far as we know, did not motivate this coup...
...Absorbed in the New Deal's domestic program, the President gave Welles a free hand in Havana...
...All political organs of legitimacy had been wiped out many years before...
...Since Latins were obviously lazy, as well as corrupt and revolutionary, the best method of attaining such a laudable goal would be to control these areas financially...
...Batista made and unmade Cuban Presidents at will...
...Bryce Wood, The Making of the Good Neighbor Policy, Columbia University Press, 1961...
...Fortunately, a detailed report was sent to Washington...
...The entire elite of the country, part of the Trujillo panoply, was discredited...
...the control of elections through the primary system...
...On August 11, Machado accepted, as Welles reported: "due to the fact that all of the ranking officers of the Army throughout the Republic had notified him that the Cuban Army would not support him further...
...The land * This essay is part of a series that examines critically, from a variety of political outlooks, American foreign policy...
...But what was good for the Dominicans can be equally good for all temporarily aberrant Good Neighbors...
...The major difference is that America pretends not to do what she does, concealing imperialism in a rhetoric of lofty aims...
...No matter how many U.S...
...The pessimists say they are malignant...
...Where political subversion was required, it occurred...
...Bosch's anti-Communist position was well known...
...Beside Brazilians, the other significant body of Latin-American troops came from Paraguay, where dictator Stroessner is a Teutonic version of Trujillo...
...It must be remembered that this was the depth of the Depression and an offer to push up the sugar quota at such a time was the difference between starvation and subsistence for many Cubans...
...but when the new Ambassador followed precisely the same line, he knew...
...Address of Carl Oglesby at the March on Washington for Peace in Vietnam, delivered on November 27, 1965...
...For almost two years the Dominican Republic seesawed back and forth in a potpourri of generals...
...The Latin-American countries have been told by the most distinguished political figures in the U. S. to choose an Inter-American Force or the Marines...
...and he would own everything else...
...By such methods the country expanded following its Manifest Destiny, until the broad swath of the North American continent formed one national territory...
...The Dominican Crisis," Commentary, December, 1965...
...Referring to the Monroe Doctrine, he said: "Today the United States is practically sovereign on this continent and its fiat is law upon the subjects to which it confines its interposition...
...Canada had always refused to be a member...
...We ought to aim at the first, but we really can't renounce the second until we are sure that we can avoid the third...
...It was obvious that virulent nationalism had at last caught up with the Latin-American countries...
...The rationale of this policy was that the U.S...
...Preaching democracy and liberty, the Americans had seized half of Mexico, all the remaining Spanish territories, broken off Panama from Colombia, and created an economic protectorate over Central America, the major islands of the Caribbean, and Venezuela on the South-American mainland...
...Mark Twain, in a light mood, once defined Americanization by the following story...
...Roosevelt piously told the American people that it "would be obvious interference with the internal affairs of another nation" to insist on deposing Machado, but privately he backed Welles.* On August 10, 1933, Welles had a talk with General Alberto Herrera, chief of staff of the Cuban Army, and suggested that Machado take a leave of absence...
...It was equally obvious that their leaders could now appeal to an other power, namely Russia, to play off against U.S...
...It was cheaper, and affronted public opinion less, to influence the elite than to dispatch the Marines...
...The process took several months and the details are revealing...
...It may take longer for Americans, freed of inflated rhetoric and official lies, to understand that every nation has a right to seek its own destiny in accordance with its own set of values...
...In South America the expeditions of Sir Walter Raleigh into what is now the Orinoco River basin of Venezuela were soon abandoned...
...the great ones eat up the little ones," is the answer...
...5, 1933, U. S. Government Printing Office...
...influence was so enormous, intervention was not necessary to bring down the government...
...He intervened in the Dominican Republic and Haiti, creating financial protectorates...
...But it cannot work in Latin America, for the weight of a different culture, a different history, a different language, a different racial composition, a different majority religion, and a different economic structure is too great for any Alliance for Progress to present kittens as biscuits...
...would be ideal camouflage to consolidate the Dominican operation—and any similar invasions required...
...What counted was whether the ruler could maintain the status quo—or as a last resort in the rare cases where a revolutionary party got control (as in Mexico under Cardenas, or in Bolivia), whether proper indemnification could be secured for nationalist confiscation...
...Direct intervention was more reluctantly applied with each successive Administration, until it faded out with the advent of Franklin Roosevelt...
...Caffery referred to "our reiterated declarations as to our position on recognition...
...By evening American Marines landed and patrolled the streets of Santo Domingo in company with Wessin y Wessin's men...
...The Pentagon defines Communists within this frame of reference...
...We shall in no way allow men to extinguish the flame you lighted on the altars of the Republic and in the souls of all Dominicans...
...The government apparatus and communications media enforce and reinforce this mythology: the enormous expense of running for public office...
...Where economic domination was denied, the Marines or mercenary troops were dispatched...
...to invade the Dominican Republic, to send quisling troops into Guatemala, or even —against all accepted modes of international law in peacetime—to stop ships of other nations from entering Cuban waters during the missile crisis...
...I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests...
...Historians of the American Revolution agree that the Royal Order of 1763, by which England sealed off the western lands and left them to the Indians, was a major factor in the resultant revolution...
...President Kennedy, incidentally, supported the anti-Bosch side...
...By 1960 time was running out...
...To complete the picture in our time, President Eisenhower in 1954 set up his own puppet in Guatemala by means of mercenary troops, President Kennedy sought to repeat the Guatemala story in 1961 in Cuba (for once without success, since the opponent was as ruthless as the Americans), and President Johnson in 1965 402 overthrew a liberal revolution by direct intervention in the Dominican Republic...
...This failed...
...Welles then urged Batista "through the force of authority which he represented in his person [to seek a solution to the problem which] would make it possible for confidence in government to be restored in the Republic...
...he knew what he wanted and he went for it...
...Note: Later studies conclusively proved that the list of names had been presented to President Johnson several days after ordering the invasion...
...From an objective view, a certain pattern may be seen underlying these events...
...To increase the population and to stimulate education in a petrified caste system merely enlarges misery...
...What led to the collapse of this policy was Cuba under Fidel Castro...
...The shift in American policy was engineered by summoning the O.A.S...
...The State Department, distinguishing between direct conquest and real control, concerned itself solely with the protection of American investment...
...The concept of such an Inter-American Force had its virgin launching in the Dominican Republic...
...secondarily, protection of the local oligarchs who were the American allies...
...And the O.A.S...
...Russia was now a world power with forces not too inferior to those of the U.S., and for the first time alternatives were available to Latin-American revolutionaries...
...Stalin's Russia set up puppet Communist regimes in Eastern Europe that patently represented a small minority of the people...
...And a 3,400-man elite Dominican brigade, under American advisers, has been organized...
...Roosevelt almost immediately replaced Ambassador Harry F. Guggenheim with Sumner Welles...
...Now Welles knew who was truly the master of Cuba...
...The United States talks of free elections, a good-neighbor policy and Pan-Americanism, while smashing the attempts of LatinAmerican nations to create governments that might disagree with Washington...
...making a key figure manager of an American branch bank or local representative of an American corporation should never be described in such ugly terms—nor the action of an American President in dangling a higher sugar quota in front of a country if there would be a revolt...
...It is obvious, of course, that such an interpretation of U.S...
...relations with Latin America...
...senators and congressmen he might have on his payroll, despite the best lobbying activities of Franklin Roosevelt, Jr...
...In August, 1966, VicePresident Hubert Humphrey declared that "the U. S. and each LatinAmerican country are authorized to use armed force, individually or collectively, in confronting Communist threats...
...But the dictators, who form the majority, gave their affirmative vote...
...Freeing water from bacterial infection, saving mothers from death in childbirth, inoculating children, enlarging educational opportunities in a static society only multiply the number of the hungry and discontented...
...The Pentagon has been so shocked by Fidel Castro, that anyone not totally subservient to Washington now seems like an enemy fledgling who must be destroyed in the nest...
...April 29: U. S. correspondents aboard a ship stationed off Santo Domingo accidentally tuned in a transistor radio on shortwave communications and overheard talks between Ambassador Bennett and military junta leaders...
...This time it assumed the form of a mass insurrection, including many elements of the military establishment...
...Perhaps the best example was Andrew Jackson, who was an odd combination of much of the best and worst in American character...
...to maintain this system a special training school for a national guard was established...
...To justify his failure, Smith wrote a book, The Fourth Floor, in which he claims the State Department was full of Castroites who sabo taged his policy: this is the measure of the man...
...Despotic Latin-American leaders were hardly a novelty and Machado had of course scrupulously respected the safety of American investment: at that time it already amounted to over a billion dollars...
...Conditions got steadily worse...
...then created the Inter-American Peace Force...
...This is history as an educated Latin American would see it...
...The resultant U.S...
...The New Leader, May 24, 1965...
...Ambassador Bennett, however, suggested the request be changed to ask for American intervention in order to protect the lives of U. S. citizens...
...The American invasion was so obviously similar to the Russian invasion of Hungary 10 years before, it could not be left on that unsubtle a level...
...A chronological description, including the reaction of the United States, makes quite clear what occurred...
...Support of free currency exchange means greater uncontrolled foreign investment...
...The Braden and Guggenheims, with enormous copper interests in Chile and Peru, always seem to end up as ambassadors to Latin America...
...VI The goal of U. S. policy, thus, is that pantomime governments share our aims and prejudices...
...On August 12, Machado, with nearly all the leading members of the government, fled Cuba...
...The Organization of American States was the perfect instrument...
...Wilson set up a financial protectorate...
...In his initial approach to the creation of the good-neighbor policy, Henry L. Stimson was thoroughly sincere...
...Theodore Draper, "The Dominican Crisis—A Case Study in American Policy," Commentary, December 1965...
...Within the week Batista came to terms with Carlos Mendieta, the kind of Cuban the Americans liked, and Grau was forced to resign...
...Within the U. S., officials may only take office if they strip themselves of any investment which could lead to a conflict of interest...
...FACTS RELATING TO THE DOMINICAN REPUBLIC Theodore Draper, "The Roots of the Dominican Crisis...
...The results were predictable...
...Ambassador Caffery wholeheartedly agreed with Welles...
...Keep the Faith, Baby" Adam Clayton Powell is the best example of Trujillo's problem...
...When those forces are curbed within the United States that fatten themselves on social inequality everywhere, then there will be little problem in adjusting to Latin-American ferment...
...What happened was so obvious that there was discontent at home...
...It is illogical to expect the U. S. voluntarily to give up power...
...Welles defined this government immediately as "an undisciplined group of individuals of divergent tendencies representing the most irresponsible elements in the city of Havana...
...And it may take even longer for the more important truth to sink in that often what is called foreign policy is nothing more at bottom than the massive use of U. S. power to enrich a small group of well-placed businessmen...
...Trujillo made an honest division of his country: the Americans could own all the sugar plantations and mills they wanted...
...Kennedy's position might be described as two-faced...
...speculation companies, controlled by men such as George Washington and Benjamin Franklin, were paralyzed just when the tobacco planters of the South were up to their necks in debt to English merchants and the Northern shipowners had been frozen out from the slave and rum trade of the Caribbean...
...In April, 19'65, a counterrevolt broke out...
...In this case Washington was right...
...Homes for the poor end up as special housing for the lackeys of the status quo...
...Henry L. Stimson, the special representative sent by Coolidge, indicated that a native constabulary must be established which would "eventually greatly reduce the number of Marines necessary to guarantee stability...
...American investment had not been threatened...
...Behind them stood the American Marines and paratroopers...
...General Anastasio Somoza became head of these guards trained by the Marines...
...Within the year Mendieta suspended the writ of habeas corpus and all constitutional guarantees, and he declared the sentence of death or life imprisonment for acts of violence—" stability" again descended on Cuba...
...On three occasions he requested U.S...
...Guatemala was the last of the pure banana aggressions...
...A more detailed study is necessary, for the seeds of Fidel Castro were sown in 1933 and not 1957...
...Trujillo stayed in power under this amiable arrangement for over 30 years—a longer reign than that of Hitler, Mussolini, or Stalin...
...The Marines are no longer necessary...
...Buying" or "bribing" are vulgar words to describe this process...
...April 25: At 4:30 P.M...
...Stability" has again returned to Santo Domingo, as it returned to Havana when the U.S...
...Change in face was not a change in policy...
...the troops were then duly sent from the ships waiting off the coast...
...intervention, and the ingenious creation of a new device to hold all Western Hemisphere states under American hegemony requires close analysis...
...The Stimson technique—as in the Dominican Republic, Cuba, and the Honduras, where the same thing was done with minor variations—simply set up a caricature of democracy dominated by ruthless oligarchs...
...Lyndon Johnson may not be able to admit a mistake but it is not impossible that he is quite capable of correcting one...
...Balaguer was elected President of the Dominican Republic...
...Just to be certain, the military purge continued...
...From August through December he could never be sure whether Washington or the personal animosity of Welles created U.S...
...is an American-dominated group whose aims originally were to sponsor better relations among the nations of the Americas, but which soon degenerated into an apologist body for U. S. policy...
...The land west of the Appalachians was immediately overrun...
...We still have the "Somoza dynasty" that was created and the third successive Somoza, a West Pointer, was just "elected" this year under the aegis of the American eagle...
...It will be part of a book the editors of DissENT are preparing on the general theme of foreign affairs and foreign policy...
...The Commander of this force was from Brazil (where a military coup had taken over the government a short time before) and in total sympathy with the Dominican junta...
...Like Welles and Gallery in the earlier period, Smith considered himself a Proconsul over a conquered people and acted accordingly...
...Not satisfied with such glut, (with Lincoln almost the sole public dissenter) the United States struck at Mexico in 1847 and took as war booty all the territory north of the Rio Grande as well as New Mexico and the remainder of California...
...policy had reverted to an earlier period...
...General Walter Bedell Smith, director of the CIA when the coup against President Arbenz of Guatemala was planned, joined the board of the United Fruit Company the next year...
...Norman Gall, "Struggle in Santo Domingo," The New Leader, January 2, 1967...
...But the success of President Eisenhower in crushing Arbenz with a small mercenary army had lulled the State Department into false security...
...From 1933 on political activity by the army, which had been nearly unknown in earlier days, was the major factor in Cuban government...
...In short time Weller decided that Machado had to go or there would be a violent revolution...
...The State Department vacillated, while paying the salaries of the junta soldiers, as to the choice of its next creature in Santo Domingo...
...The present Somoza is president of a shipping company, an airline, and a textile company, as well as head of the family plantations...
...When Cuba went Communist under Castro, the country was expelled for being undemocratic: the necessary votes being supplied by such democratic nations as the Honduras, Nicaragua, Haiti, and Paraguay...
...Even the best aspects of disinterested philanthropy can be bad if not accompanied by other important reforms...
...Roosevelt was inclined to recognize Grau but, given such information, deferred...
...Now the entire political and financial weight of the United States was geared to action and backed, of course, by the military junta...
...the channeling of public opinion by means of advertising pressures on magazines, newspapers, radio, and television...
...Where conquest was necessary, it was done...
...From these, the settlers spread west to the Appalachian mountains...
...These contradictions also pervade the Alliance for Progress...
...This argument was stated most clearly in Latin-American Mission by deLesseps S. Morrison, U. S. Ambassador to the O.A.S...
...victory...
...took Puerto Rico, the few remaining Spanish West Indies, and assumed tutelage over Cuba...
...And the chances are that this process will collide with Yankee interest...
...In December, 1965, Colonel Juan Maria Lora Fernandez, former Chief of Staff of the rebels, was killed by tank fire inside a hotel...
...This critical attitude grew after World War I, when the fruits of Wilson's Crusade for Democracy became more obvious...
...Henry L. Stimson, now Secretary of State under Hoover, had learned from Nicaragua...
...The American people will still feel only vague sympathy with nations of such vastly different backgrounds...
...During the night a cat crawled into the oven and gave birth to kittens...
...The solution to this problem introduced a new stage of relations between the United States and the Latin-American countries, and one that may be with us for many years...
...The State Department will still be under pressure from businessmen fearful of confiscation and desirous of profits...
...This was the latest evolution of American policy...
...A condottiere loose in the wrong century, Trujillo was indifferent to the old deal, the New Deal, or any other deal as long as the cards were dealt for him...
...This should have been apparent to U.S...
...Roosevelt rejected all three requests...
...7, 1966...
...Why, as men do a-land...
...But any goal is only as weak or strong as its presuppositions, and the Alliance is hamstrung by conceiving the ideal society only as an extension of the American system...
...The future of Latin America lies in its own sense of history and not another sense of history, its own psychology and not another psychology, its own people and not another people...
...The optimists say U.S...
...In practice, therefore, the U. S. supports those elements which lead to rightist dictators...
...It may seem harsh to state that the United States actively promotes military dictatorships...
...Latin-Americans will take many years to reshape their destiny...
...history would reflect another kind of bias—for the Latin American, like his Yankee counterpart, would be influenced by his own culture and tensions...
...At the same time Roosevelt, feeling Welles was too personally involved, replaced him as Ambassador with Jefferson Caffery...
...A woman left dough to bake overnight in an oven...
...In early November, Roosevelt again considered recognition, and Welles nervously requested permission to return to the Capital in order to make a personal report...
...intervention occurred in 1926 when President Coolidge landed the Marines to put down discontent "encouraged by Communist influence from Mexico...
...c) November 26, 1966...
...In 1903 President Theodore Roosevelt stole Panama...
...troops, the first time the very night of the Batista mutiny...
...The impulse to expansion was temporarily suspended by the Civil War and the resultant shift from an agricultural to a commercial America...
...If one would search for analogies, the most likely comparison would be Mexico under Lazaro Cardenas in 1938...
...Smith was a product of the American ambassadorial system, where if you give a large enough sum to the winning candidate you can choose your post...
...CIA subversion came later...
...Before withdrawing, the Marines found a young man of firm opinions by the name of Rafael Trujillo Molina and pushed him to the top...
...Educated persons may concede that there are some valid surface parallels but then insist that U.S...
...Note: It was later published, without official contradiction, that a cable had been sent out from the U. S. Embassy at Santo Domingo earlier that day: "I have reluctantly agreed to the de los Santos-Wessin plan even though it could mean more bloodshed...
...He was a Wall Street financier who knew nothing of the language, culture, or traditions of Cuba...
...policy-makers are idiots...
...And the ideology was ready at hand: for the Monroe Doctrine clearly meant that U.S...
...But America fears independent leaders, nationalists who put their own interests over those of Pax Americana...
...The final decision was for Dr...
...The military rebels under Batista named as provisional President of Cuba a professor of biology, Ramon Grau San Martin...
...The American Ambassador was discussing delivery of U. S. equipment and food to the generals and giving words of encouragement...
...For he not only refused recognition but slyly offered a bribe if the Cubans would revolt—a revision upward of the sugar quota and revocation of the Platt Amendment: We have wished to commence negotiations for a revision of the commercial convention between the two countries and for a modification of the permanent treaty between the United States and Cuba...
...He tied in the creation of a local constabulary with a two-party democracy...
...In 1818 Jackson, bent on subduing the Seminole Indians, pursued them into Florida, territory of another country at peace with the United States...
...11 The earliest stage, that of territorial enlargement, may be best summed up with a remark made by President McKinley during the Spanish-American War: "While we are conducting the war and until its conclusion, we must keep all we get...
...U. S. forces cut the Bosch zone into two parts and (later) permitted the regrouped junta to wipe out the northern sector...
...The job was indeed done well...
...His troops had likewise taken effective action against Communists, which had "rallied" the support of business interests...
...It then was an equally logical conclusion that any country in Latin America (and especially in the Caribbean) not wholly subservient to the Pentagon was a hostile government...
...This is surface analysis...
...John Gunther, Inside Latin America, Harper Brothers, 1941...
...He told an audience in Montevideo that the principle of nonintervention was becoming "obsolete," a remark which President Johnson repeated shortly thereafter...
...her recent conduct in Eastern Europe bears the same trademark as American policy in the Caribbean...
...The Rockefellers own a large part of Venezuelan oil and Nelson Rockefeller was Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs from 1940 to 1944...
...No one ever accused Andy Jackson of splitting with the Indians...
...It is based on the false assumption that "stability" through repression means progress and that the friendship of quislings or dictators is equivalent to Pan-American accord...
...The policy during these years had two aims: primarily, support of expanding American investment and protection of those American citizens going about this business...
...After discussing Washington's choice of BaIaguer, Draper then notes that the Provisional President chosen in the interim period before the election was Hector Garcia Godoy, "no puppet and no reactionary...
...In the Spanish-American War the U.S...
...To the south, they moved into South Carolina and Georgia, but then came up against the powerful Spanish interest in Florida...
...d) December 3, 1966...
...He occupied parts of Mexico and only withdrew as he started to inveigle the United States into war with Germany, fearing hostile action on the exposed southern border...
...In early October, the officers of the army attempted a counter-coup against Batista...
...From 1832 to 1836 American settlers broke off Texas from Mexico...
...The rest we all know...
...Cardenas did not hesitate to appeal to Nazi Germany when the American cartels blocked his oil sales and repurchase of drilling equipment...
...The French Canadians abstained, fearing New England Puritan bigotry far more than Post--Reformation English religious intolerance...
...The mood of the country was against territorial expansion, and far more suspicious of the motives behind patriotic rhetoric...
...Ironically, such a program is also the best way to create Communists...
...Finally, he organized an opposition and induced Cuban groups to revolt...
...Though investment protection was still an important objective (the tension with Castro started because of his nationalist aims, not Communism) , the Cuban fiasco and the missile crisis made national security an overriding obsession...
...In this matter, of course, the United States is no different from any other great nation...
...The change was duly made...
...Bosch lasted barely more than six months in office before he was overthrown by a military coup...
...And the United States, fearing war with Russia, did not land the Marines...
...April 28: By late afternoon it seemed that the attacking military junta was beaten...
...who received $60,000 a year for his efforts and was then appointed Undersecretary of Commerce by Kennedy in 1963) , even overlooking his killers who operated with impunity in the United States, Trujillo was getting into very serious trouble...
...Controlling the local military establishment or civilian government could be just as effective, and far more discreet...
...Bosch organized a liberal party, and in December, 1962, was elected President by over 60 per cent of the total vote...
...The Alianza orginally was created by President Kennedy to counter the Castro heresy...
...Welles told Batista that he was "the only individual in Cuba today who represented authority...
...Like the men who gravitate to the State Department, the Pentagon is also dominated by cadres who share both an emotional distrust of other systems and an automatic respect for conservative leadership dominated by moneyed interests...
...Andrew Jackson illegally seized Florida in 1818...
...The Communists despised him and the best expression of their view may be seen from the statement of Verde Olivo, the official organ of the Cuban Armed Forces: "Juan Bosch is the candidate chosen by Yankee imperialism to check the growing liberation movement of the Dominican people which surged forward after the assassination of the dictator Trujillo...
...Ellsworth Bunker, Jr., U. S. Ambassador to the O.A.S., deeply involved in the Dominican negotiations, was a board member and stock owner of the National Sugar Refining Company, a firm with important Dominican sugar interests...
...The military was susceptible to the grant of arms, training programs, foreign consular posts, and decorations...
...V At first glance, it would seem obvious that U.S...
...is accused of following a path of world conquest...
...The choice of Balaguer is a measure of the panic in the Johnson Administration...
...In the same way Castro turned to Russia, which gave him also the advantage of a hometrained administrative corps, the native Communists...
...It also, and perhaps just as important for the success of revolutions, gave the extreme radical element a clear and present enemy to fight against: Uncle Sam...
...But this is a surface impression...
...These expeditions and pressures failed only because the South and North were so split on the slavery question, and expansion into more slaveholding areas was politically sabotaged...
...Reported in Commonweal, Jan...
...But since our foreign policy is a reflection of domestic policy and the wishes of those who control it, the ultimate answer lies here at home...
...Dominican policy...
...that is to say, the list was put together to justify an act already committed...
...Earl E. T. Smith was Eisenhower's Ambassador to Cuba from 1957 to 1959...
...policy...
...investors...
...And many Latin-American nations were in a frenzy of rage at the unilateral action...
...The more democratic governments of Latin America, such as Mexico, Chile, Peru, and Venezuela, protested and would have nothing to do with this comic-opera repertoire...
...Instead of having Russia ringed by atomic missiles (defense of the U. S.), the War Department saw with horror Latin-American countries doing the same thing (offense against the U.S...
...Americans did the same in California in 1846...
...Victor Perlo, Marines in Santo Domingo...
...Joaquin Balaguer...
...Political figures could be reached by other means...
...Brochure published by New Outlook Pub...
...had created the best system of government in the world and that by the extension of the American Century into other lands, like benefits would attend...
...His dispatches repeatedly stated that Grau was only supported by the army and the "ignorant masses...
...the domestic brainwashing that brands new political and social views disloyal...
...force (like U.S...
...he was a good friend of Franklin Roosevelt and of Dwight Eisenhower with equal aplomb, and if Mao Tse-tung had suddenly appeared, he would have made a similar accommodation...
...He became Vice-President to the dictator in 1957 and was chosen as figurehead President by Trujillo in his last year when the public storm had begun to spill over...
...It was not that Powell operated differently from his peers in the flourishing trade of congressman, but rather that he was so obviously indifferent to the usual hypocrisies...
...History was on their side, as was indeed obvious from the course of events...
...Armed with this credential, the Generalissimo took over the government...
...President Kennedy was adored by most liberals...
...It may not be too farfetched to hazard a guess that certain ambassadors and other high officeholders have deliberately chosen Latin-American posts under the spoils system in order to protect or advance their personal fortunes...
...Ambassador Bennett cabled President Johnson of the situation...
...He opposed intervention in Cuba despite the increasing brutality of Gerardo Machado after 1930...
...It consisted of fabricating an "Inter-American Peace Force," formed with token troops from the LatinAmerican dictatorships which, combined with massive U. S. forces, would operate under a Latin-American general taking orders from Washington...
...In January, 1966, Leon Bosch, son of the former President, was shot in Santo Domingo...
...The impulse toward domination, allied with the desire to control a growing market for sugar, bananas, metallic ores, and oil, clashed with a moral repugnance to old-fashioned aggrandizement...
...A large part of the military, including most of the junior officers, had defected...
...Somoza in Nicaragua, Trujillo in the Dominican Republic, and Batista in Cuba were the result...
...Theodore Draper, "A Case of Political Obscenity," The New Leader, May 9, 1966...
...There are two schools among critics of American foreign policy...
...Let it be stated in all fairness that the Am4erican investors did not press their advantage to the utmost...
...An Inter-American Peace Force under the O.A.S...
...But the essential consideration of the good-neighbor policy was not who ruled or how, democrat or tyrant, legally elected or not...
...In less than one month he reestablished diplomatic relations and resumed military aid...
...Russian expansion south and east during the past century is very similar to that of the United States...
...And Balaguer was the main speaker at Trujillo's funeral on June 2, 1961, and eulogized him: "Dear Chief: Adieu...
...It was certainly not done by radicals...
...An ocean of books has been written on the question whether the present Cuban dictator was originally a Communist or whether the United States made him one...
...Balaguer served Trujillo 30 years in every position of importance...
...Note: At the same time Washington insisted U. S. policy did not support any single group in the Dominican Republic...
...Augustine...
...expansion, and the role of world policeman which America has reluctantly assumed, cannot be put in the same class with traditional imperialist aims...
...Air Force planes of General de los Santos Cespedes attacked the capital in cooperation with tanks sent by General Wessin y Wessin, former commander of the tank corps for Trujillo, graduate of the U. S. Army School in Panama and strong man of the 1963 anti-Bosch coup...
...Looking backward, two things are clear...
...This was an era devoid of hypocrisy...
...President Coolidge in 1924 occupied the Honduras and in 1926 Nicaragua...
...The New Leader, May 10, 1965...
...No progress along these lines can be made until there exists in Cuba a provisional government which through the popular support which it obtains and which through the general cooperation which it enjoys shows evidence of genuine stability...
...engineered the exile of Grau San Martin in 1934...
...May 5: Washington released a list of 54 "Communist and Castroist" names, the men who were behind Bosch...
...During the 1850's American-backed expeditions were launched against Cuba, Lower (Baja) California, and Nicaragua—and pressures were exerted against the Panama Zone and the northern provinces remaining to Mexico...
...Grau somehow survived for a short period...
...And here may be the most vicious aspect of U.S.LatinAmerican relations...
...Note: The Fulbright investigation later revealed that the military junta had requested American troops because of what they called danger of a Communist take-over...
...The President issued a statement on November 24, which in effect destroyed Grau...
...leaders in the SpanishAmerican War, as can be seen in the above-quoted remark by McKinley, led to a change in spirit...
...Napoleon, who feared English conquest from Canada, in 1803 sold the vast land tier from the Mississippi River to the Rocky Mountains...
...Any foreign figure or party which veers from our preconceived image is viewed with great distrust...
...Under the Platt Amendment, passed after the Spanish-American War, the United States had the right to intervene when it desired in Cuban affairs...
...April 24 and 25, 1965: Pro-Bosch forces came close to winning a victory against the military junta...
...Comparisons with Hitler, with Stalin, and with the imperial machinery of England and France in the nineteenth century are met by shocked outrage...
...Our ideological desire to create a stable middle class is riven by contradictions from head to toe...
...But the future of Latin America is also a special case of the U. S. future...
...The Dutch in New York and Swedes in Delaware were weaker, and the areas were seized by force, uniting the Eastern Seaboard...
...b) November 29, 1965...
...An honest conservative, he thought that creation of military stability would lead to more democracy (or at least his conception of democracy) . It never seemed to occur to Stimson, as it obviously was beyond the range of John Bartlow Martin, U.S...
...Among such optimists is Theodore Draper, whose articles on the recent Dominican Republic crisis are most penetrating...
...An excellent example of this phase in Latin-American relations is the case of Nicaragua, precisely because it was so successful...
...wanted done for recognition...
...As it was, such men could not be assuaged under any circumstances: the reason given for the revolt was that the President was soft on Communists and refused to "crack their heads...
...The significant point is that the world had changed by the mid-twentieth century, but the tactics of the State Department had not reflected this change...
...A constitutional democracy with two responsible parties was then set up on paper...
...Latin-American policy was influenced by this change...
...If he had attempted a military purge, he would have been thrown out much earlier and would have triggered a civil war...
...Halper feels the State Department and War Department wereworking at cross purposes...
...In terms of normal standards of peacetime amity, Andrew Jackson in Florida, Fremont in California, and Teddy Roosevelt in Panama were pirates no different than Drake and Hawkins when sacking the Spanish Main...
...Mare Nostrum, the Caribbean as an American Sea, was seriously threatened...
...In North America two areas were occupied, Massachusetts and Virginia...
...He knew well that his refusal to recognize the Cuban administration made success impossible for Grau, that no Cuban government could stand up without U.S...
...Subsidies to support existent governments become instruments for enlarged state oppression...
...By the 1890's it grew strong again...
...Stimson also felt that a two-party system should be encouraged...
...We could be good neighbors, a Good Neighbor, without intervention, through a variety of devices...
...In our own time, if it was wrong for Russia and China to invade Hungary and Tibet, it was certainly equally wrong for the U.S...
...Then Welles refused to recognize the government, and here he was backed by Washington...
...Stimson also came to the conclusion that Marine intervention had led to even greater turmoil...
...President Johnson claimed the Marines were disembarked solely to protect American lives...
...The oligarchic elite, of course, shared the same aims as U.S...
...Before he was through, Jackson conquered the Spanish province except for the city of St...
...A series of atrocity stories were handed out for publication, all of them later proved false or totally unsubstantiated...
...Then Kennedy was assassinated (the Latins are usually more civilized in this matter, merely shipping off their presidents into exile), and President Johnson took over...
...In 1895, Cleveland's Secretary of State Olney stated the matter bluntly...
...IV The next serious crisis arose in the Dominican Republic in 1965...
...Mao's China simply took Tibet and the mountainous areas of eastern India by martial occupation...
...III The best example of the good-neighbor policy, as it developed, is Cuba, where the situation erupted at the end of the Hoover Presidency...
...This is the heart of the problem...
Vol. 14 • July 1967 • No. 4
