HAITI AND DOMINICAN REPUBLIC: TWO DICTATORS SHARE AN ISLAND
Rubin, Morris H.
HAITI and DOMINICAN REPUBLIC Two Dictators Share an Island T^he island of Hispaniola, discovered by Christopher Columbus December 6, 1492, is shared by two countries, Haiti and the Dominican...
...The Dominican Republic is wealthier and more industrialized than Haiti, which is dominated by rural slums...
...U. S. financial tutelage over the country continued in one form or another until 1940...
...Labor unions are the stooges of the ruling family...
...This Haitian suggested that if the United States continued its aid program, it should openly "siphon off ten per cent, give it to government officials as their share of the booty, and make the rest directly available to the people...
...We can't let that happen," he concluded...
...The entire country is a vast prison...
...From 1916 to 1924, U. S. Marines occupied the island to make certain our bondholders got theirs...
...Haiti is worse off than she was in the 1950's, mostly because the price of coffee is down...
...The women, incidentally, are duty-bound by tradition to bring home to their men every penny earned in the market...
...Haiti, of course, has little or no use for an army, except to keep the populace under control...
...Duvalier maintains a tight rein on the people, permitting them no freedom of the press, assembly, or right to petition for redress of grievances...
...The stock of the United States is higher today with reform elements in the Dominican Republic than at any time in recent years because we have indicated that our ardor for Trujillo is cooling somewhat...
...From 1804 to 1915, Haiti had only two rulers who served their full terms...
...How," demanded one leading democrat in Central America, "can you justify rewarding this despicable despot by tripling his sugar quota when there are democratic regimes in Latin America that desperately need that kind of help...
...The streets were cleaner and tidier, the shop windows filled with a wider variety of goods, and the people better dressed and seemingly more content than those I saw in Port-au-Prince...
...You don't...
...I saw only little of this side of Haitian life, for most of my time there was spent exploring the politics and economics of the country...
...Thus, the "old man," as the senior Trujillo is known without affection, has ruled arbitrarily for three decades...
...There are many streets in Port-au-Prince which have an intolerable stench because there are no toilet and sewage facilities, indoors or out, in whole blocks of the capital city...
...In the taxi to my hotel, the driver chatted amiably enough as long as our conversation was bounded by the weather and the scenery, but he froze into total silence when I approached the forbidden territory of political and economic conditions in the country...
...It is your government's help that has kept this crooked crowd in power...
...The way it works, said one informant with first-hand knowledge, is this: "You are asked to fork over part of the earnings of your business...
...The church refused, in diplomatic fashion, and Trujillo opened war against the bishops...
...Spokesmen for the Duvalier regime contend that a substantial portion of the budget and most of American aid go to relieve poverty by providing jobs on public projects...
...But both Haitians and Americans in Haiti with whom I talked were bitter in their rejection of this explanation...
...The other twenty-three were overthrown or died in office, five of them violently...
...This is far from the truth, as I discovered from talks with thoughtful Haitians and Americans resident in Haiti...
...I did see some of the most beautiful women in the world...
...My luggage was searched relentlessly, and a copy of the Latin American edition of Time confiscated for ten minutes by government agents who took it away to determine if there were any language that might offend the man who rules, and in large measure owns, this curious country...
...Opposition to the regime is widespread, but disorganized and leaderless...
...The poverty is unbelievable until you see it close up...
...Church officials constantly denounce the excesses of the police terror and call for social reform...
...The average worker earns $1.50 per day in the sugar fields if he is doing well...
...The church, which had long played along with Trujillo, returned the fire, and today the two are locked in combat...
...Two brothers have held the presidency for more than thirty years...
...While Haitian women, by our standards, are beasts of burden who bear farm produce and handicraft goods to market on their heads, it is a joy to watch them on the streets and in the marketplace — tall, black, colorfully dressed, with heads proudly erect as they balance their baskets heavyladen with the stuff they hope to sell...
...There are various forces committed clandestinely to reform, but they are united only in their opposition to the hated Trujillo tyranny...
...Everyone knows this regime would have fallen if it had not been for your help...
...There is considerable under-employment in the urban areas...
...It is only those who speak up or fight back who are subjected to pitiless persecution and often torture...
...If you don't respond then, you are threatened with reprisals...
...HAITI and DOMINICAN REPUBLIC Two Dictators Share an Island T^he island of Hispaniola, discovered by Christopher Columbus December 6, 1492, is shared by two countries, Haiti and the Dominican Republic, both of which are corrupt tyrannies...
...Social security consists largely of breadlines and handouts...
...Corruption, tyranny, and violence are no strangers to the people of Haiti...
...The Duvalier regime, said another Haitian in furtive conversation with me, "has not done one damned thing for the people in its three years in power...
...Elections are held without opposition...
...Happily for the cause of freedom, the relations of the Dominican Republic with the United States and Latin America are at their lowest ebb right now...
...Population density is higher than in India and China...
...Trujillo retaliated only recently by sacking the diocesan residence of Bishop Thomas F. Riley and placing him under "protective custody" for a time...
...With those bitter words ringing in my ears, I moved on to the island's other dictatorship...
...His civil guard, a gestapo-like organization that terrorizes the populace and keeps the army under its thumb, is the most powerful force in Haiti — and it is tightly under the president's personal control...
...From 1915 to 1934, the country was occupied by U. S. Marines dispatched there to "preserve order" and "safeguard our interests...
...Corruption is rampant...
...Nearly seventy per cent of the economy is dependent on the coffee trade...
...All the leaders have either fled the country, or they rot in jail where the system of refined torture is said to have produced many cases of insanity...
...They feel that they hitched their wagon to his star thirty years ago and somehow have to hang on, for it would mean their death if they were caught in a conspiracy against him...
...But semi-official estimates place the cost of maintaining the country's military and police establishment at thirty to forty per cent of the total...
...As we rode to the hotel, and later when I walked the streets of the city, I was struck by the significant improvement over Haiti's Port-au-Prince...
...The reins are relaxed now and then but pulled in again by "the old man" when it suits his fancy...
...This year, the Dominican Republic's sugar quota is being restored to its normal level, but there is a firm conviction among reform elements in that country and elsewhere in Latin America that the United States must go further than that and embargo all trade with the Dominican Republic until the present dictatorship yields to a more democratic succession...
...Haiti is a black country whose people speak French and Creole, while the Dominican Republic is white and Indian, whose people speak Spanish...
...Through the years, Trujillo has shown an extraordinary capacity for keeping his opponents divided and for ferreting out and destroying plots against him before they could be hatched...
...It is widely believed in the Dominican Republic that Trujillo committed a serious strategic blunder by bringing the church into the opposition fold...
...But as one American observed, "The tragedy, of course, is that what little good has been accomplished has been nullified by the terror and violence of the police state...
...Haiti is a country of green mountains and blue-green water, of magnificent foliage and beautiful beaches, but it is also a country of some of the most squalid slums in the world...
...You are content to go on as you do because it is what the dictator wants...
...He wondered, too, "How can you tolerate Trujillo for thirty years and rebel at Castro in two years...
...Haitian history is replete with bloody struggles for power...
...For a long time we had maintained cordial relations with the Dominican despot, and even as late as last year, when we wiped out the Cuban sugar quota, we tripled the amount the Dominican Republic could export to the United States—and thus greatly contributed to the Trujillo treasury, for the Trujillos are the largest owners of Dominican sugar fields, too...
...The Trujillos have contributed handsomely to the church, and in return, the "old man" sought to have himself designated Benefactor of the Catholic Church...
...Despite the unsavory record of the Duvalier government, the United States has poured an impressive amount of money into its coffers...
...The Trujillo dictatorship was spawned in this setting...
...I was soon to discover that the great mass of Dominicans are apolitical or non-political and are largely left alone if they do and say nothing to offend the ruling family...
...You say you must help in order to prevent the Communists from moving in, but bad as they are, the Communists could do no worse...
...From the moment my plane arrived in Ciudad Trujillo, the capital city, I knew I was in a dictatorship more grimly policed than Haiti's police state...
...Tourist literature in Haiti describes the present government as "a republic — independent and self-governed...
...The small middle class in the cities is relatively well off, but it must share its bounty with the greedy Trujillos who control the country...
...Our military planners regard Haiti, with her location between Cuba and the Dominican Republic, as occupying a strategic position in the Caribbean...
...Illiteracy runs to ninety per cent of the population, and helps explain why Duvalier's own paper, the Haiti Journal, has only 800 subscribers in this land of three and a half million people...
...There are significant differences between the two nations...
...The Trujillos are everywhere and everything in the Dominican Republic...
...Per capita income runs less than $245 per year...
...He served four terms as president and then gave way to his brother, General (now Generalissimo) Hector B. Trujillo Molina, in 1952, but he retained the post of commander-in-chief of the armed forces and continues to wield the supreme executive power in the Dominican Republic...
...I heard much the same comment among thoughtful officials, all of them anti-Castro, in most of the eleven countries I visited—wonderment and shock at how we had played ball with the Trujillo tyranny...
...The Organization of American States concluded an investigation last year which resulted in the accusation that the Dominican Republic has resorted to repeated and continuing violations of human rights, including "cruel and inhuman treatment of political prisoners" and "the use of intimidation and terror as political weapons...
...If you still don't respond to the suggestion that you make the Trujillos your partners, you are arrested on trumped up charges and jailed...
...But both countries are alike in being governed by bribe-infested dictatorships...
...Another Haitian, who spoke to me only after receiving my firm assurance that his identity would not be revealed, blamed much of Haiti's plight on the United States...
...Francois Duvalier, came to power in 1957 after nine months of turbulence during which five transitory regimes followed one another in rapid succession after the peaceful overthrow of Paul E. Magloire in December, 1956...
...aid were lessened or discontinued...
...If he gets what he wants, you will be left alone to 'stop Communism.' But why can't you see that by going on this way, you are creating the very conditions on which Communism, or a domestic variety of it, feeds and flourishes...
...It is worth noting that the United States has interfered actively in the affairs of the Dominican Republic for some thirty-five years before and during the dictatorship — hardly a recommendation for the kind of government our intervention produces...
...Dominicans, however, are not terrorized in their daily lives unless they dare speak critically of the regime...
...he works less than half the year...
...We are helping Haiti because of its significance to us," a State Department official told me, "but we do not approve of its government" He went on to say that Duvalier has threatened on occasion to run eastward — to the Kremlin — for help if U.S...
...They walk like queens...
...Our action shocked liberal Latin Americans who know the Dominican dictatorship for what it is...
...The reason for this aid, I was told, is Pentagon-inspired...
...There are so many sellers in the marketplace and so few customers that one almost gets the impression that they are playing store, as children will, selling to each other...
...In 1905 the United States established a receivership over the Dominican customs in behalf of American bondholders...
...During the past decade the United States has made more than $40,000,000 available in grants and economic assistance to the Haitian government, much of it during the past three years...
...Illiteracy is growing worse instead of better...
...Your help is not reaching the people...
...Haiti, which occupies the westernmost third of the island lying in the Caribbean Sea between Puerto Rico and Cuba, is frequently described as an exotic land where the ancient folkways of Africa, including voodoo-ism, combine with a renaissance in native art to provide a distinctive flavor that separates Haiti from her neighbors in the Caribbean...
...The evidence of mere subsistence living and unemployment and underemployment is everywhere too great...
...I reject Castro's ways, but I reject Trujillo's too...
...One middle-class Haitian, a man of superior education and community status, bitterly complained that "eighty per cent of the aid given Haiti by the United States is wasted, some of it the result of mismanagement and the rest of outright corruption...
...Eighty per cent of the people are peasants living on the land, growing sugar, cacao, or coffee...
...There is a widespread feeling that the "old man" and his regime are deteriorating, that he is becoming insane and his rule is cracking up...
...The average annual income in Haiti is $65 to $70, one of the lowest in the world...
...It has become increasingly more brutal and corrupt through the years, levying a vast tribute on virtually all business and enterprise of any consequence in order to fill the family coffers...
...Sixty per cent of the populace is illiterate...
...Some of the money doubtless goes into job-creating ventures, but it is highly doubtful if the amount is considerable...
...From all I heard, it would be difficult to conceive a judgment more clothed with restraint...
...It cuts itself in as a partner in any venture that has any prospect for profit...
...It might have fallen if you had not rushed to its assistance, but you kept it alive and now it may be too.late to do anything to save our people from this tyrannical gang...
...In the early stages of the old man's reign, the Dominican Republic made some phenomenal progress in improving the economic situation of the people, but now there is too much siphoned off by the Trujillo family's graft and too little left for the people...
...In general, no graft is tolerated in the country — except that practiced by the reigning family, which has a complete monopoly...
...The present president, Dr...
...Death is your final verdict if you have not surrendered before then...
...There must be ways you could administer your aid programs so that some of the help would trickle down to the people who need it so much...
...If you are slow in responding, you are dazzled with a bribe...
...For all its lavish public buildings, wide streets, and a four-lane highway that goes nowhere in both directions, the Dominican Republic is a poor country with enormous extremes of wealth and poverty...
...The men around him, however, hesitate to take steps to hasten the departure of the elder Trujillo—much as they might like to...
...In 1930, the senior member of the firm, Generalissimo Rafael Leonidas Trujillo Molina, rose to power and has held it ever since...
...The church's stature, I was told, is at an all-time high because it has chosen to fight back and, in effect, assume the moral leadership of the struggle against what is doubtless one of the most corrupt regimes on earth...
...Budget figures are not available...
...You pretend," said one, "to treasure freedom and espouse democracy, and yet you are helping to keep alive one of the foulest and most arrogant tyrannies in Latin America...
...The opposition today is divided, disorganized, and leaderless...
...You have double standards, and it is hurting you seriously throughout all of Latin America...
...the government simply refuses to publish them...
...The most important source of opposition today is the Catholic Church...
...The president is doing little if anything to relieve these desperate conditions...
...Sometimes they will walk several days and nights from farm to market while their husbands, if they have them, stay home to work the field...
...The Trujillos have some concrete achievements to show for their tenure — new roads, hospitals, sanitation, and a modest housing program...
Vol. 25 • June 1961 • No. 6
