THE DOMINICAN TRAGEDY
GRANT, DONALD
The Dominican Tragedy by DONALD GRANT Santo Domingo President Johnson's militant for-eign policy has resulted, in the Dominican Republic, in throwing the bloodstained cloak of the late dictator,...
...The best-informed foreign ambassadors agree...
...Finally one demanded the right to speak "as a union member...
...I rented a Volkswagen, hired an interpreter—a dark-skinned Dominican who had been badly wounded in the aborted revolution —and took along my tape-recorder on a 700-mile trip through the countryside...
...At this writing the United States troops are leaving—five years earlier than the time the U.S...
...I spent some weeks with the Greek underground during the occupation of that country by the Nazi Germans in World War II...
...Ignorance—and fear grounded in experience under dictatorship— assured the election results in an occupied country—in this case occupied by the United States...
...They have seen the machinery of the Yankees in action, and they have seen the attitude of the Dominican reactionaries...
...After failing at legal means we took to arms in 1965...
...We tried to create a democracy in this country, first by working in the elections of 1962, which we won—but that victory was taken from us after a few months...
...Even less does the vast army of unemployed in the city of Santo Domingo fear Communism...
...The Dominican army was discredited by the revolution...
...One peasant told me he grew tobacco on five acres, divided the crop returns evenly with his landlord, then divided his share again with another peasant who helped him farm the land...
...I, too, am completely disillusioned with democracy—not with democracy as a system, but with the pseudo-democracy created by the reactionary forces of the Dominican oligarchy, supported by the United States...
...To rational minds exploring the situation on the spot the probabilities seem heavily weighted against the Administration's claim...
...Their village priest, and the soldiers, and the police has told them so...
...It is all so familiar...
...Unlike Bosch, who remained safely in Puerto Rico when the fighting was going on, Pena Gomez was in Santo Domingo, in the thick of it...
...Workers who stood near became restive...
...Balaguer knows that if he displeases the oligarchy he can be replaced by a military dictatorship overnight...
...If the Communists came to power they would burn the rough wood-and-thatch huts of the peasants and make them slaves...
...then I was with the oppressed Greeks, now I was identified with the army of occupation...
...Plots for farming run from three to ten acres...
...Union leaders tried hard to hold the conversation along "moderate" lines...
...As a result, he says, he was able to take a Vatican visitor for a walk through the slums of Santo Domingo—where Americans are ordinarily spat upon—and was greeted as a friend...
...on further questioning, it turned out to be the CIA radio station...
...Yes, they had voted for Balaguer...
...The Dominican army, he added with transparent cynicism, has become the great bulwark of democracy...
...Reform of Latin American feudalism—a necessary prelude to progress—¦ was proposed by President Kennedy in his celebrated "Alliance for Progress" speech...
...Now, he says, he has abandoned his studies to become a full-time revolutionary...
...With evident pride he tells of the charges against him, brought by the reactionary Dominican oligarchy, of being a "Communist...
...Those of us who stay at home in civilian garb are not, I think, less involved than the U.S...
...When the revolution was at the point of victory, when the foot-soldiers and the majority of the people were with us, the United States intervened...
...They were (the Peace Corps girls later reported, regretfully) attractive young men...
...The United States has, then, succeeded, with great damage to American prestige, in leaving the Dominicans with a choice between genuine revolution—which this time the Communists may indeed control—and reaction, which can be maintained only by oppression...
...That policy is demanding of Americans that they wear the heavy boots of military occupation in foreign places where the people are weak and poor and oppressed...
...Asked what would have happened if President Johnson had kept calm and let nature take its course, one ambassador replied : "Bosch would be president, that's all...
...To be seen with American officers in uniform, the girls said, would have destroyed their own relations with the Dominicans with whom they were working...
...Our last ray of hope for democracy was in the election, but every negative force was used against us—psychological, military, terror, and fraud...
...He told me he intended to reform Dominican society—with the consent of the oligarchy...
...Headquarters for the United States military command were established precisely in the deposed dictator Trujillo's spacious house in Santo Domingo...
...The Nuncio confirms the testimony of peasants that many village priests —disregarding the Nuncio's wishes— help spread the canard that Bosch was a Communist...
...troops to avoid being destroyed...
...It was, Pena Gomez told me, a disheartening experience...
...Watching an antiAmerican demonstration in the streets of Santo Domingo I suddenly felt I was re-living the experience in the Greek underground...
...Again and again, the peasants told me the same story...
...I believe that democracy has been wounded to death in the Dominican Republic," my tape-recorder quotes Pena Gomez as saying...
...The CIA has been trying to help the former Trujillo police force emerge into an effective body even though it is rooted in years of cruelty and corruption...
...All in the family were barefoot...
...Not that he or any of the other American soldiers here relishes the assignment...
...He is head of the Fourteenth of June movement...
...The odd little Dominican, Joaquin Balaguer, who had served Trujillo so well, is also serving the Americans...
...Marines and the U.S...
...Few were...
...In the past," he said, "the Dominican people did not really know who their enemy was, who sought to keep them poor and oppressed...
...Even the most oppressive of governments must rely on a minimum of consent...
...They said Juan Bosch, his opponent, was a Communist...
...By "the people," Fafa means the workers in the cities and towns, who are twenty-five to forty per cent unemployed...
...No doubt there was some juggling of votes, but so far as one could tell most of the peasants did vote for Bala-guer—as they had voted for him before, when he was Trujillo's unopposed candidate...
...The Voice of America verified what the priests, the soldiers, and the police had said...
...The supreme power, the American military, took over Trujillo's house...
...his qualifications as an administrator are not impressive...
...The people have learned their lesson," Fafa told me...
...We all must live with ourselves, and the fearful military power that President Johnson commands can never really shelter us from that...
...The racial element is built-in, hardly mitigated by the presence in the American forces of a scattering of Negroes...
...So it was with many of the German troops in Greece...
...In Santo Domingo the well-fed Americans seem so tall—and so fair-skinned—in contrast to the short, dark Dominicans...
...From the experience of the American occupation various segments of the population of the Dominican Republic have drawn similar conclusions...
...Even with such precautions, the work of the Peace Corps has been badly damaged...
...The moderate if somewhat blundering "middle way," represented by Bosch, has been destroyed...
...We must talk to the peasant," says Fafa...
...Louis Post-Dispatch, recently returned from a survey of the Dominican Republic...
...Marines and the U.S...
...The Dominican Republic is three-quarters or more a peasant country...
...Army, and the relative quiet that followed the crushing of the revolt, the rebels' arms were to have been turned into the provisional government...
...The Voice of America—and especially the clandestine radio station operated by the Central Intelligence Agency with the help of Cuban refugees—was at least equally clear on that score...
...The peasant's wife lifted the ragged pants-leg of her son to show his spindly shank...
...On one occasion two young American Army officers, spruced up for the occasion, knocked at the door of a billet where two Peace Corps girls were staying...
...Peasant votes elected Balaguer as the "Yankees' president...
...So now the youth of the country are completely disillusioned with democracy, and one cannot quarrel with them...
...Army officers and men in Santo Domingo—or Vietnam...
...Despite the widespread poverty many peasants own cheap Japanese transistor radios...
...The most articulate spokesman of the left-wing workers is Rafael Taver-az, known by his nickname, Fafa, who is twenty-seven years old...
...None was in school...
...He had five children to support...
...It had to hide behind the U.S...
...he came to Santo Domingo as a student...
...Finally, they had heard it on the radio...
...Here, in Santo Domingo, it is the same dirty game...
...Later in my journey in the sugar-estate country at the eastern end of the island, I talked to some sugar workers in their union hall at La Romana...
...The Dominican Tragedy by DONALD GRANT Santo Domingo President Johnson's militant for-eign policy has resulted, in the Dominican Republic, in throwing the bloodstained cloak of the late dictator, Rafael Leonidas Trujillo Molina, over the shoulders of the United States...
...Dominican revolutionaries told me they had cultivated American Negro soldiers and had been rewarded by supplies, including arms, and information...
...Even without the vile name-calling, the shouts of "Yankee go home!," the occasional overturning and burning of jeeps, and the shot in the night, one can feel the hatred...
...It is impossible to prove that Santo Domingo today would be the second Communist capital in the Western Hemisphere, were it not for the U.S...
...But they were turned away...
...Malnutrition, I found, is a great deal more common than literacy among the peasants...
...But the Dominicans would be running their own show and attempting to achieve the long-overdue reform of the feudal structure of the Dominican society...
...This is a doubtful proposition at best...
...Now they know—it is Yankee imperialism, and the Dominican oligarchy allied to it...
...the lot of an army of occupation is not a happy one...
...After the landing of the U.S...
...With a few exceptions, the United States troops here seemed to have behaved well, as occupation armies go...
...It may be, however, that the peasant will join the revolution only after it has been begun by the sugar workers and the workers in the city...
...Army forces...
...They know it is impossible for the people to gain power by legal means . . . The American troops came here not really to prevent the formation of another Cuba in the Caribbean, but to arrest any possible changes in the social-economic-political structure of the Dominican Republic...
...The Johnson formula, here, was to pump the formaldehyde of direct miliDONALD GRANT, United Nations correspondent for the St...
...But this time I had changed sides...
...The image of the United States, which lies behind the Balaguer government, is not especially helpful...
...I also talked to Bosch and Balaguer —but in retrospect the post-election conversation that made the deepest impression was with Bosch's young lieutenant, a large, dark young man with a deep voice, named Francisco Jose Pena Gomez...
...The peasants, he admitted sadly, are another case...
...still, hatred eats at the guts of the Dominicans like a disease as they watch the GI's come and go, and hear the crunching sound of their black boots on the gravel...
...One of the American officers pointed out to me that a well-worn path led to the United States Embassy, next door...
...For the ultimate revolution, Fafa and his friends have thousands of hidden arms at their disposal—rifles, machine-guns, mortars, and grenades...
...Probably he would not have been a very good president...
...For more than thirty years Trujillo had told the Dominicans that Communism was the supreme evil, and that it lurked everywhere...
...An intelligent Spanish priest, a good friend of the Nuncio's, has given this matter some study and concluded that there was never any real danger of Communism here...
...We must show him that his real, material need—for land—can be met, but only by revolution...
...If there were an election today I could not, in all conscience, ask the youth to turn again to the ballot box...
...Unlike the peasants, the sugar workers show little fear of Communism...
...For the moment the corpse appears almost life-like, with the aid of a little rouge here and there...
...The other sugar workers in the union hall roared in assent...
...President Johnson seems to prefer military dictatorships...
...There is a relentless consistency to the Johnson foreign policy, as seen from the Dominican Republic...
...commanding general in the Dominican Republic told President Johnson it would be safe to leave, assuming his assignment was to complete the pacification of the country...
...The peasant has begun to realize this...
...Fafa was reared in the interior...
...What has happened—in contrast to what might have happened—is something else...
...How did they know that...
...The Monsignor refuses to verify the United States' claim that were it not for the Marines, the Dominican Republic would have been a Communist country by now...
...He fought in the name of democracy, as defined by the liberal Bosch...
...The peasant has reacted from fear, the worker from anger...
...policy, it is said by the Administration, has avoided the possibility of "another Cuba" in the Caribbean...
...tary action into the decayed body of Trujilloism...
...The Papal Nuncio, Monsignor Emanuele Clarizio, also has disassociated himself from the Americans...
...The American Peace Corps has tried desperately to disassociate itself from the occupation, with indifferent success...
...The greatest tragedy of all, I believe, is what the Johnson foreign policy may be doing to Americans...
Vol. 30 • September 1966 • No. 9
