Leveraging American Security Policy in the Caribbean

Abstract. This article analyzes the successful ability of Rafael Trujillo in the 1930s to leverage American humanitarian concerns regarding Jewish refuges attempting to flee Europe to gain American support and the removal of American controls over Dominican political sovereignty that had come from American interventions in his country. America’s strategic preoccupation with the fascist and Nazi influences in the Caribbean and Latin America added a momentum to Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Good Neighbor Policy, which played quite well with Trujillo’s own political interests which had included—among other things—repressive policies and the massacre of Haitian immigrants that had rankled American diplomats at times. By ingratiating himself with American national security interests, Trujillo strengthened his control over Dominican society.

Introduction

In July 1939 Rafael Trujillo, as head of the armed forces of the Dominican Republic and the real power behind a puppet presidency, visited Franklin Delano Roosevelt with his wife.¹ Critics of Trujillo and his ferocious dictatorship lambasted the American president for receiving a dictator while denouncing European fascists and Nazis. It was one of the seeming paradoxes of American foreign policy born out of the Good Neighbor Policy toward Latin America, which had been formulated by the Roosevelt administration in the early 1930s as the US cast a wary eye on the totalitarian systems controlling Europe.  Historically, American foreign policy toward Latin America had a starting point with Monroe’s doctrine, which called for exclusion of the European powers from Latin American countries recently freed from Spanish domination. It had seen a corollary in Teddy Roosevelt, who asserted in a presidential address the right of the United States to intervene in Latin America in cases of “flagrant and chronic wrongdoing by a Latin American Nation.”² In light of this corollary the US had intervened several times, for example in the Caribbean, in Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and Mexico. American anxieties about the European—more specifically German—move into the area had already taken a place in American political memory during the Venezuelan crisis of 1903-1904 where European warships came to collect debts for European investors. In this episode Germany stood out and elicited in Teddy Roosevelt stronger and stronger antipathies towards Germany.

The Good Neighbor Policy was an attempt by Franklin Roosevelt to improve the image and substance of American relations with South America, which had been frayed by events ranging from the Spanish American war to the secession of Panama from Colombia to the invasions of Nicaragua, Mexico, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic in the first quarter of the 20th century. In his first inaugural address he had stated his commitment, “In the field of world policy I would dedicate this Nation to the policy of the good neighbor—the neighbor who resolutely respects himself and, because he does so, respects the rights of others—the neighbor who respects his obligations and respects the sanctity of his agreements in and with a world of neighbors.”³  When the policy was outlined at the beginning of his first administration in the midst of the great depression, Washington seemed to be bent on improving international economic relations with both Latin America and Europe as the documents make clear, but as time went by anxieties about the rise of totalitarian systems in Europe and their influence on the security of the United States in the western hemisphere became more pronounced.⁴ Previous American experiences with a German presence in the Caribbean area predisposed the United States to see, even more so during the ‘30s, the Nazi experiment in Europe as a threat to American security. The United States had now a strategic interest in improving its relations with Latin America. The case of the Dominican Republic in the ‘30s stands out as an example of the shifting fortunes in the conduct of foreign policy for both Washington and the little Caribbean Republic.

Of the many Latin American dictators in the 20th century, Rafael Trujillo, who ruled the Dominican Republic for nearly 30 years, stands out for his violence, racialism, and his adroit manipulation of American political necessities and the tragedies of the 1930’s in Europe.  While the stereotype of a Latin American dictator is one of a reactionary, oligarchic, conservative individual tied to traditional landed interests, the political and internal policies of Rafael Trujillo do not necessarily match such a stereotype.  His domination of the Dominican political system saw also systematic economic development of his country, greater independence in internal and external policies from American pressures, and populist policies that appealed to the peasants in his nation through land reform. His system of domination ran along basically neo-patrimonial lines as his family members came to control many aspects of the internal and external policies of the republic.⁵  One of the issues that propelled him to preeminence, which was also part of his psychocultural make-up, was his racialism. His racialist perspective was not unique to the Dominican elites and certainly not to the Latin American experience but it characterized the political developments of his country, one that was to persist all the way through the 21st century.⁶

One of the themes in Dominican politics had been its tortuous relations with Haiti and the African heritage of the island. The elites of the Dominican Republic found the African past unappealing and an indicator of underdevelopment. To put it bluntly, “blackness” and an African heritage were associated with underdevelopment and savagery. A 19th century war with Haiti, and a Haitian invasion of the Dominican Republic, had left some bitter memories. The notion of race, class, and caste in Latin America has been explored for quite some time now and certainly many observers have looked at some aspects of the Latin American wars of independence, especially in what we call “Indo-America”, has many aspects of a race war.  Certainly this was the case in Haiti, where the white and mulatto elites were practically destroyed, or in Mexico where the revolution of 1910 saw the rise of what is called Indianismo with a political-ideological focus on Mexico’s Indian heritage and a downgrading of the Spanish European cultural and political heritage.

This was also the case in Brazil where, in the late 19th century the African heritage was so unappealing to its elites, that to promote modernization, the country brought in an ever increasing number of European immigrants, especially from Italy and Germany. ⁷ Some of the peasant revolts in that country were marked by racial overtones which left their political imprint on the country to the extent that by 2010 Brazil was in the midst of a debate on the issue of race.⁸

The Mexican example can be seen, even today, in Ecuador and Venezuela. Hugo Chavez’s denunciation of the Spanish heritage of Venezuela and his outburst against Venezuela’s elites, whether of Spanish stock or new European immigrant communities, of the last 60 years in contemporary Venezuelan history, are an example of his racialism and his appeal to the lower orders in their resentment of the upper classes. Likewise, Evo Morales’ Bolivia has seen problematic conflicts between his pro Indian policies and upper-class Bolivians of European heritage. Of course, racial and class relations displayed to this day in many parts of Latin America are characterized by variables which make every nation in every way unique. Trujillo did accept the Indian heritage but did not care for the African. In the Caribbean, there was a residual of memory of the Indian heritage that went back to the Caribe Indian heritage which Trujillo did not deny.

Racial theories, economic development, and civilization were notions imbedded in 19th century European thought that had come to influence Latin American leaders in the 19th and 20th centuries.  There was a consensus among leaders and members of the upper-classes that Latin America could catch up with Western Europe only by limiting the number and or growth of the aboriginal population of Indians or citizens of African origins. This became a policy in Brazil by the mid-19th century, one that was also put forth, for example, by the Cientificos in Mexico under the dictatorship of Porfirio Diaz.⁹ In both cases the influence of Sociological Positivism from Europe was striking in that the European especially the French model of economic and political development in the 19th century had come to be a model for Latin American nations. The accent on science, planning, and progress appealed to Latin American leaders already bent on “catching up” to the developed world.

Trujillo articulated anti Haitian sentiments, and in response to reports of thefts and depredations by Haitian workers in the border areas sugar cane fields he instigated large scale massacres that resulted in the deaths of an estimated 20-30,000 Haitians.¹⁰ For approximately five days, from 2 October 1937 to 8 October 1937, Haitians were killed with guns, machetes, clubs and knives by Dominican troops, civilians and local political authorities, some while trying to flee to Haiti by crossing the Rio Artibonito, which had been the site of bloody conflict between the two nations.¹¹ The massacre, however, was motivated principally by Trujillo’s desire to establish a clear border separating the two nations and to exercise more political and economic control over the far reaches of the country. From the perspective of Trujillo, the presence of Haitian immigrants on Dominican borderlands — unconnected to Dominican urban life and its Spanish tinged and influenced lifestyle — hindered the formation of clear political, cultural, and social boundaries. It also weakened or at least did not strengthen his attempts to establish an authoritarian caudillo type regime in line with the experiences of other Latin American countries and the constant involvement of the military establishments and their pursuit of military modernization.¹²

The massacre of the Haitians in 1937 did not endear Trujillo to FDR’s State Department especially as Trujillo himself was trying to free the Dominican Republic from the controls the US had on Dominican external and internal sovereignty.¹³  Many American diplomats and journalists had been appalled by a clear condemnation of Trujillo’s policies in his own country but he managed to avoid denunciation and censure by a clever policy of public relations and media manipulation in America.

The US had invaded the Dominican Republic in 1916. American control over Dominican affairs had come to be resented.  The American invasion had been prompted by the chronic financial inability and political instability in paying off American bond holders. President Wilson had ordered the invasion in response to the specific demands of American investors, The Santo Domingo Investment Company, who were having problems in collecting fees and interests. Even before Wilson, Theodore Roosevelt had imposed demands on the Dominican government to fulfill its financial obligations. The United States withdrew in 1924 from the Dominican Republic with the provision that Washington would control customs for the country and the revenues would be used in part to pay American creditors. The eight years of American military control over the island saw American officials in charge of the development of the Dominican Republic in areas ranging from the creation of a more modern educational system to a police constabulary and law and order. This experience incidentally was also shared by Haiti which had had even more economic and political problems than its neighbor. She had also been invaded in 1915.

This arrangement, paradoxically, stabilized the economic system of the island and even brought a request by the Dominican government to improve military relations with the United States by requesting the replacement of German Mausers in use by Dominican soldiers with American Springfield model bolt-action rifles, which were at the time falling into disuse in the US forces with the advent of the semi-automatic firing M1 Garand.¹⁴ As it was, the German rifle had been employed all over Europe and Latin America and there was not necessarily a pressing need to replace it, but the request certainly added momentum to the improvement of diplomatic relations to the United States. It was not coincidental that when visiting Washington in July 1939, Trujillo was hosted by the then acting chief of the United States army staff General George C. Marshall. The party given in his honor saw also the presence of many high ranking military officials.¹⁵ Trujillo himself had risen through the ranks of the Dominican constabulary forces through the help of American military officials. During the same week he visited the Marine Corps base in Quantico, Virginia where he was hosted by the commander. The Dominican envoy to Washington, Pastoriza, had been very adept at setting up his visit and polishing up Trujillo’s image.

It should be pointed out that, during this period, the United States was involved in other countries in Central America, especially Nicaragua, where it had come to back what came to be the Somoza dynasty and the creation of military establishments beholden to the United States. The interest in the area was already linked to concerns about Italian and German activities in Central and South America, concerns that had become even more pronounced anxieties as they came to coincide with the rising of European fascism and Nazism.

FDR and the State Department began a systematic policy to block Axis influence and infiltration in the area.¹⁶ This was to be confirmed as the war began as German saboteurs landed on American shores and where Florida was considered to be a soft target for German activities.¹⁷ In fact the Germans saboteurs, who were brought ashore in that state, were caught and eventually executed. The American fear of Nazi activities was compounded by the large presence of German and Italian immigrant communities in Latin America and the Caribbean. Immigrant communities as a fifth column for foreign powers were not an unknown fear in the American political experience. In the 19th century it was “rum, Romanism, and rebellion. The echoes of the Irish battalion of the US army in Mexico, the St. Patrick’s brigade defecting to Santa Ana had yet to disappear. Irish immigrants had joined the US army in their conquest of Mexico. The Irish volunteers soon discovered the Mexicans were Catholics and many came to sympathize with fellow Catholics fighting protestant Yankees.  In fact in WWI the fear of German immigrants and their influence in the United States and incidentally Canada led both governments to look upon German speakers with great suspicion, to the extent that the German language which was quite common in North America practically disappeared and cities such as Berlin in Ontario came to be renamed with English names. Berlin, for example, became Kitchener after Lord Kitchener. Trujillo had ingratiated himself even more with Washington when he declared war on the Axis powers in December 1941 and cooperated militarily and logistically with the United States.¹⁸ This action had already been strengthened by, among other things, the extension of the lend-lease agreement to the Dominican Republic in August of 1941 and to other Latin American nations, thus enhancing American security in the Caribbean and Latin America.¹⁹ One of the strategic anxieties of the United States centered on the Panama Canal and its possible sabotage. The blocking of the canal would have impeded the transfer of American warships from the Atlantic to the Pacific and vice versa. Trujillo was quite aware of the potential American strategic necessities, which he adroitly leveraged. Among other things the Dominican Republic supplied food to Puerto Rico, thus cutting back the American logistic need to supply that island directly from the United States.

American policy makers were still remembering that American security had been threatened by German imperial influence during WWI in the Caribbean and Mexico, when Berlin had attempted to instigate a Mexican invasion of the United States when Mexico City was promised the return of Texas and parts of the Southwest in exchange for an alliance with the Central Powers. This episode came to be connected to the famous Zimmermann telegram.²⁰ Even before the Zimmermann telegram, instability in Mexico and the arrival of Mexican arms supplies to General Huerta, who had become the new president through a coup, had prompted Wilson to send Marines into that country following the outbreak of the Mexican revolution. In time a tense border situation even saw a Mexican bandit turned revolutionary leader, Pancho Villa, invade the United States and raid Columbus, New Mexico, an event that precipitated an American invasion of Mexico.

FDR’s Good Neighbor Policy entailed, paradoxically, a tolerance for any sort of government, democratic or non-democratic, leftist or rightist, so long as German or Italian influence was kept out.²¹ The American necessity to improve its relations with its southern neighbors mindful of constant American interventions in the Caribbean, Central America, and Mexico allowed Latin American states to gain concessions from Washington, as for example in the American assent to the nationalization of British and American oil companies in Mexico. Even Britain, however reluctantly due to the experience of seeing their oil companies being nationalized by the Bolshevik regime after 1918 without compensation, accepted the American policy of acquiescence to nationalization. The US accepted the nationalization of American oil companies in Mexico under the presidential leadership of Lazaro Cardenas who, following in the footsteps of Alvaro Obregon and Plutarco Elias Calles, finally accomplished the goal of Mexican revolutionaries in having the state fully control the natural resources of Mexico. Of course it was understood that just compensation would be paid out which the Mexican government dutifully accepted as part of its policies in taking over foreign businesses.

It should also be remembered that in this period Latin America felt all the pangs and pains of the Spanish Civil War. Republican and Nationalist Spain had supporters and opponents in the Americas. Whether in Bolivia, Chile, Argentina, or Mexico, the events of the Spanish peninsula from 1931 onward had profound repercussions to the extent that, eventually, hundreds of thousands Spanish refugees moved to Central American countries especially Mexico.²² The Spanish experience on both the left and the right influenced inevitably Latin American politics, thus in addition to the presence of the immigrant communities connected to Italy and Germany, the rise of local fascist movements came to be seen very suspiciously by Washington. As it is, it was the case, for example, in Mexico where the Catholic conservative reaction against the Mexican revolution’s secular and anti-clerical leanings came to be tinged with European fascist and corporativist ideas.²³ Even Trujillo’s Dominican Republic welcomed Spanish republican refugees though his regime had far more affinities with Franco’s order.  It was an example of Trujillo’s notion of “whitening” Dominican society. In fact he even came after World War II to welcome Hungarian freedom fighters and even Japanese immigrants.²⁴

The 1930s had seen the unfolding of a tragedy that was going to befall European Jewry. German and Austrian Jews had already begun leaving with the rise of Nazism and certainly Anschluss in Austria precipitated the flight of Austrian Jews.  Some European countries such as, Italy, France, Holland, Belgium, England, and the Czechoslovak republic, had taken political exiles at first but by then ordinary Jewish refugees. However, European countries and the United State were becoming increasing reluctant to receive refugees and Jewish refugees in particular.  As the record shows, societal and religious prejudices coupled with fears of adding to unemployment problems during the Depression became a harbinger of the destruction of European Jewry.²⁵

In the United States, Jewish organizations were rather reluctant to push openly for the admission of European Jews, fearing anti-Semitic backlashes and desiring to avoid embarrassing the Democratic administration in Washington that was overwhelmingly supported by the Jewish community.  The fear of an anti-Semitic backlash was also strengthened by the fact that Roosevelt’s administration included some influential Jews such as Henry Morgenthau, Jr. who was Secretary of the Treasury in 1934-1945 and Felix Frankfurter who had been nominated for the position of associate justice of the US Supreme Court by FDR in 1939.

American and international Jewish organizations had begun steering Jewish refugees toward Palestine where the British administration eventually came to have reservations about such immigration because of the systematic hostility of the native Arab population and Arab states. It resulted eventually in a white paper that called for severe reduction of Jewish immigration to Palestine.

Jews individually had tried to scramble out of Europe by moving outside the Continent, to destinations from China to Iran and Turkey and Latin America. Paradoxically, in Latin America the fear of Nazi and Fascist infiltration or subversion was heightened by the apprehension to provoke an American reaction, as in the 1930’s Washington became more fearful of German subversion in Latin America. Thus, Latin American countries saw some of their Judeo-phobic and anti-Semitic tendencies reinforced by a desire to strengthen their relations with the United States. It became even harder for European Jews to flee to South America, though one way or another some managed to get there.²⁶

As Latin American countries preferred Catholic immigrants, often Jews in Europe strove to either receive baptism in the Catholic church and/or to buy baptismal certificates to facilitate their entry into the new world. Thus Trujillo’s invitation to receive Jewish refugees, especially after the Evian conference, came to be very welcome in Washington and Europe. That conference took place in France and saw the participation of 31 countries and 24 observer voluntary organizations at the behest of President Roosevelt. It was an indicator of the increasing concerns and anxieties in Washington about the humanitarian crisis in Europe and at the conference, nations were called upon to accept Jewish refugees. The conference was a failure as no systematic international policy was developed and was another step toward the Holocaust, but the Dominican Republic had managed to cast a very positive image onto the American political scene by stating its willingness to accept refugees. That image that was to last the arrival of the few refugees.²⁷

Trujillo’s invitation had many political dimensions. For a start, he wanted American support for his regime, economic aid, and investment. Secondly, the idea of whitening Dominican society was a theme in the process of the modernization of the Dominican state. Paradoxically, in Latin America, especially in countries with large African and Amerindian populations, Jews were considered white as opposed to the stereotype in Europe and North America of Jews as a separate race: the “Semites”.

American Jewish organizations, sensitive to the problems of anti-Semitic social problems in the United States and the State Department, and also acutely aware of the ever increasing harassment and persecution of Jews in Europe, tried to open up channels formal and informal to help financially the emigration of Jews from Europe to Latin America. American Jewish organization which had already been involved with resettling Jews within the Soviet Union during the process of collectivization from the Ukraine to the Crimean and helped with the emigration of Jews to Palestine as agricultural settlers, saw in Trujillo’s offer another avenue for their philanthropic activities.

At the onset, implementation of the offer was faced with logistic and political problems. To the extent that only a few hundred people not hundreds of thousands ever made it to the Dominican Republic. One of the issues about resettling and saving Jews from Western Europe was that not only did many states reject them but often the Jews themselves wanted to be resettled in English speaking democratic and modern countries. Their knowledge of the Dominican Republic and the Caribbean was often scant, and of course the century old European desire to immigrate to North America was even more pronounced during this tragic period. The case of the Jewish refugees in the Dominican Republic should be relevant to an insight into the existential dimension of the Jewish immigrants who came from Europe. Not many Jews came. Some Jews from Austria and Germany moved to the Dominican Republic in the wake of persecution and discrimination in the Nazi controlled areas of Europe and many of them had no knowledge of the Dominican Republic or its exact socioeconomic conditions.²⁸

The Dominican Republic had a Jewish presence going back to the Spanish conquest and of course Sephardic Jews had come in the wake of European discoveries and settlements of the area. This certainly had been the case with Dutch Sephardic Jews who had settled in Surinam and northeast Brazil. In 1882, Dominican General Gregorio Luperon sought unsuccessfully to establish Russian Jews in the Republic as part of an ambitious agricultural program, as Jews by then were fleeing Russia to a better life in the Americas.²⁹

Generally speaking, to a large extent the Sephardic Jewish presence was characterized by integration and assimilation, to the extent that among their descendants were Dominican President Francisco Henriquez y Carvajal and his son Pedro Henriques Ureña.  The reality at the time was that European Jews on the continent wanted to move to North America as even Palestine came to be closed to their immigration due to the legitimate concerns of Britain about the Arab reaction to the Jewish settlements in Palestine.

Of the Jews who moved to the area of these agricultural settlements many hoped to move to the United States which they did in time. Some intermarried and some stayed behind. Some eventually developed the most efficient dairy farming operations on the island, providing a large percentage of the island’s dairy products. The idea of settling Jews as agricultural farmers did not work too well. Not because Jews are congenitally unable to do agriculture but rather given the background of the settlers who were middle class and sometimes upper middle class with a professional background, their interest in agriculture was rather minimal. Some had had dairy farming experience working on farms in Europe as they escaped Nazi persecutions to rural areas and they did parley that into economic preeminence on the island.  Paradoxically, in time their dairy operations were sold to a Mexican company. This community eventually disappeared though there are still a few members in the Dominican Republic who do recall the origins of their community.³⁰

Trujillo was very successful in leveraging Jewish concessions with the United States. His intentions were linked to his concerns about the whitening of the country in response to the fear of Haitian infiltration and penetration into Dominican society and certainly the potential contribution that skilled European immigrants could make to Dominican society. As it is the Dominican Republic did not become any whiter but certainly Trujillo was successful in propping up his influence and status in Washington for a long time in spite of reservations of many American diplomats, politicians, and political activists.³¹ His legacy was in many respects a bloody one with the massacre of Haitian workers and the assassination of political opponents. Trujillo was assassinated in May of 1961 with the collusion of the CIA. He had come to alienate the United States and other Latin American countries including Venezuela whose president he tried to assassinate, following Caracas’ denunciation of human rights violations by Trujillo.

A few years after his demise and a period of anarchy and instability, the Dominican Republic underwent a military coup in 1965 and an American invasion in response to Washington’s fear of a communist takeover of the island as had happened a few years earlier in Cuba. Again an American security concern prompted in this case the arrival of 42,000 American troops and the removal of a leftist leader, Juan Bosch, suspected of communist leanings.³² In time, the US managed to get Joaquin Balaguer to become president. He had served as a puppet president for Trujillo, who had basically controlled institutions through personalities that were loyal to him and others who were beholden to him for power, prestige, and economic status. However, the American presence did finally bring some degree of political stability, democracy, and freedom that has persisted to this day in that nation. Ironically, Balaguer a Trujillo man, came to be a democratically elected president who oversaw the transition to a democratic form of government and the establishment of a more legal rational system that eventually saw normal democratic elections without the threat of military coups or rebellions.

Conclusion
What is relevant in approaching American foreign policy in the area is the parallels in the US posture towards Axis influence and its development as a model for countering Soviet and communist influence after World War II, a point which has escaped most observers of US foreign policy during the cold war in Latin America. The war against communist influence real or imaginary in Latin America after 1945, especially after the establishment of the Rio pact in 1947 which called for a coordinated pan American front to fight Soviet intrusion in the new world, had remarkable analogies with the successful US attempt to impede German influence in Latin America.³³ In 1947 the policy makers in the State Department were still influenced by the successful American policies in defeating the Axis powers.³⁴ In fact, with the threat of communism, Trujillo was still seen as a valuable ally to the extent that in 1954 Francis Pegler, a conservative Hearst newspaper columnist claimed, “Rafael L. Trujillo is one of the great men of his time in the Western Hemisphere… I tell you the so-called dictatorship of Rafael Trujillo in this island fortress against Communism is much better than ours in one particular… Trujillo is much more sensible, practical and helpful to his people than Roosevelt, Truman or Eisenhower has been to ours.”³⁵ Trujillo was still riding high in America because of his clever association with American foreign policy and Washington’s search for security. His adroit understanding of American security needs, and American humanitarian concerns over the Jewish refugee problem of the 30s, had enhanced his image in America to the extent that, regardless of the misgivings of the liberal press and State Department officials over his dictatorial and sometimes bloody ways in holding on to power, he had come to accomplish far more in achieving full Dominican sovereignty than previous presidents in that island nation. 

Notes

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