34 – Dominican History

I ended my brief review of colonization in the Caribbean with the growth of the sugar empires and mentioned that sugar was an important element in the history of the Dominican Republic, although it had not always been.

The history of the Dominican Republic is fascinating but baroquely complex.

Dominicans are justly proud of their history. Throughout the country, one frequently sees images of the three men who are considered to be the fathers of the nation–Juan Pablo Duarte, Francisco del Rosario Sanchez, and Ramón Mella. They liberated the country from its occupying power in 1844. That power, however, wasn’t Spain, as many tourists might expect, but Haiti, which had taken control of the Spanish portion of the island in 1795.

After achieving liberation from Haiti, there was a period of chaos in the Dominican Republic which eventually provoked the citizens of the country to ask Spain to take them back as a colony. Spain did so, but ruled so poorly that it provoked further revolutionaries to take up arms in 1865, winning the country its second independence.

Technically the Dominican Republic has remained independent ever since. But by the beginning of the 20th century, the country was in serious debt to external banks, many of them in Europe. This raised concern in the United States that certain European nations would be tempted to resort to “gunboat diplomacy” and attempt to take control of the Dominican Republic in order to ensure its debts were paid. So, in 1916, the US invoked the Monroe Doctrine to justify invading the country in order to prevent European powers from doing so. That pre-emptive occupation lasted for eight years.

Compared to what England and France were doing in their colonies during this same period, the US occupation of the Dominican Republic was almost benign, but, Dominicans still had little control over their own resources or destinies. One of the first things the US did was remove the tariffs on food imports which had been established to protect Dominican farmers. This opened the country to cheap US farm products but devastated local farming. Then legislation was enacted to expropriate communal lands and the lands of small farmers. That land was needed for sugar production.

The Dominican Republic had been a major center for sugar production around the turn of the 17th century, but by the time of the Haitian occupation, their primary industry was raising cattle. In fact, in the early 19th century, the cattle population was forty-times that of the human population.

But World War I had ruined the European sugar beet industry, and sugar had become a valuable crop once more. Under the terms of the occupation it was easy for more than half the sugar mills in the Dominican Republic to come under the control of US corporations, but these mills required massive land holdings in order to be profitable. During the US occupation, those holdings grew to ten times what they had been. And 98% of the sugar they produced was exported back to the United States.

Not everyone was happy with the occupation, of course. Dispossessed landholders and others sought to fight the US occupiers and the sugar monopoly. The Americans considered these people terrorists, and in order to keep them under control, the US helped the Dominican government create the Guardia Nacional–which was trained by US military officials as a “counter-insurgency” force. The Guardia Nacional was headed by Rafael Trujillo. And when the US occupancy came to an end, Trujillo used his position in the Guardia to take control of the country and establish the first totalitarian state in the Americas.