I asked you to disprove something. You said everything I posted was easily disproved. I want to see how you go about disproving this.
The Empire and Ourselves, by Noam Chomsky
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In fact the Dominican Republic serves as a kind of illuminating case study to answer what I think is the crucial question: what Kennedy and the other planners mean when they say we have to avoid the danger of a Castro. The first Marine landing on the Dominican Republic was in the year 1800, so there's a long history.
I won't run through the nineteenth century but the most serious interventions began under Woodrow Wilson. Woodrow Wilson, as you all learn in school, was the great apostle of self-determination and he celebrated this doctrine, among other things, by invading the Dominican Republic and Haiti. In the Dominican Republic his warriors fought for six years to suppress the "damn Dagoes" as Theodore Roosevelt had described them. This was a vicious counterinsurgency campaign that has essentially disappeared from American history. The first major scholarly study of it just appeared in 1984, by Bruce Calder, University of Texas Press. Calder, in keeping with the conventions of American scholarship, regards this as a kind of an odd exception, an inexplicable departure from our path of righteousness. But he does describe what happened and I'll give you some of his description.
He says that Wilson intervened in the Dominican Republic in 1916 to block constitutional government and insure complete U.S. economic and military control. The behavior of the Marines, he says, was brutish by Dominican standards. They murdered, destroyed villages, they tortured, they created concentration camps which served as a slave labor supply for the sugar corporations. The end result was that the sugar companies, overwhelmingly American, owned about a quarter of the agricultural land while the population sank into misery and starvation.
Now, of course, all of this was done in self-defense. Everything we always do is in self-defense. But who were we defending ourselves against? Well it started in 1916 so we couldn't be defending ourselves against the Bolsheviks. So it turned out that we were defending ourselves against the Huns. There didn't happen to be any Huns there but that didn't matter.
When the Marines left, they placed the country in the hands of a National Guard trained by the United States. Trujillo quickly emerged and he became the dictator, one of the most rapacious and brutal of the many dictators that we've established under similar conditions throughout the region of our control.
Well, everything was okay for thirty or thirty-five years. Trujillo was praised in the United States as a forward-looking leader; for example, after he massacred fifteen or twenty thousand Haitians in one month in 1937 and carried out other similar actions against his own population. However, by the late 1950s this love affair was beginning to turn sour. Trujillo owned at that time about 70 to 80% of the economy, which means that the proper owners, mainly American-based corporations, were being pushed out. The CIA was authorized, or instructed, to carry out an assassination plot. Whether they did it or not, somebody did. He was assassinated.
At that point there was a democratic election, in 1962. Juan Bosch was elected. Juan Bosch was a Kennedy liberal. His policies were essentially those professed by John F. Kennedy. Kennedy immediately committed himself to undermine and destroy him. U.S. aid was stopped. The United States blocked the removal of Trujilloist officers. The U.S. military maintained their close contact with them. It was quite obvious that there would be a military coup given this U.S, insistence on maintaining the Trujilloist military system.
Bosch fought corruption, he defended civil liberties, he stopped police repression. He began programs to educate peasants and workers for true democratic participation. He actually succeeded under awful conditions in initiating an economic revival. It was plain that we had to "let him go," as Ambassador Martin said, and so we did. There was a military coup, quickly recognized by the United States. Well, at that point an economic decline set in, corruption increased, the repression increased--and all of this was fine. No objections.
That incident helps us get some understanding of the meaning of the term "Castro." Juan Bosch was one of those Castros who we have to oppose in favor of a Trujillo. Juan Bosch was not a Communist, he was a liberal democrat. He tried to institute a capitalist democracy, and that was intolerable to Big Brother.
Well, that's not the end of the story. In 1965 there was a constitutionalist military coup, attempting to return the Dominican Republic to constitutionalist rule to reinstate the legally elected president, Juan Bosch. Twenty-three thousand Marines were sent, who fought against the Constitutionalist forces. And then they stood by while the Dominican military, whom they had rescued, carried out a substantial slaughter of civilians. They stood by because the official line was that it would violate U.S. neutrality for them to intervene at that point. So, the threat of democracy was averted and the traditional order was restored.
The result this time was more serious. It was death squads, torture, mass starvation, the flight of about 20% of the population to the United States, and outstanding opportunities for U.S. investors who bought up pretty much the rest of the country--Gulf and Western being one, among others.
