Haitian–Dominican Counterpoint
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Haitian–Dominican Counterpoint Nation, State, and Race on Hispaniola Eugenio Matibag
HAITIAN–DOMINICAN COUNTERPOINT
© Eugenio Matibag, 2003. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. First published 2003 by PALGRAVE MACMILLANTM 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 and Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, England RG21 6XS. Companies and representatives throughout the world. PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN 0–312–29432–8 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Matibag, Eugenio. Haitian–Dominican counterpoint: nation, state, and race on Hispaniola/ Eugenio Matibag. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 0–312–29432–8 1. Dominican Republic—Relations—Haiti. 2. Haiti—Relations— Dominican Republic. 3. Dominican Republic—History. 4. Haiti—History. I. Title. F1938.25.H2 M38 2002 972.93—dc21
2002029247
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India. First edition: May 2003 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America.
Contents Preface and Acknowledgments
vii
Chapter 1 Introduction: Point Counterpoint
1
Chapter 2 Limits of Colonialism, 1492–1750
27
Chapter 3 The Great Opening, 1751–1801
51
Chapter 4 Haiti and Santo Domingo, 1802–44
81
Chapter 5 Territorial Imperatives, 1845–1929
111
Chapter 6 Transnational Dictatorships, 1930–85
139
Chapter 7 Close Encounters: Haitians in Dominican Literature
163
Chapter 8 Searching Out the Boundary, 1986–2003
187
Notes
217
Bibliography
245
Index
263
For my parents, Ramona and Dalmacio Matibag
Preface and Acknowledgments None of these sounds could exist by itself within the fugue or in any polyphonic system; none is an irreducible unity within the counterpoint; they form among themselves a harmonic ensemble of themes and responses that unfold, in opposition, in alliance, juxtaposition, and pursuit, until the piece’s end, an end that in a fugue is always arbitrary. —Antonio Benítez-Rojo, The Repeating Island: The Caribbean and the Postmodern Perspective1
he present composition on what I have called the Haitian–Dominican Counterpoint presents its own polyphonic system, one replete with both harmonic and dissonant arrangements of themes that compete for ascendancy, with ensembles that “unfold, in opposition, in alliance, juxtaposition, and pursuit.” The type of counterpoint that accounts for the multiple and proliferating narratives of Hispaniola’s two nations can be none other than the fugue, for it is the fugal antiphony that admits of dramatic call and response, flight and exchange, crossing and reversal. Like the art of the fugue, the island’s sociopolitical destiny can be analyzed as so many convergent–divergent narrative lines caught up in a puzzlelike unity of contrasts and affinities, continuities and discontinuities. The concept of counterpoint, insofar as it foregrounds the interplay of unity and difference, can focus a sociopolitical reading of culture to the extent that it can model the play of divergent perspectives within a system. That system, even if characterized as a crowded array of loose, contingent, and often improvised linkages, can be made to reveal itself as a sort of unfinished, even unconscious totality that ideologies seek to negate and repress. In contradiction to a society’s evolving system of ad hoc linkages, the dominant classes, espousing the dominant ideology, will demand and expect the enforcement of national boundaries and assert the definition of
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a national identity wherever those constructions can serve their interests. Serving the same dominant interests, the state is invested with the power to control the coercive apparatus necessary to maintain the order of power relations both within the national territory and with other nations. Previous studies have recognized the manner in which such enforcement and definition occur along a temporal axis, working through sociopolitical processes of cultural exclusion and differentiation. What has been overlooked in the study of national relations and identities is the way they are constructed in a spatial dimension, the manner in which they define the meaning of the national identity and nationhood by their contradistinction to the image of an Other with regard to the terms of place, region, location, interaction, and movement. Within the conceptual framework of spatiality, identity and difference appear as constituted geographically as well as historically. So framed, geographical dispositions and differences, like political processes, will display the effects of power. Soja and Hooper (1993) underscore this complicity between hegemonic interest and differentiation in asserting, The cultural politics of difference, whether old or new, arise primarily from the workings of power—in society and on space in both their material and imagined forms. Hegemonic power does not simply manipulate naïvely given differences between individuals and social groups, it actively produces and reproduces difference as a key strategy to create and maintain modes of social and spatial division that are advantageous to its continued empowerment. At the same time, those subjected, dominated, or exploited by the workings of hegemonic power and mobilized to resist by their putative positioning, their assigned “otherness,” struggle against differentiation and division.2
To explicate the workings of power in differentiation and boundarysetting is to uncover the logic underlying the constitution of Otherness. The national Self, in accord with this logic, is created in the division and distancing of that Self from the foreign Other. Self and Other, in the case of Hispaniola, are defined, or “positioned,” by spatialized representations that play a crucial role in the securing and maintenance of power at the expense of subjugated Others. Yet, in contradiction to the operations of individuating, naming, and assigning that characterize a political culture of difference, there emerges, between the national Self and the foreign Other, a third term, another figure that is neither one nor the other, and yet both. One representative instance of this third term is the fact of the borderlands. Neither Haitian nor Dominican, and yet both, an interstitial and syncretic culture grows in
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the Haitian–Dominican borderlands, assuming a life of its own. Yet such a culture stands out not so much between borders, David E. Johnson (1997) suggests, as within borders, nor is it limited geographically to the zone of the national frontiers. For borderland cultures do not so much erase the borders: “they multiply [them].”3 Borders proliferate, reduplicate themselves both on the margins of the national territory but also in the heart of each society. The unreflective dualism of the dominant ideology would, on the contrary, lump each nation’s populace into the presumably united masses of “us” set in opposition against “them.” State-sponsored Manichaeanism would proscribe the existence of the borderlands, dictating instead the clear political division of sovereign territories and also the code of the differing and opposed ethnicities to which the two national populaces putatively belong. Yet against this hegemonic dualism, another style of thinking, one that I would call contrapuntal, can guide us heuristically in our search, not only for the obvious differences between nations, but also for the covert if, at times, transitory identifications that borders simultaneously frustrate as they engender. My thanks go out to friends and family who shared time, advice, encouragement, homes, food, cars, and company as I traveled the roads of research toward completion of this project. Such friends and family were you, José Alcántara Almánzar, Miguel Barnet, Leslie Bary, Eduardo González, Manuel Rueda, Arthur Konar, David Cayón, Walter Morris, Sergio Solís Tavera, Ricardo de la Fuente Ballesteros, Kathy Noftsger León, Susan Vega, Madeleine Henry, Marleny González, Rita Urrutia de Guyader, Héctor Cárdenas and Cecilia Escalante, Anna Marie and Charles Snyder, John and Leticia Schmitten, José and Julie Matibag. Zoila Yadira Guerra de Castillo worked diligently on the index, and Keith Povey on the editing. Primii inter pares were the friends and colleagues of the Straw Dogs group, all of whom provided valuable critique: Christopher Lee, A. Whitney Sanford, Robert Baum, Dawn Stinchcomb, and especially Michelle Mattson. Thanks also to the patient personnel of the Biblioteca Nacional of Santo Domingo, the Biblioteca República Dominicana, the libraries of the Universidad Autónoma de Santo Domingo and Iowa State University, and the Ames Public Library. In the beginning, Mario Salvador and Maritza Guerrero opened wide the doors of la Ciudad Primada. Wayne Pedersen recovered many a lost and lonely volume of forgotten lore. Wayne Osborn later on provided thread through the labyrinth, and Jim Dow helped to wind up loose ends. To all of you, merci and gracias. Any defects or errors in this text of course have to be my own. And from beginning to end, Karen, Cris, Tessa: Your love knew no boundaries, crossed every border with me.
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Chapter 1
Introduction: Point Counterpoint
And all of this happens on an Antillean island divided into two countries, and in each one people are scourged by man and the whips of those who rule. —Freddy Prestol Castillo, El Masacre se pasa a pie 1 Ahora mismo y aquí Están buscando su yo Santo Domingo y Haití. —Manuel Cabral, “La Isla Saqueada”2
hey are separate and unequal: Haiti has a predominantly black, French patois-speaking population; the Dominican Republic, a predominantly mestizo or mulatto, Spanish-speaking population. Apart from one another, yet each one occupying a part of the same island, the two countries of Hispaniola have been called “two tragic twins sharing the same craggy rock,” and “conjoined siblings” so dissimilar that, between them, “no dialogue can be established.”3 The two countries’ “shared insularity,” comments another observer, “has been fraught with a history of antagonism.”4 Others have likened the two countries’ troubled relations to the fighting of gamecocks. This is the metaphor elaborated by another commentator, Michele Wucker, in Why the Cocks Fight: Dominicans, Haitians, and the Struggle for Hispaniola (1999). Wucker’s book offers the traditional image of the pelea de gallos as a way of characterizing the aggression that seems to dominate the history of relations between Haiti and the Dominican
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Republic. In the analogy, each contending rooster that is placed to fight in the arena—with beak, talons, and taped-on spurs at the ready—has no choice but to claw and peck his adversary in a bloody fight to the death. Wucker extends the metaphor: “Like the gamecocks, the two nations of Hispaniola share a history of violence that has been compounded by their confinement.”5 The contenders of the deathmatch are made to fight for reasons biological, social, economic, and spatial. Metaphor has its limits, however. The analogy between the cockfight and Haitian–Dominican relations may go far in shedding light on the history of Hispaniola’s dilemma, but it does so while eclipsing other significant aspects of those relations, even confounding the issue by offering a reductionist paradigm, one that emphasizes antagonisms and conflict at the cost of overlooking other kinds of interaction. The cockfight metaphor, that is to say, may conceal as much as it reveals of the nature of a complex situation. True, the cocks must fight, Haiti and the Dominican Republic must confront one another in an ongoing contest for land, power, and resources. Yet a deeper mystery lies beyond the conflicts of the surface, operating through persistent yet largely unrecognized interrelations between adversaries, in the hidden linkages that have united their fates even when their animosity appeared at its most belligerent. The optic that sees the two nations as joined entities occupying the same insular space can also perceive the ties that have connected the two republics throughout their shared history. But it would take a major shift in perspective to prepare the way for reconstructing the precedents and bases of integration—a vision that must challenge not only previous interpretations but even the very attitude of hostile mistrust that persists between the two countries. The task of acknowledging such linkages would call for a new kind of frontier thesis, one that, although cognizant of persistent hostility between Haitian and Dominican peoples, can place that secular history of antagonism against a background of reciprocal influence and interdependence between Haitian and Dominican nations. This thesis forms the focus of the present study, whose purpose is to analyze the complex integrations found in what can be called an insular system, one organized according to the processes of intrinsic and extrinsic differentiation peculiar to the human geography of Hispaniola. As a notable feature of the insular system, the 232.5-mile frontier that today separates the two countries also conjoins them in an often complementary, sometimes violent, always problematic association. “Apart from positive and exceptional moments of solidarity,” writes Dominican political scientist María Elena Muñoz (1995), “the Dominican Republic and Haiti have lived united back-to-back, rejecting and ignoring one another
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because of this charge of aggressivity that has colored their relations.” Though appearing like an immutable barrier on the insular landscape, the Haitian–Dominican border also constitutes a rocky interface allowing what has been, since colonial days, a traffic in goods and a flow of people, culture, and language from west to east and back again. Muñoz goes on to cite exceptional moments of solidarity across the border: citizens of the two opposed countries, for instance, collaborated during the 1865 War of Restoration, when the Dominicans were aided by the Haitians in the successful fight to restore sovereignty to a people that had been recolonized by Spain. Haitians and Dominicans collaborated again, in 1871, in their combined resistance to the subsequent attempt, led by President Buenaventura Báez, to annex the Dominican Republic to the United States. Such mutual support reiterated past instances of cooperation and also opened the way for future rapprochements. The message formed in such collaborative struggles for independence, concludes Muñoz, “is doubly valid, for its clarity and its permanence: all that occurs here is reflected there and all that happens there is reflected here.”6 Such reflections reveal the structure of a persistent mutuality, a systematic relationality built into the affairs of the Dominican Republic and Haiti. What would the island of Hispaniola look like if viewed as a loosely articulated system? That is the question this book seeks to answer as it surveys the insular space shared by Haiti and the Dominican Republic throughout their parallel histories. The systemic approach, here proposed, would see beyond the familiar story of hostilities, looking for particular connections to reveal a lesser-known, holistic narrative of interdependencies and reciprocal influences that have shaped each country’s identity. Within its inclusive framework, the account of discontinuous linkages connecting the two countries would have to resemble not so much a cockfight, the traditional metaphor, as a serial and polyrhythmic counterpoint. Without dwelling for long on the implications of his statement, Alan Cambeira in his Quisqueya la Bella (1997) reflects in similar fashion on the ties that have bound the two societies together: [O]ne cannot possibly view or begin to understand Dominican history and culture without fully realizing or recognizing the intricately interwoven textures and threads flowing between the two neighboring cultures, Dominican and Haitian. Their evolving societies on the jointly shared island of Hispaniola have been quite intimately interconnected since the earliest periods in the island’s history.7
Although falling short of taking the pan-insular perspective, Cambeira’s study aims to “delineate the ethnohistorical processes involved in the
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formation of Dominican culture,” processes that in reality involved cultures of both countries throughout the 500 years of their shared history.8 What difference, then, would the pan-insular perspective make? Not only national cultures, but national cultures in their interactive evolution would come within the purview of the transfrontier and systemic analysis proposed here. To develop a sociopolitical theory on the insular system would mean inferring the ground-rules, or laws of motion, by which the two island countries have affirmed some deeper common identity throughout the history of their conflictive-cooperative association. With Hispaniola’s sociopolitical genesis in view, attention to contrapuntal relations within this framework will allow an accounting of linkages, influences, and mutual impacts; it will also acknowledge not only differentiations and divisions, but the adjacencies and continuities that have occurred in relations between the two countries. There is an interweaving of textures as well as a breaking of threads on this view; it would have to accommodate contradiction: fragmentation in unity, conflict in complementary. Its narrative account would have to resemble in significant ways an ensemble of themes and responses that is both harmonious and dissonant, at times continuous and symmetrical as a melody, but at other times, as edgy and jangled as a tone row. That narrative would have to be multiple and yet one: a polyrhythmic counterpoint. The task of composing that counterpoint takes on a greater urgency when we consider the double fact that dominates the insular problematic: the socioeconomic failure of Haiti and the relative, related success of the Dominican Republic. So extreme is the imbalance, that the Haitian crisis seems to cry out for aid from the Dominican quarters. Given the relative (but far from complete) success of Dominican society to provide for the needs of its citizens, the path to a solution would seem to lie in the direction of a new kind of relationship, one in which the Dominican Republic could take the role of co-advocate or sponsor in joint development projects. Such assistance has been promised of late, if mainly in the form of openings to negotiations. Other solutions to the Haitian crisis—the four I’s of Isolationism, Intervention, Insurrection, Immigration—have met with dead ends; the crisis now requires an approach centered about a fifth I: that of Integration. The approach of Integration is validated by the model of Paul Farmer’s (1994) analysis, which views Haiti as “enmeshed in a larger social and economic system,” one in which the Dominican Republic plays a prominent role. But it is the larger framework of interrelations between groups and entities, and not the focus on the isolated units of country or even island, that yields the most accurate account of historical processes that determine what happens in Haiti and the
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Dominican Republic. Farmer’s admission, “That system’s boundaries are ill-defined and shifting, certainly,” suggests that boundaries within the island, along with those setting its outer limits, must be viewed from the perspective that grasps the working of a dynamic and ever-changing international “nation-state system.”9 At an international colloquium on the Haitian–Dominican problematic taking place at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma in Mexico City during 19–23 July 1974, Haitian sociologist Gérard Pierre-Charles (1974) established the essential distinction between the nation and the state as the key to demystifying central concepts in the border question. In the process that created the “national duality” of the island, argued Pierre-Charles, the nation is the more fundamental of the two terms, for it constitutes the basis of common characteristics and mutual interests on which future linkages between the two countries’ economies and governments could be founded. According to the same model, the Dominican state, the sphere controlled by government, appears as the servant of an oligarchy that has consistently elevated the long-standing prejudice against the Haitian Other to the level of orthodoxy. The dominant interpretation, which has attained the status of an official ideology, sees the rise of the Dominican Republic as taking the form of a heroic struggle against the threat of Haiti. This version has its counterpart on the Haitian side, in the mythified Haitian struggle for liberation. Pierre-Charles further argued that the confusion of nation with state has constituted a stumbling block to the evolution of the Dominican national identity, inhibiting the formation of a more rational, mutually beneficial alliance between the two polities.10 Historian Patrick Bellegarde-Smith (1974, 1985) elaborates the significance of the nation/state opposition in the context of recent political history. The “revolutions” that put the noirs Dumarsais Estimé (1946–50) and François Duvalier (1957–71) in the Haitian presidency represented a limited enfranchisement of the new middle classes in the political process. The movement of Haitian Negritude in this context constituted a vindication of blackness in a dual sense: as a broadening of political inclusion to empower this privileged sector of the population, and as a program of cultural, though not political, democratization. The state’s reorganization at these junctures aimed at incorporating the national institutions appropriate to the group’s interests. Bellegarde-Smith follows the lead of his forebear, Dantes Bellegarde (historian and Minister of Education, Agriculture, and Cults under Dartiguenave), in referring to this particular “widening of the circle of political participation” as an “ ‘Africanization’ of Haitian state structures.”11 The distinction between state and nation undergoes a radical revision in the writings of Haitian political scientist Michel-Rolph Trouillot, who
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identifies the nation of Haiti not with the noir middle class but with its peasant majority. This is the constituency that demands to be represented in the political process, as manifested in the revolution of 1986, and to be served by a state that is not antagonistic but rather responsive to its needs. Trouillot asserts in his Haiti: state against nation (1990), “The long overdue reconciliation of state and nation requires the fundamental understanding that, in Haiti, the peasantry is the nation.”12 The key distinction between state and nation in the thought of Pierre-Charles, BellegardeSmith, and Trouillot implies the potential, though not the actuality, of a congruence between the two terms in the democratic nation-state. Taking into account this distinction, the chapters that follow will survey the counterpoint of Haitian and Dominican relations from colonial times to modern times; they will chart the manner in which the “formation of the border”13 has figured in the ethnohistory and the politics of nationbuilding on the “anarchic” island. In order to explicate the movements taking place between national territories and within the statist demarcations of territorial limits, the present study offers a contrapuntal narrative of the processes that have created and reproduced the border as both sociopolitical fact and epistemological framework. The approach taken here is therefore aimed at explaining the origins of comparative advantage and disadvantage, at exploring the paths of reciprocal influence and mutual dependence as it traces the genesis of insular interactions since the colonial period. With regard to this particular Antillean island divided into two countries, there are two interrelated question that concern us most: (1) How did two nations rise on the same island? and (2) Being two, how did they interrelate? Focusing on contrapuntal relations within the island’s geography, the answers to such questions should reveal the ways in which nationalist and capitalist interests have produced and reproduced a border that would legitimize power structures in a spatial dimension.14 The need to write an alternative account of Haitian–Dominican ethnohistory that could play up and even “allegorize” such integration has not entirely been neglected in previous research; cultural ties between the two countries have already received attention in other accounts. Dominican writer Pedro Mir, for one, has affirmed what he finds to be a “unitarian current” running between the two nations. In Las dos patrias de Santo Domingo (1997), Mir unearths the foundations for an integral insular identity. Three broad aspects of a shared history comprise those foundations: (1) the territorial community (2) economic interdependence (3) contacts that were created by clandestine economic activity15
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The two peoples of Hispaniola shared the common identity of peoples sharing the same bounded territory of the island. They contacted one another, communicated with one another, intermarried, produced culture, and, as a basis for all the rest, did business both licit and illicit with one another. Mir’s account was not, however, the first to lay out the bases of the insular identity. Anticipating the unitarian lines surveyed by Mir, Franklin J. Franco, in the introduction to his Santo Domingo: Cultura, política e ideología (1974), had already declared as his purpose “the definitive destruction of the old stereotyped interpretations of our culture and the appearance of the revalorization of what is authentically Dominican.”16 Exposing the racist ideology through which la haitianidad, “Haitianity,” has been represented in Dominican society, Franco denounced the interpretive distortions of a culture imposed by a dependent economy. The culture of dependency, Franco indicated, legitimized an alienating ideology of racial superiority based on the valorization of foreign cultures, i.e., those of Europe and North America, which it considered superior to its own. An authentic national culture would comprise, rather, “the entirety of the customs, beliefs and legends of the popular classes.”17 The “rescue” of national culture and a “national liberation” in the cultural sphere would consist in this view of nothing less than the vindication of the people’s “authentic values,” values drawing sustenance from, among other sources, the African roots of Dominican culture, roots that however unacknowledged are shared with the neighboring country to the west. Valorizing therefore the African stratum of Dominican culture and its intermixings with elements from the other culture, Franco goes on to identify the moments in the history of Hispaniola when its two nations achieved degrees of unification or integration, laying the foundations for a culture common to both.
Point Counterpoint Like the twinned protagonists and antagonists of the stories written by Jorge Luis Borges, Haiti and Santo Domingo discover at key moments of their shared history that they are joined as one character, with the one country doubling the other, albeit in unbalanced and unequal fashion. Yet in spite and because of their differences, they are indeed searching for their I, their selfhood in common, as Manual Cabral asserts in “La Isla Saqueada,” in the process of seeking a common ground that underlies the phenomena of division and individuation. The present study follows Mir and Franco’s lead in critiquing the orthodox frame of reference in which Hispaniola appears as a divided island. As we elaborate a sociopolitical
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analysis of Hispaniola along ethnohistorical lines, we will account for the ways in which Santo Domingo and Saint-Domingue became, through a unifying stream of both conscious and unconscious moves, the secret sharers of a unique, complex, articulated drama of crossed destinies. This task of recuperation has pragmatic consequences in the present: current dialogues between representatives of the two nations indicate their constituencies’ willingness to build ties of cooperation and interdependence, thus challenging in political reality the traditional attitudes based on the stereotype of two insular antagonists set against each other like gamecocks in the arena. Taking its cue from such gestures, this study will brush against the grain of received ideas that consider division and enmity to have constituted the norm; it will offer instead the alternative perspective, which opens up a discursive space for exploring the precedents and bases of such bilateral relations. The objectives realized of late by the two countries in consultation with one another will be examined in the last chapter of this book (Chapter 8), but they also inform the earlier chapters by signaling a different kind of reading of the past: one that would historicize and problematize the simplistic dualism of previous studies, suggesting a less familiar object of analysis that the idea of a counterpoint can effectively address. Within the framework that considers the geopolitical destiny of the island as a whole, the features of region, place, location, interaction, and movement come under a new light. Those features, viewed as parts of a loosely articulated system, participate in a series of conjunctures involving the two countries on both macrostructural and microstructural levels. Manifesting the confluence of forces and the combining of circumstances, these conjunctures are marked by the crises that altered the function of the boundary between the two nations: 1. The first major conjuncture occurred throughout the island’s colonial periods and appeared in the interrelations of a diverse population composed of French settlers, Spanish colonizers, the aboriginal inhabitants, and the enslaved Africans. Those interrelations included confrontations originating in disputes over contested territories, but they also embraced collaborative linkages between the diverse groups of Santo Domingo and Saint-Domingue. 2. The second of the major conjunctures is figured in the event and consequences of the Haitian Revolution; that is, the revolution that founded the Republic of Haiti but also drew the colony of Santo Domingo into a complex dialectic of identifications, separations, and distantiations with relation to its agnate territorial neighbor. Cross-national encounters
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during this period, which began in the mid-eighteenth century and ended with the 22-year domination of Santo Domingo by Haiti, had much to do with the definition of the two nations’ identities, precisely in and through their differential relations with one another. 3. The events of the third major conjuncture were the post-revolutionary struggles to define national identities within the insular space. Once the Dominicans gained independence by separation from Haiti, Haiti attempted to defend and extend its sovereignty through a series of invasions and thereby aimed to establish the integrity of a single island republic. The Dominican state attempted as well to defend its sovereignty from the Haitian threat by unprecedented means: this recourse was to submit voluntarily to the rule of a colonizing power that would protect the Dominicans from a takeover by their territorial neighbors. The subsequent annexation by Spain (1861–5), however, provoked a Dominican nationalist movement that involved the same insular neighbors. Haitian leaders and combatants were only too willing to join in the fight against a European power that, having recolonized the neighboring republic, endangered their own independence. After Dominican sovereignty was restored, yet another challenge to the definition of national identities and jurisdictions presented itself with a series of U.S. economic and military interventions into the two countries. The rebirth of the island’s sugar industries began at the end of the nineteenth century and underwent an accelerated growth during the U.S. occupations of Haiti (1914–35) and the Dominican Republic (1915–24). Not only did the U.S. hegemony undermine the sovereignty of the two countries, but so did the fact of Haitian labor, which moved en masse across national boundaries in search of employment and thus threatened to destabilize the concept of Dominican and Haitian citizenship. 4. The double dictatorships—31 years of Trujillo’s rule in the Dominican Republic, overlapping for just barely three years with the nearly 29 years of the Duvaliers’ reign in Haiti—produced a fourth conjuncture, one based the Dominican society’s increasing dependence on Haitian migrant labor and the shifting and contradictory strategies taken by Trujillo’s government to control and manage that labor force. The complicity of national leaders during the successive governments of François and Jean-Claude Duvalier further underscored the tension-filled interdependence of the two republics. 5. In the post-Trujillo, post-Duvalier periods, the two nations of Hispaniola struggle for survival both within and against the structures set in place during the double dictatorships. In recent years they have found themselves repeatedly challenged by increasingly diversified and decentered
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economies dominated by transnational capital. To meet the challenge, some progressive sectors of both Haiti and the Dominican Republic have taken tentative initial steps towards reconciliation of antagonisms and the building of economic, political, and cultural linkages aimed at benefiting both countries. From the contentious beginnings to the cautious present, Haiti and the Dominican Republic’s shared history of insular confinement, competing colonialisms, and ethnic animosities displays what Elena Muñoz (1995) has called a “dynamics of complementarity,”18 one built on the division but consisting also of economic and cultural arrangements that have connected the disparate centers of the insular system.19 Accounting for this complementarity, the systemic view allows that the Haitian/Dominican binary was always a functional opposition, with both antagonistic and “neighborly” aspects. The combative twins of the dyad refused, since the beginnings of Hispaniola’s colonization, to remain in their corners: they insisted, rather, on getting out, on transgressing the lines of separation, and, with each crossing, reconfiguring the relation. Such dynamics operated not only between nations, but within each of them. Transcending the frontier but also accounting for its particularity, the Haitian–Dominican counterpoint appears as a complex orchestration of communications and productions, a veritable network of reflections and responses that constituted not the exception to the rule but rather the rule itself. One country to the other had significance that collapsed or confounded the binary opposition: each to the other was haven, market, pays-arrière; a source of labor, a site of employment; the home of the confederate, cohort, socio secreto and frère de la côte. Despite these semi-covert ties, the duality inherent to the Haitian– Dominican condition has nonetheless dominated the island’s counterpoint of interweaving histories since the early sixteenth century. On either side of the shifting border, a sense of collective identity—what Otto Bauer calls a “community of character”20—formed itself by way of negation, on the basis of perceived differences from the image of identity projected upon the insular Other. Among the Dominicans today, a nervous nationalism invokes the specter of occupation, and this feeds on an anti-Haitian prejudice. This is a nationalism inculcated in the schools, that erects a great “wall” of xenophobic culture set up to keep out the “invaders.”21 A pervasive antihaitianismo in Dominican society, as Ernesto Sagás (2000) correctly defines it, has functioned in at least three ways: (1) to justify discrimination of Haitians; (2) to diffuse class tensions among Dominicans
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by diverting attention from social inequalities; and (3) to eclipse and overpower other ideologies that have attempted to challenge its standing as the dominant world-view. As the ideology propagated by the dominant classes, el antihaitianismo plays a key role moreover in masking what amounts to a collusion between Dominican leaders and Haitian authoritarian regimes. “Rather than a foreign policy directive,” specifies Sagás, “antihaitianismo ideology is really a domestic political tool, geared toward the maintenance of an inequitable social order and the preservation of elite privileges.” Although seemingly foreign-directed in its expressed animus toward the Haitian, antihaitianismo’s domestic thrust is the more significant, for it “confuses the foreign and domestic political realms in its ultranationalist discourse, just as it confuses race, nation, and ethnicity.”22 Viewing the racial and economic commonalities that tie the Haitians and Dominicans together in one history, Sagás’s analysis identifies the center of antihaitianismo in what he calls the “confusion of categories” and thus strikes at the heart of the racist ideology that falsely legitimizes existing inequities and power structures in Dominican society. The subjectivist focus of the same analysis, however, largely overlooks the geopolitical and social structures authorizing that ideology, structures that should be addressed in order to ascertain the existence and viability of other perspectives. The former slaves of Saint-Domingue fought to win their liberty and, after winning it, struggled to defend it by endeavoring to establish the indivisibility and political unity of the island. To do so, the Haitians were willing to defy the might of the worldly powers united in their efforts to deny the humanity of the former slaves and to crush the fledgling republic they had built from the ashes of Promethean revolt. The Dominicans, on the other hand, placed their country under the protectorate of a foreign power in order to defend their territory from Haitian aggression; in so doing, they in turn endangered the freedom and autonomy of the Haitians and all the other hard-won gains of their revolution. Jean Price-Mars (1953) rightly proposes a study of “the parallelism of this double attitude.”23 The double attitude should be studied indeed, but also problematized: the interactions between the two nations contradicted the simplistic binary, creating a complex situation in which Dominicans opposed other Dominicans and in which Haitians opposed other Haitians. That is to say, those of one country who held a stake in dealings between the two nations articulated and acted upon beliefs and convictions that ran counter to those of others of the same country. Manichean dualism cannot explain the manner in which peoples of the two nations fought complicated struggles, sometimes in complicity with those of the other nation, often at cross-purposes with their own compatriots.
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How then to make sense of the Haitian–Dominican antithesis while recognizing its unitarian currents? To examine the nature of its parallelism, but also to historicize it; to scan its double attitude but also alternative attitudes; to explore duality but also the series of breaches and branchings that contradict it: this is the way to critique the Manichean logic whose simplification of the Haitian–Dominican problematic has dominated both public and academic discourse on the subject. A ethnohistorical examination of the double attitude will reveal how hidden agendas underlying Haitian–Dominican interactions exceeded the binary scheme and often, though not always, originated in the plottings of external powers. Early in its history, the Haitian Republic’s aggressions against Santo Domingo found support in Bonaparte’s plan to establish a French empire in the Americas, a project that might have succeeded had the French succeeded in recapturing their most prized overseas colony. Other agendas in this contrapuntal narrative have internal origins, but these are always mixed with the external. A significant root of antagonisms has been the previously mentioned migration of Haitian workers—braceros—to the sugar plantations of the east: a movement that had its causes in the neocolonialist demand for cheap labor for the harvest. By the 1990s, economic pressure or political peril had pushed one Haitian in six not only eastward but to other receiver countries: not only the Dominican Republic, but Cuba, the Bahamas, Venezuela, Colombia, Mexico, Canada, the United States, and France. Haitians have also migrated to African countries that include Togo and Zaire. Today, one of every four inhabitants of French Guiana is of Haitian origin or descent.24 The most rational destination, in many cases, remains the Dominican Republic, across the border, but this catalog of receiver countries provides but one indication of the scope of the issue of Haitian emigration. As Paul Farmer (1994) illustrates with the case of one Yolande Jean—a Haitian refugee consigned to an HIV prison at the U.S. Naval base at Guantánamo, Cuba—the Haitian crisis has roots that extend far beyond the confines of Haiti and even Hispaniola: As reflected in the life of Yolande Jean, Washington, Guantánamo and Port-au-Prince are all part of the same civilization. The very existence of Guantánamo—a U.S. military base in the middle of a small country supposedly hostile, a threat, to the United States—reminds us that the real unit of analysis required to understand processes taking place in the Caribbean is not the nation-state, but, rather, complex systems tied intimately to an international capitalism dominated, at the moment, by U.S. capital and U.S. policies.25
The workings of those complex systems forms the broader framework of the present study, in which Haiti and the Dominican Republic form
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a subsystem, an insular system inextricably linked to the networks dominated by U.S. capital and U.S. policies.
Border Crossings Joining two nations’ parallel histories within complex systems, marking the place of their difference within broader patterns of differentiation, the border has figured preeminently in the politics of the divided island. For one Dominican analyst, the border problem is “the most transcendent and difficult issue” faced by the Dominican nation; for another, it is “the national neuralgic problem.”26 Competing claims on the island’s territory have contested time and again the reach of political jurisdictions, the rights of territorial domains, and the legitimacy of property titles. Patriotic and ethnocentric definitions of national and cultural identity have been formulated with reference to the border. Since the 1980s, westto-east migration over the border has continued to exacerbate the traditional enmity. Many Haitians cross illegally, earning them the name an ba fils, literally meaning “under the wire,” a common way of entry. Seeking employment in the jobs that Dominicans refuse to accept despite a 30 percent unemployment rate, Haitian workers, called braceros or congos by Dominicans, continue to provide the host economy with the cheapest of cheap labor, and they work under conditions that many have likened to slavery. Economic distrust on both sides fosters prejudice; prejudice inflames jingoism; and jingoism fuels militarism. What the ideology of racial difference and antagonism overlooks are other dimensions of the problematic, ones that a contrapuntal study can elaborate as it questions the centrality of the west–east dichotomy in the Haitian–Dominican geography. If the reductionist Haitian–Dominican binary does not adequately account for the complex play of differential forces throughout Hispaniola’s ethnohistory, what is needed to make sense of its dynamic of complementarity is the critical strategy, mentioned in the Preface, that Edward Soja and Barbara Hooper (1993) have called a “cultural politics of difference,” one whose aim would be “to break down and disorder the binary itself, to reject the simple structure of closed dualisms through a (sympathetic) deconstruction and reconstitution that allows for radical openness, flexibility and multiplicity.”27 By this cultural politics, difference itself is seen to issue forth as a primary product of the border, inasmuch as “[t]he border gives difference, gives to us the place of the other.”28 The notion of culture itself implies that the place of the Other is given not only in geographical location but in displaceable
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cultural sites; it is situated in regions of diverse human interaction. Dominican poet Manuel Rueda has written cogently of a “border mentality” that has gripped the island’s inhabitants in the narrowest definitions of national identity.29 Caught up in this mentalidad de la frontera, the Dominican sees Otherness as elsewhere, in “Haiti,” but looks “blindly” upon the Otherness that maintains a hold within the Selfsame. The Other is encountered in the Dominican bateyes, or canecutters’ compounds, of the Central Romana; or in the Mercado Modelo of Santo Domingo’s Avenida Duarte, a gathering point for multitudes of Haitians. Difference cuts not only both ways, in binary fashion, but every which way. Not only was the island torn in two by colonial conflict: each separate nation found itself riven by internal forces that allied themselves, through multifarious associations and linkages, to forces on the other side and the outside. Migration, like that of the Haitian bracero, has contributed and contributes every day to breaking down the binary, further linking up sectors in a moving crossborder network and connecting points in the insular market system. Scrutinizing the formation of the border itself as a historical phenomenon, we are therefore struck not so much by its permanence as by its permeability. It constitutes not only a limit or terminus, however: the frontier becomes a region unto itself; the border has expanded into a borderland. This is because in marking the division between nations and cultural regions, the border creates its own unique site, a place in-between. Boundaries are “factors determining location,” Morrill (1970) observes, and so they “foster special development: military posts, customs services, and sometimes border towns to take advantage of price, wage, product, and other differences.”30 More than a division, the border has become an interstitial region for interaction. Through and across their border, Santo Domingo and SaintDomingue never separated absolutely: their distinct peoples created linkages of trade, communication, kinship, alliance, and custom. The border’s selective openness to what was Other thus admitted, and continues to admit, admixtures and syncretic fusions—of, for example, Dominican culture with Haitian crossovers and African remnants—on the most intimate of levels. Previous studies of what is idiosyncratic, national, and “uniquely creole” to Dominican culture have downplayed its commonality with what is Haitian, especially with regard to the African elements of Haitian culture. Yet culture itself, as with Haitian culture or Dominican culture at their very roots, is a phenomenon that originates in and inhabits an interstitial zone, one in which boundary crossing repeatedly negates delimitation, where demarcations are erased only to be reinscribed. Among the cultural manifestations of this border-crossing, Afro-Dominican religion provides some striking displays of syncretic
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intermixings. Called “Dominican Vodoun” by researcher Carlos Esteban Deive (1986), the Gagá religion derives its name from the Rará branch of Haitian belief and practices. Groups of Gagá performers, musicians and dancers primarily, are often seen to travel in comparsa processions through the villages of the borderlands, especially during the Holy Week observances leading up to Easter Sunday. June Rosemberg, a North American anthropologist and author of El Gagá: Religión y Sociedad de un Culto Dominicano (1979), highlights the transcultural nature of Gagá as it is practiced principally in the Dominican bateyes by Haitians, Haitian– Dominicans, and Dominicans.31 Mostly Dominican-born revelers dance their processions in and around the sugar refineries, taking respite from the cane cutting and providing entertainment for the curious, whom the dancers solicit for contributions.32 As the Gagá participants move and sing, they devote their thoughts to the luases or espíritus: the spirits of Papá Legbá, Ogún Balendyó, Barón Samedí, Olivorio Mateo, Candelo Sedifé, Ogún Badagrís, or the coquette Anaísa, and all dance to the rhythm of beating sticks and balsié drums.33 Expressing a people’s creativity, heedless of the constraints of orthodox Catholicism and official culture, folk religion symbolizes a borderland ethos and constitutes a display of a truly Haitian–Dominican culture, one that combines elements from various cultural systems. Marguerite Fernández Olmos (1997) finds in Gagá a unique type of transculturation, one that combines and transforms elements from cultures that are not simply European and African. That is, Gagá draws from beliefs and practices of two groups inhabiting the same island, making it the result of what Fernández Olmos calls a ‘secondary type of syncretism, one between (ex)colonized peoples.”34 By an ethnohistorical process that occurs at at least two removes from its origins, the Catholic saints of Santo Domingo, according to this interpretation, were fused with the luáses (lwá) or vodoun of the Haitian pantheon. Those who worship the gods, inviting them down to possess their followers, are called the serviteurs, literally servants or servitors of the spirits. The servitors are said to possess conocimiento or connaisance, the privileged knowledge. They know that Ogún Balendyó is Saint James, they recognize Bellié Bercán in Saint Michael, and they adore Candelo Sedifé through Saint Charles. Catholic prayer is not forgotten in such systems: it can be recited for curing diseases or for counteracting malevolent magic. Traces of Africa suggestive of cultural ties with Haiti can be found in other practices of Dominican popular religion, which saw its beginnings in the slaves’ practice of blending together rites from diverse liturgies into coherent systems of worship, forming a separate “nation” of worshippers
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in the process. The spectacle of carnival, to give another illustration, displays Africanity in reenacting a rite of fecundity, symbolized by the macho cabrío, the male goat of virility, and the exorcising farewell to the flesh and the devil. In another example drawn from religious practice among Dominicans, African-derived toques de palo, drumming with sticks, accompany the baquiní ceremony, observed on the occasion of an infant’s death, and the drums are heard in other exequies. As manifested in the beliefs and practices of Gagá, such observances indicate how an evolving culture with pre-Hispanic roots succeeded in evading the rule of masters and overseers, such that the legacy of Africa continued to tie Dominican culture with Haiti through a uniquely insular form of “sociocultural genesis.”35
Backgrounds to Insularity As a complement to Wucker’s central figure of the cockfight, a more inclusive metaphor embracing the many-sided interconnectedness within Hispaniola’s dual reality would highlight not only the multiple causes for why the cocks fight, but what they could do when they are not fighting. The alternative metaphor of counterpoint suggests alternative ways of approaching Haitian–Dominican relations as part of a tradition in which solutions were sought to overcome problems affecting both countries. Acknowledging interdependencies and revisiting the border as an object of research could suggest approaches to policy that would aim not only to resolve conflict, but to open up new economic arrangements, permit a more productive division of labor than the prevailing one, and allow access to new markets and new channels of information. What is needed to achieve this openness, of both information and access, is an empirical description of the island that would manifest its internal connectedness within and across borders and provoke a rethinking of ensconced ideas on the Haitian–Dominican difference. In other words, a new paradigm could be used to reinterpret the cultural identity of a people in such a way as to shake up identifications produced in the colonial past and to admit new definitions of identity in the pan-insular context.36 Under this new paradigm, la identidad nacional would constitute more than a mere given by birth and location; it would be conceived as something to be reinvented constantly, through movement and interaction, through the interconnection of regions and countries, by the transformation of place. Identity, itself always already relational, would have to be seen as emerging in a relational field, to a great extent in response to the expression or perception of the Other’s own developing sense of identity. To achieve the kind of “integrated
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exposition” of the Dominican Republic’s ‘sociohistorical evolution” to which Cambeira (1997), for one, has aspired, it would be necessary to take the further step of integrating the parallel and complementary evolutions of Saint-Domingue and Haiti within the same exposition.37 That act of revision will have to begin with a full accounting of the conflict that did occur in establishing the island’s topographic organization. In the beginnings of the colonial period, once Pope Alexander VI had ratified the Treaty of Tordesillas in 1494, the Spanish could claim exclusive rule over the Antillean archipelago and, soon thereafter, over the American mainland. Asking to see what clause in Adam’s will could have bequeathed such singular rights of possession to the Spanish crown, Francis I (1515–42) and other rival heads of empire contested the claim of Castile over the Mar Océano’s scattered realms. La Isla Española thus became stage and spoils for long-distance conflicts between rival colonizers, encounters from which sprang a long succession of usurpations, invasions, migrations, and, finally, the sort of genocidal operations that some today call “ethnic cleansing.” Such events have borne out Hubert Herring’s (1968) judgment: that “[t]he curse of anarchy fixed upon the island was never lifted and seems to have dogged each step of the two little nations which divide the island between them.”38 Along with this troubled legacy, however, other key events in the history of Haitian–Dominican relations demonstrate that the border, no static line, has undergone a process of formation, changing its nature, location, and function in response to diverse provocations. One significant force affecting the whole system since as early as 1503 was the resistance put up by the slaves who escaped captivity on the plantations. The Spanish called these defiant slaves cimarrones, and the French called them marrons, just as one would refer to runaway cattle. By its negation of the laws and chains of slaveholding society, marronage affirmed the right to freedom, signaling an alternative to the system imposed by slavocracy. Yet it was a precarious alternative. As Carolyn Fick (1990) interprets the phenomenon, the act of marronage “offered no guarantees, but its continued existence in colonial society was testimony that slavery was not an irrevocably closed system.”39 Marronage can serve as a metaphor for varieties of escape: from the regimen of the plantation, or from pre-determined social meanings. Accordingly, the frontier separating French from Spanish territories beckoned the Saint-Domingue marrons with its invitation to freedom, since many of those who escaped from the French plantations could find refuge in Santo Domingo. The meanings of marronage suggest ways in which a barrier, such as a border, can be considered as both an obstruction to crossing and a passage
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for the traffic of products, people, and capital from one territory to another. Such traffic, although officially prohibited by the Spanish crown, was regulated nonetheless by the diverse agencies invested in a system structured on social inequality and the division of labor. The border had, and has always had, a function for the wielders of local power, those who stood to gain by maintaining the border and antagonisms against the neighboring country. José Alcántara Almánzar (1979) points out the origins of this enmity in colonialism and its social contradictions: The colonial interests of France and Spain fed the discord between the colonies for centuries. When the Republic of Haiti arose, by way of the first slave revolution of the continent, the local dominant class in Spanish Santo Domingo, raising arguments of racist character, invoking a nonexistent superiority that only defended interests of class and benefitted the proslavery group, kept the enmity alive. For both peoples the consequences have been more than cruel: wars, invasions, genocides and an estrangement begetting of tragedies.40
In Santo Domingo prior to independence, social hierarchy and privilege found their justification not only in loyalist sentiment but in an antiHaitian animus. The fear of a menacing Other could divert attention both from the violence of slavery, by indirectly legitimizing it, and from the injuries of class stratification, since all exploited Dominicans had someone to hate besides the upper-class oppressors. Franco, in La aportación de los negros (1967), similarly finds a “manipulation” of the facts in the interests of the Dominican elites throughout the history of the Republic. In modern times, this manipulation took the form of the anti-Haitian ideology, according to which the Haitian was relegated to the lower end of the Dominican cultural spectrum. For this dominant view, espoused by the dominant classes and subscribed to by the majority of the population, Haitians would be nothing more than brutes, lowlife, scum: brujos, prietos, maleantes, negros, analfabetos. Their poverty forces the Haitians into promiscuity with the lowest classes of Dominican society, which they represent by synecdoche. Consigned to a dehumanized category, Haitians continue to toil in a neocolonial situation, with Dominican and American corporate officers and shareholders taking the place of the French masters. Their lowly position in Dominican society seems to validate the discriminatory view of Haitians as inferiors, a perception that in effect represses consciousness of the Afro-Haitian element in the formation of the Dominican national identity. This element is a potentially powerful one, as Franco (1972) asserts, for it represents “the ideal of the struggle for freedom” and the historical example and precedent set by Haiti for a
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Dominican people engaged in their own struggle for economic and political self-determination, facing their own struggles as a nation often at odds with the ideologies and repressive measures sanctioned by the authoritarian Dominican state.41
The Geography of Hispaniola A quick reconnaissance of Hispaniola’s physical terrain will help to ground discussion of the island’s human topography and the interrelations of its two countries. This descriptive “fly-over” will bring into relief relevant geographical features shared by the two countries. Lying southeast of Cuba and to the west of Puerto Rico; in size similar to the state of Maine, the island “Columbus loved best” measures 30,528 square miles, making it the second largest of the Caribbean. The Canal de la Mona separates the island from Puerto Rico to the east; the Canal du Vent, or Windward Passage, separates the northwest peninsula from Cuba and the British Turks and Caicos to the northwest. To the south and southwest, the Canal de la Jamaïque separates the southern peninsula from the Caribbean’s fourth largest island. The Taíno name for the island, “Haiti,” means “mountainous,” and Hispaniola’s mountains do constitute, in Wucker’s words, “the defining physical feature of an island whose geography is, in effect, its story.”42 Highlands stand out over some three-fourths of Haiti’s terrain, whose appearance many have likened to that of a crumpled sheet of paper. Shared mountain ranges running laterally across the border have impeded communications, both between the nations and within each one. Shared intermontane valleys at the same time have functioned as virtual corridors through which contraband and labor have flowed. The arching Massif du Nord is Haiti’s longest mountain range: flanked by the Plaine du Nord and the Plaine Centrale, it presents a continuation of the volcanic chain extending through the Cayman Islands and Cuba’s southern Sierra Maestra. The same Massif du Nord becomes the Cordillera Central as it reaches into Dominican lands. Haiti’s southernmost range, the Massif de la Selle, includes the country’s highest elevation, the Pic de la Selle, rising in the southeastern corner of the country and close to the Dominican border. Whereas the Massif du Nord forms a sort of backbone to both the northern and the medianly situated “western” part of Haiti, the Massif de la Hotte dominates the long southern peninsula. Starting from where the Gulf of Gonâve seems to narrow, funnel-like, at the capital city of Port-auPrince, the Cul-de-Sac lowland interrupts the “highland conglomerate” of
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mountain chains with a corridor that opens from east to west, around the brackish waters of the Etang Saumâtre and into the Dominican Valle de Neiba. Running northwest from the Gulf of Gonâve, the Chaîne de Mateaux crosses the frontier to become the Sierra de Neiba, which is the Chaîne de Trou d’Eau in Haiti. The Massif de la Selle blocks approach from the Cul-de-Sac to the Chaîne de Mateaux and on the Dominican side acquires the name Sierra de Bahoruco. Like a continuation of the lowland Plaine du Nord of Haiti, the fertile Cibao lowlands are situated between the northwest–southeast-running Cordillera Central and the Cordillera Septentrional and reach eastward to run coextensively with the Río Yuna on the highland’s southern margin. La República Dominicana occupies the eastern two-thirds of the island, with an area of 18,704 square miles—roughly that of Ireland—and a population in 2001 of 8,581,444. The Dominican landscape hosts a great diversity, as seen in river valleys, plains, arable regions, mountain ranges, desert wastes, rain forests, and litoral zones. A greater surface extension and a generally flatter terrain than Haiti’s have favored the Dominican Republic with a more generous endowment of resources and advantages. One fourth of Dominican export produce consists of sugar, followed by tobacco, cocoa, coffee, and minerals such as gold and ferronickle. The United States takes in the largest part of Dominican exports and, with Venezuela, provides most of its imported petroleum, foodstuffs, and manufactures. It is the aforementioned reliance on Haiti as a source of cheap labor that has ensured the Dominican Republic’s overall comparative advantage over its neighbor, which translates into a higher net productivity and a higher average standard of living.43 La Republique d’Haïti, situated on the western side of Hispaniola’s internal border, claims 10,714 square miles of the island as its own, making it similar in size to the state of Maryland. The land agonizes in its struggle to sustain 2000’s estimated total of 6,867,995 Haitians. The most eye-catching feature of Haiti’s, or indeed western Hispaniola’s, physical geography must be its uneven lateral horseshoe shape, with the sides of the horseshoe extending westward, the southern horizontal arm stretching some 90 miles further westward than the northern one. The Gulf of Gonâve seems embraced by the peninsular arms of Haiti, and within the gulf, the rocky ellipse of the Île de la Gonâve seems to float opposite the harbor of Port-au-Prince and lie obliquely on a northwest–southeast axis. Only 30 percent of the Haitian land is “arable,” but in reality 50 percent has been farmed, leaving no cultivable land to spare in the valleys and plains of the mountainous country. Peasants will resort to farming even precipitous slopes—a risky business as attested in tales referring to farmers who,
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while tilling or harvesting, took a tragic misstep and tumbled to their deaths. Hunger for land, and for employment, naturally draws migrants lòt bòt, over there, toward the oriental part of the island or to any other place where a living can be made.44 The common border twists and snakes for about 375 kilometers or 232.5 miles. Stretching from north to south, running through streams and along mountain ridges, it cuts through the interior highlands. Not what you would call highly monitored or tightly patrolled for most of its extension, the border presents no impenetrable barrier to those who travel on foot, walking or wading their way across the accessible parts,45 although “[a]t intervals along its mountainous course,” writes Selden Rodman (1964), “guardhouses, with curiously medieval crenelated towers, survey the populous, dark lands to the west.”46 Rivers mark the northern and the southern edges of the Haitian–Dominican divide: the river called either the Massacre or the Dajabón flows northward into the Atlantic; the Rivière Pedernales-Río Pedernales flows southward into the Caribbean. Elsewhere along the boundary, straight lines connect points across short stretches. Superimposed upon such landmarks as mountain ridges, river courses, and stream lines, the border continues along the La Carretera Internacional or the Route Internationale, the highway that defines the division as it follows the Rivière Libon, respected in former times as the demarcation between republics.47 This highway continues southward: through Lomas de Cabrera, Restauración, Bánica, Elías Piñá.48 Much of the borderlands surrounding the division features arid landscapes, with flora of scattered cacti, dry scrub, or chaparral bush, especially on the deforested Haitian side. Next to the border on the Dominican side, the Cibao presents arid semi-desert lowland and thorn scrub savanna, both characteristic of the locale of northern town of Montecristi. Montecristi lies due south of the desembouchement into the Atlantic of the Río Yaque del Norte and to the east of the international border, which continues to cut northwest through the Bay of Montecristi. Krèyol speech predominates in that coastal region inclusive of Montecristi and the Haitian border.49 Along the Valle del Yaque to the east, in a zone extending some 200 miles, is the country’s most intensive rice cultivation. Toward the south central part of the island, in the Valle de San Juan, an upland basin that continues the expanse of the Plateau Central, a semi-arid climate supports deciduous forest, subhumid seasonal forest, and wet savanna. At these latitudes, the Artibonite flows along the division and the Route Internationale, and drops down into precipices below the highway. Also called el Artibonito, the river springs from the Cordillera Central and marks the midsection of the Haitian–Dominican frontier before coursing
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into the Haitian departement of Centre and into Haiti’s Lac de Péligre.50 Wucker (1999) writes that along that stretch of boundary, “Every few mountaintops apart, an outpost bearing a tattered Dominican flag pierces the mist. Each station is staffed by a lone soldier, who, if he is lucky, might have his family living in a shack at the foot of the lookout tower.”51 The relatively lush greenery of deciduous-conifer growths on the Dominican side stands in sharp contrast to the disconsolate barrenness of the Haitian side. Woodlands there have been replaced by arid zones of scrub and grasses, and the absence of forests has allowed ground moisture to evaporate at an alarming rate, exacerbating the effects of droughts, such as the one resulting in the famine of 1977. Graham Greene (1966) was not alone in noting how the verdant countryside to the east of the border put to shame Haiti’s eroded borderlands, barren of most of their topsoil, their many hillsides denuded, the consequence of generations of unrestricted wood-gathering for fuel. Given the deficiencies of their resource-poor homeland, Haitians must look to another place that is endowed with the resources necessary to maintain life, yet near enough to make the journey pay off. With another, more prosperous economy so close by, the locational decision is often determined in advance by the uneven distribution of resources in Hispaniola.52 About 30 percent of Dominicans in the Republic live in Santo Domingo, while 11 percent of Haitians in Haiti live in Port-au-Prince and three-fourths are settled in the rural sectors. Compare the Dominican Republic’s 18,704 square miles, with its population of 8.6 million, to Haiti’s area of 10,714 square miles, with its population of 6.9 million, or about 94.4 percent that of the Dominican total.53 The Dominican Republic thus has about 1.5 million more people than Haiti in an area that amounts to nearly twice Haiti’s geographic extension. Up to a million Dominicans reside in the United States, whereas one in six Haitians lives in the United States. As many as half a million Haitians are living in the Dominican homeland.54 Haiti, the poorest nation of the western hemisphere, one of the three or four poorest nations of the world, can claim a per capita income of $870, but that average—given the enormous disparities of wealth among the classes, ranging from the minority mulatto elite to the black urban and rural masses—would leave the poorest of the masses owning next to nothing. Indicative of such inequalities: 60 percent of the land is concentrated in the hands of 1 percent of the population, and about four-tenths of 1 percent of its population controls 40 percent of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP). Life expectancy for the masses is low under such conditions: males can look forward to living an average of 43 years, and females, 47.
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The infant mortality rate is 1.0–1.8 for every 10 births, but higher in the shantytowns, bidonvilles, such as Cité Simon and Cité Soleil, close by Portau-Prince.55 The population has grown steadily, nonetheless, having nearly quadrupled since the start of the twentieth century. Among the reasons for emigration out of Haiti, the lack of land ranks foremost. Parcellization through the post-independence years has resulted in the ownership of small and overcultivated holdings. The dearth of natural resources intensifies the pressure of land scarcity in a country where two-thirds of the population ekes out a living from agriculture or fishing, and where widespread poverty has driven multitudes to the crowded cities, and especially to the capital, and to other countries.56 In the Dominican Republic, the life expectancy for males is 66 years; for females, 70, and infant mortality is 56 out of 1,000. That makes for an infant mortality of nearly half that in Haiti, where up to 180 out of each 1,000 newborns will die before reaching childhood. The adult literacy rate of Dominicans is estimated at 83 percent, whereas only 53 percent of Haitians can read and write, although the latter figure is probably high.57 A continuing disaster by anyone’s standards, Haiti must claim the lowest standard of living in the Americas, and its burgeoning population must face the daunting challenges of unemployment, undernourishment, archaic agriculture, desertification, shantytowns, and political violence. Beyond the media stereotypes, the Haitian people must live with underdevelopment, crime, squalor, and diseases like helminthiasis, malaria, syphilis, tuberculosis, ankylostomiasis, and now HIV/AIDS.58 The constant state of disaster cries out for social change. Such change, should it come, will necessarily have to involve a change in relations with the Dominican Republic, given that the fate of the Haitian people has been intimately tied up with that of its insular neighbor.
Krèyon Pèp In Santo Domingo’s Plaza de Cultura, a museum of geography enshrines an impressive array of relief maps, portraits, photographs, newspaper clippings, and maquettes. Walking through the museum’s rooms and corridors, one sees such artifacts as weaponry, artillery, uniforms, and medals. Relevant as well to the concern of this study, the exhibit includes narrative texts, printed and mounted in such as way as to tell an official history, from the nationalist perspective, of political and military conflict between the Dominican Republic and Haiti over the limits of the national territory. For in this museum, curators and historians have applied the science of
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geography not only to record topographical data and representations, but also to institute, with persuasive concreteness, a certain “spatialization of the temporal.”59 As set forth in this museum, an official culture sponsors the very deployment of cartographical power in producing and valorizing one version of the parallel lives of Hispaniola’s conjoined nations. In so exhibiting that official story, the Dominican government sanctions its own statist view of Haitian–Dominican relations as constituting a long series of confrontations between national Self and foreign Other. But in contesting the grounds of the official statist narrative, the present study, offering a contrapuntal account of Hispaniola’s insular system, will establish the parallels and interactions that have marked the island’s sociopolitical evolution. The phenomenon of the border, which includes not only the geographical and historical division, but also its multiplications and redefinitions in culture, will constitute a key element in a narrative that at times will resemble a topographic puzzle, but a puzzle whose parts never stop changing their contours, definitions, and relations to one another. Reimagining the problematic of Haitian–Dominican nationalisms in the terms of a contrapuntal system can and should result in the unsettling of established thinking on both the national territorializations and other, ghostlier demarcations. To understand the ways in which the border and the insular difference have figured in the shared destiny of Haiti and the Dominican Republic, it will be necessary to see what the accidents of geography have joined together, and what the agencies of power have put asunder. Chapter 2 begins by examining the origins of the differentiation process in the very forms assumed by European colonization in Hispaniola, taking in the period spanning from Columbus’ discovery to the decades prior to the Haitian Revolution. Ranging through the colonial centuries, the argument will account for French incursions into Spanish territory, subsequent occupations and settlements, Spanish responses, and the mutual formation of Santo Domingo and Saint-Domingue. The argument will go on to demonstrate how, in a situation in which economies and social ecologies defied the Spanish monopoly, national differences created not only division, but also ties of resemblance and interdependency. The rise of Haiti forms the focus of Chapter 3, which begins by surveying the early slave revolts and follows up with analysis of the epochmaking event that eliminated the French colonizers, abolished slavery, and established the second republic of the Americas. In the light of the insular counterpoint, the first half of Chapter 4 will chart the course of the two countries’ sometimes amicable, often bellicose relations with one another throughout the first four-and-a-half decades of the nineteenth century. The second half of the chapter presents the results of an inquiry into the
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character of the 22-year-long Haitian Domination (1822–44), which produced a tense unification of the island and whose legacy continues to bear on relations between the two countries. The dynamics of the sovereign state in Hispaniola’s contested territory provides the focus for Chapter 5. With its consideration of nationalist developments, the argument explores the extent to which the founding of the Dominican Republic in 1844 and its consolidation afterwards not only constituted negations of insular unification under Haitian hegemony, but also established the foundations of the “weak state”—the nation-state as not only a function of international capital but as a negation or complement to the insular Other. The unsteady quadrangle of post-independence themes—caudillism, reannexation, restoration, and neoimperialism—is elaborated in the second part of the chapter. This part will focus especially on the impact of increasingly powerful U.S. interventions on the weak states of the island and the subsequent function of the border as a mediating differend in the interaction of each country with the other. Chapter 6 addresses the positioning of the border during the periods that span the Trujillo dictatorship and the beginning years of the Duvaliers’ dynastic rule. Examining in this regard the formation of national identities under the authoritarian governments of the period, the argument here will focus on the policies and cultural discourses constituting the border as a militarily enforced division. Special attention will be given to the thinking that legitimized the anti-Haitian violence characteristic of the three decades preceding Trujillo’s assassination. This discussion will provide a context for interpreting the signal event of the Trujillo era, the borderlands massacre of 1937, as a message that marked the divisions once again for defining national identities. The literary thematics of Chapter 7 will feature the ways in which political-cultural discourse has represented the Haitian–Dominican difference in modern times. The representation of the Haitian in Dominican literature, the literary mapping of the island, and the vision of life in the borderlands—all themes considered in this chapter—will account for the ways in which Dominican writers have reconceived and, in some cases, reinvented the character of Haitian–Dominican relations. The book concludes with Chapter 8’s contrapuntal interpretation of the eventful history of Haitian–Dominican interactions in the postTrujillo, post-Duvalier eras. Occupying this chapter are continuing facts of Haitian–Dominican interdependence and the latest developments in the struggle for reconciliation in the contemporary period. The chapter finishes with a review of prospects for creating future collaborations between Haiti and Dominican peoples.
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If the island can be said to “play” like a contrapuntal machine, with themes and variations crossed in complex orchestration, then the border becomes but one motif in our reading of the island’s ethnohistory. Blended into the polyrhythmic texture of that multitudinous narrative, the border takes on an ambiguous and polyvalent aspect: it is both physical and psychological, both economic and ideological, both there and not there. In dividing the national territories, the border stands and separates, it exists concretely in the stone markers that line the frontier, but projects a more diffuse reality as well, multiplying itself into discourse, mappings, and memory, persisting in the border mentality.60 To reiterate: What if the divided landscape of the island were viewed not only as a cockfighting club, but as a loosely articulated system? How would it play as a counterpoint, albeit a postmodern one? How would it sound, this sociopolitical fugue of two countries on one island? On the pages of that counterpoint, the border constitutes an abiding mark of difference writ large across the island surface, separating state from state. Yet the border at the same time conjoins nation with nation and people with people, because “all that occurs here is reflected there and all that happens there is reflected here.” The people’s perspective and testimony is vindicated in the Haitian proverb, Krèyon pèp pa gen gonm: “The people’s pencil has no eraser.”61 But what people, we ask—wielding what type of pencil, compelled by what sort of urgency—have inscribed their indelible mark in the landscape’s counterpoint?
Chapter 2
Limits of Colonialism, 1492–1750
The struggle for the lands of the west was a struggle of opposed interests between two societies and between two economies. It was a battle between the plantation and the ranch, between French colonial capitalism and the traditional Spanish system of land exploitation. But in a more particular sense, the formation of the border was a slow and conflictive process during which the French tried to round off the edge of their possessions, endeavoring at times to occupy the whole island, and at others to keep what was already occupied. —Frank Moya Pons, Manual de Historia Dominicana1
n a letter addressed to Philip II in 1594, Fray Nicolás Ramos, Archbishop of Santo Domingo, complained of the laxity with which the king’s subjects inhabiting la Banda del Norte (the Northern Band) were fulfilling their Catholic duties: settlers, the archbishop reported, were accepting Protestant baptismal rites and reading Protestant bibles. There was contraband not only in religion, however, for Dominican cattle and slaves were finding their way into the possession of Dutch and English trespassers of the monopoly. Four years had passed when one Baltasar López de Castro, a judge assigned by the Audiencia to investigate the situation, submitted his opinion that the best way to eliminate the contraband and protect the colonists from the pernicious influence of foreign religion would be to relocate all the cattle of the Banda del Norte to the vicinity of the southernmost region of the island. Not only the cattle, advised the judge, but also the untrustworthy settlers of the Northern Band and their slaves. Thus was introduced the idea of las Devastaciones.2
I
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The Spanish Crown ordered into action the recommendations made by López de Castro. The removal of the Northern Band residents and the destruction of their homesteads, of which more will be said later, yielded an unexpected result, however: by clearing the northern coastal zone of settlers and leaving it unprotected, the Spanish authorities in effect opened the door to the ingress of French adventurers and settlers into the region. Thanks to that opening—the first in a long series of openings—French settlers were encouraged to establish themselves on the northwestern zones of the insular territory claimed by the Spanish monarchs. Those that followed the first usurpers could, once established in the northwest, develop a new kind of economy on the island, one that rivaled and yet strangely complemented the economy of the Spanish part. In the beginning, therefore, it was an act of violent removal that created the conditions of possibility for what would later become a heterogeneous and complexly articulated insular community. The northern devastations and the western usurpations made possible the establishment of a plantation economy built up under the auspices of the French monarchy during the seventeenth century. Foremost in that economy was sugar cultivation, the enterprise and industry that would bring enormous wealth to the French planters and unprecedented prosperity to their colony. While this was going on, the eastern portion, as it remained under the lax control of Spain, saw a slower growth, one dominated by the rise of a much less labor-intensive and less technologically intensive mode of production than sugar cultivation. That mode was cattle-raising and herding. The economy of animal husbandry, although adapted to the ecology of the eastern part and sustainable under the indigent circumstances of the Dominican settlers, failed nonetheless to supply the basic needs of its participants, nor could it alleviate the condition of generalized want and misery that prevailed throughout the century, a condition whose signs provided ample proof of the Hapsburg monarchy’s unwillingness or inability to adapt to the “new rhythm imposed by the new insurgent forces of capitalism.”3 Itself caught up in the moment of its greatest expansion while headed irrevocably toward its own decadence, Spain continued to shape the destiny of Santo Domingo by the same contradictory process that spelled out the colony’s unmaking. And by its actions, the crown and its agents unwittingly set the stage for introducing a unitarian trend in relations between the two communities occupying the same insular territory. The very act that was intended, ironically, to remove the incentives drawing French and Dutch contrabandists into the Spanish territory in the first place, made it necessary for the Spanish settlers to turn to their French
LIMITS OF COLONIALISM, 1492–1750
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neighbors later on for the help denied them by the Spanish crown. Whereas Spain, in the words of Rondo Cameron (1989), became “the worst violator of her own law” by the practice of exporting precious metals to other European countries,4 social forces and agents in Hispaniola made violations of the monopoly into a customary mode of economic conduct. After the inaugural event of the devastations, Saint-Domingue would flourish, Santo Domingo would languish, and their distinct economic systems would sustain what would amount to a symbiosis of commerce and culture with one another, their uniquely mutual accommodation operating in nearly open defiance of the Spanish monopoly. How this accommodation came about forms the focus of this chapter.
New Colonial Encounters Long before the devastations occurred and since well before the Spanish Empire extended into the Americas, the long war of the Spanish Reconquista had been waged, from 711 to 1492, over the border that divided Christian from Moorish possessions on the Iberian Peninsula. One could say that an updated version of la guerra a los paganos continued on in the New World context, on la Isla Española, whose conquerors and colonizers carried forth something of the zeal that fired the Spanish Reconquest. In that warring spirit, on that Iberian precedent, was established the framework for interpreting the border in terms of ethnic antagonism and religious crusade. Carlos Fuentes has correctly observed the way in which the feudal spirit that drove the Spanish to war against the Moslem infidel and to repulse the Protestant heretic was carried forth in the Spanish colonization of the New World. Spain during the Reconquest was un país fronterizo, a frontier country whose frontiers divided Spain itself. The desire of the Spanish soldiers to possess land and to defend Catholicism was reinforced by two church-related developments: the militarization of the church during the Reconquest and the emergence of the soldier-priest, figuring prominently in the history in which sword and cross were fused together in holy war.5 The background of the Reconquista and the presumed superiority bestowed by pureza de sangre framed the Spanish attitude toward the subordinated races either pre-existing in or infused into the Quisqueyan aggregate. The devastations in Hispaniola in the first decade of the seventeeth century constituted a defensive maneuver carried out in the imputed interests of a small Spanish colony vulnerable to the depredations of colonizing powers that were hostile to Spain and/or disdainful of Spanish
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claims in the New World. But the defenselessness of Santo Domingo reflected the economic weakness of the madre patria itself and in particular that of Seville, the first seat of the Casa de Contratación, which was the agency charged with overseeing trade with the American colonies. The merchant guilds of Seville in their turn depended on foreign capital, that furnished by financial groups in Genoa, France, and the Netherlands, to underwrite their commerce with the port cities of the New World. Dependency of a virtual dependency, therefore, Santo Domingo along with other islands of the Spanish Antilles sent gold and silver to Spain, and Spain sent it on to the coffers of European creditors. Reinforcing the strictures of monopoly, the Counter-Reformation buttressed Charles V’s refusal to trade with virtually all the other European monarchs, and even with Francis I. Although a Catholic too, the king of France refused to capitulate before the king of Spain; he moreover encouraged the maraudings of such corsairs as Jean Florin, in 1522, in the waters of what was presumably a “Spanish Lake.”6 The matter of fixing boundaries between Spanish and French possessions was already troubling the crowned heads of Europe throughout the first century of American colonization. In 1521, Charles V of Hapsburg had claimed the title of Holy Roman Emperor that Francis I had wanted for himself. France and Spain subsequently declared war against one another over the disputed territories of Milan, Naples, Navarre, Burgundy, and the French-speaking Netherlands. The treaty of Cateau Cambrésis would end that conflict in 1559, awarding most of Italy to the Hapsburgs and lands west of the Rhine to France. Losing thereby the wealth of the Netherlands, a bankrupt Spain found itself without sufficient means to control or exploit its overseas colonies with any effectiveness. But feeling abandoned as they were by the madre patria, the Dominican settlers had started to abandon the island themselves. Having exhausted deposits of precious metal in the western regions of Hispaniola, they followed the lure of riches allegedly in abundance on the American terra firma, leaving a mere 1,100 Europeans to populate the Dominican capital by 1545. Of those who remained in all the island, some 7,000 Dominicans or 1,000 settler families were scattered over an expanse of 29,000 square miles (75,000 square kilometers) by 1550, leaving to each family a space of 19 square miles (50 square kilometers). This dispersion made communications difficult between population clusters and exacerbated feelings of forlornness. Many towns at that juncture were not really towns but rude assemblages of houses, villorios. As if this neglect by the madre patria were not demoralizing enough, an earthquake in 1562 laid many of the settlements to waste.7
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Lacking population and labor power for starting up export production in earnest, and chastened by the early failure of sugar, the Dominican vecinos (settlers, neighbors) were well positioned for an early experiment in free trade. The conditions were right: from among the first heads of cattle brought over by Columbus, on his second voyage, and from the herds transported by Governor Nicolás de Ovando, escaped animals would thrive and proliferate on the plains of the island. They were runaway cattle, cimarrones, roaming wild, foraging on vegetation, virtually unchecked in their growth and reproduction. The cimarron cattle dispersed and multiplied, for the island offered open ranges and water aplenty, especially in the central and southern zones. Hundreds of thousands of the cattle, having reverted to a natural state in field and forest, could be rounded up into a pastoral economy and turned into a principal source of food for sugar mill owners and their slaves. The growth and importance of the pastoral mode of production came to be reflected in the maxim, La crianza aleja la labranza (Husbandry pushes away farming). Cattle-raising grew as an industry, so much so that wealth would come to be measured by the thousands of heads of cattle owned. Valued primarily at first for their leather, which was exported to Spain, the cattle provided beef, whether fresh or smoked, for local consumption. The growth in cattle led to a significant new development in the second half of the sixteenth century: the ranchers of the northwestern settlements of Montecristi, Puerto Plata, Bayajá, and la Yaguana found a big demand for hides from another important consumer, namely, the French settlers of the western portion. Dominican ranchers were happy to fill that demand in defiance of the monopoly. And not only the French settlers, but French contraband runners, were more than willing to barter hides and salted beef. What the French offered in exchange was an especially precious commodity: slaves. Colonial neglect had isolated the Dominicans, but they developed the means to support themselves in their dealings with colonial Others. Not only ranchers of the Northern Band, but also those of the southern coastal region around Santo Domingo were transporting their cattle to this borderland of the colony, which was fast becoming a conduit of exchange and communication. Breaking the monopoly, maintaining illicit commerce with the political and ideological rivals of the empire: this was not the worst of the business in the eyes of the Spanish crown. What hurt most was that the Dominican ranchers were evading taxation.8 How had this mutually advantageous, if unexpected, economic arrangement between colonies come to pass? In Hispaniola and the rest of the Caribbean during the sixteenth century, the bourgeois sponsors of Spain’s European rivals were setting up true
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commercial enterprises that would produce the tropical products that would find avid buyers in the metropolis. With Hispaniola’s precious metals rapidly depleted during the first decades of the Conquest, the Dominican colonists went on to make an early trial of sugarcane cultivation, which, realized by the labor of enslaved Africans, would create an economic boom in the 1520s that would die out toward the end of the century. Whereas the majority of slaves in the future Saint-Domingue would be bossales, imported directly from Africa and then forced to toil in the plantations, the majority of Santo Domingo’s slaves would be born on the island. When old enough to work, they did so under relatively relaxed conditions of servitude, with the definite possibility of buying their freedom. Through manumission, freed Santo Domingo blacks and mulattos could enjoy some privileges that were denied to the affranchis domingüois, thus explaining the latter group’s discontent and their motive, later on, for participating in the anti-colonial revolution.9 Frequent slave revolts and slave escapes succeeded in putting a damper on the early prosperity of the Spanish colony. The first black insurrection broke out in Hispaniola on 27 December 1522, at the plantations of Diego Colón, son of the Discoverer. The rebellious slaves, gelofes or Wolofs in their majority, burned the buildings of the trapiches, or sugar presses, and ran away, taking refuge in the region close to Nizao. They were apprehended and taught the harsh consequences of their disobedience. By 1545, some 7,000 runaways were taking refuge in the manieles, palisaded settlements of cimarrones, that were concentrated around San Juan de la Maguana and in the south’s Sierra de Bahoruco.10 One preeminent leader of slave revolts was Sebastián Lemba. By directing a strategy of mobile, hit-and-run warfare, Lemba succeeded in resisting and evading the colonial forces for all of 15 years. Burning and sacking their way from Higüey to Yaguana, Lemba’s group of guerrilleros negros evaded the Spanish authorities until 1547, the year in which the troops captured and executed the rebel leader, hanging his severed head from a gateway as an example to others who would dare disobey their white masters. Slave insurrections continued through the mid-century, some led by Diego de Ocampo, Juan Criollo, and other valiants. As accounts indicate, slave revolts in the colony of Santo Domingo anticipated Saint-Domingue’s uprisings by some 267 years.11 The runaway slaves developed a pattern of escape, flight, and refuge that led to the formation of new linkages between the slaves of the two parts of the island who encountered one another in the liminal zones of the runaway settlements. In the two centuries following the northern devastations, the manieles would also serve as precarious hideouts for slaves who had run away from the Saint-Domingue plantations. In those
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earthwork fortifications set atop the mountains in the heart of Hispaniola, the runaways created semi-independent neo-African societies, like the one founded by Lemba in southern Bahoruco, and they reconstructed neoAfrican cultures that could substitute for the ones erased by slavery.12 Out of necessity there also developed a unique mode of communication, for the slaves proceeding from diverse tribal groups, joined together in a struggle for survival, had to improvise their speech in order to understand one another. What eventually coalesced in these slave sanctuaries was a composite language of necessity, a creole idiom that was the farraginous blending of Spanish, French, Portuguese, and Guinea Coast tongues: Ewe, Fon, Yoruba, Ibo, Ga, Bantu, Biafra, and others. Some runaways from the French colony found their way to regions further south and east, where, they learned, the Spanish colonial authorities were waiting to grant them asylum. Welcomed into the Spanish colony, the increasing numbers of runaways from the French portion prompted the formation of special mounted patrols assigned to search and gather them up in the borderland regions. The riders then transported the slaves to such settlements as San Lorenzo de Los Mina on the east bank of the Ozama.13 More will be said later on with regard to these frontier patrols. The frequency of marronage, together with the increasing incidence of piracy and the contraband trade, led to the failure of the nascent sugar industry by the end of the sixteenth century. The high number of slave uprisings in Hispaniola moreover produced the fear among the whites that the island could one day soon be dominated by former slaves. So great was their fear that many did not dare venture into the countryside unless it were in groups of up to 20 armed men.14 Despite these adaptations, the depopulation of the island continued. Spanish settlers abandoned as well the islet of Tortuga, lying off the northern coast of the northwestern peninsula, and they left this part of the peninsula as well. The abandonment produced unforeseen consequences: it left the northwestern part of Tortuga open to the penetration of French pirates and adventurers, those who in turn opened the way for more French and Dutch interlopers to settle in the western regions of the island. From the Dutch flibustier derived the English terms flight-boater or freebooter, which designated those mariners who freely signed up for a single voyage and mission with the aim of sacking and looting particular galleons. Crews of freebooters, who enjoyed the privilege of electing their own expedition leaders, also occupied the Peninsula of Samaná at the northeastern side of Hispaniola around this time, and from there they spilled over onto the tiny Bannister Islands at the entrance of the bay, eventually turning the islands into a rendezvous point.15 Those seafaring
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marauders depended for provisioning on the interlopers who had established a business of hunting wild herds of goat, smoking their meat, and selling it to hungry frères de la côte. It is the goat, bouc, that gave up its flesh, and the smoking pit and grill, boucan, that gave its name to those uninvited boucaniers/bucaneros/buccaneers—rustic cooks and entrepreneurial vanguard—who quickly diversified their operation by hunting and roasting boar and wild cattle meat as well.16 The buccaneers are remembered for wearing their hair and beards long, their clothing bloody from butchering, and with five or six knives hanging on their belts.17 They also made it possible for the French to establish their foothold on Hispaniola: they sold their smoked meat not only to the freebooters but also to the more sedentary habitants of the bigger island. These raised primarily tobacco, which they carried a short distance to the coast, then transported to Tortuga, where it would be bartered or sold. By exploitating cimarron cattle and setting up emporia that provided consumer goods and slaves in exchange for Dominican cattle and hides, the buccaneer economy would open the way for the more intensive exploitation of the land to come. It would also provoke the representatives of the Spanish crown to take the action that would shape the future course of relations between rival colonies. This unique arrangement of course could not have arisen had the Spanish authorities not taken action to clear the northwestern region of its inhabitants, thereby opening up a space for future incursions of French settlers.
Las Devastaciones In the period prior to the Devastations, the population of the eastern part had dwindled to 6,000. The isolated and indigent subjects felt they had no one to turn to but the French, Dutch, and English “enemies” who were more than eager to sell them the essentials for life. But the northern frontier cities of Montecristi, Bayajá, Yaguana, Puerto Plata, and others, by doing business with the subjects of England, France, and Holland, had violated the monopoly-protecting prohibition of the Real Cédula of 1556.18 Around 1565, the illicit commerce that up to that point had made a mockery of the Spanish mercantile law, had also become Hispaniola’s most lucrative economic activity, bar none. Other nodes in the contraband network, lying east and to the south, included Santiago, La Vega, San Juan, and Azua, all of which saw their share of smuggled goods en route to the forbidden foreign ports.19 In February 1605, Governor Antonio de Osorio took the congenial tack against the monopoly-busters: he declared a general pardon for all who
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had engaged in the illegal commerce, inviting all former contrabandists to collect their personal possessions, including cattle and slaves, and head southward to be relocated in sites designated for that purpose by the Audiencia. Not all the cattle could be rounded up, however. An estimated 8,000 out of 110,000 were moved, leaving the rest to roam about freely, as they did before their capture, leaving the Dominican capital without sufficient supplies of meat to feed its suddenly swelled population.20 Those displaced were forced to relocate in ten population centers designated by Osorio, with most of them clustered around the cities of Santo Domingo and Santiago. Refugees in their own country, now distanced from erstwhile trading partners, the relocated settlers fell back on ranching and small-scale farming. The depopulation of the north therefore created the conditions under which the Dominicans by the second half-century of colonization would become “a people of pastors.”21 At this time, the combined African and mulatto populations outnumbered the Spanish whites by a ratio of 5 : 1, so by far the majority of the displaced were people of color.22 Most went without resisting, but there were some, like the mulatto Hernando de Montero and his followers in Guaba (Hincha), who did not give up their cultivated parcels without a fight.23 Meeting with such resistance by the northern subjects, Osorio turned to more severe measures. The governor sent the 150 soldiers of the Puerto Rico garrison to enforce the decree, subsequently ordering them to burn all buildings and plantings of the coastal zone and the nearby interior, eliminating therewith any reason for the dislodged settlers to return. Montero succeeded in evading Osorio’s troops; Dominican mulattos and manumitted fought alongside the white vecinos against them. The rebels could defend themselves for a while, but they could not prevent government troops from destroying their livelihood and moving the rest of the townsfolk to some of the least desirable land of the island. And what about the more than 70 defendants found guilty of breaking the monopoly and consorting with the heretics? One and all were executed for treason.24 The authorities ordered not only the destruction of life-sustaining cattle, but also, as a final measure, the razing of Montecristi, Puerto Plata, Bayajá, La Yaguana, San Juan de la Maguana, and Neiba, all of them burned down for the end of eliminating the temptation or means to do business with the enemy.25 The depopulation and destruction of the coastal settlements left the colony, well, devastated. With the loss of income, the derechos reales, royal duties or taxes, came down to nothing, and with no payment of duties, there was no local income with which to maintain president, tribune and cabildo or town council. Misery was general and shared by all. In an effort to alleviate somewhat the penury of the neglected colony, a contribution
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of monies drawn from the treasury of New Spain began crossing through the Gulf a few years after the northern devastations. Called the situado, the annual contribution helped to make up the administrative deficit of a colony unable to finance its own governance.26 The situado first arrived in 1608 and paid for the salaries of the Real Audiencia of Santo Domingo, and it continued arriving for many years afterward. In 1614 it paid the salaries of the island’s garrison, at the time consisting of only 200 men.27 There are reports that the greatest fiesta celebrated in the harbor of the Ozama took place at the arrival of the situado, an indication of how great was the misery shared by most Dominicans. During that yearly celebration, writes Sánchez Valverde, all the bells could be heard ringing and the people shouting, such was the rejoicing in Santo Domingo.28 As if life were not tough enough, attacks by the English corsairs on ships in the Spanish Main would overtake riches passing through en route to the crown’s treasury, undermining the colonial economy as they had done during the initial fat years. So discouraged was this galleon traffic by the pirates, that few ships from the metropolitan ports could drop anchor in Santo Domingo’s port, and this at a rate of every two or three years.29 Santo Domingo in the second century of its colonization would suffer the lack of specialists in the trades: outside the capital, blacksmiths, tailors, teachers, or doctors were nowhere to be found. With little commerce, the society sank down into a vegetative condition of near inertia. Political authority became concentrated in the hands of the hateros, ranchers who operated relatively self-sufficient farm-ranches, the hatos. The relative self-sufficiency of the hatos and an economy based on hides and livestock production, together with the lack of capital, created a more decentralized, less regulated society than that which was developing in Saint-Domingue.30 The depopulations were followed by the founding of new towns to the north of the colonial capital. Those displaced from Montecristi and Puerto Plata became the inhabitants of the new town christened with the name Santiago de Monte Plata. In like syncretism of naming, those of Bayajá and la Yaguana were assigned a town named San Juan Bautista de Bayaguana. Relocated Dominicans were prohibited from crossing the guardarrayas or boundary lines that bordered the northern and western limits of Santiago de los Caballeros and the western edges of Azua and San Juan de la Maguana. The ingenuity of the colony’s administrators had triumphed, but not to the benefit of the colonists, who by this point had more than caught on to the notion that the crown did not always have their best interests at heart. Moya Pons aptly sums up the consequences of the devastations: neither was all the livestock taken out, nor was the export trade of the city of Santo Domingo immediately favored, nor were the common people
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impeded from carrying on contraband, and on the other hand all the island’s population was definitely displeased, the insurrection of many black slaves towards the wilds was encouraged, dozens of families from the Banda del Norte were ruined, and the northern coasts of the island were abandoned, leaving them freely exposed to the visits of the Dutch.31
During the remainder of the seventeenth century, the stagnation of Santo Domingo, its economy based on livestock, garden mounds called conucos, and barter, contrasted with the burgeoning growth of a French plantation economy in Saint-Domingue. Within the Dominican economy, a primitive sugar industry supplied the domestic consumption of only the Spanish colony, which counted on its 22 mills worked by 600 slaves. It was more profitable anyway to import sugar and coffee from the French neighbor than to grow them locally, and Saint-Domingue provided chocolate and taffia rum as well. Very little of the Dominican tobacco, cacao, and cotton, as in the case of sugar, was bundled up for export.32 Such differences in economies, and also their complementarity, provided the bases for cultural-national differences that would fortify the future division between the two countries. Indeed, as André Corten (1993) says on this point, “A division of labor is initiated and the bases are laid for an integrated society that unifies the two parts of the island.”33 Saint-Domingue would go on to become the most prosperous colony of the New World and the most profitable overseas possession of France, thanks to an intensive production of sugar, coffee, tobacco, indigo, and cotton by plantations owned by its colonial aristocracy of planters. Prosperity turned Cap Français, the French colonial capital, into the Paris of the New World. But the Thirty Years’ War in Europe, beginning in 1618, stepped up pressure on both the island’s economies by intensifying the rivalry between the French and Spanish empires, with Britain waiting on the sidelines, ready to snatch up whatever was left unattended. Exacerbating the desperation of the vecinos, absentee landlords of the Spanish part neglected their lands: sugar cultivation died out in the southern litoral, due in part to the depressing impact of pirate raids. The absence of roads in the fertile Cibao made large-scale production unprofitable at any rate, and Spanish trade restrictions in any case severely discouraged cultivation for export. Showing discouraging signs of abandon and stagnation, the “immobile” seventeenth century of the Dominicans would earn the popular name of the Hundred Years’ Misery.34 Adventurers and speculators, when they remained, felt drawn to enterprises originating in the capital, not to the tedium and uncertainty of agriculture. The only economic activity of broad importance to which absent owners and resident ranchers would commit their energies was the rounding up of cimarron
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heads of cattle and their sale, as contraband, to the meat-hungry settlers of the French side.35
The French Move In Leaving a territory open to incursions by the pirates, freebooters, and corsairs that had previously established themselves on tiny Tortuga, the depopulations cleared a space in the central Cibao region for the further proliferation of cimarron cattle and for future incursions of French privateers and buccaneers, those who prepared the way for others to establish a more permanent French presence in Hispaniola. Still reeling from the destruction of their settlements and properties, the remaining Spanish colonists reacted with ambivalence toward the encroachments, feeling some animosity and distrust towards the French settlers, but also harboring resentment against the metropolitan center that so coldly had dispossessed them and then left them to manage again on their own.36 The uninvited newcomers hailed from various European nations, with varying degrees of patronage from state authorities and private concerns. The Dutch corsairs were financed and equipped by the capitalist groups of Amsterdam, Middelburg, Rotterdam, and Groningen. These rogue capitalists, whose umbrella organization was the West Indies Company, carried out a dual mission: to wage commercial and military war on the Spanish, and to launch their pirating campaign. In 1630, French and English privateers were forced to evacuate San Cristóbal (St. Kitts) by the flotilla commanded by Don Fradique Alvarez de Toledo. The displaced pirates looked for another base of operations; they found an ideal site for resettling on the southern coastal strip of the 69-square-mile island the Spanish called la Tortuga. With time, some 300 of the “refugees” learned they could round up cimarron cattle, or buy it from willing Dominican contrabandists, then sell the hides and jerked meat to British and Dutch traders, and that way make a peaceful living.37 Peaceful, that is, until the authorities in Santo Domingo sent the expedition of Captain Ruy Fernández de Fuenmayor to remove them in 1635. The Spanish squadron accomplished its mission, killing 196 settlers and their chief and taking 39 prisoners.38 With Tortuga evacuated, Fuenmayor’s force then returned to the colonial capital, making it easy then for the pirates who escaped with their lives to return to the little island and re-establish there in 1636. In response to the intrusion this time, Admiral Don Carlos Ibarra, in 1638, launched an attack by a galleon flotilla that massacred the tiny colony. The victims were replaced soon enough, however, by some 300 English and
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French led by Roger Flood, all of whom arrived the next year to join the remaining survivors of the previous eviction. Many of the French, this time, answered to the French West Indies Company, founded by Cardinal Richelieu. That company, like the West Indies companies of the British and Dutch, took advantage of their charter to accost and sack the ships sailing in through the Gulf and the Caribbean under the Spanish colors.39 In the year following Fuenmayor’s expedition, some 80 Englishmen and 150 Africans, in addition to the French and Dutch, were calling l’Îsle de la Tôrtue their home, in effect converting it into a beachhead for future invasions of the western end of Santo Domingo. The same pattern of dislodging and resettlement occurred once again, in 1638–9, and further French incursions were launched after 1638 from Samaná to Port de Paix40 before France definitively laid claim to the little island in 1640, with the invasion by Levasseur and his 49 men, inaugurating a 12-year period of French rule.41 This islet called Tortuga/Tôrtue, un castillo edificado por la naturaleza (a castle built by nature) measuring 4–5 miles (6–8 kilometers) in width and some 23 miles (37 kilometers) horizontally, saw the arrival of an assortment of privateers, shipwreck survivors, and deserters: such rogues and fugitives formed the islet’s first group of settlers engaged in everything from hunting cimarron cattle to smoking meat on the boucans, to besieging Spanish galleons.42 It is around 1640 that a new pattern of commerce was established: this was the “triangular circuit” of trade, in which ships weighed anchor in France, sailed to the west coast of Africa, and there loaded up with human cargo bound for the Antilles. The slaver ships carried thousands of Africans in dark, dank, and crowded holds. Many died during the crossing, but many survived, only later to be worked to death in the fields of sugarcane.43 The Spanish authorities in the meantime lacked the might with which to expel the French from the smaller island, largely owing to a lack of population in Hispaniola. Even with the end of the Thirty Years’ War in 1648, the remaining colonists had still to resist the raids of French and Dutch pirates and attacks by the British fleet. The Spanish did regain control of Tortuga in November and December 1653, after a 10-day siege that threw out the buccaneers led by de Fontenay. These adventurers were not long in returning, however, once the Spanish forces had abandoned the islet in 1655, as Don Félix de Zúñiga reported unhappily to his superiors in 1656. In a well-known story, the repulsion of the British attack on Santo Domingo in April 1655 sent the fleet and its army on to Jamaica, where the English sailors and soldiers found consolation for the Dominican defeat by setting up what would become a permanent colony. That same year would see the final withdrawal of Spanish troops and
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settlers from Tortuga. The Compagnie Française des Indes Occidentales, which had paid 15,000 francs for the islet, named Jeremie Deschamps, seigneur Du Rausset, governor and lieutenant general of Tortuga in 1657. Du Rausset led the assault on the Spanish emplacement in 1659. Although the Spanish made repeated attempts to rout the French during the seventeenth century, they did not defend their repossessed lands with garrisons, leaving the territory free for the enterprising French planters to repopulate. Continued attacks so incensed the French governor, however, that he assigned a freebooter by the name of Delisle to command a retaliatory invasion into the Spanish part in 1660. Part of the motivation for this enterprise lay in the desire to oppose the British presence in the Caribbean, particularly in nearby Jamaica.44 In 1664, Louis XIV, recognizing that privatization has its advantages, made a concession of la Tôrtue to the French West India Company, and he appointed Bertrand d’Ogeron governor. Ogeron arrived at la Tôrtue on 6 June 1665 to assume office. There he found the already established community composed of freebooters and pirates. From this home base Ogeron could affirm the French presence in Saint-Domingue once and for all. Ogeron built up the economy, finding the wherewithal to send a punitive expedition against the Spanish and take command of Santiago and Puerto Plata, albeit for a short while. The ambitious governor then proposed a plan to take over the entire island in the name of France, a move that many a settler of the impoverished Spanish side probably would have welcomed.45 Every day during this period, a ship of the Companie de la Providence et de l’Association de l’Îsle (founded in 1613) dropped anchor at the harbors of the nascent French colony. At the end of the seventeenth century some 50 women, prostitutes taken from French prisons, were transported in to be handed over to the founders of Saint-Domingue.46 During the first four years of Ogeron’s appointment, the pirate population grew from 400 to 1,500. Delisle’s forces sacked and burned Santiago de los Caballeros. In 1669 Delisle and his 500 men landed at Puerto Plata and marched on Santiago de los Caballeros a second time. There they found an uninhabited city: the santiagueros, alerted evidently beforehand, had moved out and sought refuge in Concepción de la Vega. Delisle caught up with them and proceeded to persuade them to pay a sizable ransom in exchange for the promise not to burn down their homes. Satisfied with the payment he had extorted, Delisle called off the attack, and his army returned home by way of Puerto Plata. Some five years later, in 1674, Ogeron sent another contingent to Samaná, where a French fort had resisted a series of Dominican attempts to recover the peninsula. Upon Ogeron’s sudden death in Paris,
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it fell upon Ogeron’s nephew, Jacques Nepveu, Seigneur de Pouancey, to govern Tortuga and western Hispaniola. Claiming possession by “right of conquest,” de Pouancey answered not to the French West Indies Company, as did his uncle, but rather to Louis XIV. For at the behest of Finance Minister Colbert, the monarchy had taken over the company’s jurisdiction, assumed control of the buccaneers’ activities, encouraged tobacco cultivation, and reinforced the strongholds. At de Pouancey’s command, the French forces and settlers were withdrawn from Samaná and relocated to the Cap Français, allowing the peninsula to return to Spanish possession. Why the change in strategy? Because expansion was the aim, not just fortification: it was necessary to regroup, because Colbert planned on making the entire Spanish isle over into a French one. The slow and steady encroachment of French traders upon Dominican territory was menacing in terms of sheer demographics: in 1681 the 1,500 families of the Spanish colony, dispersed in towns or cities, unfortified by walls save for the capital, faced the threat signified by 7,848 land-hungry French settlers, more than half of them taught and trained in the school of piracy. Compounding the specter of usurpation was the economic jeopardy posed by the steady decapitalization of incomes originating in the situado but going to the French in payment for the manufactured goods that the Spanish galleon trade was unable to provide. The general misery of Santo Domingo was due not only to politico-economic causes, but also to natural ones. The cyclone of 1672 had wiped out yucca and cacao plantations; an earthquake in 1673 left no building standing or inhabitable. Adding to the natural catastrophes, the port of Santo Domingo was losing its commercial importance as a stopover along the trade routes to Havana and San Juan. Caught between French encroachments and continuing pauperization, scourged as well by the forces of nature, the Dominicans, it would seem, had more to fear than fear itself. Up through the administration of Governor Tarin de Cussy, who replaced de Pouancey in 1683, contraband in salt meat, cow hides, and horses continued to flow into the French portion, mocking the restrictions and offsetting the disadvantages imposed by the Spanish monopoly. Economic interdependence between the colonies had become ipso facto a reality of everyday life; it would remain for its beneficiaries to petition the authorities to recognize it de jure. De Cussy made overtures to Don Andrés de Robles for reconsidering the formal demarcation between Santo Domingo and Saint-Domingue, but the Spanish governor not only dismissed the entreaty to redraw the boundaries but also denied the added request to openly permit trade between the two colonies. The show of Spanish recalcitrance fired up the French resolve to remove the Spanish
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from the island once and for all. Taking the offensive in 1689, de Cussy gave the order for a column of a thousand soldiers to attack Santiago de los Caballeros. The invaders burned about half of Santiago’s 230 homes but spared the five churches, which de Cussy wished to preserve. The invasions strained the resources of the already strapped Spanish colony, but they prompted a delayed counterattack, in 1691, of the santiagueros against Cap Français. Governor Ignacio Pérez Caro sent troops to prevent a permanent occupation of Santiago and authorized the march on the Cap Français. On the plains of Guarico or La Limonade, a bloody confrontation left 47 Spanish dead and 130 wounded. On the French side, the toll was 400 dead, which included de Cussy himself and members of his staff. The Spanish attacks on the northern plain then prompted Governor Jean du Casse to tighten the security of the Guarico frontier and assign militia to patrol it. The pattern had been set: the give-and-take of antagonistic moves and countermoves would repeat itself numerous times over the next few decades, with the French keeping alive the dream of taking over the whole island.47 Removed from the scenes of battle, a traffic in slaves continued between the two colonies. This clandestine commerce, improvised ad hoc in the absence of crown support for industry and trade, grew in importance, strengthening contacts across the frontiers. For their provisions of piezas de Indias, the Spanish had earlier depended primarily on Portugal, France, and, to a much lesser extent, England. For slaves destined specifically for Hispaniola, Portugal was the “legal” holder of Spain’s royal asentamiento, or official authorization for slave trading activities. France’s traders therefore mocked the Spain-sponsored Portuguese monopoly in supplying their own slaves to the Spanish colony. According to Franco (1970), those slaves who arrived in Santo Domingo tended to be the ones less desired by the owners for specific reasons: they were the ones identified as either displaying a certain “spirit of rebelliousness, little adaptable to the system of forced labor,” or showing signs of infirmity and weakness. Given the disposition of numerous Dominican slaves to rebel against the masters, a great “insurrectional activity” on the Spanish side succeeded in disrupting and disarticulating the plantation-dominated economy of the colony’s early years, which at any rate was evolving toward the mode of animal husbandry and small-scale subsistence farming, as discussed earlier in this chapter. Saint-Domingue’s contrasting modality of slavery, on the other hand, involved from the outset the importation of Africans direct from Africa, the segregation of masters and slaves, the documented brutality of their treatment, and the inhuman conditions under which they worked. These factors all contributed to the bitter antagonism between races that
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would intensify to later become the conflagration that was the Haitian Revolution. Differences in the two colonies’ ethnic-racial formations were signaled in other ways. Whereas economic demand and forced migration determined the darkening of skin color through successive generations in the French colony, authorities of the Spanish colony encouraged intermarriage between European settlers, mostly men, and women of indigenous and African stock, and thereby a general lightening of skin color among the Dominican population.48
Patrolling the Border The authorities of the Spanish colony, fearing the consequences of the wave of emigrations occurring after the setbacks of the 1660s, resolved to undertake the repopulation of the Dominican frontier. Thus began another long and complicated narrative, that of repeated attempts of successive Spanish colonial regimes to promote the immigration of white foreigners and their settlement in the borderlands. With this strategy, the authorities intended to set up both a first defense against the French colonial militias and armies and a racial buffer zone between the two nations.49 In 1681 the authorities of Santo Domingo made a petition to the Spanish crown to allow peasants from the Canary Islands to immigrate to the island and occupy the endangered regions. It was argued that such a measure would at once solve the dilemma of the Canarians’ own poverty and discontent while creating a line of settlements that could protect the Spanish territory from French encroachments. A group of 100 families arrived according to plan in 1684, and then another group of 108, bringing the total of Canarians to 543 individuals. Ninety-seven families arrived in 1687 and established homesteads near the French settlements. The total number of families brought in between 1684 and 1691 was 323, comprising 1,615 new members of the colony. Some of the newcomers were encouraged to cultivate tobacco, but it turned out that only a few in the Santiago region could do so, and they did so only to sell their produce to the French buyers, a practice already established there. Those located near the capital on the banks of the Ozama, the largest group, encountered another kind of enemy: the dreaded smallpox, among other dire epidemics. After numerous deaths among the families, the settlement was moved in 1686 to the outlying village of San Carlos, named after a city in Tenerife, one of the Canary Islands. More families from the same islands would be requested in 1718, more arrived in 1720. On their new island home, the immigrants would work and sweat and suffer their share of the
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general misery. They would also, as was expected, do their part to brace the frontier towns against future invasions and to prevent occupations of land by French colonists, especially the areas that had been vacated in 1605 and 1606. In addition to importing settlers to form a living boundary, colonial authorities took steps to tighten the security as much as meager resources would allow: they formed a corps of mounted troops to patrol the frontier. These armed militia, called the cincuentenas, succeeded in keeping the French “on their line,” as Governor Robles declared they would do in 1687. They also looked for Africans who had escaped the plantations of the west, in order to relocate them elsewhere in the Spanish part. Numbering in the forties, falling short of the 50-plus indicated by their name, riders of the cincuentenas joined for various motives. Besides the opportunity to watch and protect the borderlands, posses offered just about the only means by which impoverished male inhabitants of the Cibao could improve their limited prospects, with farming already stunted by the monopoly, not to mention seasonal droughts that left the soil dry and cracked, allowing little else with which to make a living except for ranching. No deterrents, however—neither Canarian settlers nor the cincuentena patrols—could keep the Dominicans themselves from carrying on trade with the French planters and dealers, going even so far as to invite some border-crossers and dwellers into their homes. The incentives for breaking the monopoly, and thus for breaching the border, remained strong as long as the Spanish system limited opportunities in the colony for profit or failed even to supply an adequate provision of necessary goods. Manufactures sent from Seville to Hispaniola would cost six times their wholesale price. In exchange for expensive imports, the gold of the Indies flowed into Spain, passing on into the coffers of financiers in Antwerp, London, Lisbon, the Hague, and Geneva, thus backing the increasing amount of species needed to fuel the growth of a western European commercial bourgeoisie. Although the colonies were left wanting, Spain’s direct trade with France was protected by the Peace of Nimegen, signed in 1678, and the Truce of Ratisbon of 1685. On the island in the meantime, the business of transporting hides and cattle to the west was discouraged by merchants and overtly prohibited by the government, and not all the ranchers participated in it, but those who did enjoyed its benefits sporadically until nearly the end of the seventeenth century.50 As these events bore out, the century following the devastations of 1605 and 1606 saw no full recovery, but rather the sapping of the Spanish colony’s vitality by way of departures, disease, general impoverishment, cultural degradation, and de-urbanization. Further contributing to
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underdevelopment in Santo Domingo was the simple lack of roads, making it difficult to transport crops and other produce to market, frequently forcing carriers to steer their wagons through the plantations and fields themselves. The economic deterioration in the devastations’ aftermath gave settlers all the more reason to move on to the more prosperous colonies of the terra firma of New Spain and the southern continent. As the Dominican cities lost people and capital, the industry in cattle-raising and pasturing continued to grow. The growth in ranching and the concomitant depreciation of sugarcane would continue up through the time of the liberal revolution of Gregorio Luperón in 1879. But two centuries before that time, a curious change in racial attitudes was taking place on the Spanish side. As propertied elites abandoned the failing colony, the mulattos gained in status; they and the free blacks became the blancos de la tierra—a curious phrase that translates, “whites of the land.” The phrase indicates the manner in which Dominican slavery was mitigated somewhat by the close association of the distinct races, with blacks, mulattos, and whites working in proximity under the conditions of pastoral production. In the context of shared hardships, and in the face of numerous interracial unions, one had to say that familiarity bred not contempt, but a unique sort of intimacy, and the quality of blackness was so much lightened in a way that a dark-skinned individual of the Spanish part could actually be considered “white.”51 Compare this situation of racial intermixing and re-definition, however, with that of the simultaneously existing culture of Hispaniola’s French colony, in which the cultivation of sugarcane, tobacco, indigo, cotton, sisal, and other cash crops created a huge demand in slave labor, intensified the exploitation of that labor, and produced a violent antagonism of races: conditions that would lead to mass insurrection toward the end of the next century. The end of the War of the Augsburg League led to Spain’s cession of French-claimed lands in Hispaniola and an official demarcation between French and Spanish possessions on the island. This concession was one of the consequences, although not specifically a provision, of the Treaty of Ryswick, which was signed in September 1697, putting an official end to the war. The event of the treaty, and the ascension of Philippe d’Anjou, or Philip V, to the Spanish throne, marked the beginning of a new era of Spanish-French relations on the island. It would unfold as an era of both cooperation and antagonisms: of continuing French usurpations and acts of Spanish resistance and retaliation, relieved by collaborations across the border. The Spanish Dominicans in 1691 had routed the French Dominicans near Guarico, in the battle of Sabana Real del Limonal. The subsequent War of Succession obliged Spain and France, already allied
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against England since 1701, to respect the terms of the Ryswick treaty. Tolerance was the key word, as the cincuentenas took care not to cross over into land west of the Rebouc or Guayubín possessed now by France, and the French military kept a respectful distance from these mounted border patrols. The policy of tolerance was sanctioned now by royal decree, which required the Spanish Dominicans to recognize as French the lands occupied by the French by the time of the royal ascension.52 Among the planters of Saint-Domingue, a high European demand for sugar and the readiness of metropolitan capitalists to invest in its production promoted both the construction of more sugar mills and the increased importation of African slaves during du Casse’s administration. The triangular trade was maintained to provide a steady supply of forced labor to the French plantations: each slave, after all, would die after an average of seven years’ labor. The rise of sugar under du Casse meant supplanting of ranches in the Guarico (Limonade) region, already weakened by Spanish attacks, with the planting of sugarcane and the building of mills during the last decade of the seventeenth century. There was no doubt at that point that sugar was more in demand and more profitable within the French system. A 1711 ordinance required that all lands lying between the Limonade and the Rebouc (Guayubín) River be apportioned for agriculture, and that included all former ranchlands.53 In contradiction to the designs of the planters on either side, the slaves had their own objectives. Marronage now, as in the early part of the 1500s, linked remote corners of the island together. Santo Domingo earlier had offered refuge to the marron slaves from the French colony. In 1688 Governor de Cussy had denounced the Dominican practice of receiving runaways and enlisting them in colonial troops commanded by black officers. A similar objection was expressed in 1692. In 1697, when 6,000 white and mulatto males of Saint-Domingue held dominion over 50,000 black slaves, an unusual accord was signed between du Casse and Santo Domingo’s governor: for the price of 25 piasters, it was agreed, the runaways in the Spanish territory would be captured and then returned to their masters in the French plantations. Yet two years later, the same du Casse had reason to protest that the Dominicans were not holding up their end of the bargain, and that they were going so far as to arm the former slaves in their struggle to remain free. Governor Galiffet, in 1701, would repeat the demand for the runaways’ return. Future accords included the 1714 ratification of the 1703 order to restitute slaves escaped from the western part, and the Real Cédula or Royal Decree of San Lorenzo in 1722 promised the same. Yet despite the apparent willingness of the Spanish authorities to cooperate with the French in the return of the fugitives,
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it was also apparent that the Dominican colonists had much to gain by keeping them on the Spanish side. In 1719, a healer and spiritual man named Michel had followed the example set by Lemba in leading his group to freedom in Bahoruco. Tensions rose again between the two sides in 1738 when a group of runaways was given in encomienda to a Captain Francisco de Mieses de Ponce de León.54 Still connecting the two economies as well was the traffic in contraband, and this illicit trade had become an open secret. So open it was that a whole succession of Dominican governors not only knew about it, they had a hand in it. These self-interested public servants included Ignacio Pérez Caro (1691–8 and 1704–6), Guillermo de Morfy (1708–10), and Fernando Constanzo y Ramírez (1715–24). This last governor, Constanzo y Ramírez, conceived the idea of stationing troops at the border town of Dajabón and there exacting a tribute for each head of cattle destined for sale to the French. Should the cattle rounders refuse payment, they were denied passage. The imposition of this tariff raised the ire of the cattle raisers of Cotuí, La Vega, and Santiago. In 1721 the inhabitants of Santiago rose up in revolt against the government of Santo Domingo, choosing as their governor Don Santiago Morel de Santa Cruz. Santa Cruz and his young officers marched on Dajabón, where they disarmed the border guards and established a provisional government. The Santiago insurrection was an uprising supported by the popular masses and, as such, manifested something of a proto-nationalist sentiment directed against official Spanish rule. The improvised government of Santiago lasted for several weeks, thanks to the support of the local cattle raisers who saw their best interests vindicated by the “Captains’ Revolt.” The commerce championed by the revolt continued to develop and grow, making more than ever the interdependence between the two colonial economies an accepted fact. As a Mr. Duclos would say in 1729, “it is advantageous for [the French] to have Spanish neighbors who provide them with everything they need, giving them the opportunity to plant their fields with sugar or indigo and make the better use of them than by employing a part for raising animals.”55 What is more, these first stirrings of a national consciousness fed upon the hopes of saving a strapped economy, drawing mass support in Santiago and throughout the northwestern region based on simple facts: the hateros needed a market for their cattle, and the French colony, the beef. The attempts of various regimes to facilitate this illegal commerce and even to tax it for personal profit, while stirring up an inchoate sort of nationalist feeling, fell short of backing up any conviction that would propel the Dominican vecinos into a war for independence against Spain.56 The informal arrangement suited immediate needs for survival.
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In addition to producing for local consumption on the island, cattleraising in Santo Domingo continued expanding to meet a growing European demand for leather. Leather was needed, in sizable shipments, to produce shoes and boots, chairs, hats, chests, room dividers, book covers, bed bottoms, saddles, and harnesses. Illustrative is the case of one truly wealthy hatero, Bishop Bastida, who owned some 25,000 head of cattle at a peso per head. To ship his leather out, the bishop had to depend on merchants with ties to the French colonial economy.57 Thanks to the business practices of Bastida and others like him, hatero production could become the dominant mode in the Spanish part. Given the semi-covert, complementary relation of the two economies, it was clear that some sort of agreement on the frontier would have to be drawn. The first official accord was signed in 1731. Official border, emergent order. In year the accord was signed, some 400 Spanish crossed the Dajabón and razed three houses in Capotillo. In reprisal, 200 French crossed the Massacre (or Dajabón) to assault three Spanish haciendas. For the makeshift borders, an extraofficial order. Conflicts over contested frontier territories established their own kind of chaotic pattern, as did new projects to populate the borderlands with families from the Canary Islands. A new alliance was drawn up in the Family Pact of 1761, negotiations were renewed in 1764–6, and new hostilities led to clashes such as those of 1771. In yet another in a series of rapprochements between the two colonial governments, a royal decree issued in 1772 in Santo Domingo ordered that, once again, slaves escaped from Saint-Domingue would be returned to their French owners.58 The 1731 accord had left other differends unresolved. It did not settle the dispute over a strip of land situated between the Capotillo and Dajabón Rivers, nor had ownership of a little island in the Dajabón been clearly determined. Nor did the accord provide for clear demarcations in the south. This indeterminacy left in question any claim to the region of the Seiba River or la Savanne de Verettes, as the latter would become the scene of dozens of skirmishes from 1736 to 1773. In 1776 the Spanish authorities sent troops into the occupied Mirebalais region west of the Seiba and held on to it until the matter should be decided between France and Spain. French and Spanish crowns were not always warring with one another during the eighteenth century, as witness their alliance against the English in the War of Italy—also known as “the War of Jenkin’s Ear”—of 1739. Santo Domingo and Saint-Domingue could follow suite in an unusual era of intra-island cooperation, in which commerce across the border was officially permitted under the Bourbon kings. The regulation of this
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commerce involved the taking of a census of the ranch-farms in the jurisdiction of Hincha, which numbered 128. Also determined were the numbers of cattle destined for sale and those destined to remain for continued breeding. These were years of unprecedented growth in the French colony. Saint-Domingue had 117,000 slaves in 1739; around 1775, the 30,000 whites, the 28,000 mulattos or gens de couleur confronted a quarter million African slaves, a number that would nearly double by the beginning of the 1790s. Hosting this growth of the slave-based plantation economy on the French side, the divided island of the eighteenth century continued as a divided camp, but commerce continued across the frontier, as the plainsmen of the Cibao continued to look to the domingüois as a market for their cattle and as suppliers of their slaves. The traffic in cattle destined for a meat-hungry Saint-Domingue became so lucrative for a handful of Dominican ranchers that they came to be respected as the leaders, albeit weak leaders, of their colonial society. Under their direction, Santo Domingo around 1740 underwent a reactivación: Montecristi carried on free trade with the west, and immigrants from the Canary Islands repopulated the countryside and developed tobacco for the export trade, especially in the region around Santiago. The reactivation stimulated the Dominican economy somewhat, but fortified in the process the dominant pattern of pasturage and contraband trade with Saint-Domingue and thus bolstered the power of the hateros. Yet during a stopover in the French colonial capital in 1741, Governor Don Pedro Zorrilla de San Martín learned, to his dismay, that the butchers of the Cap Français were adding a sales tax to the meat that had proceeded from the Spanish ranches of the east. Zorrilla immediately ordered a stop to the westward transport of beef and cattle, a measure that further deprived a Saint-Domingue that was already suffering the effects of a continuing drought visited upon Hispaniola from two years before. Upon receiving French petitions to resume the commerce, Zorrilla agreed, but authorized a 5 percent tax on each pair of heads. The French colonists objected to the imposition, and so did the Dominican ranchers, who quickly resumed a more profitable participation in the contraband trade.59 The developments discussed in the foregoing narrative illustrate how differences in the two colonies’ economic structures created significant differences, between the two colonies, in the relation between master and slave. The same developments led to the formation of a unique economic relationship between the same two colonies, whose intercolonial articulations left discernible marks on each country’s evolving national identity. That relationship produced what amounted to an insular division of labor and a complementarity of social functions. Cambeira (1997) sums up the
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significance of this idiosyncrasy and renegade element in the island’s ethnohistorical process when he writes that the cimarrones, similiar in this way to the buccaneers and pirates, “symbolized an alternative to the rigidity of Spanish colonial authority.”60 A number of alternatives proved attractive, given the rigors of slavery, the neglect of Spain, the general impoverishment of the Spanish colony, and the emigration of much of its population. The relative success of Santo Domingo’s livestock economy, dependent in great part on the contraband trade with Saint-Domingue, contributed to the interpretation that the Spanish Dominicans managed to escape the dictates of the Spanish monopoly in finding the means to survive. This arrangement also produced a situation in the Spanish colony in which master and slave, brought together by the process of a amulatamiento (“mulatto-ization”), shared hardships and formed the bonds of intimacy that were lacking under the harsher conditions of plantationbased slavery in the western part. Although social differences and divisions still existed, mestizaje, or racial mixing, had a notable leveling effect in the Spanish colony: the blurring of racial distinctions effected the formation of, if not equal relations between compatriots of differing skin color, at least a kind of community among those who shared work and hardships in common.61 And whereas this somewhat more humane form of slavery was still slavery, it did not for all that produce a taxable income that could justify the sort of investment that poured into the enterprises of the rival colony. There, in Saint-Domingue, on the other hand, the hundreds of thousand of slaves brought in during the eighteenth century suffered the indignities of their forced labor and objectification: whipped by the overseers, treated like beasts of burden by their grands-blanc and affranchi owners alike, they were literally worked to death. As borne out in the case of these adjacent and incommensurate yet complementary approaches to colonization, national self-definitions unfolded as a process of self-differentiation that continued, and continues today, to defy attempts to reduce the island’s uneven histories to the lines of either country’s master narrative.
Chapter 3
The Great Opening, 1751–1801
Baboukèt-la tonbe (The horse was unbridled). —Haitian proverb1
n the night of 14 August 1791, assembled in the heart of the Bois Caïman (Cayman Wood), the delegates from the plantations of the Plaine du Nord called on the African gods to bless their righteous cause. Addressing the congregation of slaves intent on rebellion, the Jamaican Bouckman Dutty invoked in Krèyol the Rights of Man and Citizen. But it was Bondye, and not the Supreme Being, to whom Bouckman referred that night. His speech, which echoed across Saint-Domingue and all the way to the Spanish part of the island, is rendered here by C. L. R. James (1989):
O
The god who created the sun which gives us light, who rouses the waves and rules the storm, though hidden in the clouds, he watches us. He sees all that the white man does. The god of the white man inspires him with crime, but our god calls upon us to do good works. Our god who is good to us orders us to revenge our wrongs. He will direct our arms and aid us. Throw away the symbol of the god of the whites who has so often caused us to weep, and listen to the voice of liberty, which speaks in the hearts of us all.2
With a ceremony consecrated by the killing of a black pig and the drinking of its blood, the pact was sealed, and the enslaved thereupon refused to endure the whips and dogs of the French. That stormy night on the Morne Rouge, a volcano was set to erupt upon the dreams of the French colony: for eight days after the night of Bois Caïman, the slaves unleashed an
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eight-day riot of burning and slaughter against the plantation owners. Also on that night of fire, a freed slave made ready to assume leadership of the insurrection. But first, Toussaint L’Ouverture proceeded to ensure the safety of his benevolent former manager, Bayon de Libertas, and Libertas’ family. He then sent his own wife Suzanne and children to safety—in Santo Domingo—under the watchful eye of brother Paul L’Overture. Toussaint went on that night to join in directing the massive assault against the white masters of France’s wealthiest and most prosperous colony. The Haitian geste of liberation rings throughout Caribbean history and speaks to the heart of the postcolonial desire for equality, social justice, and self-determination. In that very epic, the emancipatory ideals of the French Revolution were truly realized in the struggle waged by the most wretched of the earth’s oppressed, and in that struggle was to be founded the first black republic of the world and the second independent nation of the Americas. And yet, the narrative of liberation was not to unfold in such a straightforward manner, precisely because its unfolding was not confined to the territory claimed by France, but rather took place over the whole of Hispaniola. In historical fact, the struggle for freedom taken up so heroically by the Saint-Domingue slaves could not but founder on contingencies of geopolitical reality: in the making of Haiti, Toussaint and his successors had to deal with the divergent wills of those inhabiting the neighboring colony to the east. During the 14 years of revolution that would eventually result in the birth of the Haitian Republic, Santo Domingo was set, as it were, on a seesaw relationship by which the increase in the one colony’s autonomy was perceived by many as posing a threat to that of the other.3 In this critical period, each of the two colonies, each a separate entity within the insular system, played an integral part in the national destiny of the other. Toussaint would soon find that his situation forced him to turn to the Spanish colony for support in his fight against the French. Yet later, with the abolition of slavery by the French Decree of 16 Pluviôse, Toussaint had reason to switch sides and this time do battle against the Spanish Dominicans. All told, the 14 years of the Haitian Revolution saw not only the unleashed fury of the blacks—and others—who struck against their oppressors, but also the complex interaction of agents and groups that communicated across the frontier. Although contradictory, Toussaint’s alliances, now with the Spanish, now with the French, signaled a search for an alternative kind of nationalism in a specifically problematic setting. As Wilson Harris (1967) finds in C. L. R. James’s characterization of the black general, Toussaint found
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himself fighting both in the “dimension of suffering” tied to the experience of slavery, and in the “dimension of revolution,” illuminated by the ideology of Enlightenment and guided by the model of the French Revolution. For C. L. R. James and Harris, the portrait that emerges is of a Toussaint who was befriended by Léger Félicité Sonthonax, the French commissioner who counseled the general to proclaim a sovereign and independent Haiti. Toussaint, however, grasped the discrepancy between the historical achievement realized by the slaves in revolt and the tenuous gains to be conceived as a merely “abstract freedom” that could be negated in inevitable confrontations involving the insular neighbor. Toussaint’s strategic opportunism permitted him to improvise in a difficult pass, one in which no easy options were available. But whereas James sees a clarity of purpose in Toussaint’s acts of complicity, Harris finds a certain embracing of doubt and uncertainty, a “groping towards an alternative to conventional statehood, a conception of wider possibilities and relationships which still remains unfulfilled today in the Caribbean.”4 In approaching Santo Domingo, in attempting to incorporate it under French colonial rule, Toussaint intended to forge a broader unity underlying the diversity and conflict of the unfolding historical drama. The saga of Dessalines, Pétion, and Christophe would later contradict the intent of these overtures, but not foreclose the desire of the great opening. Whereas the Haitians fought unflaggingly during the revolutionary decades to unify the island under their government and thus ensure their freedom, many Dominicans struggled, at key moments, to block that possibility. Others who, in the absence of any strong support from the madre patria, favored a Haitian takeover, sought to lend their support to the revolution and the cause of unification. The French, for their part, would look on Spanish-held Santo Domingo as the corridor through which to invade their former colony and retake it, rightly believing that “the weak flank of the Haitian independence was the oriental part of the island, whether because the garrison of Santo Domingo did not have strength enough to resist an attack from the outside, or because it continued as a Spanish possession.”5 All in all, French and then Haitian control over the eastern two-thirds of the island brought upon it a half-century of military intervention and unsuccessful economic reform. During these episodes of the narrative of liberation, the encounter with the Other constituted a forced unification, but a unification nonetheless. Anti-colonial revolution bound the two nations together, indeed, although loyalist reaction, antiHaitian sentiment, and competing drives toward independence did their part to disrupt the unitarian current. To understand the manner in which each nation, during this period, reinvented itself while conceiving the
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position and place of the Other, we must enter into the geopolitics of that world-historical event known as the Haitian Revolution.
The Kingdoms of this World Before the independent nation-state became a key player on the world stage, some 3,000 marrons, by official estimate, escaped from SaintDomingue in 1751 and established themselves in Spanish Santo Domingo. Marronage had thus become a paramount concern for the French plantation owners, and constituted a principal means of resistance for slaves who often looked to the border in plotting their flight from bondage. The border came to signify freedom in other ways. Among the legendary slave leaders was one Romaine Rivière, the visionary affranchi who had crossed over from the east. Rivière claimed to receive guidance directly from the Virgin Mary and the Holy Spirit, and he rechristened himself Romainela-prophètesse. Brandishing the arms of the spirit, the “prophetess” led a growing army of slaves through the region of Jacmel and Léogane in a campaign of sacking and destruction. His image struck terror in the hearts of the grands-blancs.6 Representing a threat from the outside, it also symbolized the dangerous discrepancies between the two colonies. The mercantilist policy of eighteenth-century France had long required the promotion of export from its colonies for the end of accumulating bullion. The system of monopoly invented by Louis XIV’s chief minister Jean-Baptiste Colbert and called L’Exclusive, was the French counterpart of the mercantilist policies laid down by Spain’s ministry overseeing trade, the Casa de Contratación. Colbert’s system protected the slave-based economy of what was indisputably the most productive and lucrative of France’s overseas colonies, which by 1790 boasted a total population of more than a million and required more than 700 ships and boats to transport its output. So profitable was the colony in fact, that England momentarily considered the proposition to offer its 13 American colonies in exchange for Saint-Domingue. France’s hyperexploitation of the western colony would of course produce the oppression, suffering, death, and outrage that would bring on the complex series of Haitian wars leading to independence.7 By contrast, Santo Domingo in the same year of 1790 could claim a population of around 100,000–125,000 people, supporting themselves primarily by a subsistence economy based on horticulture and cattle-rearing and dependent on the selling of meat and hides to SaintDomingue. Two-and-a-half centuries of administrative neglect and inefficiency suffered by the Spanish colony had resulted in a massive
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emigration, primarily to other islands or to the South American continent, leaving the Dominican economy in ruins. Santo Domingo continued nonetheless to export slaves, or rather, to re-ship the slaves purchased from Portugal and France to ports in Puerto Rico, Jamaica, and Cuba. It also retained some of the slaves purchased through traders in SaintDomingue for work in the domestic economy. This was a vigorous traffic, and it went unabated well into spring of 1793, although it did not match by far the great numbers of Africans forced to slave in the plantations of Saint-Domingue.8 Earlier, at mid-century, the continued occupation of Tortuga and forays into the greater island’s western end by French settlers had provoked another attempt on the part of the Spanish to check the usurping tide. In 1756 the authorities encouraged yet another wave of emigration from the Canary Islands, offering the Canarians the incentive of land and livestock and hoping that they would establish a band of settlements to stand up against French incursions. That project lost its funding and volunteers; the influx of French usurpers continued. After Governor Pedro Zorrilla de San Martín was succeeded by Francisco Rubio y Peñaranda, the border town of Montecristi flourished as an entrepôt for the French and English and as a port of entry for the enslaved Africans bound for either colony. It was Governor José Solano who put effective controls on the commerce in cattle, granting authorization for the exchange of steers for slaves. The planters and merchants of one colony thus found themselves doing a brisk business with the ranchers and merchants of the other by the second half of the eighteenth century.9 In 1752, the Saint-Domingue slave Mackandal had lost his arm when it was crushed in a sugar press. Making use of his remaining arm, the future rebel leader gathered plants and learned of their uses for healing as well as for killing. Armed with this knowledge, Mackandal initiated a campaign to poison the white planters and their families, along with all intransigent blacks of the Plaine du Nord. Mackandal crossed from his refuge in Santo Domingo into French territory in 1758, the year in which he was later captured by the authorities, tried, and later burned alive at the stake. Mackandal is also remembered as the houngan (spiritual leader or mage) who could change his shape; the Dominican lexicon remembers him as one of a number of galipotes, the term designating the individuals gifted with the ability to transform themselves into diverse animals or things. Through a campaign that started up by magical yet tactical means, Mackandal’s resistance movement would escalate, gather adherents, and gain momentum. Yet the slave insurrection would be checked in its headlong path by the limits of territory and competing claims of sovereignty.
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Linkages that would bind the fates of the two colonies were already forming off-stage, as it were. Setting aside for a moment their disputes over territories on either side of the Atlantic, Spain and France agreed to the Family Pact of 1761 against England, resulting in an alliance against the British presence in the Caribbean. The same English threat, along with the increasing wealth and population of Saint-Domingue, motivated Governor Manuel Azlor to renew talks on the border question. Thanks to the Bourbon reforms intended to reactivate the colonial economy, free trade was already permitted through Montecristi, now declared neutral, which opened it up to an influx of French and Dutch corsairs. Having once been destroyed in 1606, the port city gained new life thanks to the new measures and reforms, while the immigration of more families from the Canary Islands significantly raised the population. The war of 1762 between England and the alliance of Spain, France, and Naples made a new opening for Dominican privateering against the British ships sailing in the waters near Montecristi, and the considerable booty gained thereby included precious cargoes of Africans, which provided more incentive for Dominican trade. The economic upswing further stimulated the ongoing clandestine commerce in Dominican livestock, leading settlers to found the villages of Baní, San Miguel, and Caobas. Thanks in part to the reactivation, the Cibao—a fertile, long, and narrow valley, 140 miles long and 14 miles wide—could become the country’s most prosperous region, a breadbasket of grains, coffee, and beans. Cattle-raising received a boost in the Cibao as well, and its dominance thwarted plans to diversify for increased export, as did the specialization in tobacco-growing in the region surrounding Santiago. In order to monitor the border and regulate the traffic going constantly across it, a first Dominican attempt to meet with the French envoy Comte d’Estaing was made on 22 May 1764, the year in which a Royal Decree (Cédula) was issued to authorize the building of settlements that would house the marrons fleeing slavery from the west. With that decree, already existing settlements like San Lorenzo de Los Mina would gain legitimacy in the eyes of the Spanish colonial administration. Under the terms of the pact, Governor Azlor could ratify an accord permitting the sale of cattle, unencumbered and tax-free, to the French colonists. Subsequent attempts to bring this livestock trade under exclusive control, as with the establishment of the Compañía de Cataluña in Santo Domingo, provoked another revival of the illicit cattle trade. The French of Saint-Domingue in fact increased their rate of cattle purchasing, owing to the demand produced by the introduction of additional French troops into the colony, and the lifting of the government monopoly on the sale of beef in 1787 encouraged further encroachments on Spanish territory in the effort to round up
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more of the cattle grazing there freely. Azlor succeeding in drawing up a pact on 4 June 1770 that provided a protocol for conflict resolution through peaceful discussion between commandants of the two colonies’ corps of border guards. This provision paved the way for the peaceful although difficult resolution, in May and June 1771, of a conflict involving the French appropriation of lands owned by Don José Guzmán, Barón de la Atalaya. Yet another joint action seemed to confirm the rapprochement, when the anti-British alliance of Spain and France sent military reinforcements to Hispaniola to defend all the island against possible English attack.10 By this time, Saint-Domingue had exported more sugar and imported a far greater number of slaves than any of the Hispanic islands, which were prevented from carrying out either activity, sugar cultivation or slave importation, on any significant scale until the nineteenth century. By its role in the French system, Saint-Domingue was a colony of production, not of “residence,” and its high profitability created a favorable balance of trade for the metropolis as it took an untold toll on human lives, not to mention the ecological havoc it wreaked by widespread deforestation intended to clear the way for cash crops and to exploit wood for export. Whereas the domingüois in 1776 sold primarily products of industrialized or semi-industrialized agriculture to the dominicanos, that is, products such as sugar, coffee, and cotton, the latter on the other hand limited themselves to selling mainly live animals and some few other products of the hatero economy.11 It was the lack of an overseas market from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century that in reality limited Dominican sugar production to the function of supplying an intrainsular demand: with no external market, there was no saca, no exportation, of sugar. The cultivators who did depend on sugar for their livelihood kept to operating the trapiches, primitive horse- or human-drawn mills, and in good years the owners even refrained from producing too much, lest a drop in prices render the investment futile. By 1783, only 20 refineries and mills would be operating in the entire Spanish colony. In Saint-Domingue, on the other hand, the plantation owner found it profitable to overwork his slaves so hard that in four to seven years, their labor could make good the initial investment with a return of some 8–12 percent to the owner, and when they died off they could be replaced with fresh shipments of labor from West Africa. Abbott estimates that almost a million Africans died during a hundred years of slavery in Saint-Domingue.12 Without the pressure to produce that a foreign market would have created, the Santo Domingo hateros managed their rustic business, contrasting in its seeming naturalness and simplicity with the more “advanced”
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capitalist orientation toward accumulation and investment characteristic of the harder-driving Saint-Domingue planters. A home-grown physiocrat, the hatero tended to operate under the assumption that wealth derived from the land, and that the more land one owned, the more wealth one could draw, essentially in the form of money to be accumulated for its own worth. The highly specialized work in the Santo Domingo ingenios (mills or plantations) did constitute the exception, and it set the sugar-producing personnel apart for a while from the ranchers and ranchhands of the hatos, with the sugar masters possessing valued technical knowledge and thus enjoying a certain prestige and respect. In the French-claimed territories by contrast, the Saint-Domingue planter tended to see money as capital: that is, as one productive means among others, valuable in its power to generate more capital. Contrasting uses of slaves also distinguished the two modes of production: whereas the Saint-Domingue slaves were normally sent to labor in the fields or to process in the sheds, slaves in Santo Domingo, if not sent to round up their owner’s herds, were often loaned out to other ranchers or farmers for a salary the owners would collect. Oftentimes the slaves were sent to the French part: records from 1747 and 1769 tell of Spanish troops actually crossing the eastern border to recover borrowed slaves who remained and bring them back to Santo Domingo.13
El Tratado de Aranjuez Along with contraband and crossings, tensions in the borderlands drew the two colonial governments to the table with the goal of fixing the boundary at the officially recognized limits of the two countries’ “actual possessions.” The topographical project of defining the boundary took place through 1772 and 1773. As surveyors worked on the ground, measuring the contours of a raya de tolerancia (line of tolerance), governors and officials worked out the administrative details, communiqués flowing briskly between sides. With the French officials striving to retain their possessions, the Spanish officials insisted on recovering lost territories, and the two crowns insisted on a speedy resolution of the differend. The disputed areas included Capotillo, la Sabana de Verettes, and the Saltadero of the Canot River. In one particular case the French asserted a claim to lands extending to the Neiba River (or Yaque del Sur), in effect demanding recognition of a line traced from San Juan de la Maguana to the Massacre (Dajabón) River. Governor José Solano Bote refused this immodest proposal and threatened the French commissioner with both the cessation of the cattle trade and the refusal to restore runaways from the French part to their owners. The threat apparently hit home, for
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the French commissioner accepted the general terms of the convention signed on 25 August 1773, which fixed the boundary to a line that stretched down from the Massacre southward to the Pedernales.14 On 29 February 1776, ambassadors from the two colonizing countries subsequently met in the Aranjuez Castle at la Atalaya, not far from the Spanish capital. The treaty they drew up would put to rest the limits dispute, if not the tensions that would arise from the fact of two countries sharing a common border. In the treaty, the boundary was described, adjusted, and fixed; signing the pact were Don José Solano Bote, knight of the order of Santiago, governor and captain-general of Santo Domingo; and Victor Therèse Charpentier, Marquis of Ennery, count of the Holy Empire, and inspector-general of the military and militia of the French Leeward Islands. Both gentlemen acted in plenipotentiary roles. The jointly observed division followed the river Rebouc (or, later, Guayubín) in the north, starting from the site of the first settlement at la Isabela, and continuing on southward until reaching the other shore near Petite Goâve. As set down in the treaty, the line of demarcation, after crossing the Mont d’Haïti, the Piton de l’Oranger, and the Reposoir, ran through Pyramid No. 179, in the midst of a little savanna, and then went on to a bigger savanna where once stood a guardhouse. Eventually the line would cross the Artibonite, running from No. 183 on the right bank to No. 184 on the left, and so on. Accordingly, Article 1 of the 1777 treaty specifies that the line of demarcation between the two nations of Hispaniola “shall remain perpetually and invariably fixed at the mouth of the river D’Ajabon, or River of the Massacre, on the northern side of said island, and at the mouth of the river Pedernales, or Des Anses à Pitre, on the southern side, in the terms specified in the second article.” The surveying for the demarcation was made by two commissioners, the Viscount of Choiseul and Don Joaquín García, both assisted by their teams of engineers and local informants.15 The physical markers themselves in Spanish were called mojonaduras, boundary markers with columnar pyramid form; their placement was finished in August 1776.16 Now drawn on paper and marked in stone, the demarcation officially recognized, legitimated, and bounded the French presence on the island, legalizing what the Spanish authorities had considered up to that point an illegal or extra-legal occupation. The limits question was therefore resolved, but it did not apparently quell the French colonizers’ desire to extend their claim over the entire island. Although Aranjuez recognized in effect the territory of the central plains as Dominican, it would not stop future occupations, since no sooner were the limits fixed, they were breached again by the eastward advance of more French colonizers.
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Against the invisible hand of economics and the visible hands of surveyors and soldiers, the slaves, when they did not seek to escape, continued an unending struggle to stay alive and to maintain a sense of identity and meaning. Culture and religion were sources of comfort, courage, and resistance. Destined to incorporate the slaves ever more tightly into a body of insurgents, the frenzied danse à Don Pèdre came over into the French colony from the Spanish part around 1768. With that dance arrived Dom Petro or Don Pedro, the houngan who gathered a religious following and established his houmfort (temple) in Petite Goâve, South Province. Secrecy, unity, vengeance: the adherents of the fiery Petro cult, identified by the red of their costumes and the violence of their dance, swore to uphold these tenets of resistance to oppression. Where they did not stay and fight, they took to the pays arrière of the mountains and lay low. In the instances where the marrons did not make their exodus to the Massif de la Selle, which extends through the southern peninsula, the runaway slaves of Saint-Domingue repaired eastward, to the relative safety of the Spanish territory amid the Bahoruco mountains, or in such refuges as Maniel, a significant portion of which lay across the divide in Spanish lands. French colonial authorities sought in vain to strike an accord with the Spanish that would provide for the capture and return of the Maniel marrons, yet the latter evaded or resisted capture, standing fast in their palisaded redoubts. The failure of such attempts at cross-border slave recovery led to the pardoning and legal recognition, in 1785, of the manieles. As a term of the peace treaty, the marrons were granted parcels of land and eight months’ worth of provisions. Fick (1990) quotes a Marquis de Najac, who, in a letter to Governor La Luzerne, informed the latter,“During your administration [1786–7], over four thousand slaves fled into Spanish territory; since your departure, the Spanish hardly returned any of them, and I am convinced that there are now six thousand in the Spanish colony.”17 Again a renegade element, marronage had subverted the slave system and disturbed the larger order of the island. At the same time, the anomaly reconfirmed the complementarity between the two colonies and stoked powerful contradictions within the French part that would intensify to the point of no return. The stage was being set for a scenario that would confirm the worst fears, not only of the Saint-Domingue whites but of the Santo Domingo ranchers and farmers as well.
The Voice of Liberty and the Line of Tolerance Once their hold on Saint-Domingue had been secured, the French were pouring capital and slaves into the colony by way of Bourdeaux, Le Havre,
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and La Rochelle; plantations arose, and the most prosperous of the territories controlled by France produced more than all the Spanish American colonies combined. Profiting most from these boom times, the big plantation owners, the grands-blancs, met with the envy and hostility of the affranchis, most of them freed mulatto offspring. Numbering in the thousands, the affranchis acquired through inheritance the wherewithal to purchase plantations and slaves of their own. Attaining wealth that in many cases was equal to that enjoyed by the white planters, the mulattos nonetheless found themselves denied the civil rights and political opportunities enjoyed by the whites. It was the racial tension between the two classes, of which more will be said later, that would catalyze the uprising that would destroy this, the French empire’s richest colony. Santo Domingo in the meantime remained backward, its economic growth stunted by neglect and financial undernourishment. Sunk in a pastoral mode of production was the valley region spanning from the Cibao to as far south as Azua and as far west as Bánica, the total head of cattle numbering around 115,000 by 1780. Representing nearly half of all the cattle that grazed in Hispaniola, most of those 115,000 would be rounded up and herded westward, eventually to feed the planters, farmers, merchants, and slaves of Saint-Domingue. At this time, the cibaeño tobacco cultivators began to count on a steadily growing demand for the weed among the smokers and sniffers of the French colony. The demand would increase so much that to supply it, tobacco would continue to expand; it would later exceed animal husbandry, during the nineteenth century, as the primary economic activity of the valley region.18 While struggling Santo Domingo could squeeze out a mere 70,000 pesos in taxes from its farms and ranches, the Saint-Domingue plantation economy yielded a full million from its postage, tollhouses, and other sources. By 1773 there were 240 million pounds of dark sugar issuing from its mills, and 84 million pounds of coffee, 4 million pounds of cotton, and more than 150,000 pounds of indigo issuing from its plantations. By 1783 the French colony boasted 3,150 indigo plantations, 3,117 coffee plantations, 789 cotton plantations, and 182 rum distilleries. Its 783 mills processed the sugar of its canefields, with the main part of the work done by about 460,000 slaves. Port-au-Prince had 10,000 inhabitants, and the Cap Français, 18,000. The latter, the colonial capital, enjoyed fame as “an overseas Paris,” for it featured cafés, libraries, and bookstores. Noteworthy as well were its 20 doctors and two dentists; its theater, paved streets, public lighting, aqueducts, and even, as reported by Moreau de Saint-Mery in 1783, a lightning-rod.19 Because white planters forced sexual relations on their female slaves, a common practice, the latter gave birth to many offspring of mixed race.
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These offspring were the mulattos, many of whom would later become the affranchis once they were granted their freedom by their fathers. The affranchis would figure prominently not only in the political development of the island during the years of the revolution but also in the subsequent period leading up to the occupation and domination of the Dominican side by Haiti. By 1789 in Saint-Domingue there lived, in tense proximity, 31,000 whites, 28,000 free mulattos, and 456,000 slaves.20 The affranchis possessed more than a fourth of all property on SaintDomingue, including a large portion of the slaves. The freedmen nonetheless found themselves disadvantaged by the sanctions authorized by the Code Noir, subjected to discriminatory treatment by the social and juridical institutions, and denied many of the privileges, such as bearing arms, enjoyed by their white “superiors.” All three of the castes—blanc, mulâtre, and noir alike—shared the desire for freedom, albeit in different modes: the whites generally sought relief from the burden of tariffs through selfgovernment; the mulattos desired equality with the whites as promised by the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen; the blacks, oppressed by white master and mulatto master alike, desired the most elemental freedom of all.21 But the metropolis had a vested interest in maintaining the status quo. At this time, grands-blancs and affranchis controlled some 8,512 plantations, which covered 43 percent of the colony’s soil.22 France’s total exports in the first months of 1789 were valued at 17 million pounds sterling, with 11 million destined for the colonial trade with Saint-Domingue. Forty percent of France’s overseas investment went into the tiny flourishing colony, which saw one-fifth of France’s overseas commerce.23 Whites, comprising 6 percent of the Saint-Domingue population, owned 70 percent of the colony’s wealth, which included 6,512 plantations. The wealthy affranchis for their part owned the remaining 30 percent, which included 2,000 plantations. The petit-blanc small farmers, tradespeople, and various classes of skilled professionals accounted for the rest of Saint-Domingue’s white population. Saint-Domingue’s plantation economy continued to grow. Whereas 206,000 African slaves had been imported by 1763, that number had more than doubled by 1789, with enslaved Africans arriving in Saint-Domingue at a rate of 40,000 per year. On the eve of the Revolution, cultivation in mountainous Saint-Domingue was restricted to tablelands and plains: the plateaus of the Artibonite, Cul-de-Sac, Les Cayes, L’Arbre; the Plaine Centrale, and the Plaine du Nord. So intensive was the cultivation of the region that, in Cordero Michel’s estimation (1968), some 90 percent of its arable land was put to agricultural use.24 Tobacco and sugar cultivation in
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Saint-Domingue, with the harsh regimen and technological constraints they imposed, again required a stricter hierarchy and crueler discipline than those developed around Santo Domingo’s dominant pastoral mode of production. Imbalances between the two nations were bound to occur. The rapidly growing population of Saint-Domingue generated increased demands for meat and hides, good news for the normally sagging Dominican economy. But in the midst of Saint-Domingue’s booming prosperity, the mulattos were to become leading actors in rebellions that would build up to revolution. A steadily growing sector of the population, the mulattos by 1780 had numbered 12,000, and their numbers more than doubled by 1789. Many of the mulattos owned plantations and black slaves, and Article 59 of the Code Noir of 1685 guaranteed the mulattos’ right to succession. Yet the members this group of mixed race, these progeny of the normal concubinage, were made to feel inferior to whites. Their hopes for ascension dashed by an accident of birth, yet unwilling to remain second-class citizens, the mulattos resolved to remove the barriers to their social and economic advancement. It was on behalf of the SaintDomingue mulattos that the Societé des Amis des Noirs of Paris sought recognition of their civil rights by the National Assembly in Paris.25 With profound consequences for the Spanish colony of Santo Domingo, the Haitian Revolution started in 1789 as a struggle in SaintDomingue for vindication of rights, but fought for at this time mainly by the mulattos, not for general emancipation, but for advancing their own interests. It was the French Revolution of 1789 that sparked the demand for liberty, equality, and fraternity among this group. Whereas the Colonial Assembly assumed a “wait-and-see” approach in the days following the fall of the Bastille, the revisionist National Assembly that met in Saint Marc declared the independence of Saint-Domingue and an economic policy that included the opening of its ports to unlimited trade in defiance of Colbert’s exclusif métropolitain. These radical actions prompted the flight of many conservative planters to the Spanish side of the island. The year 1790 is remembered for the massive uprising of black slaves demanding their freedom, justified by the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen. But in Saint-Domingue, grands-blancs and mulattos, both threatened by insurrection, would now band together to form a united front against the blacks. Still, some of the mulattos were not convinced that the white planters had their interests at heart. Those mulattos included the emissary of the Societé des Amis des Noirs, Vincent Ogé, who arrived in Saint-Domingue in October 1790. With his brother and Jean Baptiste Chavannes, Ogé attempted to lead a mulatto revolution against the grands-blancs. Armed with the Declaration of Rights and the
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March Decree of the National Assembly, Ogé and Chavannes sought equal rights for the hommes de couleur. They met with rebuffs, mainly from the petits-blancs, who refused to recognize any decree that would legislate equal standing with mulâtres or with their own slaves. The subsequent revolt led by Ogé and Chavannes, at the head of some 300 mulâtres, met with initial success. They overtook the Cap, but later confronted the 1500 white militia and noir volunteers who overpowered the mulatto forces and drove them back through Ouanaminthe (formerly Juana Méndez) into Dominican territory. Sadly for the righteous mulâtres leaders, the Spanish had no interest in allowing racial insurrection into their own lands, and they delivered Ogé and Chavannes to the custody of the French and, ultimately, to the judgment of the Provincial Assembly. In the Cap Français, colonial authorities oversaw their prolonged torture and painful executions.26 News of the uprisings spread through the Spanish colony: concurrent with the outbreak of slave revolts in Saint-Domingue, the Dominican blacks staged uprisings in the Nigua ingenio and in the Guarico, both in 1791.27 In the southwest, the mulatto leader André Rigaud formed a different coalition, obtaining support from both the slaveholders of his caste and the insurgent blacks of the north. Planters with the means to do so sent their families to safety in Cuba. The Spanish of Santo Domingo, in the meantime, did what they could to hold their ground during these upheavals. The Spanish governor welcomed the black insurgents who crossed over, seeking refuge and aid, not only into the Dominican territory but also into the Spanish garrisons and, in some cases, the army officers’ corps.28 In an attempt to make the best of the situation, the Directorate in 1792 sent Sonthonax, a Girondin civil commissioner, to Haiti to deliver the 4 April decree and pacify Saint-Domingue. In Sonthonax’s portfolio was an offer of reconciliation and appeasement; at his back, some 6,000 troops under the command of Generals Desfourneaux and Laveaux. Sonthonax’s intention was to engage the blacks in the process of the radical revolution, eventually to offer them equality with the French citizenry. For the time being, however, he had to set the French troops on the counteroffensive against the rebellious slaves. Black forces were armed and provisioned by Spanish of the eastern side even before war against France was officially declared in Europe on 9 July 1793. The Spanish formed their alliance with the slaves for the pragmatic end of forcing concessions from the French and creating conditions for eventual reconquest of the island. By their defiance of white supremacy and their example of revolt, the Saint-Domingue blacks posed a significant threat to all slaveholding
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societies of the region, and these included the southern region of the now United States of America. Rigaud, as commander of the mulatto armies in the south from 1791–2, held strong against the British during this period of shifting alliances, when slaves were fighting on the Spanish side against the French, only soon to be fighting on the French side against the Spanish.
The Great Opening During the months that saw the imprisonment, torture, and execution of Bouckman Dutty, other insurrectionary leaders with ties to the eastern side came to the fore. The self-proclaimed General of the Negroes, Jean François, was Grand Admiral and Commander-in-Chief of the Royal Army. François spoke fluent Spanish and wrote in superb French, received his appointment as Royal Commander from the Spanish functionary Don Alfonso to Gros, and had received arms from the Spanish before openly pledging allegiance to Spain. As if slave revolt were not outrage enough, the French crown was none too pleased to hear the report that blacks were being armed by French monarchist aristocrats who, intent on counterrevolution, had allied themselves with the Spanish. How had these unexpected alliances come about? After the National Convention’s liberal decree of 4 April 1792 declared the political and social equality of the mulattos with the white planters, the latter subsequently welcomed support from the former in what became a common fight to suppress the mounting slave revolt. For their part, the black leaders felt deeply disillusioned by the Convention’s refusal to abolish slavery. Seeing an opportunity to reclaim the whole island under the Spanish flag, the Spanish royalists promised freedom for the slaves and support from the English, with the Spanish crown conferring recognition on the officer ranks of the “black Jacobin” leaders. On the side of the whites, those opposed to this Spanish-black alliance were the royalist Pompons Blancs, who, led by the planter Hanus de Jumécourt, created alliances with the mulattos. Mulattos and Pompons Blancs also joined forces against the Pompons Rouge, or “red Jacobins,” under the leadership of Auguste Borel. The latter party, composed primarily of poor whites impassioned with the radical ideology of the French Revolution, sought to subjugate the mulattos and to bring about a reapportionment of the land. Their hostile actions drove dozens of the Pompons Blancs to the eastern side of the island, where, contradicting their previous stance, they joined the Spanish army in preparation for a future attack on Saint-Domingue in
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the name of the monarchy. The French Republic, on the other hand, in its fight to regain control over the colony, was obliged to turn to the mulatto leaders Rigaud and Beauvais and to sectors of the professional middle class for the support of its colonial army. Despite these counterrevolutionary moves, the military successes of the former slaves continued to make gains against the colony. In 1793 it pleased the British to see France struggling to quell the growing insurrection in in Hispaniola, and they leapt at the opportunity to support the anti-Jacobin planters in their own peculiar brand of conservative counterrevolution against some of those who had helped the 13 American colonies to achieve their independence. It was at this opportune moment, during the period in which fugitives were taking refuge in Santo Domingo, that a Padre José Vásquez, working with a Padre Vives as agent of the Spanish crown, attempted to bring the Haitian leadership into the Spanish camp. After the French drove Jean-François’ army of the north to retreat into Spanish territory, it was there that Toussaint decided to enlist in the Spanish auxiliary regiments, where he would ascend the ranks, eventually to command a battalion of 4,000 black soldiers, a fighting force sworn to defend the interests and claims of the Spanish crown. With the false promise of a Spanish recognition of the slaves’ emancipation, the two presbiters had convinced Toussaint, Dessalines, Jean François, and Biassou to join the fight against the French. Yet beyond his fighting for the Spanish cause, it appears that Toussaint remained true to the cause of the emancipation. On this point, Ros (1994) speculates that Toussaint’s intention was to “turn his back on the Spaniards and their retinue of has-beens and slaveholders.” Ros continues: The fact is that his head always prevailed over his heart and, all along, he had only had one thought, namely, to make his army as strong as possible, too strong for the Spanish to tackle and, then, for all other adversaries as well; only then would he be able to finally complete the slave rebellion.29
Colonel Toussaint had offered 600 soldiers to the Spanish cause in exchange for the promise to abolish slavery. Despite his previous refusal to accept Spanish inducements, Toussaint, it turns out, had paid regular diplomatic visits to the Spanish at San Rafael, a town near the border. Many French planters, Toussaint learned, had joined with the Spanish, and a certain Père Sulpice entreated Toussaint to come over to their side. In July 1793, at the headquarters of General Cabrera in San Rafael, Toussaint signed the pact with the enemies of France, committing himself to lead the fight against the French. Shortly after the signing, Toussaint received the medal of the Order of Isabel. It was Padre Vásquez again who, as
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confessor and vicar-general of the army under Jean François, accompanied François in his occupation of Fort Dauphine on 6 July 1794. The same Padre Vásquez celebrated mass for the troops of former slaves in the plaza of the city; he afterwards incited the black brigadier to commence the killing of the whites of the city. At the end of the slaughter, 950 French colonists—children, women, and men—had lost their lives.30 Toussaint was already contemplating another change of sides when, in the French Assembly, the Girondins were supplanted by the more radical Jacobins led by Robespierre. Better to lose a colony, pronounced Robespierre, than to betray a principle. Liberté meant the abolition of slavery; egalité, the Assembly’s decree granting voting rights to the hommes de couleur. Not so said the grands-blancs domingüois, doing what they could to preserve their economic hegemony and exclusive rights to representation, presuming to speak, when it suited their purposes, for the petitsblancs, who often indeed saw their interests allied with those of this same aristocratic planter class.31 It was not until 4 February 1794 that the Convention accepted the three deputies representing the three castes of Saint-Domingue: Mills, Dufay, Bellay—a blanc, a mulâtre, and a nègre. The Convention they joined would ratify, by a vote of acclamation, the abolition of slavery in France’s Antillean colonies. It was Deputy Bellay who had proposed the definitive emancipation. Toussaint’s response was to continue double-dealing between the two colonial powers. He wrote to Captain-General Don Joaquín García, expressing indignation at Biassou’s attempt to reverse the emancipation, and pledged loyalty to the king of Spain, strongly implying however that that loyalty came at the price of Spain’s continued support of the Saint-Domingue’s freedom against the military threat of France. Generals García and Cabrera, hearing the veiled threat in Toussaint’s words, responded with Cabrera ordering the arrests of Moyse and Mme. L’Ouverture. Toussaint’s angry protest drew an order from García to release the prisoners. Cabrera then required of Toussaint an earnest of good faith in the form of an all-out campaign against the French. Toussaint assented, but when he convened his deputy commanders, it was to announce the news, conveyed in a letter from General Laveaux, that the Convention had abolished slavery, and that six blacks and mulattos had been elected to its ranks. By now it was clear that Toussaint was holding the trump card: his choice of sides could swing the war’s outcome in favor of either Spain or France. Laveaux wanted Toussaint to fight next to him, and sent a negotiator named Chevalier to convince the black general to convert.32 Sonthonax had announced his support for building a republic where once stood a colony, and Toussaint, the man Bonaparte was calling “that gilded African,” now made ready for his move.33
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With his elite formations of former slaves, all familiar with the terrain and inured to the hardships of battle and the heat of the tropics, Toussaint on 6 December 1793 captured the mulatto-controlled town of Gonaïves and turned it into his own headquarters, confirming the notion that, with Toussaint fighting on their side, the Spanish would restore all of Hispaniola to their control. (In Gonaïves he sustained a serious hip injury that would cause him pain for the rest of his life.) But on the refusal of Laveaux to recognize the emancipation, Toussaint continued to fight on the side of Spain for the next eight months.34 Toussaint’s alliance with the Spanish during this period arguably constituted a tactical move that would defend the anti-French interests of the ex-slaves precisely by playing the European superpowers against one another. In the name of the Bourbon monarchy, Toussaint captured all the south of Cap Français, Ennery, Plaisance, Morne Pelé, and La Tannerie—victories that would win him Hermonas’ praise as “benefactor of Santo Domingo.” During this brilliant campaign, the French tactician General De Brandicourt was taken prisoner and persuaded to join his forces with the Spanish. The Dominican officials in the meantime tried to make the best of the Saint-Domingue revolt. Don Pedro Acuña, the Secretary for Colonial Affairs in Madrid, sent a letter to Governor García ordering that he offer its leaders freedom and Spanish citizenship in exchange for allegiance to Spain. Madrid, in essence, was attempting to buy their support for an eventual Spanish takeover of the French side, offering them in the bargain “large plots of land so that, once they have become rich, they will keep the rest of the Negroes subject to us as slaves.” Acuña continued, “We will find the land for them in Haiti.” Toussaint rejected the Spanish offer in a proclamation demanding nothing less than “freedom and equality” for all on the island, a demand that Sonthonax had already fulfilled by abolishing slavery in the north of Saint-Domingue. Of the French fighting on the Spanish side, there formed a coalition of expatriates led by Laplace, Governor Blanchelande’s former secretary, in opposition to Toussaint. This group made appeals to Biassou in hopes of convincing him to betray his former comrade-in-arms. As if to announce his impending break with Spain, Toussaint prepared an ambush for General Cabrera on Sunday, 6 May 1794, at a church in San Rafael. While mass was being celebrated, Toussaint’s soldiers surrounded the church and, on signal, set upon Cabrera and his men. Dessalines is said to have entered the fray singing the Vodoun song, “Papa Legba, ouvri barrière pour moins” (Papa Legba, open up the door for me). The scene became a bloodbath. Women were not spared. With this action done, Toussaint had left the Spanish forces, taking his troops with him. Abandoning as well his
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former comrades François and Biassou, Toussaint led his men in joining the Republican-colonial army, to fight in common opposition to the threat now posed by a quadruple alliance: the Spanish, the French royalists, the grands-blancs, and the British. Having mounted the ambush at San Rafael and then a punitive expedition on Marmelade to eliminate the forces of former slaves who had fought for the Spanish, Toussaint launched his multi-pronged campaign throughout the countryside. With Gonaïves already taken, Toussaint went on to scatter the Spanish from a succession of occupied towns—Grande Rivière, Limonade, Gros Morne, Quartier Morin, Brogne, Limbé—and from the vicinity of Port de Paix and Cap Français. Toussaint had turned against Spain for once and for all, having played out his hand in the double game.35 Their withdrawal imminent, the Spanish were attempting to make a pact with the British when they lost the strategically important towns of Saint Michel and Dondon. Toussaint could now maneuver more fully than before against the British forces, which now counted on a steady supply of arms and food from the Spanish. Toussaint enjoined Laveaux to send an expedition against Santo Domingo to cut off this support and to make good the provisions of the Basle treaty, to be discussed shortly. The French governor declined Toussaint’s proposal, however, on the grounds that Spain once again had become an ally of France. The invasion would have to wait another five years. Seeing the advantage of his own alliance with France, Toussaint did change sides, thus consolidating his power and defending the liberty of the former slaves. When the time was right, the “black Napoleon” would oblige the last French civil commissioner, Philipe Roume de St. Laurent, to grant him the permission he had requested to invade the Spanish part and therewith unify the island under the French tricolor. During this temporary rapprochement, the French depended on the black and mulatto armies to stand up to British and Spanish assaults.
The Treaty of Basle To recapitulate a bit, it was ironic that a French dynasty, the Bourbons, had begun its rule in Spain in 1700 with Philip V and ended at the century’s end with Prime Minister Manuel Godoy. Blood ties bonded the Spanish monarchy with the French empire during an era of relative cooperation. That era ended abruptly with the outbreak of the Franco-Spanish war of 1793, provoked by the execution of Louis XVI. To oppose the French Republic, which resumed the imperialist agenda of the ancien régime without so much as a blink, the Spanish creoles felt moved to join forces with the English and with
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the Saint-Domingue slaves, now in revolt. Madrid’s Secretary for Colonial Affairs saw opportunity in the uprising. At his behest, Santo Domingo’s governor extended an offer of land, liberty, and Spanish citizenship to Toussaint. With France occupied with its own shift in power, Spain was holding on to the hope of reclaiming in Hispaniola what it felt it should never have lost. The years 1792–4 saw Spanish forces in Santo Domingo not only welcoming fugitive rebels into their midst but also lending arms and support to the struggle in northern Saint-Domingue. With the western third of Hispaniola already in French possession, and with the island’s internal border in dispute, Madrid took an action that had far-reaching consequences for the struggling Spanish colony. A threenation accord, engineered by the queen’s favorite, Godoy, would clear the way for delivering the whole of Hispaniola into the hands of France. The treaty was signed by Prussia, Spain, and France in the Swiss city of Basle in 1794, antedating Bonaparte’s conquest of Spain and Nelson’s defeat of the Spanish navy. Effective 22 July 1795, the Treaty of Basle would put an end to the monarchist war between France and Spain, which had begun in March 1793, and it obliged Spain to cede now the eastern part of Hispaniola to the French in exchange for the return of all continental territories and military emplacements taken by France during the war.36 The treaty thus contained the provision of Article IX, stating that, “in exchange for the restitution dealt with in Article IV, the King of Spain himself, as his successors, cedes and abandons in all right of possession to the French Republic all the Spanish part of the island of Santo Domingo in the Antilles.”37 The cession amounted to an admission on the part of Spain, in its moment of general decadence, that it simply could not muster the means to defend its American possessions from rival claims.38 In one fell swoop, the capitulation cancelled the Spanish Dominicans’ title to the insular space. In exchange for Santo Domingo, Republican France restored territories beyond the Pyrenees to Spain, knowing full well that British forces occupied key territories of Hispaniola’s western portion, which they would continue to do until forced to leave almost three years later, in April 1798. Imagine the mortification of the Dominican loyalists upon receiving news of the cession, granted without consulting any who had fought and sacrificed for their survival against the territorial rivals.39 Following the terms of the treaty, Spain offered to relocate Spanish colonists to other Spanish islands in the Caribbean. For this purpose they designated warships docked in the Bay of Ocoa to transport them. Many colonists took up the offer and went off as soon as they could pack their things.40 But by August 1794, Toussaint had changed sides again: he had deserted the Spanish camp, pledged his allegiance to France, and welcomed assistance
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from the French government. Once again fighting for the tricolor, Toussaint proved his brilliance as a strategist whose forces succeeded time and time again in breaking the cordon that, to a lesser extent with every successive battle, separated Santo Domingo from Saint-Domingue. Now the pressure was on to lay claim to the Spanish part before the British, who, establishing their presence throughout the Caribbean and having threatened the cities of Azua and Baní in southern Hispaniola, could beat them to the punch. Added to the British menace, the penury of Santo Domingo could only slow down the colony’s transfer to French control, as did the loss of more than 50,000 soldiers and the unwillingness of the French commission, headed by General Hedouville, to entrust the invasion of the eastern part to a black general whom many Dominicans would feel more than reluctant to accept as their governor. But Toussaint had his plan. Once he had taken the Cap, it remained for him to accomplish two essential tasks in order to secure the island: remove Roume, of the third Civil Commission, from his command; then wrest Santo Domingo from Spanish control.41 With the Basle Treaty signed, Toussaint continued to play different sides in the emancipation game. He declined an offer from the British to be crowned king of his nation; and although France was launching its counteroffensives against the slave rebellions, Toussaint reaffirmed his allegiance to France and promised to honor the Revolution itself as SaintDomingue’s bond with the mère patrie.42 At this time, authorities of the Spanish colony suppressed an attempted slave revolt in Samaná; three French whites and seven blacks were charged with inciting it. The infiltrations did not cease, however. Another international incident would occur five years later at Cotuí, where three black affranchis of Saint-Domingue were bound and taken to be sold.43 Confusion reigned in the eastern part. Although Santo Domingo would be restored to Spain by the Treaty of Paris in 1814, the multiple conquests sweeping the island were creating not only anarchy, but a collective crisis of identity among the Dominicans, a disorientation captured well in verses attributed to Padre Juan Vásquez. The verses comprise the wellknown quintilla, or strophe with five octosyllabic lines, penned shortly after France gained possession of the entire island in 1795 and sung by many a confounded Dominican: Ayer español nací; a la tarde fui francés, a la noche etíope fui, hoy dicen que soy inglés: no sé qué será de mí.
Yesterday I was born Spanish; in the afternoon I was French, at night I was Ethiope, today they say I’m English: I don’t know what will become of me.44
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While the future and identity of the Dominicans hung in doubt, what became of the British troops sent into Saint-Domingue between 1793 and 1797 was something more definite: 12,500 soldiers, or more than 60 percent of the 20,500 total, were felled not by the guns of the French occupiers so much as by the double scourge of malaria and yellow fever, contracted after they landed on Hispaniola. Another event added to the overturning of identities: close to where the Nigua River empties into the Caribbean, west of Santo Domingo, a major slave insurrection erupted in October 1797. The 200 rebelling slaves had heard news of France’s intention to emancipate them. In a frenzy of freedom, they killed cattle and burned fields.45 Bonaparte was inaugurated First Consul in 1799. Toussaint approved Bonaparte’s elimination of the Directorate and establishment of the Consulate on the 18th Brumaire—9 November 1799—and he pledged undying loyalty to France. At the same time, Toussaint defied Bonaparte’s rumored intention to recapture Saint-Domingue. After Bonaparte had lifted the embargo on American trade with Saint-Domingue on 13 December, Toussaint felt that the time was ripe to make good the rights accorded by the Treaty of Basle and move to occupy Santo Domingo in the name of France. He requested permission to do so of Roume on 28 December, during Toussaint’s involvement in the offensive against Jacmel. But Roume declined him permission, justifying his refusal with the claim that Generals Kerverseau and Chanlatte already had Santo Domingo under control and that it were best that Toussaint’s forces await “special regulations” from Bonaparte before taking action. Angered by this refusal, Toussaint ordered his deputy Moyse to prevail upon Roume. To this end, Moyse staged a show of force for the commissioner’s benefit that included an exhibition parade of the 600 cavalrymen under his command. Moyse threw in a bit of personal abuse into the argument for good measure by locking up the commissioner in a hen house and threatening to chop him up into chicken feed.46 Roume held out, but repeated entreaties and veiled threats compelled him to sign the decree, on 27 April 1800, that would clear the way for Toussaint’s campaign to take la Partie Espagnole. Paradoxically, the black general could commence a colonial war for anti-colonial ends. Decisive events again transpired beyond the control of the combatants. With the agreement of Mortfontaine signed on 30 September 1800, the United States made peace with France and withdrew its warships from SaintDomingue’s coastal waters. Toussaint again had to maneuver his way nimbly between the superpowers, and he moved fast especially to avoid the disastrous consequence of a possible accord between Britain and France: namely, a Napoleonic invasion to restore French rule to the island.47
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As now Governor-General of Saint-Domingue and Delegate of the French government on the island, François Dominique Toussaint L’Ouverture, on receiving word of the Dominican governor’s refusal to yield up the Spanish part, sent his troops marching into Santo Domingo, in the name of France but against the will of Bonaparte.48
Une et indivisible At the behest of his Supreme Commander, Agent Roume on 18 June 1800 rescinded his permission to invade Santo Domingo, and Toussaint’s immediate response was to have the agent re-arrested, but with strict orders that this time he not be manhandled but used as a bargaining chip in Toussaint’s long-distance war with Bonaparte. Bonaparte responded by sending him a letter forbidding him to occupy and annex Santo Domingo. The letter never caught up with Toussaint, however, as the general rode ahead, leading the invasion of the south. As the letter followed from post to post, Toussaint pressed on to defeat the Spanish armies and ultimately to force Governor García to surrender. So wide a swathe did Toussaint cut, the Spanish reportedly transferred Columbus’ bones to Cuba, lest they be desecrated in the invasion by what they considered the enemy hordes. With the handover of the plaza pre-arranged with García, Toussaint and his troops entered Santo Domingo on 26 January 1801, and with him the island entered into a new phase of its history. The Spanish flag was lowered from the mast atop the Homage Tower within the grounds of the Ozama Fortress: in its place was raised the French tricolor, to the firing of 22 cannon and the playing of the Marseillaise. The Dominican colonists, defeated and downcast, presented no opposition to the takeover. On 27 January, with a great Te Deum sounding from the Cathedral of Santa María la Menor, the one called “Black Napoleon” and “First Among Blacks” appeared in a public ceremony in which García handed him the keys to the city. Fifteen thousand slaves were freed on that day. Estates and cattle were soon distributed to the victorious officers. And later, when García broached the possibility that Toussaint take possession of Santo Domingo for Spain and govern for an interim under the aegis of the Spanish Empire, Toussaint, ever mindful of Bonaparte’s ascendancy on the continent, replied,“I am doing all this for the French Republic, officially,” reminding García that “the French armies will shortly cross the Pyrenees just as easily as I crossed into Santo Domingo.”49 Notwithstanding the Basle treaty, it was soon apparent that Bonaparte lacked sufficient troops to hold the island, but Toussaint’s forces now could do just that by joint campaigns
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with Spanish detachments remaining on the eastern side. But with the emancipation now of Santo Domingo’s slaves, the ideal of unification had merged with the ideal of emancipation that had been guaranteed by the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, if not by subsequent actions of the French Assembly.50 Now, backed by the terms of the Basle Treaty, Toussaint declared the whole island of Hispaniola une et indivisible, its only borders the sea. Next among Toussaint’s initial acts was to convoke a General Assembly, composed of deputies chosen by electoral assemblies, that would draw up a new constitution “for the island of St. Domingue, according to its interests, which are different from those of France.”51 The Assembly convened on 22 March 1801, with Bernard Borgella and the Dominicans Monceibo, Morillas, Muñoz, and Roxas in attendance. The constitution it wrote, which was presented to Toussaint on 9 May 1801, concentrated power in the hands of the gouverneur-general-à-vie. The commander-in-chief, it declared, would have final say on finances; on military, ecclesiastic, and civil appointments; and on legislation. It did not proclaim independence but claimed as belonging to the French empire all the “island of SaintDomingue” and its dependencies, including Samaná, Tôrtue, Gonâve, the Cayemites, Île de Vaches, and Saona.52 Even before his commissioner Vincent presented the new constitution to Bonaparte, Toussaint had himself proclaimed gouvernor-à-vie, with the power to decree all laws that the assembly would to be expected to ratify, bringing the theory of une et indivisible into reality.53 The new constitution also abolished slavery and all color distinctions. It partitioned the island into six arrondisements: North, South, West, Louverture, Ozama, and Cibao. The arrondisement named Louverture would later be divided into the parts renamed the Artibonite and the Center. As for the regional governments, the north district went to Moyse, Maurepas, and Christophe; the south and west, to Dessalines, Belair, and Laplume; the east, to Clervaux, Pageot, and Toussaint’s brother, Paul. Toussaint forged ahead with his campaign to modernize and rationalize Santo Domingo’s economy and culture. In a public sermon he admonished the Dominicans to marry their concubines.54 He instituted measures to establish a French political system, setting up a court of appeals. He made sure as well to solicit the support of two important constituencies: the hateros, to whom he promised security of land tenure, and the blacks, to whom he promised no less than total emancipation. Manumission freed so many slaves on the Spanish side that by the beginning of the nineteenth century, the libertos or “freedmen” would make up the majority of the Dominican population. Having freed the slaves in the Spanish
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portion, Toussaint had also raised them to the same status enjoyed by SaintDomingue’s citizenry since 1793. The gesture did little to benefit the emancipated, however: since Toussaint had proscribed unauthorized sale of lands in order to prevent the division and parcelization of the latifundios, the former slaves had no recourse but to keep working the large properties of their former owners. Toussaint had thus made his pact with the Dominican planters and ranchers in order to save the unification. He counted on the support of the urban mulattos as well, who by now had gained entry into the upper echelon of positions formerly occupied only by whites.55 Toussaint shared the skin color of many of the Dominicans, but he was compelled to do all he could to assure the lighter-skinned Dominicans of the new government’s ability to run the country. He invited expatriates “of all colors” to return to the island. On 10 February he devalued the peso, raising its equivalency from eight to eleven reales. Toussaint made other changes: while preserving the system of large landholdings, he instituted a compulsory labor system enforced by the state, with harsh penalties for noncompliance. Toussaint with these measures was attempting to counteract the ruin of the former Spanish colony and to shake the creoles, accustomed to the loose rhythms of husbandry, out of their “pastoral indolence.” His ultimate goal was to convert the Dominican economy of hatos and conuco mounds into one of agriculture based on the French plantation model.56 Yet the hateros looked with suspicion on Toussaint’s restructuring and preferred to throw their support behind the pro-French caudillo Juan Barón. And the now former slaves for their part looked with suspicion on a new system that prevented acquisition of small properties to the masses and thus offered few of the benefits of the hatero regimen. Besides these motivating interests, the terror sowed by Colonel Jean Philippe Daut, consisting of slashings and sackings in the capital, illustrated what many regarded as the military’s essential inhumanity. Owing to the self-interest of the hateros and the neutrality of the former slaves, the French could count on Dominican support to loosen Toussaint’s hold on the eastern part.57 Toussaint’s stay in the Dominican capital ended in March 1801, after something more than two months. In command he left Paul L’Ouverture and General Pageot. And the French administration, once welcomed and accommodated, would stay on in Santo Domingo even after its army had been defeated in Haiti and this nation’s independence declared under Dessalines on New Year’s Day, 1804.58 Toussaint’s conquest of the east, accepted ambivalently by the masses, had been repudiated and combated by the Spanish Dominican oligarchy. Unification definitely went against the interests of those who had something to lose by the abolition and the land reform imposed by Toussaint.
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Toussaint’s new order never broke completely with French sovereign rule but gave no significant role to any French representative in the government of the united former colonies, therefore taking a bold step toward independence. Holding in comtempt the victories achieved by Toussaint in the name of France, the White Napoleon wanted to teach him who really was in charge. The audacity with which Toussaint had set the course of the nation so infuriated Bonaparte that the French Consul prepared for invasion: eager to recommence building a French empire in the Americas, having acquired the Louisiana Territory from Spain, he would send in an expeditionary force of 50 ships, 20,000 sailors and 21,900 soldiers, and it would be commanded by Bonaparte’s his brother-in-law, VictorEmmanuel Leclerc. Leclerc’s army consisted of 20,000 troops—the largest colonial force ever sent out from France. Its mission was threefold: take Saint-Domingue from the blacks, reinstate the Code Noir, and return the colony to the order once enjoyed by the grands-blancs under the ancien régime.59 The force departed from Brest on 14 December 1801; a month and a half later, on 2 February 1802, it entered the Bay of Samaná. There the squadron divided itself, directed to distinct points around the island that included Santo Domingo and Port-au-Prince. The forces landed and proceeded to encircle Toussaint’s army.60 After his arrival in the Spanish colony, Leclerc found support for his invasion from among the Dominican creoles. Led by such caudillos as Barón, the hatero sectors, mulattos in the majority, acted on their refusal to be dominated by the blacks of the western part, wanting to send back those they considered their inferiors. At the beginning of the first French invasion, Leclerc counted on the support of the black generals Dessalines, Christophe, and Maurepas. It was not until 17 October 1802 that these three joined the mulatto generals Pétion, Clervaux, and Daut in alliance with Belair to lead the revolt against the French in Haut-du-Cap. Their combined forces outnumbered Leclerc’s, already under constant attack by flying troops of yellow fever-carrying Aëdes aëgypti. In the first campaign, Leclerc’s invasion of intended reconquest was defeated, although more by disease than by the resistance of the former slaves. The French failure nevertheless gave Dominican elites the opportunity to reinstitute slavery, and doing so reinforced the dominance of the hatero latifundists and stymied the growth of the incipient middle class.61 Toussaint’s first reaction to the Napoleonic invasion was to send his emissary Agé, a white general, to negotiate a peaceful surrender with Spanish Governor García. García refused, however: the two French generals Ferrand and Kerverseau were already installed as administrators of the colony, reasons were not compelling enough to submit to yet another
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foreign government, and, besides, substantial numbers of Dominicans supported the cause of the mulattos of southern Haiti, enemies of Toussaint.62 Toussaint’s armies, withdrawn from la Partie de l’Est after three years of occupation, had virtually ceded that sector to control by the French invasionary forces.
Bonaparte’s Bid for Hispaniola Spain had ceded its Louisiana Territory to France by 1 October 1800; Bonaparte was ready to surround and reconquer Saint-Domingue and thus reassert his presence in the Caribbean. Poised in readiness to begin his war on the Iberian front, he did not need a black general of the colony leading former slaves in a war of unification in the name of the Republic. That is what he got, but Bonaparte had other plans for Toussaint. Wishing to wrest the island away from the blacks, France still claimed possession of la Partie de l’Est. The failure of Leclerc’s invasion, intended to recover the colony and reinstate slavery, foreclosed indefinitely the possibility of a Haitian–French partnership on which Toussaint had banked his hopes.63 As Immanuel Kant had reflected in his essay “What Is Enlightenment?,” Europeans of the eighteenth century were living in an age of reason, but not in a reasonable age. A Caribbean plantation system based on slave labor had provided one of the most blatant proofs of this contradiction. An ironic offspring of the century of lights was the Law of 30 Floreal, issued in the Year X of the Revolution (20 May 1802). The Floreal law was the Convention’s move to abolish the emancipation granted by the previously pronounced Decree of 16 of Pluviôse, Year II (4 February 1794). The thrust of the law was to reinstate the regulations in force before 1789, and therewith revive the pre-1789 slave trade and importation, in effect turning back the clock on the Enlightenment. It was Leclerc who had been commissioned to carry the 30 Floreal law to Saint-Domingue, where he promulgated it in February 1802 and thereafter enforced it with extreme caution, since this piece of legislation went against all that the SaintDomingue slaves had sacrificed to achieve. In any event, Toussaint would not remain in charge for long. Lured into a meeting on 7 June, under false pretenses, with French General Brunet near Gonaïves, Toussaint was arrested, then placed on a ship bound for France. On his departure, Toussaint declared, “In overthrowing me, they have cut down in SaintDomingue the trunk of the tree of black liberty. It will shoot up again through the roots, for they are numerous and deep.”64 Toussaint was taken away and imprisoned in the castle of Joux, on the mountainous border
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between France and Switzerland, where he passed his last days on earth. Meanwhile in Saint-Domingue, Toussaint’s leadership role was filled by Jean-Jacques Dessalines. Swept up in the violence of war and rapine, the forces led by Dessalines put some 2,000–3,000 whites to death, sparing the doctors, priests, and Polish colonizers. With Leclerc’s death by yellow fever in 1802, Bonaparte sent as mariscal and new governor-general his appointee, Jean-Baptiste-Donatien de Vimeur, Comte de Rochambeau. Rochambeau had fought in the revolution that gave birth to the United States of America, but he was soon to gain notoriety for ordering the ruthless pursuit and punishment of rebellious blacks, as exemplified in his practice of loosing vicious mastiffs on helpless captives. The sanguinary Rochambeau recaptured Port-de-Paix, considered a prize by the French as a conduit for the ongoing flow of Dominican cattle. This victory was a costly one, however, for Rochambeau’s exhausted forces were repeatedly struck down or weakened by tropical disease. Faced with imminent defeat, the governor-general signed the French surrender to Dessalines in 1803. The triumph of the former slaves over their erstwhile masters was auspicious for the fledgling republic to the north: thanks to Dessalines’ defeat of Rochambeau, President Thomas Jefferson could acquire all the territory that would become “the Louisiana Purchase” for the bargain rate of the 50 million francs (15 million dollars) for which it was sold by Bonaparte, blocked in the pursuit of his dream to establish a French empire in the Americas. Who knows just how eager Bonaparte might have felt about selling Louisiana had he succeeded in subduing Toussaint, the upstart leader of Saint-Domingue’s former slaves. With Dessalines’ victory, with the renaming of the colonial capital le Cap Haïtien, the territory controlled by the former slaves stretched nearly from Cape Tiburon to the Massacre River, the latter marking the eastern boundary of the Haitian realms up to the present day.65 Whereas the propertied classes of the eastern part might eventually have reconciled themselves to Toussaint’s conciliatory policy toward the grands-blancs of his own country, they would not suffer the dicta of a Dessalines who would have proscribed all whites from owning land. Although the big and medium landowners of the Cibao might eventually have adapted themselves to Toussaint’s regimen of continued agricultural exploitation of the existing latifundia, they would not accept Dessalines’ denial of citizenship to most whites, his program of nationalization and agrarian reform, and his plan to exact a contribution destined for the Haitian military. Many of the cibaeños, who constituted more than half the Dominican population of the time and included the powerful hatero aristocracy of Santiago, had looked favorably upon a unification and complete
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economic independence of the island; these changes, many believed, would fortify the cattle-raising and export industry far beyond the limits previously set by Spanish mercantile policy. But it was Dessalines’ aggressions more than any anti-Haitian sentiment, and not economic self-interest that finally decided the cibaeños’ opposition to the principle of Haitian rule. The more conservative Dominicans of the capital had rejected unification and not only rushed to the pro-French cause, blessed by the Catholic hierarchy, but would seek the protection of Jean Louis Ferrand, general-in-command of the Dominican capital during the early years of Haitian independence.66 The urban elites of Santo Domingo had fostered an image of Toussaint as the archenemy of their society; they saw in Dessalines a logical successor in a continuing conflict between nations. The same classes identified the political act of unification with the violence of invasion and usurpation, while identifying their own program with that of the ultra-reactionary Ferrand. The dominant interests and ideology set the tone of the antiHaitianism would later be espoused by the majority. Once Dessalines declared Haitian independence on 1 January 1804 and had himself proclaimed gouverneur-général-à-vie, he set about Africanizing the population of the new republic. Some 70,000 Europeans had died in the battle for Haiti; other whites had been eliminated by either mass execution or forced emigration. Now, to increase the number of black citizens, Dessalines encouraged immigration from the United States by offering captains of slaver ships $40 for each slave handed over. Moreover, he gave exclusive permission to Jamaica to sell slaves to Haiti, admitting only men so as to swell the ranks of the army. Flouting the Floreal law, Desssalines’ immigration policy determined that Haiti would be black and henceforth provide a haven of freedom for blacks. By the same stroke, the freedom of the Dominican blacks and mulattos had implicitly been declared. As the culmination of an anticolonial movement of transcendent significance, this act of defiance could only confirm Jean Price-Mars’ (1953) conviction, that however trifling one may judge our contribution to a new conception of the human, we have contributed all the same to the elaboration of the historical and scientific process that relegates to the curiosity shop of worthless antiquities the theories and the outdated claims about superior races and inferior races.67
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Chapter 4
Haiti and Santo Domingo, 1802–44
And God created the earth, and in the center of a bright blue sea He put an island to be a point of expiation in the world. —Máximo Avilés Blonda, Pirámide 1791
his chapter on the Haitian decades of Hispaniola begins with the story of a flag. In Arcahaye on 18 May 1802, Jean-Jacques Dessalines obtained the pledges of Generals Christophe, Clervaux, and Pétion to unite under his command. Dessalines then took the French tricolor of three broad vertical bands, under which Haitians had fought to that day. He tore out the flag’s white band, cast it upon the ground, and tramped upon it. At a later date, he would have his goddaughter, Catherine Flon, sew together the remaining blue and red bands. After making another change, this time replacing the blue band with a black one, Dessalines had finished his task: the creation, though not of whole cloth, of the Haitian national flag.2 Previously, on 28 April 1804, after a bloody war that achieved the expulsion of the French from the country although not from the island, Dessalines had declared the independence of Haiti and thus founded the first black republic of the world, proclaiming: “Never will a European colonist set foot on the territory of Haiti as a master or proprietor.” This decree, made law by the constitution of 1805, would remain in force until its abrogation under the U.S. military occupation in 1918. Dessalines had himself crowned Emperor Jean-Jacques I on 22 September 1805. Soon after his coronation he would order the invasion of French-controlled Santo Domingo, sending 25,000 troops into la Partie de l’Est.
T
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During the months that Dessalines was organizing his government in the Haitian capital, a small group of French soldiers maintained a garrison in the Dominican capital under the command of Brigadier General Jean Louis Ferrand. Slavery was well reestablished in Santo Domingo by the time Ferrand arrived to take command in 1804.3 Having initially accepted the Haitian presence in their country, citizens of the capital soon expressed their preference for the French rule, encouraged perhaps by the presence of French families taking refuge among the Dominicans. As a countermeasure to Dessalines’ threat, Ferrand issued his directive to the Dominicans: all Haitian prisoners older than 14 years of age were to be enslaved. Dessalines took this act as provocation enough to launch his offensive against the east. This he did, departing on 14 May 1804 from Cap Haïtien with an army of 25,000, all of whom crossed the border in the southwest region.4 Dessalines then marched on the Dominican capital, intent on taking the tiny French garrison that defended it. This was a time of rapidly shifting power arrangements and allegiances. Since before the abrogation of the decree prohibiting white ownership of the land, the Dominicans had feared that Haitian domination would put an end to all property ownership by Spanish-descended colonists. Yet they would find French rule unsatisfactory, too. Indeed, it would be the fear of dispossession under a French takeover that would later fuel the fires of the Dominican “Reconquest”: aided by the British, combined Spanish and Dominican forces would defeat the French and frustrate again their dreams of a unified “Island of Haiti,”5 leading to a recolonization by Spain in 1809. The restoration of Spanish rule for 11 years, with its unsatisfactory outcomes, led to another movement for independence, achieved but briefly in 1821, with the consequence of creating another opening to Haitian rule.6 What happened between the two countries after the death of Toussaint and the end of Haitian hegemony in Santo Domingo constitutes the concern of this chapter.
The Era of France in Santo Domingo With the glorious militancy of their anticolonial struggle still fresh in their minds, the Haitians now faced the possibility of slavery redux. With the restoration of slavery in the French Antilles, racial and political lines were being drawn. Hommes de couleur of Guadeloupe, Martinique, St. Lucia, and Île-de-France no longer could marry blancs, nor enjoy protection before the law equal to that of the blancs. In the uprisings subsequent to
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the reimposition of slavery, the black Haitian general Charles Belair led the battle in the north and west of the former Saint-Domingue with the cry, Point d’esclavage, point de colonie.7 The period that the Dominicans call La Era de Francia began with Rochambeau’s capitulation to the forces led by Dessalines. Ferrand confronted two options: either surrender to the British, or resist an assault of the Haitians. He found a third alternative, however: he opted instead to march with his 600 soldiers on the Spanish colonial capital. Once in Santo Domingo, Ferrand gained the support of the 400 soldiers garrisoned there. Ferrand first dismissed General Kerverseau from his command before setting sail for the French metropolis. Ferrand’s departure from the Cibao had created a new problem, though, for it left the northwest region unprotected and open to penetration by the Haitians. But the French could count on support from the cibaeños. Subsequent to Toussaint’s abolition of slavery in 1801, those who had depended most on the labor of slaves— namely, the Dominican landowners—now looked to France for succor and welcomed the French invasions of the next two years. The other significant group were the Dominican mulattos, gente de color, who sided with the European whites against the Haitians, whether noirs or gens de couleur.8 Yet other Dominicans of the borderlands were ready to throw their support behind the Haitians. It was in their vulnerable position under the occupation that the ranchers and merchants of Montecristi, Dajabón, and Santiago appealed to Dessalines for protection, and the Haitian president sent a contingent of 200 soldiers under the command of José Campos Tavares to Santiago to take control of its fortress. Named governor of the department of the Cibao by Christophe, Dessalines later exacted a million pesos from the residents in contribution to the Haitian war effort.9 Facing the imminence of new invasions from the west, Ferrand, commander of Montecristi, issued a proclamation on 6 January 1805 to the effect that French and Dominican forces would recommence the defensive war against the Haitian enemy.10 French troops therefore stayed on in Spanish territory even after Dessalines’ victory. Invoking the Treaty of Basle, Rochambeau declared in a message conveyed by his chef d’état major Jacques Boyer, that the French forces stationed in such outposts as Santo Domingo and Santiago de los Caballeros belonged neither to Spain nor, as auxiliaries, to any other foreign power. Those troops were French and remained French, insisted Rochambeau, for none other than the king of Spain had ceded that territory to France, and to France it therefore belonged, despite the capitulation of the Cap Français, now le Cap Haïtien.
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France found itself under no obligation whatsoever to evacuate its own troops from what it considered to be its own territory.11 The French army stationed par delà l’Ozama thus carried out a doubly antagonistic mission: both as a vexatious holdout against the Spanish host, and as a last line of colonial reaction against the Haitians’ revolution. Among the Dominicans who remained after the invasions at the beginning of the 1800s, there were those who anticipated an improvement under the more economically “advanced” French. The French planters and their technicians, possessing the know-how to organize production of sugar, cacao, tobacco, and coffee, could have furnished the capital and drive to transform the hato-based Dominican economy into one focused on the plantation, thereby laying the base for the future emergence of a Dominican bourgeoisie. As territorial governor, Ferrand did what he could to strengthen Santo Domingo against the onslaughts of Haiti, and during the occupation of 1802–9, he undid what Toussaint had achieved in Santo Domingo. Once Kerverseau had reinstated slavery in July 1802, nullifying the Toussaint-declared abolition of 1801, Ferrand found no obstacle in authorizing the Spanish to carry on the slave trade for 12 years and foreign trafficking for six years. When he was not busy with turning back Haitian assaults, Ferrand promoted agriculture in the Spanish part and encouraged lumbering and timber exports to the United States. During the years 1804–8, Ferrand thus revitalized the colonial economy.12 In addition, he made progress in repopulating the abandoned areas of eastern Hispaniola, welcoming the return of many an emigré family despite any pro-Spanish sympathies they might have. And Ferrand initiated construction on waterworks for Santo Domingo and built schools. None of these measures, however, could dissuade the loyalists from rising up in a struggle intended to restore Spanish sovereignty over the colony.13 Indeed, the occupation under Ferrand could possibly have established a degree of development and industrialization in Santo Domingo had its imperialist project not been cut short by the actions of the growing proSpanish movement. That the path of development under French tutelage was not to be taken was especially evident after the rout of Bonaparte’s naval forces on 21 October 1805, a defeat that seriously impaired the French marine’s ability to provide transport for its Antillean colonies. The failure of French colonial power to satisfy the Dominicans resulted again in the isolation of poor Santo Domingo, giving reason for revolt among the disadvantaged groups dependent on the export trade. Moreover, like the Spanish peninsulars before them, the French had monopolized the highest positions in government and commerce, creating a foreign-born oligarchy and thus resentment among the creole classes.
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A returned Commander-in-Chief Ferrand now declared publicly his intentions in a decree issued on 6 January 1805 from his headquarters in Santo Domingo. Article 1 of that decree authorized the residents of the departments of Ozama and the Cibao to begin expeditions to apprehend and imprison all sublevados, insurgents, of the occupied frontier regions, with that designation referring for all intents and purposes to the blacks and mulattos of the borderlands. Articles 2 and 3 guaranteed that such prisoners would belong as property to their captors. Article 4 expressly stipulated that black and mulatto children 10 years of age or younger were to be kept in the colony and not exported, but Article 5 allowed that boys of 10 to 14 years of age and females of 12 to 14 years be sold, but only through the port of Santo Domingo, as required by Article 6. Article 13 offered a suspension of hostilities against all those insurgents who “recognized their error” and submitted to the authority of the French emperor. Cordero Michel (1968) correctly assesses the import of Ferrand’s decree: not only did it authorize “aggressions against the young neighboring nation”; it also, in opposition to Haitian independence and Spanish sovereignty, “brazenly gave instructions for the hunting of Haitians, their capture, sale as slaves and exportation as if they were agricultural products.” The decree was dated the 16th Nivôse, Year XIII of the Revolution.14 It appears that Ferrand’s ulterior motive behind these measures was to regroup in the eastern part in preparation for a French attack and reconquest of the black-controlled western part. Dessalines, as Toussaint’s successor under whom the Republique d’Haïti had been declared, had reason to abhor the prospect of a Napoleonic invasion proceeding from the neighboring colony, an invasion that not only could resubmit Haiti to French rule but could also reestablish the slavery whose abolition had cost years of war and bloody sacrifice. Santo Domingo thus continued to play a decisive role in the shifting balance of power. During Dessalines’ rule, it turned out, the defeated French troops would regularly seek refuge in Dominican territory, where they rearmed and replenished themselves under the competent command of Ferrand in preparation for the next assault against the Haitian strongholds. These French forces, Franco observes, could band with Spanish troops to resist the Haitian military efforts at unifying the island. Dessalines’ resolve to incorporate Santo Domingo into the republic met indeed with a great obstacle in Ferrand, who ensured that armed soldiers were posted on the rooftops of the capital’s churches and convents in wait for the Haitians’ arrival.15 In this stand-off, the future of the world’s first black republic hung in the balance.
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The Invention of Haiti First demographically, then constitutionally, the Haitian state was founded on a racialist principle of identity and a foreign policy that accentuated its difference from other nations. What defined that difference was negation, meaning that what Haiti was, was not “white”; and moreover, it was not Hispanic and French-occupied Santo Domingo. Article 12 of the 1805 Constitution stated in no uncertain terms: “No white, irrespective of his country, can arrive in this territory as a master and property owner and will not in the future be permitted to acquire any property.” The same article sanctioned the confiscation of any Frenchman’s property by the state. Article 14 defined all Haitians of color to be known “henceforth by the generic name of blacks.”16 Article 9 pledged non-intervention in neighboring states, declaring: “The Haitian people make no conquest outside their own islands, and Haiti confines itself to the preservation of its own territory.”17 Justifying conquest of the islands claimed as Haiti’s “own” and the right to preserve Haiti’s “own territory,” the same Article 9 thus allowed for and envisioned what would be seen as the eventual unification of the island under one flag and one government. A build-up of military installations and armaments under Dessalines pushed Haiti further along the path of aggression. The militarization of the new republic was perhaps most dramatically illustrated in the pullulation of dozens of fortresses, most strikingly those erected to stand watch over the Dominican border. Today, they remain as silent witnesses to the period in which illiterate former slaves, weary of tilling the soil but despairing of attaining the civil service jobs which the mulattos could attain, sought employment in the armed forces of the black republic.18 The resistance against recolonization established an important pattern in Haitian militarism. In the struggle against Rochambeau, the Haitian army had seen itself as defender of the republic against the forces of imperialism and slavery; later, in the second half of the century, it would hurl itself into all of four invasions of Dominican lands. As Michel-Rolph Trouillot confirms in Haiti: state against nation (1990): it was primarily an army that claimed to fight foreigners and to defend the national community. Because of its stated role, because of its origins, and because of Haiti’s position in the world, the nineteenth century Haitian army believed it had been assigned a national mission, even though history may have proved it wrong.19
One year after Dessalines proclaimed the independent republic, the Haitian state controlled most of agricultural lands. The chief crop in 1805
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was coffee, the sugar plantations having been destroyed in warfare. The arable land was marked for redistribution, and although small parcels went to the soldiery to assuage somewhat their discontent, the principal benefactors of the reform for the rest of the century were those occupying the upper echelons of military and civil service. The new mulatto and black oligarchy could now amass great latifundios on the Haitian side, but that did not keep them from looking eastward with hopes of expanding their holdings. As a part of his program for land reform, Dessalines mandated that peasants remain tied to the plantations, thus securing land tenure for the privileged classes while killing incentive for entrepreneurship or for developing other modes of production. Many saw in this new social order only a new form of serfdom, but Dessalines was following the precedent of Toussaint, who in his time had protected the plantation for the sake of building up the export economy. France looked upon these novel developments with interest. With the signing of the Floreal law, Bonaparte had partially restored slavery in French Antilles. The First Consul seemed to be sparing Guadeloupe and Saint-Domingue, but secretly sent out copies of the decree, one with General Antoine Richepanse, leader of the expeditionary force on Guadeloupe, and one with General Leclerc. The generals had their orders to lay down the law when they saw fit. But even Bonaparte looked forward with misgiving to the time after Dessalines would be put down, when the French republican troops would have to confront the thousands of Haitian peasants who, ensconced in the hills of the Dominican part, busy arming and organizing themselves, awaited the opportunity to vanquish once and for all those who would return them to the shackles of servitude. To safeguard against the return of the French and especially against the westward advance of their occupation troops, Dessalines armed his country as much as scant resources permitted. A ragtag but disciplined army of 15,000 men, a tenth of whom were cavalry, were backed by a militia composed of all able-bodied adult males of the populace. A chain of forts constructed in the hills formed a line of defense against attack by sea.20 But with the fetters of colonialism removed, it seemed that reasons of state clamped on a different sort of restraint. In the name of the new nationalism, Dessalines’ appropriations of large Haitian properties led to the founding of a new kind of institution doomed to failure: the latifundium of the militarized Haitian state. Intending to reconstruct the war-torn economy, Dessalines not only required the former slaves to remain on the state-owned plantations: those who did not work the land were obliged to stay and stand guard. The reconcentration of the now “free” labor brought about a brief period of prosperity for the holders of the state plantations, which constituted two-thirds of the country’s total.21
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By sending another invasion into Santo Domingo, Dessalines succeeded in terrorizing Dominicans and French occupiers alike. In the assault on the capital, the permanent battalion of Santo Domingo was taken prisoner, transported to Haiti, and executed to a man on a site just outside of Port-au-Prince. The arrival of the French fleet in support of Borgella dissuaded Dessalines from continuing the occupation, but on the return march to Cap Haïtien, the Haitian soldiers set fire to the southern city of Azua de Compostela. In the northern city of Moca, the Haitians found a group of Dominicans hiding out in a church. Not a man, woman, or child found in that church was spared: even the priest was killed. The invasion of 1805, like the one of 1801, drove Dominican families eastward from homes near the western limits to cities that included Higüey, Santiago, Cotuí, Moca, and La Vega. Migration to other territories of the Spanish Antilles and the mainland also occurred during these years.22 It became apparent in the meantime that the agricultural laborers of Haiti, most of them ex-slaves, could not cultivate the latifundia to advantage, lacking not only the appropriate technology and expertise for making good such a conversion, but also the motivation to toil like slaves for yet another master. The Haitian economy continued to languish, and Dessalines provoked the anger and resistance of mulattos, black generals, and ex-slaves alike who had laid claim to lands abandoned by the fleeing whites. It was mulatto discontent that most likely motivated the ambush and assassination of Dessalines in Pont Rouge on 17 October 1806.23 The interrelations and mutual hostility between Haiti and Santo Domingo henceforth came to be reflected in subsequent constitutions and edicts of the fledgling republic, through which it continued in a process of shaping an exclusionist definition of nationhood. Indeed, the provisions of the Haitian constitution of 1805 that favored citizens of verifiable African descent would reappear in every constitution to follow until 1918, racializing in effect the very nature of citizenship in Haiti.24 The 1816 constitution imposed new constraints: Article 39 recognized as Haitian citizens only those whites who had served in the army or the civil service, or those who entered the republic by the time the same constitution was published. Apart from this exception, no other whites could attain citizenship or enjoy the rights and privileges thereof, which included possession of land. These strictures on citizenship and land tenure ran squarely against the interests of the Dominican property-holders, who, under the planned extension of Haitian sovereignty over the entire island, would lose not only all their land but all their slaves.25 The prospect of unification thus held diametrically opposed meanings for the two countries: desired by the Haitians as the safeguard to their liberty, unification would mean the end of the elite Dominicans’ racial and class privilege.
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Once Christophe and Pétion had come to power, the French prepared for a Haitian comeback by strengthening their hold on Santo Domingo, placing their hopes on a campaign of reconquest that would start out from French-controlled Samaná and Santo Domingo and then sweep across the entire island. The French had already given license to the Dominican settlers to enslave Haitians captured in the borderlands. Already established in the eastern part, some French occupiers went so far as to take Dominican wives. Another union of sorts had occurred when the defeated Napoleonic troops, in their retreat from the armies of ex-slaves, took refuge on the Spanish side of the island and reorganized themselves under Ferrand’s command and with the uneasy support of the Dominican oligarchy opposed to unification. During these years of upheaval, the Dominicans could not fend for themselves. Having long depended on the charity of the now discontinued Mexican situado, the Dominicans received little support from Spain, whose own economy was in crisis and its own government controlled by Napoleon’s brother, Joseph Bonaparte. The leaders of Dominican society, the hatero class of slaveowning latifundists and their creole oligarchy, now saw their desires overruled by the will of the people: many among the masses were looking favorably upon the idea of Haitian rule, and they did not demur from hitching their fates to their neighbors’ anticolonial struggle. Yet there were those who chose a different path: neither Haitian unification nor French capitulation, but rather a return to the Spanish fold.
The Kingdom and the Glory With the imminent arrival of a French fleet intent on reconquest during the occupation of 1805, the Haitian generals led a retreat westward. On their way back, they razed the Dominican cities in their path, burning down San Pedro, Cotuí, Moca, and Monte Plata, executing Padre Vásquez and many others in Santiago. They killed the men and took 249 women and 748 children back with them to Haiti.26 Gabart, Pétion, and Geffrard returned to the south, and Christophe to the north. Henry Christophe became chief of the North and would rule 1806–11 as president, 1811–20 as Emperor Henri I. Splitting the rule “by a sort of tacit agreement,”27 Alexandre Sabès Pétion became president of the republic of the South from 1807 to 1818.28 A history of internal boundaries was already begun in Haiti, as reflected in Abbott’s (1998) account: “In open schism, the mulatto South elected the highly educated and refined Pétion, while the black North supported the
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self-taught and polished Christophe. Divided, each ruled over a decade, their entirely contradictory policies adding to the chaos of Haiti’s chaotic history.”29 Christophe proclaimed his plan to implement an agrarian reform in benefit of the North’s black population, a plan that, after a delay of several years, gave much of the land to the black elite but also smaller parcels to members of the peasantry. Pétion followed suit with his own policy of land distribution in the South and West, which granted small holdings in accordance with military rank and thus favored the mulatto officers of the republican army. In addition to legislating such subdivisions, Pétion restored to the mulatto aristocrats lands expropriated by Dessalines. Pétion’s land reform made peasant owners or sharecroppers of the majority of Haitians, with the result that “Haitian agriculture became unworkable,” whereby subsistence farming and sharecropping became the rule.30 So, whereas Pétion built a southern republic on parliamentary law, the latifundium owned by elites, and the minifundium owned by soldiers and peasants, Christophe set out to erect a neofeudal kingdom in the North on the foundations of latifundium, monarchy, and militarism. As ruler of the northern kingdom, Christophe wrested the towns of San Rafael, former scene of Toussaint’s maneuvers, and San Miguel from Spanish control. After the model of the enlightened despot, Christophe worked to raise up the culture of his kingdom by surrounding himself with intellectuals and statesmen, a court and coterie that included many Europeans. He also conceived the plan of buying up the Spanish side of the island in due time. What is more, Christophe showed enough foresight to have invited key Dominican figures to his coronation ceremonies. These included blacks from the Spanish part, especially from the northern districts, and commanders of the Santiago and La Vega forts.31 The divisions internal to Haiti notwithstanding, Pétion continued to press claims on the whole island’s territory. The Haitian constitution of 1806, drafted and promulgated under Pétion, had declared that his country’s outer border was the same as Hispaniola’s geographical limits. No line, but the island’s perimeter, accordingly, set the territorial bounds of the Haitian Republic. The United States reacted: fearful of the “Haitianization” it perceived as spreading through the Caribbean and into the southern states, it arranged for the fledgling republic to be strangled in its crib by imposing a trade embargo. The quarantine separated the Haitian economy from the international commerce in which the founders had placed their hopes for the nation’s survival. Pétion’s and Christophe’s policies set the pattern by which today’s Haiti, uniquely among the Greater Antilles, became a land of which more
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than four-fifths of the population considers itself self-employed and/or working land owned by a family member. Despite this pride of ownership, the instituting of private land tenure in Christophe’s kingdom and in Pétion’s republic left scarce land for cultivating cash crops, reinforcing the mode of subsistence farming and thus discouraging the development of the export economy. The outcome of property division would moreover prove disastrous for the isolated, ostracized black republic, and it was the smallness of agriculture and the pressure on the land that would motivate the invasion of Santo Domingo some four years after Pétion’s death.32 Decolonization also signified a tremendous loss of revenue for the world’s first black republic. Whereas 702,277 quintals (each equivalent to 46 kilograms or 100 pounds) of refined sugar were shipped abroad in 1791, the amount exported in 1801 dwindled to a mere 165,000. From 931,175 quintals of dark sugar in 1791, exports went down below 55,000 by 1818. In addition, no longer were the Dominican-supplied hides shipped to France via Haiti: the much less profitable dyewoods took their place as principal export.33 Into this scene of distress and turmoil, enter don Juan Sánchez Ramírez, a wealthy Dominican who made his fortune in cattle and mahogany. Sánchez Ramírez’s antipathy toward French rule fueled a desire to expulse the usurpers and restore Spanish sovereignty to the colony. As Brigadier General, Sánchez Ramírez sought collaboration from Peninsulars and exiled Dominicans living in Puerto Rico and established communications with Governor Toribio Montes. Furthermore, he made a pact with Petión, received arms from Christophe, and joined forces with the English, all in the common cause of expelling the French troops from Dominican territory. It was the Napoleonic invasion of Spain on 2 May 1808 that galvanized the Dominicans, already angered at Ferrand’s prohibition against all cattle sales to the Haitians, now outraged that both madre patria and colony were subjugated by French invaders. In the summer of that year, emboldened by the anti-Napoleonic fervor that was sweeping through South America, Sánchez Ramírez, like many another paladin of independence, raised the cry of ¡Viva Fernando Séptimo! and ordered the offensive against the occupiers. Meanwhile, French forces under Ferrand were ordered in October 1808 to put down the separatist insurrection led by Ciriaco Ramírez, who was aided by Haitian and British forces. Tobacco growers, timber cutters, merchants, and above all the hateros joined to fight in the anti-French alliance headed by Sánchez Ramírez.34 This movement, called La Reconquista, would be undertaken to restore the eastern side to Spanish colonial rule; it did not aim to achieve reunification with Haiti. Far from it.35
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However, it was during these convulsive years of resistance to French rule in Santo Domingo that José Campos Tavares, a mulatto of Santiago, exemplified the border-crossing hero representative of an emergent middle class of the Cibao. Here, it was the ranchers, along with the ascendant tobacco cultivators of the Cibao and the Vega Real, who led the fight against the French occupation during the first decade of the 1800s.36 Campos Tavares joined the anti-French resistance alongside other Dominicans by enlisting in the Haitian army, receiving the highest honors in the fight for Haitian independence. He had risen to the rank of colonel and assumed command of the Yaque battalion, composed of blacks and mulattos. He later attained the ranks of Adjuvant General and Brigadier General of the Haitian Army, the title of Baron of Tavares, and the governorship of the Department of the Cibao under Dessalines. He signed Christophe’s constitution in 1806. He would later be named Haitian ambassador to Spanish Governor Urrutia, in 1811.37 Yet Santo Domingo was far from unified unto itself. The parties into which the Dominican population divided during these years included: (1) Spanish loyalists; (2) pro-independentists; (3) those who would, in the next decade, favor annexation to Bolívar’s Gran Colombia; and (4) those who followed Christophe in promoting unification with Haiti. The movement in the south, headed by Ciriaco Ramírez, had sought in independence a salutary alternative to another Haitian dominance or another Spanish colonization. For their part, many ex-slaves on the Dominican side chose to fight in defense of their freedom. Sympathetic with the program of the Haitian liberators, they often met with violent reprisals, often in the form of lynchings and burnings in pitch.38 The champions of a restored Spanish sovereignty in 1808 on the other hand included many emigré landowners who had returned, unhappy that the French had taken over their colony. Bonaparte, in the meantime busy directing the French invasion of Spain, had not the means to fully suppress Sánchez Ramírez’s movement. After some initial defeats, Sánchez Ramírez and his troops gained momentum, pushing the French troops to their last redoubts in Santo Domingo City and Samaná. It took a siege of nine hard months before Sánchez Ramírez saw himself obliged to turn to the Governor of Jamaica for assistance. Ferrand held the fort in Santo Domingo through the summer of 1808. In the face of the Dominican onslaughts, and after a series of unsuccessful counterattacks, Ferrand himself took up arms, leaving the Dominican capital under the command of General Barquier. Ferrand would meet his moment of truth on 8 November 1808: the decisive conflict of the Reconquest was fought on the plain of Palo Hincado, where Sánchez Ramírez’s 2,000 soldiers
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overwhelmed Ferrand’s 600. There, his numbers diminished owing to the desertions of Dominicans, the French commander faced certain defeat. Devastated by the rout, surrounded by fallen soldiers—having lost his cause and French control over Santo Domingo—and now with the Spanish host closing in, Ferrand retreated in anguish to a river gully, where he took his own life with a bullet to his head.39 Only with the help of the British Jamaicans could the Dominicans expel the Haitian and French armies, an event that would finally come to pass in 1809, the year in which British gunships fired into Santo Domingo and scattered the defenses of both occupying armies. The anti-French Dominicans could now take the upper hand. Sánchez Ramírez sent his forces under the command of Admirals Cumby and Carmichael to Santo Domingo. The impact of their mortar-fire from batteries emplaced in the hills of San Carlos convinced Barquier to surrender the capital. With the defeat of Ferrand’s troops in Santiago and of Kerverseau’s in Santo Domingo, the colony could now be reincorporated into the Spanish Empire under Fernando VII, an act subsequently recognized by the Treaty of Paris.40 Carmichael handed over the keys of the capital city to Sánchez Ramírez in solemn ceremony on 11 July 1809. The Haitians watched from afar as Santo Domingo was restored to Spain, the French flag lowered and the Spanish flag hoisted once again over the Ozama Fortress. In November 1809, another British expedition, this time to Samaná, did its part in forcing the remaining French troops garrisoned there to capitulate, which they did, relinquishing their ships to the British navy and the peninsula to the Spanish crown. 41 Spain thus reclaimed Santo Domingo in 1809. The victory cleared the way for the return of many a Spanish Dominican expatriate to the colony, although news of its return to the Spanish fold raised barely a nod from the crown itself, preoccupied as it was with Napoleonic wars.42 Commissioner Francisco Xavier Caro was sent to the colony, where he appointed Sánchez Ramírez captain-general and governor and confirmed his rank of brigadier-general. The colony was also restored to the organizational structure in place before the Basle treaty. Yet the success of la Reconquista was surely an ambiguous one: it had delivered the colony from French rule only to put it back in the hands of the power that could do next to nothing for it. Spain would but weakly support the eastern colony for the next 12 years, bringing no relief to its ruined economy. Some 80,000 impoverished vecinos depended on a wrecked agriculture, disorganized husbandry, and greatly diminished exports of hides, tobacco, coffee, and cacao. Population continued to diminish, sinking Santo Domingo into stagnation: considering the
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amount of capital, needed for reconstruction, that fled with the refugee families, it appeared that the Dominicans had won the war but lost the peace. If the generalized poverty did not exactly level out class distinctions, it at least made life harder for everybody. During that period of 1809–21, sugar cultivation died out, the hatos sank to the level of a bare, unadorned subsistence production, and the conuco garden-mounds sustained life without rendering profit. No money, no luxuries, no industry: nothing that makes for a rich cultural life apart from the traditional activities of churchgoing and the occasional fiesta.43 Some consolation was to be found in the sense of protection against Haitian occupation that resulted from the victory of the pro-Spanish forces. Discontent, however, outweighed this minor comfort. Weary of the madre patria’s continued neglect after 1809, pro-Haitian Dominicans rose up in 1812 against the colonizers in the name of Haitian sovereignty. The insurrection was swiftly put down.44 Yet for the ineffectiveness of its administration during this period, the colonizing country earned the popular nickname of la España Boba, Foolish Spain.
Independencia Efímera Pétion had died in 1818, Christophe’s life would end by his own hand in 1820. Jean-Pierre Boyer took over the northern kingdom. Afterwards, with the subjugation of La Grand Anse in 1819 and subsequent incorporation of the southern republic, conditions were right for Boyer to assume the presidency for life over the government of a united Haiti. Among his first important acts, Boyer set about to restructure the topography of the country according to the French model on 17 October 1821, dividing the territory into arrondisements and communes. The restoration of Spanish rule over Santo Domingo of course sat none too well with the mulatto president, his brow furrowed with care not only over the continuing threat posed by a re-Hispanized Santo Domingo, but also by the continuing refusal of Haiti’s own former colonizer to recognize his country’s independence. Having but a fifth of Haiti’s population by comparison, with its fewer than 50,000 whites and 50,000 mulattos, Santo Domingo was very different indeed, and Haiti’s half-million noirs outnumbered the Dominican blacks 20 : 1. Haitians and Dominicans still had reasons to distrust one another, but they also had reasons to rush to one another’s assistance. It was on 30 November 1821 that a group of revolutionary santiagueros sought aid from the Haitians for the cause of independence. The leader of
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the insurrection, Licenciado José Núñez de Cáceres, had been rector of the university and lieutenant-governor. Caught up in the movement of South American liberation, Núñez de Cáceres conspired with the urban creoles, operating without contacting the hateros of the interior; he did not bother to consult with the marginalized mass of blacks. Significantly, there were important pro-Haitian collaborators among the Dominicans, including one Colonel Pablo Alí, head of the Batallón de Morenos (Dark-skinned Batallion) and himself of Haitian descent. Alí already felt alienated by the refusal on the part of the Spanish administration to grant him a Letter of Citizenship. That refusal, and the Haitian promise to emancipate the slaves, drew Alí into the group of Dominican insurgents led by such commanders as Don Manuel Carvajal and D.N. Vásquez. And it was under Boyer that Haiti could come to the aid of the Dominicans in their struggle to separate from Spain and to fight for the independence of the Estado Independiente de Haiti Español.45 Spanish Haiti, founded by constitutive act on 1 December 1821, had a less than auspicious beginning. To secure his nation’s independence, Núñez de Cáceres had sought to annex the newly formed Dominican state to the Bolivarian federation of Gran Colombia. But in vain: his Haití Español seemed too far removed and too small for the former Nueva Granada to consider annexing and defending it. An unprotected, unsupported Spanish Haiti, left vulnerable, provided the opportunity that Boyer awaited to reunite the island under one flag.46 Dominican independence had resulted from a movement for autonomy organized by some oligarchic sectors disappointed with their neglect by Spain. On the eve of independence, groups of Dominican politicians and military officials had actually argued in favor of a union with Haiti, for they envisioned the benefits to be gained by linking their destiny with that of the now unified republic, ruled by the eloquent, French-speaking Boyer.47 Some elite families looked favorably on the prospect of political stability under Boyer, preferring Haitian rule to the only feeble patronage that Gran Colombia could have extended under Núñez de Cáceres’ plan. It was pro-Spanish Dominicans of the Cibao, however, who rejected Núñez de Cáceres’ proposed union with Gran Colombia and determined to side with Boyer. These cibaeños raised the Haitian flag above the cities of Montecristi and Santiago de los Caballeros. Their collaboration yielded at least one unanticipated result: it would allow Boyer to lead an invasionary force of 10,000 into Santo Domingo in February 1822.48 It appears possible that the Dominican masses welcomed the invasions from Haiti as an opening for a new postcolonial era. The traditional and commercial oligarchies, however, wished to share no community of interest with the
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Haitians. The Haitian president nevertheless determined that he would annex the Spanish portion as la Partie de l’Est. Boyer had other motives apart from protecting the Haitian Revolution: he desired as well to remove and occupy many of the superior officers left unemployed by Christophe’s death in 1820, for in their discontent lay the seeds of conspiracy and insurrection.49 The nobler motive of the 1822 occupation, however, was twofold: to protect the liberty of Haiti’s former slaves by closing off the east as a staging area for European invasions of the west; and to emancipate the slaves of the eastern side. Motivated as they were not only by landhunger but by the desire to defend their hard-won liberty, the Haitians thus sought to extend their sovereignty over the entire island. Yet the occupation would be fraught with hidden dangers, cautioned General Bonnet: the Hispanic and Catholic dominicains would take offense at any military imposition of Jacobin secular principles upon the peoples of the east. Besides, looting and the concubinage practiced by many of the Haitian soldiers, warned the general, would add injury to the insult. Despite these admonitions, Boyer approached governors of eight Dominican provinces with an offer of protection: he invited Puerto Plata, Cotuí, Santiago, La Vega, Neiba, Macorís, Neiba, San Juan, and Azua to join his anti-Spanish alliance. His goal in the occupation would be to convert all of Quisqueya’s inhabitants into “true Haitians, be these white or freedmen, blacks or mulattos.”50 Boyer gave the order to invade.
Boyer Takes Charge Boyer formally established Haitian control over Santo Domingo on 9 February 1822. Backed by 12,000 troops, Boyer met with Núñez de Cáceres at la Puerta del Conde (the Count’s Gate), where the latter handed over the keys of the city. Boyer thus established the unity of the whole island, “from Cape Tiburón to Cape Samaná, in possession of one Government.”51 Boyer, writes historian Rayford Logan (1968), “met no opposition: indeed . . . he was received in an enthusiastic manner, and in February of 1822 was formally acknowledged as ruler of the entire island.”52 Refusing to be ruled by Haitians, however, were the many Dominican property owners who departed the island, giving the Haitian administration the opportunity to expropriate their holdings and reallocate them to Haitian officials. Among its outcomes, nonetheless, the second Haitian occupation would bring the rest of the Dominican population in close contact with “the enemy,” whose soldiers, the majority of them former slaves, differed drastically in culture
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and educational formation from the majority of Dominicans. The historiographic preference for calling the Haitian presence in the east a “domination” rather than an occupation rested in part on the fact that the main part of the Haitian military during this period consisted of Dominicans. To understand the acquiescence of the Dominicans to this foreign presence, it is important to keep in mind the precariousness of the independence declared by Núñez de Cáceres. The Haitians made an offer that was not a great one, but one too good to refuse under the circumstances. As Mejía Ricart explains it, the Haitian presence in the Dominican lands under Boyer was not so much that of a “military occupation” as a “political domination,” since most of the Haitian-commanded military personnel were drawn from the Dominican population, including the troop-elected officers who included the Alfaus, the Puellos, Juan Pablo Duarte, and Pedro Santana. Boyer’s takeover of the Dominican government initiated a new era of unity on Hispaniola. And so it would be for the next 22 years. One of the Haitian president’s first acts in office was to impose a heavy tribute on the Dominicans. This he did in spite of admonitions from proHaitian collaborators like Campos Tavares of Santiago that he would do best to ease up his demands on the northern representatives. Boyer also sponsored the immigration of blacks from the United States; these were housed in the cloisters of the Convent of the Mercedes in the Dominican capital and later settled elsewhere in the Spanish territory, including the Samaná Peninsula. Boyer also imposed Napoleonic law on the eastern portion, requiring thereby a reform of property ownership. To this end, Boyer established a commission to administer the restructuring of landholding. Under the auspices of the commission, and under the right of eminent domain, the Haitian state took over all Dominican public properties and most of the private ones. The latter properties consisted of ecclesiastical holdings, included in the following categories: those held in mainmort; assets given by right of primogeniture to private individuals of the nobility; extensive rural properties dedicated to the pasturage of domestic animals; and finally, the properties belonging to the Spanish Crown. The Law of 9 February 1822 declared accordingly that all non-privately owned properties situated on the formerly Spanish part of the island would become “national properties” and “part of the public domain”; so too would all mobile and immobile properties, land incomes, and ecclesiastical rents, as well as the properties of all private individuals who either were absent from the national territory and had not returned by 10 June 1823— five months after the “reunification”—or those who abandoned the island during the reunification “without taking the oath of loyalty to the Haitian Republic.”53 Land, much of it expropriated from the huge latifundios and
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the church, was parceled out to the high military and civilian officials, to the ex-slaves, and to the tenant, or precarista, farmers. Making for an additional hardship on the Dominicans, Boyer required that all male youths 16 to 25 years of age be enlisted in the Haitian army. Because compulsory military service removed students from the Universidad de Santo Tomás and due to the drastic curtailment of church revenues, the university had to shut down its operations, a move that left jobless and destitute its faculty of clerics. The draft and its consequences, along with the practice of reserving the highest posts in the administrative bureaucracy for Haitian mulattos, contributed to a widening resentment among the Dominicans.54 The indignity of occupation was compounded by the fact that Boyer’s troops, not receiving any pay, were left to their own devices to forage and sack what they could from the civilians.55 Under Boyer, the Dominican plains were to be cleared for sugar; later, the mountains for coffee. It was natural that he would seek to exploit the land in this intensive fashion, for in Haiti the hypercultivation of the soil and deforestation of the hillsides had already brought the land to the brink of exhaustion. Systematic degradation had combined with the impact of internal and external wars, so lowering productivity that by the outset of Boyer’s regime, the now semi-autonomous regions of the republic could not sustain a steady production for export as they did under the plantation system.56 Boyer also instituted economic reform in Santo Domingo: he revamped feudalistic tax practices and opened up commerce to trade with other countries. These modernizing measures led the Dominican economy into a period of unprecedented growth, bringing a measure of well-being to Santo Domingo’s commercial and rural bourgeoisie. Adamant in opposing la haitianización, however, were the Dominican oligarchy and the clergy. The Catholic hierarchy objected above all to the Haitian state’s expropriation of the church’s latifundia.57 Offenses against the Dominican church mounted up: the Haitians sent packing all the church’s foreign clergy and wrested control of the remaining clergy away from the Vatican. Although many of the elites accepted Haitian rule, numerous emigrations of their cohorts deprived the colony of a leadership that might otherwise have initiated an anti-Haitian insurrection long before it actually occurred. And although rural bourgeoisie of the eastern portion benefitted from the economic reforms, they bemoaned their isolation by France, which not only refused to recognize the separation of Haiti but organized an embargo. Intent on reestablishing the island’s connections to the metropolitan market, the hateros pressured Boyer to seek the way to mend bridges with the former colonizers.58
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Unification and its Discontents The collective memory of the 22-year occupation serves as a historical referent and landmark by which the Dominican national identity sets itself off, politically and psychologically, against the image of the Haitian Other. Gérard Pierre-Charles (1974) succinctly characterizes the process by which a Dominican national consciousness developed in response to a need to “define the space of the emergent nation-state before the territorial ambitions of Haiti.” Under conditions of the Domination, one assertion of nascent nationalist sentiment came out in the formulaic response to the “¡Alto! ¿Quién vive?” (Halt! Who goes there?) of the sentinels: to wit, “¡Dominicano libre!”59 Haitian–Dominican familiarity during the Domination bred contempt, but also a renewed and strengthened sense of “Dominicanity” in contrast to the Haitian element introduced into the heart of the Hispanic community. Whereas the fear inspired by the outbreak of the Haitian Revolution had already revived xenophobia and anti-African prejudice among the Dominican populace, the Haitian junta in Santo Domingo introduced legislation that sat poorly with those expropriated. Intellectual-cultural production under the Haitians suffered in the meantime with the aforementioned closing of the Universidad de Santo Tomás.60 Boyer issued more decrees: he ordered that all official documents be written in French, now the official language. He ordered the closing of the publicly funded schools, their function taken over by the privately funded primary schools set up in the Dominican capital. He ordered that lumbering of mahogany and other woods favored for export be closely monitored, and he prohibited cockfights on occasions other than feast days.61 As exemplified in the cockfight prohibition, measures contrary to Dominican national custom emphasized the cultural differences between the two groups. True, the unification had brought into relief the political “community of interests” between the Haitian ex-slaves and the Dominican ex-slaves, who enjoyed equality before the law if not in social reality. The Haitian government-in-occupation succeeded in bringing in 1,200 African American immigrants, relocating them in the communes of Santo Domingo, Baní, Bayaguana, Higuey, Monte Plata, San Cristóbal, and el Seybo. As part of his program of haitianización, Boyer in 1824 also authorized the settlement of numerous African Americans in the Valley of the Nigua and the Samaná Bay and Peninsula. One important consequence of this immigration under Boyer is the predominance of the black population on the Samaná Peninsula, where today a dialect of Spanish mixed with English words and Haitian patois is spoken.62 Yet the emancipation
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and repopulation were not enough to satisfy the former slaves: Dominican blacks felt oppressed by the mulatto elite directing the occupation.63 Revolt shattered the community of interests: it occurred in el Este in the year of the invasion, el Cibao and los Alcarrizos the following year, and el Seybo and Bayaguana in 1825.64 Yet Boyer continued to reshape Santo Domingo in Haiti’s image. Having abolished slavery, he distributed land to the libertos. To do so, he nullified the traditional and informal system of communal lands, tierras comuneras—properties that had been owned collectively, grazed sporadically, and thus adapted gradually to the pastoral-timbering economy of the Spanish colony. Boyer mandated a cadastral survey of the limits of properties belonging to their titular owners. Large properties that had been previously acquired as encomiendas would also be divided according to the Haitian model of redistribution. The properties of the former Spanish government, the convents and their possession, the hospitals and their dependencies, the French properties expropriated by the Spanish government, and the properties of those Dominican titleholders who had abandoned the country without returning at the permitted time—all these devolved by order of the president to the control of the Haitian state. Petión had set the precedent in Haitian land reform by ordering the division of the plantations into parcels cultivated by small peasant owners, those who showed more interest in raising vegetables for their own subsistence than breaking their backs to produce cash crops. Boyer repeated the gesture, creating at the same time another peasantry in Santo Domingo on the foundation of free labor but at the cost of crippling large-scale cultivation. These measures, however egalitarian in spirit, encouraged small-scale horticulture and gave little incentive to produce for export. On both sides of the border, the result of land reform was a loss of revenues for the state owing to the unwillingness of the former slaves to labor for wages on the plantations. This ruinous trend produced great dissatisfaction among the mulatto elites of both nations, and thus undermined the foundation of Boyer’s main support.65 Although resembling the more successful liberal reforms of Benito Juárez’s Mexico at the time, Boyer’s redistributive measures produced a discontent that spread to the urban mercantile sector, comprising those who felt slighted by the reform’s agrarian focus.66 The Dominican elites already resented Boyer’s emancipation of the Dominican slaves, followed by a subsequent distribution of ranch lands, coffee plantations, and sugar mills to the newly freed. Thus was created a new class of small property owners in the regions of both the Cibao and the capital. Boyer ordered the inhabitants of the Cibao and the South to devote resources to sugarcane, coca,
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and cotton, crops that would generate export revenue. The new mandate made little sense to the Dominican herders of livestock, cutters of mahogany, cultivators of tobacco, and growers of viands who had established a livelihood in less labor-intensive concerns.67 Yet there was a rationality in the new measures: despite the merchants’ grumbling, Boyer’s restructuring would create an internal market for the Cibao and the South’s production, and thus stimulate increased buying and selling. The commercial class would therefore grow in wealth to the point where it shared dominance with the hatero class, with which it built stronger relations than before. The resultant alliance would prove a significant factor in future dealings with the Haitians.68 It was not until 17 April 1825 that France’s King Charles X finally recognized Haitian independence. His majesty did so, not out of any true sense of honor or respect for a people’s desire for freedom, but in acceptance of an indemnity for French properties expropriated during the revolution. The ordinance signed by Boyer and Charles X guaranteed not only the payment of 150 million francs, which the Haitians promised to pay in five annual installments, but also the opening of Haitian ports to vessels of all nationalities and the reduction of tariffs on French imports and exports by half the previous rate. These concessions were made in the face of the first Haitian constitution’s clause that stated, “Never again shall a colonist or a European set his foot upon this territory with the title of master or proprietor.”69 Although France called off its imperialist aggressions on the republic consequent to the accord, the arrangement had the effect of saddling Haiti with a crippling debt burden in its early years as a republic. Also, with dire consequences for Haitian–Dominican relations, Boyer, with no other means of raising the needed revenue, resorted to taxing the reconquered Dominicans. These protested the obligation to pay a debt incurred by the occupation government. The equal contribution expected from each part of the island amounted to 458,601 gourdes per annum. Nor did all the citizens of the western part quietly acquiesce to these terms, for many, and especially the Haitian elite, resented the imposition of a tax for revenue destined to compensate the former colonizers for an independence to which the former slaves were entitled. The Haitian senate expressed the unwillingness of an impoverished citizenry to contribute in cash for what they felt they had already won by force of arms. But Boyer had no alternative. After obtaining a reduced indemnification payment of 200,000 francs from each part, he resorted to printing paper money to pay the government’s debts and keep the economies afloat, a ploy that resulted in the devaluation of the gourde by 250 percent.70
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Adding to the hardships produced by the indemnification, the Haitian government further alienated the new Dominican elite by installing members of the old pro-Spanish creole aristocracy in its administration. These former opponents of unification and upholders of slavery, among the likes of which could be counted Tomás de Bobadilla of the Junta Central, now were holding high public office and constituted the majority of the administrative personnel by 1840. Although undoubtedly benefitting from the reforms instituted under the occupation, the incensed Dominican oligarchy lacked the strength and cohesiveness to take a leadership role during the crisis. It remained weak and subjected to a foreign power. It should be noted that social contradictions among Dominicans had their origins in this crisis of leadership, from whence arose an antagonism between small business with nationalist inclinations on the one side and the collaborationist oligarchy on the other.71 A year after signing the indemnity agreement, Boyer confronted the recurring crisis: the one created by the indolence or unwillingness to labor of the former slaves. Boyer promulgated in response a set of laws aimed at reorganizing agricultural production throughout the island along the lines of the plantation system that Toussaint had attempted to impose 25 years earlier. The Haitian president appeared before the Senate on 1 May 1826 to propose this legislation designed, in effect, to put the island’s economy back on its feet. The 1826 Code Rural was intended to compel propertyless and unemployed agricultural laborers to work on the plantations under conditions that were tantamount to serfdom. The code provided for the expropriation of large estates and recruitment of labor to work them, thus imposing a neofeudal land policy to the benefit of the Haitian mulatto aristocracy. Boyer’s plan, like Toussaint’s, discouraged the average peasant from the previously established routines of subsistence farming on the smaller properties. Obliging the peasantry to work the land where they lived, the code required moreover that all civilian inhabitants of the realm, with the exception of military and landed aristocracy, contract themselves to work for estate proprietors or lessees. Further tying them to the estate, it also forbade schoolchildren from leaving their parents’ parcels without authorization and prohibited individuals from building houses in sites outside their assigned plantations. The code also specified that vagrancy would not be tolerated, so rural guards would monitor the plantations to ensure that everyone was doing their share. Women were not exempt from these dictates, and mothers before the fourth month of pregnancy and past the fourth month after giving birth were expected to do their part for the economy’s recuperation.72
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To the Dominicans, the Haitian government offered one more kind of incentive to cooperate with the plantation economy in the form of compensations en especie (in kind) on a sliding scale in proportion to rank. Despite such attempts to appease the Dominican elites, however, the occupiers insisted on promoting an agricultural practice contrary to the hatero tradition, and so the code met with non-compliance and inertia on the part of the Dominican peasantry. Soldiers refused to enforce the code, small planters refused to recognize it, and the large planters simply refused to yield up the portion of their crops that it required. The attempt of the state to control labor and production simply did not sit well with proprietors accustomed to a more pastoral and individualistic way of life.73 Given this resistance, how was it possible for Haiti to maintain dominion over Santo Domingo for as long as it did? Despite the Dominican uneasiness over foreign rule and foreign restructuring of the economy, Boyer’s long tenure in office was tolerated and even accepted by the majority of Dominicans and Haitians, both of them long accustomed or inured to external control. The authority exercised by General Borgella over Santo Domingo appeared effective, especially since he could count on collaboration of civil service officials such as Commissioner Tomás de Bobadilla. Everything seemed in order, such that midway in 1827, Boyer decided to withdraw Battalions Twelve and Fourteen from the Dominican capital by the end of October. The Domination continued throughout the countryside, however. There, the reorganization measures were succeeding in reactivating agriculture and in bringing about an overall if limited economic improvement. Boyer’s design also included plans to restructure the Dominican judicial and legislative institutions along the lines of Haiti’s representative government.74 The domination was creating the benefits of a long period of peace and relative stability, with some prospects for diversification: the freed-up commerce forced hateros to invest their efforts and capital on lumber production in the northwest, south, and east—with the consequence of strengthening the alliance between ranchers and lumber interests that would figure significantly in the growing independence movement. Tobacco cultivation at any rate was allowed to continue dominating in the northern part of the former Spanish colony. The Haitian government also prohibited foreigners from engaging in retail sales, thus making this business the exclusive right of the Dominicans, a measure that further fostered growth in the cities.75 The years of the Domination rolled along; Dominicans worked with Haitians, mixing consent with resistance. The situation was ambiguous in the extreme. Long before he became president, Buenaventura Báez served
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in an official capacity in the occupation government. When later he plotted against Haiti, he aimed to establish a French protectorate, clearly in opposition to the wishes of both occupiers and patriots. Before that point, however, it seems that the opportunistic Báez, with apparent impunity for his career later on, had sent a secret emissary to Boyer carrying an urgent message: that an insurrectionary group calling itself los trinitarios were conspiring against him and against Haitian control of Santo Domingo.76 We will hear more of these conspirators at a later point. In order to garner recognition and legitimacy in the eyes of the world, Boyer extended the jurisdiction of Santo Domingo’s Archbishopric of the Indies westward to Haiti. The previous attempt to consolidate a proposed Haitian-Vatican concordat, in the form of a papal delegation to Portau-Prince in 1819 and subsequently in 1834, had foundered on the refusal of the Haitians to unite with Hispanic brethren to the east.77 Despite all such ambitious efforts to unite the two countries while rationalizing and regulating the Dominican economy, Boyer would meet with failure. Santo Domingo’s continuing indigence precluded any raising of income except that collected through a vexatious taxation. Haiti’s postwar disarray, combined with the intransigence of both Dominican ranchers and the Haitian peasantry, would hobble the twin economies enough to keep them from matching the high production levels reached by plantation owners during the heyday of Saint-Domingue.78 To top off the indignities of the Domination in the eyes of the Dominicans, the Haitian elites all the while elevated French culture as the new standard, deprecating all things Hispanic and the Catholic religion of Santo Domingo to boot, thereby creating another motive for resenting the economic and political imposition. The cultural imposition, finally, took a concrete form in the denying of educational opportunities to Dominican children. Such measures, intensifying the animus against the Haitians, did their part to encourage the forming of a nascent collective sense of identity among the Dominicans.79
The Anti-Boyerist Movement Resistance grew against the Domination. The previously mentioned conspiracy of Los Alcarrizos was organized by Baltazar de Nova and village priest Pedro González. Aimed at returning Santo Domingo to Spanish control, the revolt was put down on 24 February 1824 by an army of 200 soldiers commanded by General Borgella. With the exception of five escapees, the conspirators were brought to trial. Four of them were
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condemned to death by hanging, the rest sentenced to up to five years’ imprisonment.80 Apart from taxation and disruptive land reform, the causes for dissatisfaction voiced by the anti-Boyer factions included the failure to set up an educational system, the closing of the university, and the severity of long military rule.81 Yet lacking a strong creole leadership, which did exist in other Spanish American colonies prior to independence, those factions did not coalesce into a wholly united front against the Haitians. In the absence of any single oppositional group strong enough to challenge the Domination, the best opposition seemed to lie in an anti-Haitian alliance. There were five sectors in the former Spanish colony, each with its own agenda, that contributed their part to the fight for separation: (1) The popular masses or the majority, which included poor whites, the former slaves, and the majority of mulattos, all those united in the desire to remove a despotic regime. (2) The affluent pro-Spanish families of Santo Domingo and Puerto Plata, who enjoined the governors of Puerto Rico and Cuba to send troops to remove the Haitian occupiers. (3) Those hateros and merchants seeking military assistance from Britain for achieving the same end, but in exchange for preferential trade status. (4) The independentists, composed of at least two groups: the Duarteled trinitarios, who had emerged from the merchant class and sought independence for Dominicans, by the Dominicans, and by no one else; and the petite bourgeoisie, many of them creole descendants of families from the Peninsula, the Canary Islands, and the Baleares. The latter groups identified little with the peasant and ex-slave masses and succeeded in winning over the opportunistic Tomás de Bobadilla to their cause. Separation from Haitian rule could not have taken place without the organizational zeal of members the petit-bourgeois class, especially those of the Banda del Sur. These businessmen and professionals had by 1838 linked up with the tobacco growers and the dealers of the Cibao to play a leading role in the revolt against the occupying forces.82 The bourgeois faction shared moreover a common desire with the hateros and madereros (lumber traders): that of establishing a “República Libre e independiente de toda dominación extranjera.” (5) The former Boyerists collaborators also favored separation. These were mainly administrative veterans who had served under the Domination, knew the French system, and believed the French
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capable of removing the Haitians in exchange for preferential treatment in commerce. In the forefront of this group were the wealthy Buenaventura Báez and Manuel Joaquín del Monte. These and other afrancesados joined the Haitian anti-Boyer “Praslin Movement” at the encouragement of French consul Saint-Denys, seeking the ouster of Boyer and the return to colonial rule in Santo Domingo.83 Foremost among Dominican plotters for independence was La Trinitaria, the secret society founded in 1838. Leading the conspiracy was Juan Pablo Duarte; second in command were the lawyer Francisco Rosario Sánchez and the officer Ramón Mella. The name for the organization came from its secretive structure, inspired by Masonic tradition: the three heads chose three subordinate officers, who in turn chose three more each, with those three choosing three more apiece to make a third tier of 27 and a total of 39 conspirators. The architectonics of Duarte’s emancipatory ideology was as simplistic as it was idealistic: country, freedom, and independence formed its foundation; the principles of racial equality, municipal government, and representative democracy, its plinths; and for its columns, guarantees of civil rights and free elections. Duarte’s code of radical patriotism blended with reactionary provisions: it granted official status to the Catholic Church as it defined the nation as one and united against the Haitians. Duarte’s doctrine said nothing on the matter of class inequality: social revolution was not on its agenda. The conservative reaction to the Trinitarians came swiftly. Some who opposed the separation attempted to discredit Duarte and followers by calling them colombianos, as if they had resurrected the plan of Núñez de Cáceres to annex the republic to Gran Colombia and reinstitute slavery. That label raised the suspicions of both Dominican blacks and mulattos, no friends of servitude, and the Dominican landowners, no friends of Núñez de Cáceres’ Independencia Efímera, which they blamed for opening the door to the Domination. To counter such reaction, the petit-bourgeois members of la Trinitaria joined forces with the discontented mulatto elite of the Haitian Reform movement. Indeed, so great was the dissatisfaction in the former Spanish colony by 1842, and so evident was the disintegration of the Haitian regime already, that Dominican and Haitian enemies of Boyer decided to work together for his ouster. Now was the time of cross-border alliance-building in a period of increased instability. Saint-Denys became the political counselor of the Dominican conspirators. Envoys passed from one side of the island to the other. The Dominican dissidents learned of the Haitian anti-Boyer
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conspiracy: from the Habitation Praslin in September 1842, a Societé des Droits de L’Homme et Citoyen issued its manifesto of grievances against the Boyer regime. In the meantime, however, Major Charles RivièreHérard, soon to be promoted to général de division, launched a series of incursions eastward to put down some uprisings, especially one led by a hostile faction of administrators.84 Upon learning of collusions between Haitian liberals and the Dominican independentists, however, he ordered as well the capture of the Trinitarian plotters. The Haitian coup and the persecution of the Independentist leaders together stirred the Dominicans toward revolt. Yet this collusion soon began to appear untenable in the minds of the Dominican leaders, fearful of the greater numbers of the insular Others. The Dominican bourgeoisie soon decided to band together with the conservative hateros and organize a Dominican resistance force strong enough to eject the Haitians and to turn the Dominican population around to accepting a new idea: that of founding a republic. It was literally a seismic event affecting both parts of the island that ushered in a new era of cooperation. Once an earthquake struck in May 1842, destroying much of Cap Haïtien and Santiago, the ensuing state of alarm provided sufficient cover for Duarte’s opposition to contact and establish communications with the anti-Boyer faction centered in Les Cayes.85 It is important to keep in mind that although the Domination succeeded in unifying the island, especially through its freeing of the slaves, it did not succeed in empowering the masses, so that Dominican politics remained under the control of the white elites, from whose classes emerged the leaders of the independence movement of 1843–4.86 It was in Haiti that Rivière-Hérard, on 27 January 1843, called together other mulatto officers and officials to the Praslin plantation, owned by Hérard’s father, Charles ainé. Added to the anger toward Boyer for having burdened Haiti with the onerous indemnity—it would not be paid to the satisfaction of France until 192287—was the resentment provoked by an additional indemnification paid by Boyer to a Spanish man-of-war. These concessions gave the mulatto Hérard-Rivière all the more reason to organize a coup against his former comrade-in-arms and, upon its success, subsequently to declare his own presidency-for-life.88 Hérard-Rivière’s triumph was seen as the opportunity that would allow the Dominican separatists to declare the second national independence.89 Taking an active role behind the scenes in the Dominicans’ insurgency was Juchereau de Saint-Denys, the French consul to Santo Domingo. Writing to his minister on 5 February 1844, Saint-Denys pointed to the Dominicans’ desire to break with Haiti and their need for a protector.
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Yet since Colombia, Spain, and England had expressed their inability to take on such a responsibility at this time, it was up to France to step into the breach. Saint-Denys succeeded in gaining the ear of the Bobadilla-led Junta Central of the Dominican government, assuring them of French support after they should gain their independence, plotting all along to secure a cession of Samaná to the French as a prelude to an alienation of the whole island to the same colonizing power.90 Shortly before the February insurrection, and with Juan Pablo Duarte absent from the country, Tomás de Bobadilla penned the Manifestación de Independencia. In that document, the author, speaking for the provisional revolutionary government, denounced the spoliation of lands authorized by Boyer in accordance with a law of 8 July 1824. The expropriations included confiscations settled with lamentable compensations and direct incorporations of properties abandoned by their owners, to the misery of their relatives who remained after the invasion. In such expropriations originated many of the clashes between Dominicans and Haitians in the years leading up to the insurrection destined to break the Haitian domination over the eastern end.91 Once again, the French were watching with interest as events unfolded in Hispaniola. On 27 February 1844, Mella discharged the trabucazo, or musket shot, at the Misericordia Gate, and there proclaimed Dominican independence. Hérard-Rivière wasted no time in reacting: he sent an army into the newly declared republic, with Pierrot commanding the forces entering the northern territory and Souffront and Hérard-Rivière himself leading the two columns invading in the south. Waiting to confront the Haitian forces was the army of Dominican patriots, poorly equipped and undertrained after 22 years of occupation, but armed with conviction enough to withstand the charge of the counterrevolutionary forces. For championing the separation from Haiti on 27 February, the insurrectionists would become known as the febreristas. On 19 and 30 March, these febreristas stopped the Haitian charges at La Estrelleta, Beler, Cambronal, Santomé, and Las Carreras.92 In the year of the separation, Haiti’s population totaled around 600,000, in contrast to Santo Domingo’s 120,000. Twelve years of armed combat against the occupiers would be needed to secure the fledgling republic against further Haitian aggressions.93 In Santo Domingo, the Dominican flag was hoisted above the Baluarte del Conde (Bastion or Fort of the Count), which looks out on the Ozama River, and Commander Desgrotte gave up the capital city. The new republic claimed the right to constitute itself as a sovereign nation, in essence the same right claimed by the Haitians in 1804. The constitution ratified
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on 6 November 1844 affirmed the existence of the boundary determined two years prior to the Basle treaty, in 1793.94 That is to say, the very document that declared Dominican independence was the same that would put limits to the Haitian state’s drive to secure its freedom by extension of its sovereignty across the island. As this scenario reveals, there was a sort of manifest destiny operating on a small scale on either side of the frontier, upping the ante in a particular game of ethnic and national rivalries.95 Apart from the collective memory of a domination ended by separation and independence, the 22-year occupation left a racial legacy in the new republic: the flight of white colonists and the more frequent incidence of interracial marriage resulted in a darkening of skin color in the eastern portion.96 Among the other visible signs of the domination, the Haitians left little more than one structure known to have been built by them during the occupation. This was the Old Senate Building, standing in the Parque Colón.97 The Dominican Republic was born of a popular revolt against the Haitians, but this birth was a premature one in several senses. What emerged was a nation-state with no strong middle class: instead, a weak and dependent commercial bourgeoisie led the nation into an uncertain future in which neither property rights nor means of production had been sufficiently consolidated. And so, on the foundation of anti-Haitianism and the armature of chauvinism, the Dominicans built their nation precisely in the process of separating themselves from their own intimate enemy.
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Chapter 5
Territorial Imperatives, 1845–1929
When two peoples inhabit the same island, their destinies in terms of foreign initiatives are necessarily interdependent. The survival of one is intricately linked to the survival of the other; each is duty-bound to guarantee security of the other . . . [T]hese are the powerful motives why our constitutions, from our political beginnings, have declared continuously that the entire island should form a single state. And it was not an ambitious conquest that dictated such a declaration, but a profound commitment to our security. —Haitian President Fabre Geffrard (1861)1
he nation-state in the eras of imperialism and neoimperialism offers the key to understanding the function of the Haitian–Dominican border. The nation-state arises within a larger context, that of the nationstate system, which, as Anthony Giddens (1990) theorizes, produces a globalizing integration across distances of time and space. A time–space displacement or “stretching process” connecting dispersed regions and periods bears upon local interactions, as with domestic economies and border dealings, in which are assumed the co-presence or proximity of the actors involved. The system is itself self-differentiating, the product of an international division of labor. The broad theoretical framework proposed by Giddens illuminates the character of nation-building as a process by which the intensifying of proto-nationalist or nationalist sentiment responds to the nation-building moves of other powers. In the periods prior to the development of industrialized weaponry and sophisticated
T
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telecommunications, and in the case of Hispaniola after the achievement of Dominican independence, it was territorial expansion and the fixing of border demarcations that defined sovereignty and territorial rights.2 As seen in Chapter 4, one nation’s drive to gain independence and selfdetermination clashed with the other nation’s resolve to secure the territorial integrity of the island, for that meant defending an already-won independence and right to self-determination. The armed battle lasted well over 50 years: from Toussaint’s revolution of 1801 to Faustin Soulouque’s final invasion of 1856. Coextensive in part with this conflictive process, the formation of Dominican nationhood in the nineteenth century was a discontinuous affair involving Haiti in five distinct phases: (1) in the early struggle with Toussaint’s domination; (2) in the early struggle against French occupation; (3) in the experience of Boyer’s domination; (4) in the defense against Soulouque’s offensives; and (5) in a relatively tardy revolution against the Spanish recolonization of the country.3 By an accident of geography, Haiti and the Dominican Republic shared their fate; by their complex interactions, the two peoples defined and redefined their relationships to one another, and each one to itself. Yet positioned as they were within the self-differentiating nation-state system, both Haiti and the Dominican Republic, despite their “antinomy of interests” (Price-Mars 1953), resembled one another in “nobility and intentions.”4 Since the beginning of Haiti and the Dominican Republic’s shared history as republics, an ideology of the national identity and national culture has nonetheless screened the reality of a political system that has not made a clean break with colonial structures and relations. The separation of the states, moreover, has masked the underlying relationship of Haiti and the Dominican Republic in the periods after 1844: that of nations that strove to improvise their coexistence and mutual sustenance within the contrapuntal system of the island and the larger system of nation-states.
Post-Colonial Arrangements When Dominican independence was proclaimed, General Pedro Santana was assigned the command of the south while Duarte commanded in the north, both acting under the authority of the Provisional Junta Gubernativa. Charles Rivière-Hérard, the Haitian president who succeeded Boyer during the last year of the Domination, resolved to put down the Dominican insurrection and thereby preserve the imperiled union. Taking the southern route in March 1844, Rivière-Hérard’s army of 15,000 marched on the Dominican capital, only to be turned back by Santana’s troops in the vicinity of Azua.5
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The war between Dominican nationals and Haitian nationals would last 12 years. Haiti launched four invasion campaigns: those of 1844, 1845–9, 1849–55, and 1855–6. The invasions formed a part of a uniquely contradictory process from 1844 to 1856: the Haitian soldiery probably felt a certain ambivalence toward a nation that had claimed the same rights and freedoms that the Haitian people had attained in 1804. At the same time, they were obligated to rise to the defense of the Haitian independence and emancipation. Not a single one of the invasions during that 12-year period succeeded, but they made a national hero of General Santana.6 His popularity skyrocketing owing to the fight against the neighboring foe, Santana won his first presidential term by vote of the delegate assembly in November 1844. Haitian advances were stopped in Azua, Santiago de los Caballeros, Neiba, Comendador (Elías Piña), and Capotillo. In retaliation, Dominican warships bombarded important Haitian coastal cities. One general who rose to the top of the national leadership was General José María Imbert, who led his troops in the battle of Santiago on 30 March of the same year.7 There was cause for concern among the Dominican nationalists avid to defend the territorial sovereignty. Haitian advances and the occupation itself had blurred the demarcation that had been set by the Aranjuez treaty, signed by the Viscount de Choiseul and Lieutenant Colonel of her Catholic Majesty, Joaquín García, in 1777, by which Spain and France supposedly had settled their claims to Hispaniola. The crisis of limits was especially troubling in the south, where the Haitians had taken possession of Las Caobas and Hincha, renamed Lascahobas and Hinche. On 18 June 1844, General Antonio Duvergé began his campaign to restore the division at the line of Aranjuez, and afterwards succeeded in taking back Lascahobas and duly giving it back its Spanish name. The first Dominican constitution of 6 November 1844 asserted the validity and legality of that line established ante bellum. The Haitian government refused at any rate to recognize officially the independence of the formerly Spanish part until the 1855 treaty.8 They would continue to press their claims to east of that line, such that by 1856, the Dominicans were forced to accept the de facto division and the setting of the line of the status quo post bellum. During this time of invasions and threat of invasions, the Junta Gubernativa did not hang its hopes on complete autonomy: whereas the Trinitarians and their followers pursued the elusive dream of a strong independent republic, the ones who assumed power in the post-war period sought protection by a more powerful country. Junta members Tomás Bobadilla and Pedro Santana explored the feasibility of annexing the country to France as an alternative preferable to Haitian reconquest.
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In effect, they revived the plan that had been engineered by Levasseur, although this time it would entail giving up the national sovereignty. Perhaps unaware of such machinations, Duvergé was busy setting up a line of defense against reinvasion. On 6 December 1844 he captured the Haitian fort at Cachimán, right on the border line between Arroyo Seco and Carrizal, thus blocking one of the main access routes for the enemy. At this and other sites Duvergé equipped a mounted guard with his own animals to watch and protect the border. With these bands and his network of scouts and spies, Duvergé could maintain communications between the headquarters at Las Matas de Farfán and the Dominican outposts. The Haitians did not let up the attack, however. Cachimán became the object of a third Haitian offensive on 13 July 1845: General-in-chief St. Victor Poil and General Samedi Thelémaque faced Duvergé and colonels Juan Contreras, Bernardino Pérez, and Bernabé Sandoval. With that encounter, the battleground of Cachimán “raised itself again as the symbol of the national resistance against the Haitian penetrations.” But the Haitians would later recover the site and thus control of the Valley of Neyba, a space of southern territory extending from Azua to San José de Ocoa.9 But now a new power, already on the horizon, would figure more centrally in the unfolding: Enter the United States of America. Santana in December 1844 sent special agent José María Caminero to the office of Secretary of State John C. Calhoun to seek recognition for the republic’s independence from Haiti. Addressing Calhoun on behalf of the “white Dominicans,” Caminero’s appeal stated in no uncertain terms, “This union [with Haiti] and the abolition of slavery that it entailed created a disruption in general habits as well as the principles of social life to which the Spanish inhabitants have been accustomed from the beginning.”10 It was clear that what had happened on Hispaniola would matter significantly to a United States coming to terms with its own practices of slavery. Impacting as well on the balance of power between union states and slaveholding states was the westward extension of the American domains, into the territory of Texas and the rest of the region that it would soon win from Mexico. That region, half of Mexico’s territory, would be ceded to the United States with the latter’s victory in the Mexican-American War and its official conclusion in 1848 with the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. With such successes, it was clear that the United States was in an expansive mood. In Haiti after the fall of Boyer, black leaders had ascended to the power once enjoyed exclusively by the mulatto elite.11 There was disunion on the Dominican side of the conflict as well. In 1845 the blacks of Santa María, in San Cristóbal province, rose up against the authority of a government that had ordered them to join the campaign of Duvergé’s Army of the
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South. Why fight against the same Haitians, they asked, who had definitively abolished slavery? The insurgents of Santa María, given the name of congoses as if to mock their African ancestry, were punished. The Dominicans gained on the Haitians, too. With the fall of the Haitian fort called l’Invincible, the Dominicans dynamited the moats in a gesture of reconquest. The 1845 campaign ended with the retreat of the Haitian army across the Massacre River as the liberating army carried and swung their flag throughout the northern borderlands, reclaiming as Dominican the territory extending from Dajabón to the hills of Escalante. Subsequent to that encounter, Rivière-Hérard’s successors continued in their attempts to retake the eastern portion. President Louis Pierrot sent expeditions and met in combat with the heroic Duvergé and José Joaquín Puello. Pierrot attempted to rouse up support for another invasion in January 1846, but his entreaties were greeted by the anti-Pierrot masks of carnival.12 With the black Faustin Soulouque installed as president soon thereafter, Haiti again faced the external threat against its independence posed by major powers eager to intervene in the Haitian–Dominican conflict. So the Haitians kept up the pressure against their neighbors, such that the constant threat of invasion from the west was enough to discourage the major powers involved—France, England, Spain, and the United States—from rushing into the matter of making a protectorate of the Dominican Republic. With regard to the United States, President Soulouque was caught in a Catch-22: should he do nothing, la Partie de l’Est could be bought or brought into the fold of the slaveholding states. Should he on the other hand invade and thus attempt to unify again the whole of Hispaniola, he would have to face the collective ire of Britain, France, and the United States. Tensions eased with the signing of a one-year truce, followed by covert activities on St. Thomas supported by Haiti, followed by a French and British blockade of Port-au-Prince and the Cap Haïtien. When in 1849 Soulouque led the second invasion into the Dominican Republic, President Buenaventura Báez declared war on Haiti. The invasion included two unsuccessful marine campaigns. Soulouque, now self-proclaimed as Emperor Faustin I, attempted again to “export revolution” by sending, in 1850, a certain agent named “Jacinthe” to St. Thomas with a plan to incite insurrection. The fever for slave revolt had apparently spread by the next year to Martinique, where the cry of Vive Soulouque! could be heard rising from the rioting mobs in the streets of Fort-de-France.13 Now subdued under Soulouque, the warring parties of Haiti once again united under the dream of reunification. To the east, they were reminded, lay cities that Drake had plundered, Ferrand governed, and the slaveholding U.S. South coveted. For the latter, the same Manifest Destiny that had
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driven American expansion across to a California once owned by Mexico and into an Oregon territory once claimed by Britain, now pointed in the direction of the Samaná Bay, seen by many as a part of a “fair-skinned” Republic that now needed protection from its swarthy aggressors. France, for its part, was raring for a fight: Haiti was in arrears, not having paid a single sou of its indemnity since 1843, and this was a debt that was meant to be paid by a hypothecation of customs revenues that were never fully collected. Since the same eastern portion had the wherewithal, it was supposed, to pay for the cost of Haiti’s recognition by France, Soulouque had reason to send 15,000 troops eastward across the border on 19 March 1849.14 Again, Soulouque’s desire to reconquer the separated eastern part was also driven in part by his fear, shared by many Haitians, that a powerful third party—be it France, Spain, Great Britain, or the United States— would take over the fledgling Dominican Republic and from there take steps to seize Haiti for itself. As Jean Price-Mars (1953) has cogently argued, the Haitian–Dominican dispute expanded in its significance beyond the differend of border demarcations and territorial claims during this period of foreign involvement. The dispute took on the aspect of a fierce racial antagonism between two unequal groups: 600,000–700,000 black or mulatto Haitians seemed to threaten the status and livelihood of several hundred million white Americans, especially those of the slaveholding South, who despised the upstart Faustin I. Nor did Soulouque’s repeated aggressions against Santo Domingo advance his efforts to find a bishop that would consecrate his coronation, the Vatican by its refusal demonstrating its reluctance to bestow any illegitimacy on his rule.15 Stated in the lofty rhetoric of Price-Mars, “Haiti was becoming ipso facto the vindicator of the respect attached to the dignity of the human person, the champion of the rights of man whatever the color or the origin of the human species. The status of Haiti as independent black nation was becoming an international anomaly, a threat of disorder for security sustained on the sin of lucre and the most abominable of iniquities.”16 Buoyed up perhaps by such idealism, Soulouque sought as well to consolidate his hold on power and used the mobilizations against the east to draw attention from the incompetence and corruption of his own regime. The fear of Haiti among the international community thus met with a fear within Haiti of outside aggressions that could put an end to the hard-won emancipation. With the aim of securing their liberty in a racist world, the Haitian elites backed Soulouque’s invasions into Dominican territory. The consequences for the Haitian national economy were disastrous. For Báez and Santana, the twin caudillos who were virtually alternating in power during Soulouque’s administrations (1847–9 and 1849–59), the Dominican
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defense drew attention from the domestic incompetence and corruption of their own regimes and provided a rationale for working to establish the protectorate. The Haitians would have preferred a confederation with their neighbors. Even as he prepared his second invasion, Soulouque had extended an invitation to Santana and Báez to join their country in an insular union with Haiti. The offer included titles of nobility to be awarded to the two leaders, with a miliary command of the eastern part for Santana, a civil commissioner’s post for Báez.17 It was Robert M. Walsh of Virginia, representing the United States, who approached Soulouque’s foreign minister Dufrêne, Duc de Tiburon, on 2 February 1851 with persuasive arguments in favor of recognizing the Dominican independence: after all, France had done so, so had England, and, for all intents and reasons, the United States as well. Dufrêne’s response was to insist on Haiti’s rights to the eastern portion on geographical, historical, and constitutional grounds. He soon thereafter declined the joint ultimatum of the three powers requiring the conclusion of a definitive peace treaty.18 Henry John Templeton, Third Viscount of Palmerston and then British foreign secretary, informed the Haitian envoy in London by communiqué that no European country would stand idly by if his black republic were to dominate its Hispanic neighbor. The warning went apparently unheeded, for in May 1851 the Haitian army made an advance on Neyba, which was repelled in Postrer Río. In 1852, General Antonio Abad Alfau was sent to the Haitian headquarters to work out a reconciliation, but Soulouque agreed only to a prisoner exchange.19 Despite the zeal with which the Dominicans defended their independence, nationhood did not bring the economic benefits for which the hateros and merchants had fought. Four years after the separation, the Dominican Republic was again languishing in poverty. British ambassador Robert H. Schomburgk reported in 1848 that not a single European vessel had dropped anchor in Santo Domingo during the first six months of that year. Neither did the exceedingly slow growth of the Dominican population help much to build the economy or defense against Haitian attacks. About a decade before the outbreak of the Haitian invasions, the censuses or padrones counted a Dominican population of 100,000; in 1851, or seven years after the separation, the population had increased by only 50,000 in the entire country, making for a density of approximately one family per square kilometer. Not only was production low, but the sparseness of population, especially in the borderlands, invited settlement of Haitian interlopers on Dominican-claimed lands. The demographic factor, added to the lack of advanced technology for agriculture and the lack of real money for purchase or investment, redoubled the desire among the landowning
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and commercial sectors to find a powerful foreign sponsor to take over the troubled finances of the republic: the idea of the protectorate was looking better year after year.20 Haiti on the other hand enjoyed the numerical advantage in population but lacked the unity and support it would have needed to launch a full-scale reconquest of the east. The unstable, violent period of 72 years spanning from 1843, the year of Boyer’s fall, to 1915, the year of the first U.S. invasion, saw the rise and fall of 22 Haitian dictators all told, three of whom were mulattos.21 Soulouque launched his last campaign of intended reconquest in November 1855. Eastward he sent the three columns of the imperial army, led by Santander. After beating an initial retreat, the Dominicans struck back on 22 December, in Santomé in the south, and then in Cambronal in the north, dealing a devastating blow to the ragtag Haitian troops. The scene of one of the bloodiest confrontations of the post-independence Haitian–Dominican War was the Savannah of Santomé. On the plain close to Las Matas, Dominican guerrillas fought in pitched battle, wielding machetes and lances in defense of their homeland. Almost 700 Haitians fell that day, and the rest, many of them wounded, were forced to retreat as far back as the fortress of Cachimán, by Las Caobas, and then beyond the border. The Haitians met defeat on the same day at Cambronal, and then a month later at Sabana Larga and Jácuba, in January 1856. Another rout at Savana Mula on Christmas Eve, a subsequent loss at Ouanaminthe, and a final defeat at Savana Larga spelled the end of Emperor Faustin I’s dream of uniting Hispaniola under the Haitian flag. The Haitian army retreated across the Dajabón River. “This time,” write Heinl and Heinl (1996), “when Faustin returned to Port-au-Prince, there were no church bells or gun salutes or Te Deums. At midnight on 14 February, without so much as a drumbeat, he led the shattered, dispirited army through the darkened streets.”22 When all was said and done, and despite his defeats and failures during 10 years of corrupt and often violent rule, Soulouque had made up for some the losses suffered with the Dominican independence of 1844, securing for his country possession of Lascahobas, Hinche, and the Plaine du Centre.23 Though the last of the Soulouque-ordered invasions occurred in 1856, other aggressions followed. In 1857, France and Great Britain attempted to intervene in the matter of the livestock rustling in the frontier regions, beseeching Soulouque to put an end to the practice. This appeal was frustrated, and Haitian cattle thieves could continue their incursions into the border zones of Azua, Barahona, and Montecristi, thus intensifying the instability in those regions and pushing Dominican settlers out of the borderlands. A mounted border patrol, reminiscent of the colonial cincuentenas,
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was enlisted and sent into the zone to discourage Haitian settlement. But the patrol did not succeed in chasing out the immigrants, nor in preventing their communication and intermingling with the Hispanic populations. For there, in the margins of the two countries, situated in tierras de nadie, a borderlands culture did arise to confound and frustrate the Dominican authorities.24 In 1861, the same authorities traced public disorders to imputed origins in the sites where certain Afro-Haitian dances were performed—and they included the denois, vodoun, and bamboulá— and would be banned throughout the republic.25
Annexation and the Border During the administrations of Báez and Santana, the oligarchy composed of landowners and representatives of the merchant classes had proven their antagonism to any rule exercised by the insular neighbor, but not to the principle of rule by a European colonizer. The movement for annexation was headed by families who had drawn their wealth from latifundios, hatos, and commercial enterprises and never completely shaken off their loyalist tendencies. Although this privileged sector had opposed foreign intervention, it longed nostalgically for the good old days of supposed colonial prosperity. Seeking to restore this prosperity, the Dominican elite was not averse to finding a protector, preferably European. And what better protector than a former one? And in a continuing situation of economic insufficiency and dependency, what profit lies in national autonomy anyway?26 In a plausible explanation of this movement, Pierre-Charles affirms that a “sentiment of Hispanity” constituted a transcendence and sublimation of the Dominican Self, a Self found wanting and destitute in the face of the external threat, which was none other than the “black” Self of the Haitian invader.27 Following Santana’s lead, the Dominican Self turned back towards the former Spanish masters and, seeking protection from the black Self of Haiti, offered to Spain the opportunity to recolonize what had become a 17-year-old republic. Spain heard the Hispanophiles, and took them up on the offer.28 Not yet two decades after the gaining of independence, then, Dominican leaders under Santana considered national sovereignty to be expendable, or at least negotiable, if losing any part of it meant gaining the protection of the nation against aggressions by Haiti. Several powers in fact had been offered the opportunity to enter into a neocolonial alliance with the Dominican Republic, as mentioned earlier. But it was Santana’s request for assistance from Cuba’s governor, General Francisco Serrano, that opened
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up negotiations that led to the recolonializing of Santo Domingo by the once and future imperial power. Recolonization, or, perhaps more appropriately, retrocolonization, furthermore promised to provide the capital for infrastructural works and encourage the sort of immigration that the Dominican elites considered desirable.29 Everything that happened on one side of the international border had repercussions on the other. The coup d’etat against Soulouque that put General Fabre Geffrard in the presidency by January 1859 had in effect bolstered Santana’s intent to obtain the protectorate, salvage his bankrupt country, and maintain his personal hold on power. To this end, Santana operated in such a way as to keep everybody in the dark about what he was doing with everybody else. Mining and timber concessions were made to France and England, a new trade agreement was negotiated with the United States, and General Felipe Alfau was sent to Madrid to negotiate the terms under which Spain would assume authority over the impoverished country, with the promise from Spain to defend it from its external enemies.30 Santana reassured Queen Isabel II, in correspondence dated 27 April 1860, of the rightness of annexation. Santo Domingo, said Santana in his letter, should never have separated from the madre patria in the first place. According to the plan, Santo Domingo would shed its republican status and become, as Cuba and Puerto Rico remained at the time, an overseas province of Spain.31 Elsewhere in his communication, the Dominican president beseeched Her Majesty to “put an end the blood-letting” and to bring peace and security to the Dominican people. The agreement was struck; the document that ceded the erstwhile republic to the Spanish crown was signed in Santiago de los Caballeros by members of the provisional government. It was a copy of the same document, delivered to the Haitians, that fired up Geffrard’s resolve to oppose the annexation by whatever means necessary. Geffrard responded to the news of Spanish annexation in 1861 in these terms, already quoted: None will contest that Haiti has a major interest that no foreign power establish itself in the eastern part [of Hispaniola]. When two people inhabit the same island, their destinies in terms of foreign initiatives are necessarily interdependent. The survival of one is intricately linked to the survival of the other; each is duty-bound to guarantee security of the other.32
That interdependence was one more readily recognized in official documents by Haitians than by Dominicans, but partisans of each nation’s sovereignty, committed to defending their security and independence, had
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looked to those of the other nation for assistance. Indeed, the Haitians would soon be lending their assistance in the subsequent struggle that would oppose the Annexation.33 France, for its part, opposed the Spanish repossession of Santo Domingo under Santana in view of the fact that Haiti continued to owe 50 million francs to France in 1861, and the latter would not be able to collect were the whole island to be restored to Spanish sovereignty. Aside from the business of this outstanding debt, France still nurtured its own dreams of empire-building in the Americas, a dream that the Mexican reign of Maximilian and Carlota kept alive until as late as 1867. These were the years in which the ideologues of Louis Napoleon sought to forge a new link between French and Spanish cultures, in founding what for the first time was being called “l’Amérique Latine.” These, too, were the years in which the Spanish monarchy, soon to be occupied with the Ten Years’ War in Cuba (1868–78), yet aspired to regain something of its former imperial splendor in the Antilles. For Haiti, though, it was 1808 all over again: a European power had taken hold of the eastern portion. To rid itself of this imperial menace, the island again went into convulsions, as Haiti provided the staging-ground for the resistance. First, however, the Haitians had to bow to the naval squadrons commanded by Admiral Joaquín Gutiérrez Rubalcava, who in July 1861 had aimed Spanish guns against Port-au-Prince to back up his demand for an indemnity amounting to $200,000 (later reduced to $25,000) and an apology. Satisfaction of these demands, along with a 21-gun salute to the Spanish flag and a promise no longer to harbor Dominican rebels on Haitian territory, would satisfy the Admiral and the Spanish crown.34 The bombardment constituted a punishment for the Haitian government’s refusal to make restitution for the theft of a large number of horses and cattle at the border, for which the Dominicans had demanded around $40,000. Geffrard refused to yield, but mediation through a diplomatic corps secured a promise from both sides to seek future arbitration and the Haitian president’s promise to salute the Dominican flag. Neither promise would be kept by the time Geffrard was forced out of office, but at that point any reparation would have come too late.35 In the meantime, Spanish troops, many sent from Cuba and Puerto Rico by the middle of 1861, arrived and quickly occupied the Dominican towns and succeeded in suppressing the first manifestations of revolt. But the resistance gained in strength and numbers. Under the noses of the Spanish bureaucrats and priests, the anti-Santana forces sought their opportunity to destabilize the colonial order redux. Led by Francisco del Rosario Sánchez and José María Cabral, the resisters turned to Haiti for assistance. Geffrard was already
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working on the sidelines of the revolt, providing shelter and even funding to the anti-annexationists.36 Geffrard’s support to this group was motivated not only by the fear that the reestablished Spanish colony would endanger the Haitian independence, but by the probability that Spain would invoke the provisions of the Aranjuez treaty of 1777 to reclaim territories of the Central Plain taken by Toussaint in violation of that treaty. A Royal Order of 14 January 1862 had authorized the removal of Haitian squatters in Dajabón and Capotillo. Annexation also endangered the expropriated areas of San Rafael, Las Caobas, Hincha, and San Miguel de la Atalaya, and Santana did have his eye on recovering those frontier cities. During the War of the Restoration, Dominican resistance fighters in the borderlands would attack the Spanish forces and then take refuge in Haiti, where they regrouped and reorganized prior to joining the forces led by Luperón, Pimentel, and Cabrera on the plain of Montecristi. From there they marched onward to Dajabón, Guayubín, and other towns that had been taken from the Spanish colony.37 Struggle against a common enemy was again uniting former antagonists. By this point the commercial bourgeoisie that had developed during the Dominican periods of Domination and Independence had been won over to the view that its interests were endangered by the colonial reimposition. This sector was joined in its struggle by the ex-slaves, who saw themselves again threatened by rule of a slaveholding nation. In some ways the war would indeed replay the old conflict of 1808: that between the nationalist middle class and the antinationalist hatero oligarchy.38 Since the war against restored colonial rule was motivated in great part by the fear among the dark-skinned Dominicans of a restored slavery, the struggle for Dominican sovereignty assumed the character of a conflict not only between colonized and colonizers, but also between the races.39 Taking arms against the sea of recolonizing troubles, liberal Dominicans repeatedly sought the aid of the Haitians to turn back the tide. The movement to regain the national sovereignty, la Restauración, did not fail to obtain that support. Geffrard confederated with the leaders of the Restoration, supporting Cabral with arms and even the means with which to publish a Boletín Revolucionario out of Port-au-Prince. Geffrard also confronted a major challenge to his leadership by his nemesis (and future successor), Sylvain Salnave. Salnave had to beat a hasty retreat to the Dominican side of the border during the revolt, but he could count on a reinforcement of Dominican freebooters in his successful assault on the garrison at Ounanaminthe, a key access point. Marching onward to Cap Haïtien, Salnave was greeted there by Démesvar Delorme, one of his followers and leader of a council that had carried out two commissions: the
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military promotion of Salnave, and the conferring of the northern kingdom to the new Major General. Salnave’s 1865 insurrection in Cap Haïtien could count on backing from the United States and the Dominican Republic; Geffrard, for suppressing the revolt, could rely on support from the British navy.40 As British gunships fired upon Fort Belair, Salnave understood in November 1865 that this insurrection was finished and set sail for Montecristi aboard the U.S.S. DeSoto. It was from the Dominican side that Salnave later launched further attacks against Geffrard, only to be repelled again. Cabral during his alliance with Báez against the Spanish evidently had struck an agreement with Geffrard, offering him a portion of the province of Azua in exchange for assistance in the anti-colonial struggle.41
Once More Unto the Breach The War of Restoration had begun on 16 August 1863 with the rebellion of 14 Dominicans, led by Santiago Rodríguez. The patriots raised the Dominican flag on the Hill of Capotillo. Rodríguez declared the Guerra por la Independencia y la Restauración de la República, a war in which the patriots would count on reinforcements from the Haitian Republic that had sheltered the 14 freedom fighters. The rebellion, headed by José María Cabral and Gregorio Luperón, spread out from Capotillo.42 Haiti not only served as the staging-ground for the Dominican insurgency led by Generals Cabral and Sánchez. Geffrard, seeing the advantage to Haitian interests in revolution against a restored Spanish colony, sent his own Tirailleurs, sharp-shooters, to serve under Cabral. Soon the band would be joined by patriots of the northwestern region called la Línea del Noroeste, later by those of La Vega, Puerto Plata, Moca, Cotuí, and San Francisco de Macorís. To the west of the city of Santo Domingo, from the Ocoa River to the Haitian border, lay the contested lands of the Azua district, offered to Geffrard by Cabral. Sharing now a common enemy, the two nations continued to aid one another’s struggle for independence. Some of the exiled Dominicans who headed the resistance had taken refuge on Danish St. Thomas; they, too, looked to Haiti’s Geffrard for aid at this critical juncture. These leaders included Juan Pablo Sánchez, Trinitarian leader, and Generals Cabral, Tavera, and Cabrera.43 Bánica, Neyba, Las Matas de Farfán, San Juan de la Maguana, Barahona, and other communes saw the uniting of Haitian rayanos, residents of the borderlands, with the Dominican insurgents under Cabral. In Santiago de los Caballeros, 6,000 Dominicans besieged Fort San Luis and its 800 Spanish soldiers on 6 September 1863. Although the fierce battle resulted in the burning of
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Santiago with most of its houses, the Spanish were forced on 13 September 1863 to retreat to Puerto Plata, with the Dominican rebels in hot pursuit. In Santiago the next day, the revolutionaries elected José Antonio Salcedo president of the new Provisional Restoration Government.44 Haiti continued to play its part in subsequent political feuds internal to the Dominican side. From his base in Curaçao, Báez directed his partisans, led by Second Trinitarian Sánchez, in collaboration with Geffrard’s forces for the overthrow of Santana, Báez’s principal rival. General Abad Alfau succeeded in putting down two of the insurrections resulting from this alliance.45 The Spanish viceroy had to countenance the intensified insurgency swelled by ranks of Dominican liberals and the Haitian republican army. Colonel Ernest Roumain, Geffrard’s military representative, fought on the side of the rebels; Thomas Madiou, Haitian minister, served as emissary to the government of Madrid. Through either Roumain and Madiou, the Dominicans could convey their demands to the Spanish crown and attempt to broker an independence via negotiation while maintaining the pressure of the ground forces. In the island-wide campaign of guerrilla insurgency launched from the west, Cabral and Sánchez led the bifrontal charge against the Spanish troops. In the meantime, “young Duraciné Pouilh, editor of L’Opinion Nationale, set up a Dominican political headquarters in his shop, printing communiques, manifestos, and even paper money, on L’Opinion’s presses.”46 Spain lost 10,000 of her sons and 33 million pesos in the war. Except for the Spanish strongholds—Santo Domingo, Samaná, and Puerto Plata— and a few other barely defended sites, all parts of the country rose up against Santana and the monarchy. In 1865, the Cortes of Spain debated the merits of retaining a colony in which most of the population had rejected the annexation and united under the cause of restoration. Besides, noted the delegates, possession of Santo Domingo did not offer much to Spain in the way of benefits except as a symbolic recompense for the loss, 37 years earlier, of its American colonies. The decree for abrogating the annexation was drafted and approved: Isabel II signed it on 3 March 1865. A week later, the Spanish troops were boarding the ships that would take them back to Spain, Cuba, or Puerto Rico. The fighting had lasted more than two years; the last of the Spanish soldiers withdrew from the island on 11 July 1865. National sovereignty had been restored, but not unity: the Hispanophile Dominican conservatives continued to resist the power of the nationalist petite bourgeoisie. Their conflict manifested itself in anarchy: more than 50 revolts would take place in the years 1865–79, when some 21 governments were installed. On the heels of the Restoration,
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newly elected President Cabral had to meet the challenge of threatened insurrections. Restoration of independent sovereignty was the dream come true of the tobacco-growing middle class, but inasmuch as that class continued producing for export within the limits of a semi-feudal system, this weak middle class continued to be overshadowed by the hatero latifundists. The home-grown reconciliation of this contradiction would emerge in the figure of the political strong man, the caudillo, who could defend the oligarchy’s investment, unite the classes and sectors, and create stability while looking outward for sources of capital in the form of loans and investment. And the recent war of restoration notwithstanding, annexation to a European power actually continued to hold an attraction for a weak and imperiled state facing once again the prospect of annexation to its alien neighbor. Cabral’s pledges to Geffrard to the contrary, Salnave returned from the Turks Islands to Montecristi in June 1867 and there recruited Dominican filibusterers, once again, to march on the Haitian capital. Nissage-Saget had already secured Cap Haïtien against the Geffrard loyalists, and so Salnave could enter triumphant into the city. “Affecting the costume of the Dominican carabinero—panama sombrero, bright blue serape, great jackboots, and huge war machete—[Salnave] rode along the Grande Rue in what Le Reveil next day described as ‘a rain of flowers.’”47 Cabral’s hold on power on the other side was shaken by the imminence of a coup prepared by Báez partisans. Báez posed a particularly formidable threat, for he could count on support from Salnave and la Partie du Nord. Salnave had allowed these Dominicans, intent on overthrowing Cabral and encamped in this northern sector close by the border with Haiti, to establish their headquarters in Cap Haïtien. Salnave did so despite having made overtures to Cabral, in July 1867, for seeking a Haitian–Dominican alliance.48 Despite the Haitian support for Dominican independence from Spain, all the Haitian constitutions ratified between 30 December 1843 and 14 June 1867 reaffirmed the principle of the island’s unity and indivisibility. On that last date, the new document declared the inviolability of the Haitian territory; although it made no explicit definition of that territory as coextensive with that of the entire island, that definition was apparently assumed. Before he could assert this inviolability, however, Geffrard was displaced from office and sent packing, not without a sizable portion of the state treasury, to Jamaica. His replacement was Salnave, whom the Constituent Assembly elected on 14 June 1867. The independence movement headed by Luperón had cleared the way not only for Dominican sovereignty and democracy by 1865, but also for Báez’s third re-election. Once again in power in 1868, Báez began work on
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a plan to annex the republic to another major power: the United States. Soon, he had to confront a rebellion by opponents of annexation led by Cabral and his ally Luperón based in the Cibao region, close again to the Haitian frontier. Cabral and Luperón at this juncture could count on support from Salnave’s opponent from the North, Nissage-Saget, who provided Haitian arms, ammunition, and soldiers to a movement that sought to protect once again the Dominican sovereignty. Haiti itself was torn by internal conflict in 1869. The nation was divided among Salnave’s imperiled republic in the West and Center; Nissage-Saget and Nord Alexis’ Republic of the North; and Domingue’s Republic of the South. This tripartite contest meant civil war, although it should be noted that the conflict was not so much regional as factional. In 1869, President Báez caught the ear of U.S. Senator Ulysses S. Grant and proposed the annexation. With its own domestic issues for the moment resolved with the conclusion of its own War of Secession, the United States made ready to recommence its expansionist project. In a proposal to the U.S. Senate, Grant urged the annexation of Haiti and the Dominican Republic. The Báez-designed proposal met with opposition led by Generals Luperón, Pujols, and Cabral, who signed an accord sponsored by NissageSaget. A threat to the sovereignty of both countries had brought them together again. The Haitian patriots flatly rejected the annexation plan, lest they lose all that they had gained in the struggle for independence. Despite these efforts of the opposition, the Dominican Senate, adroitly manipulated by Báez, ratified the treaty. The U.S. Senate, however, would not. In subsequent military actions, Cabral would capture and deliver Báez’s ally Salnave to Nissage-Saget’s Caco fighters, Haitian peasant guerrillas, who took Salnave to his execution by firing squad. General Cincinnatus Leconte, rechristened as “Jean-Jacques Dessalines II,” on 15 March 1872 counted on Báez’s support in launching a failed noir invasion against Nissage-Saget from Santo Domingo.49 Nissage-Saget’s opposition to Báez was rooted in the fear of a permanent U.S. presence on the island. That fear was justifiable. The Haitian Minister of Foreign Affairs, Stephen Preston, had financed a campaign of opposition to U.S.–Dominican treaties that, in a period of American expansionism, would jeopardize the autonomy of the Haitian Republic, which opposed the Dominican annexation on the grounds that it would prepare the way for annexing the Haitian part as well. A letter dated 8 January 1871, from Vice Admiral Lee, commander of the Atlantic Fleet, to George M. Robeson, Secretary of the Navy, indicated as much: “With the annexation of Dominicana, the question of frontiers will be quickly arranged. A revolution among the inhabitants of Haiti in favor of the
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annexation to the United States, being a natural and inevitable consequence. All the circumstances seem favorable.”50 The two Caribbean countries found their destinies united once again, this time by the U.S. presence manifest in the form of the American fleet anchored at Samaná in anticipation of the Báez-engineered annexation. For the second time in a matter of 10 years, the Haitian government supported the Dominican groups fighting to oppose annexation to a foreign power; for the second time in a decade, the advocates of autonomy would prevail. The plan to annex “Dominicana” was blocked in the U.S. Senate thanks in great part to the opposition presented by anti-abolitionist Senator Charles Sumner and the anti-imperialist Justin S. Morrill. It turned out anyway that a Báezengineered attempt to manipulate a second plebiscite that would sanction a concession to his Samaná Bay Company outraged the patriots, and the patriots rose up again in insurrection, sending Báez out of the country and Ignacio María González into the presidency. General González had led the revolt that ousted Báez from the latter’s fourth presidential term, and his story reveals another instance of help from Haiti. González and his partisans succeeded in striking up an alliance with President Pierre Théomas Boisrond-Canal, a former Báez supporter. Although their insurrection in the north was put down by Ulises Heureaux, Luperón’s chief of staff, the rebels succeeded in gaining control of the Cibao by July 1876, and by 5 October they had the capital. González opened up a window of opportunity to pursue a rapprochement with Haiti; he oversaw the signing of a treaty of peace, amity, commerce, navigation, and extradition between the two countries. The document not only declared as inviolable each nation’s territory from expropriation and annexation: it recognized as legitimately Haitian that territory that Haiti had claimed during the 22 years of the Domination in violation of the terms set by the 1777 Aranjuez treaty. The new treaty, signed 9 November 1879, provided for fixing of the boundary in accordance with the best interests of each nation, and it allowed duty-free entry of Dominican goods into Haiti. Further commercial dealings occurred between the two populations consequent to the treaty, but increased commerce encouraged further eastward encroachments by Haitian settlers. The three U.S. commissioners who had been sent to study the climate of opinion on the annexation reported to their president that a strong U.S. presence in Santo Domingo would not only exercise a modernizing influence on the nation to the west, but it would, in enforcing the border between the two nations, allow them to redirect their efforts toward fomenting development and providing education each within its own boundaries. The report was made at a time when Dominican sugar production was gaining new life, with the infusion
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of rich Cuban immigrants who sought refuge from the dangers posed by the Ten Years’ War. The modern Dominican sugar industry got its start during this period, drawing on the cheap and reliable labor of the so-called cocolos, black migrant workers from the Anglophone Caribbean islands of St. Martin, the Virgin Islands, and St. Kitts. Large investments of North American capital were giving another boost to the industry, financing the creation of 30 sugar refineries from 1874 to 1882. As production increased, so did the demand for labor, and immigration from other islands, especially Cuba, was encouraged in 1879 by the granting of tax exemptions to foreign companies and by subsequent ratification of the Law of Immigration, aimed at regulating the treatment of workers by the sugar enterprises. Cane cutters from Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the British Antillean islands could supply the initial demand, but the North American owners soon began to look to neighboring Haiti as the source of cheap labor— labor that would cost less than other kinds to expatriate, requiring trucks for the overland journey and not the sloops (balandros) that were needed to transport the borincanos and cocolos back to their native islands.51 Diplomatic generosity on the part of the Dominicans would come at a price that would undermine the grand conciliation. Seeking to fill his treasury’s empty coffers, González offered free trade status to Haiti in exchange for an annual payment of $150,000. The proposal was unacceptable to the farmers of the Cibao, who knew that without market protection they simply would not be able to compete with the indigent Haitians’ rock-bottom pricing, and that would push the border provinces into bankruptcy. In the end, González’s deal with the Haitians cost him the government, and his antagonism towards Luperón won him the enmity of Generals Heureaux and Benito Monción. Allying themselves with the “Red” faction of Báez supporters, the two generals forced González to resign after only 40 days in office. The liberal Ulises Francisco Espaillat who replaced him was forced to withdraw after slightly more than five months in office and sent off to Santiago; Báez assumed the presidency for his fifth time, and it was González’s turn to take refuge in Haiti.52 In Portau-Prince González convinced Boisrond-Canal to support an anti-Báez revolution. It began as an uprising in the border regions and picked up momentum in the eastern provinces at the instigation of Padre Arturo Meriño. Báez’s fifth presidential term came to end with the triumph of González’s revolution, but the caudillo’s departure would usher in a period of even greater oppression under Heureaux’s iron fist. Once firmly ensconced in power, President Ulises Heureaux (1887–99) governed autocratically. He suffocated dissent by terror, facilitated by his network of spies and secret police. To keep his government operating and
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to pay for his lavish lifestyle, he resorted to issuing paper money in unprecedented amounts, driving the national debt to unprecedented heights. At the same time Heureaux, nicknamed Lilís, imposed a strict civil order, and this order allowed the nascent sugar industry to lay the groundwork for what would be U.S. penetration and domination of the industry after 1916.53 Born in Puerto Plata of a Haitian father and a mother from St. Thomas, Lilís in his youth embodied the very duality of the island. The future Dominican president spent a good part of his youth in a gang that looted and marauded settlements in the frontier zone.54 Many years later, shortly after the meeting intended to decide the border question, Heureaux attempted to address the entry of Haitians by ordering the creation, in 1895, of the Central Junta of Immigration, which would attempt to regulate, and capitalize on, the business of the frontier traffic.55 President Louis Félicité Lysius Salomon, noir and former finance minister of Soulouque, met with fierce opposition by the mulattos during the years of his presidency, 1879–88. Yet Salomon found an ally in Heureaux, who during the first two years of his presidency could count on a secret contribution of $50,000 in aid from his Haitian counterpart.56 Salomon and Heureaux arrived at an agreement to block the frontier to rebels seeking to overthrow the government of either side. Later, in January 1889, when threatened by the northward advance of rebel troops led by Anselme Prophète and hemmed in from the sea by François Denys Légitime, a retreating General Florville Hyppolite could rely on Heureaux to let him relocate his headquarters from the Cap to the bordertown of Ouanaminthe. It was from the east that Nord Alexis and Lieutenant Turènee Jean-Giles came to Hyppolite’s assistance, by way of Santo Domingo. Through fraud, intimidation, and bribery, Heureaux managed to obtain a third presidential victory in 1888. Dissidents followed General Casimiro N. de Moya into Haitian exile, from whence they plotted an invasion against the Dominican dictator. They requested and received assistance from President Hyppolite, who intended to repay Heureaux for sheltering and supporting Haitian revolutionaries opposed to his own regime. But when threatened with retaliations ordered by Heureaux, Hyppolite withdrew his support from the revolutionaries, extradited General de Moya, and promised to monitor the border.57 On 3 February 1890, Hyppolite met with Heureaux at Thomazeau to reinforce the understanding, previously forged by Salomon and Légitime, that neither Haiti nor the Dominican Republic would meddle in the internal affairs of the other, with the added understanding that no asylum or safe-keeping would be extended to would-be revolutionaries crossing over from either side.58
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While these accords were being drawn, the Dominican national debt of $34 million that accrued early in the 1890s induced the cunning Heureaux to sell borderlands for 1 million pesos. Some portion of that amount went to servicing the debt, but the bulk of it went directly into the president’s personal bank account. And though his government was bankrupt, Heureaux in October 1898 would secretly accept 400,000 pesos in payment for borderland territories disputed since the times of Toussaint and left undetermined by the 1874 treaty. Those territories had yet to be surveyed and marked.59 In order to settle their differences on the national frontier, Hyppolite and Heureaux held another summit meeting, this time at the site where the borderline extends into the sea in Manzanillo Bay. There on the waterfront is where, in April 1895, it was determined that both nations would seek arbitration from Pope Leon XIII to test the legitimacy of the previous agreement of 1874. The plenipotentiaries were named: Enrique Henrí, Minister of External Relations, and Dalbemar Jean Joseph, Commissioner Extraordinaire and Plenipotentiary Minister of Haiti in Santo Domingo. Although the two parties agreed to submit the demarcation to arbitration by the pope, two occurrences prevented the papal intervention from taking place: an impasse originating in the unwillingness of the Haitians to recognize the boundary set by the 1856 line of fire; and the assassination of Heureaux in Moca on 26 July 1899.60
The United States Counting on help from the Cacos, General Leconte returned from the Dominican Republic conspiring to topple President Antoine Simon in the early months of 1910. He counted on reinforcements sent by General Desiderio Arias, caudillo of the party of Juan Isidro Jimenes, or the “bolos.” Leconte had the Caco generals raise his flag on 2 February in the border town of Ouanaminthe. This gesture was misinterpreted momentarily as a declaration of war issued from the Dominican side. Once he learned the true source of the challenge, Simon mobilized his forces toward the Cap and took Fort Liberté; he then set them loose to burn and pillage the villages of his Caco foes. This action begot further reprisals and retaliations by the Cacos. In 1912 Arias led his own armed revolt against President Eladio Victoria in the Línea del Noroeste. Having to confront the combined Jimenist opposition of Horacio Vázquez’s and Arias’ forces, Victoria neglected the frontier, giving Arias the opportunity to seize the border
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customs and opening the way for increased Haitian immigration. The United States looked on these movements as signs of instability. Earlier, in 1907, the Ramón Cáceres administration had decreed the Law on the Colonization of the Frontier, which affected borderlands from Dajabón to the mouth of the Pedernales River.61 A concerned U.S. President William Taft now invoked the 1907 Convention and sent a Pacification Commission to mediate the dispute and the customs issue. Here was the beginning both of direct U.S. intervention into the border matter and of the next assault on the sovereignty of Haiti and the Dominican Republic.62 Continued unrest in Haiti and the Dominican Republic served to justify an armed intervention and occupation by U.S. Marines. Whereas the United States would occupy the Dominican Republic during 1916–24, it was to enter Haiti the year before that period began and to leave a decade after it closed, staying on the island all told from 1915 to 1934. In Haiti, the United States imposed a treaty—which U.S. envoy Beale Davis expected President Sudre Dartiguenave to sign “without modification”—requiring the U.S.-approved chief executive to accept a customs receivership similar to the one the U.S. would force Jimenes to accept in 1916. As in the Dominican Republic, so in Haiti: the United States would appoint broadly empowered customs officials, a financial adviser, and a U.S.-trained gendarmerie to discipline the Haitians. It was time for the Caribbean to assume its assigned role in the grand narrative of Manifest Destiny—the role of an American Mediterranean. Taking control of the Dominican government, the military authorities first designated Francisco Henríquez y Carvajal as provisional president. On 29 November 1916, Captain H. S. Knapp officially announced the U.S. occupation and the establishment of a Military Government, of which he was the Supreme Commander. Knapp set about to build up a new Dominican Republic according to the American standard. A network of highways was completed during his administration and connected all parts of the country. A system of elementary education did much to eliminate illiteracy. Knapp instituted a sanitation policy and created a Secretariat of State of Sanitation and Welfare, which launched programs to battle such chronic afflictions as malaria and intestinal parasites.63 The Military High Command under Knapp also created a system of domestic revenue collection, reorganized the judicial system, and governed the country by executive order. Disarming the populace, it went on to create a National Constabulary Guard, or Guardia Nacional, of Dominican recruits to assist and back up the Marines. It should be noted that it was up through the ranks of this force, intended by the United States to be a professional and stabilizing institution, that Rafael Trujillo rose to
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become, with time and treachery, the wealthiest and most powerful man in the nation.64 In short, Knapp had undertaken the mission to modernize the country, and in so doing made over the Dominican Republic as a safe haven for U.S. investments. An active resistance to the U.S. occupation arose in the borderlands. Supporters and allies of Leconte, the Zamor brothers, would lead the Cacos in the fight against the occupiers. Charles Zamor had lived as a child in Cerca-la-Source, Oreste Zamor in the frontier town of Hinche. President Joseph Davilmar Théodore could count on aid from Dominican allies and from Antoine Simon, now settled in Kingston. Arias, the Montecristi manufacturer who made his fortune in cigars, supplied arms and fighters to Théodore. The rebel leader of the central region, Oreste Zamor, took Ouanaminthe on 29 August 1914 and so betrayed Théodore, who saw himself obliged to flee across the border in woman’s guise only to be received by the duplicitous Arias, who had sworn allegiance to the Haitian government but sheltered its enemies in Dajabón.65 Ex-presidents were not the only ones to cross the border. José del Castillo (1984) has reported that salarial discrepancies between the two economies motivated west-east migration of Haitian labor during this time. The Haitian worker in 1918 could earn 20–30 cents a day in the Haitian-American Sugar Company (HASCO) refineries. The daily rate in the Dominican plants on the other hand reached 40 cents. Already, the stratagem of importing Haitian braceros not only provided plentiful cheap labor for the U.S. refinery owners in the Dominican Republic, but also did its part in reducing unemployment for the Dominicans’ underindustrialized neighbor.66 By the year 1920, there were 28,258 Haitians living in the Dominican Republic, working in sugar or construction: that is, 59 percent of all foreigners and 3 percent of the total population. These Haitians were found living principally in the sugar cultivation zones and the borderland provinces, with the highest concentration in Montecristi, with its 10,972 Haitian immigrants. In Azua there were 4,545; in Barahona, 4,492; in San Pedro de Macorís, 1,983. This same year, the U.S. government authorities issued permits to 10,000 Haitians to work for the sugar corporations. The rapidly growing Haitian population, which numbered 1,631,250 in 1918, would nearly double by 1935, at 2,600,000. By 1920 the pressure of this increase was sending Haitians both eastward, to the Dominican Republic, and westward, to Cuba.67 Before the U.S. occupation of the Dominican Republic in 1916–24, the main source of immigrant labor had been the Lesser Antilles, which sent the aforementioned cocolos. Now to relieve the labor shortage, the U.S. military forces cooperated with the multinational and national sugar producers to
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institute the policy of sending Haitian labor in greater numbers than ever before to both Dominican and Cuban refineries. The scant population of 894,665 Dominicans registered by the U.S. military government in the 1920 census also pointed to the need for the other source of labor to make profitable the expanding sugar industry.68 American and Cuban estate owners recruited thousands of Haitians, and Jamaicans, too, during the 1920s. Though for many Dominicans the influx constituted nothing less than a “pacific invasion,” the regulation of immigration and residence of sugar workers became a U.S. priority.69 This regulation involved the installation of border posts to monitor movement into the Dominican Republic. One could say that the tables had turned between the two colonies: a fiercely independent Haiti had sunk into continuing anarchy and economic disaster by the 1920s, when export earnings there would bring in only $21.6 million, primarily from coffee. Receiving massive injections of U.S. dollars during the occupation, the Dominican sugar production could take off. Some 37,000 tons of sugar had left the country in 1905; in 1916, the first year of the intervention on Dominican soil, that amount had more than tripled at 122,642 tons. In 1924, an export total of 200,629 tons formed part of an economic boom that would be called la danza de los millones. In that pre-depression boom enjoyed by sugar, the Dominican Republic would earn more than double the Haitian profits: that is, $58.7 million. The ones dancing, of course, were the company managers, owners, and investors, while those who cut the cane and others of the rural and urban proletariat continued to live their lives in abject poverty.70 Taking such drastic measures, the occupation was largely responsible for converting the republic from a cattle-raising economy into a U.S.dependent sugar-growing economy. By 1918, increased exports of sugar, along with cacao, coffee, and tobacco went to the United States, with which the republic did most of its trade.71 To foment plantation agriculture, the structure of land tenure was also drastically altered, for modernization under the North Americans required concentration of the lands under the control of large holders. A Tribunal de Tierras, among other agencies, legalized acquisitions of small properties by the American sugar enterprises; and these acquisitions, it should be noted, would facilitate the appropriation of most of the same properties by Trujillo 20–30 years later. The ratification of two laws further facilitated the acquisition of Dominican lands by North American corporations. These were the 1920 tax law on territorial property and the law resulting from the Land Registration Act. The latter, which gave new life to a long-standing law requiring legal titles to lands, in effect dispossessed those with no formal deed to the fields they occupied or which they worked. It consequently
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broke up lands traditionally held as communal, the tierras comuneras, and thus provided the aristocratic families of Santiago, San Pedro de Macorís, and the province of Santo Domingo with the means to get even richer. By 1925, the year after the end of the occupation on Dominican lands, these measures had ensured the swift appropriation of a fourth of the country’s land surface by the sugar companies. “Of the 22 great sugar mills,” reports Suzy Castor (1974), “twelve were North American with three fourths of the total investments and very extensive concessions of land.” U.S.imposed changes in the two countries yielded starkly contrasting results, however: whereas structural modifications in the Dominican Republic intensified that country’s dependence on monocultivation, the U.S. maintained the feudal organization of the large holdings in Haiti and thus continued the pre-existing pattern of unequal land ownership. More U.S. capital destined primarily for sugar flowed into the Hispanic side, too: a total of $69 million in 1929, compared with the $14 million invested in Haiti in the same year.72 The legislation favoring the massive acquisition of Dominican lands by U.S. corporations and the massive amount of inter-war foreign investment in sugar contributed to the creation of an “enclave economy.”73 The Military High Command thus refashioned the Dominican economy in a way that emphasized more than ever its sugar production. The demand was greater than ever at the present moment: the First World War had caused a shortage of beet sugar in Europe and the doubling of sugar prices worldwide. The rapid rise in sugar affected the whole island, along with Cuba and Puerto Rico. “As a result,” writes James Ferguson (1992), “Dominican sugar production increased by 79 per cent and land was increasingly concentrated in the hands of the large producers,” and the area of land destined for sugar cultivation in the Republic multiplied nearly 13 times.74 The demand also increased the need for cheap and tractable labor, which meant increased shipments of Haitian braceros to work the sugar cane harvest, or zafra.75 Exacerbating inequalities during the occupation of Haiti, individual Marines displayed their contempt for the Haitians, calling them by racist epithets, offending the Haitian elite and poor alike with their public drunkenness and urination. Marines could patronize the 147 dance halls and bars that were built during the occupation. In such establishments one could buy the services of mulatto Dominican girls, whom the soldiers, it was said, seemed to prefer to the darker-skinned Haitian prostitutes.76 The U.S. occupation thus reorganized the two economies; it also set the background for a legacy of borderland violence. In the 1920s, a healer named Oliverio Mateo, also called San Liborio or Dios Liborio, held temple
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service for thousands of followers in Las Matas de Farfán, close to the major city of San Juan de la Maguana in Azua. One can only imagine the message of hope he delivered to that downtrodden assembly. Government troops killed Liborio, who was also a known gavillero or resistance leader, in a violent standoff in 1922. Forty years later in Palma Sola, Las Matas, hundreds of followers of the revived Liborio cult were led by the brothers León and Delanoy Ventura. And it was against this new religion and new law that the Dominican military, alleging proof later on of a Haitian conspiracy behind it, undertook the massacre of Palma Sola. In a tragic replay of 1922, the followers of the religious leader Liborio met their death on 28 December 1962 at the hands of the machete-wielding soldiers ordered by President Balaguer’s officers to cut down the multitude of believers.77 During the worldwide depression that sent sugar prices plummeting, Haitian braceros were repatriated from Cuba: almost 300,000 Haitians were deported back across the Windward Passage during the 1930s. Wucker reports that whereas 28,258 Haitians had cut cane alongside Puerto Ricans and Cocolos in the Dominican Republic in 1920, the continuing demand for the very cheapest labor resulted in drawing close to double that number, or a total of 52,675 Haitians by 1935.78 And though many Wall Street investors did what they could to make the island one big sugar plantation, the push for monocultivation did not work out to Haiti’s benefit. For one thing, the U.S. administration imposed the corvée, a system of forced labor that the Haitian masses refused to accept, too reminiscent as it was of slavery on the old French colonial model. The failure of the corvée, combined with some three years of armed resistance by Charlemagne Péralte’s Caco guerrillas, undermined the U.S. efforts to rehabilitate the Haitian economy and encouraged emigration to Cuba and to the Dominican Republic.79 A U.S. State Department legation in 1926 had reported a constant flow of Haitians across the border and a total of 60,000–100,000 immigrants of all nationalities. In 1935, although the census showed a doubling of the number of Haitian nationals in Dominican lands over the last 15 years it acknowledged the presence of thousands unwilling to cooperate with the census. By the official estimate authorized by the Minister of External Relations Joaquín Balaguer, Haitians numbered at 400,000, an exaggerated figure. The “whites” of the Dominican population were clearly in the minority, their numbers adding up to 25 percent, while blacks and mulattos made up the remaining 75 percent.80 The U.S occupiers in Haiti carried out plans to create new opportunities for investment in the impoverished country. New measures included a cadastral survey of lands in order to clarify property claims and entitlements.
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U.S. impresarios soon found themselves confronted with obstacles related to tariffs, lack of natural resources, and the non-cooperation of local authorities. These problems, along with the resistance of small cultivators to give the titles to their parcels over to the plantations, meant poor harvests and ensuring reluctance on the part of U.S. corporations to exploit Haitian agriculture and labor. Such failures added to the pressure for Haitian migrants to seek work elsewhere, where U.S. efforts did succeed in re-creating a country ready to receive investments and new influxes of labor. Even after the withdrawal of North American troops from the Dominican Republic in 1924, the U.S. presence continued strong, with U.S. corporations owning 11 out of 21 sugar mills and the U.S. market receiving 98 percent of all Dominican sugar imports. Sugar had made the Dominican Republic an economic satellite of the United States.81 Although the annexation had been undone, the historical destinies of Haiti and the Dominican Republic would now be inextricably linked to, dependent on, the Colossus of the North. For whereas U.S. occupation pushed Haiti and the Dominican Republic to make some progress and become more tightly articulated with one another than ever before, these changes were serving the ends of U.S. hegemony. Indeed, the U.S. occupation in each country provided yet another factor unifying the two: through a common experience of imperialist penetration into the heart of each country’s political and economic system, the Dominican Republic was made dependent, more than ever before in its history, on the labor power provided by Haitian migrant workers. Border disputes nonetheless continued against the background of the occupation. The international treaty of 21 January 1929, signed by Horacio Vásquez and Louis Borno, aimed at redrawing the border to the satisfaction of all parties involved. The placement of new “pyramid” markers along the division in effect extended Haiti’s territory by thousands of acres.82 Yet the pyramids did not stop the eastward migrations nor prevent the build-up of tensions in the borderlands. The U.S. occupation imposed foreign control in the form of martial law and changes in the infrastructures of both countries. In both countries, the United States improved communications, reformed the agrarian structure, performed surveys, and carried out censuses. Although the occupation rankled the nationalistic sensibilities of the Haitians, the Marines in that country built schools, health clinics, and roadways that included the first highway connecting the capital with Cap Haïtien. The occupation modernized Dominican society, too, by improvements to its civil institutions and infrastructure. Surveys were conducted, censuses carried out,
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telephone lines raised. Education received a boost and public finances were put in order. Mapped, measured, and technologized by the same project that set them up for an unprecedented exploitation of their resources and for a future of authoritarian rule, the Haitian and Dominican Republics during the U.S. occupation were pushed and pulled into modernity, but with the effect of sinking them ever more deeply into dependence on the masters of modernization.83
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Chapter 6
Transnational Dictatorships, 1930–85
You can do what you like with Haitians. Trujillo murdered twenty thousand of us in time of peace on the River Massacre, peasants who had come to his country for cane-cutting—men, women and children—but do you imagine there was one protest from Washington? He lived nearly twenty years afterwards fat on American aid. —Graham Greene, The Comedians1
he Massacre River sometimes courses, sometimes streams along the valleys of the Cordillera Central, heads northward for about 45 miles, reaches past Fort Liberté, flows out into Manzanillo Bay and the waters of the Atlantic. On its way there, it passes between Ouanaminthe, on the western side, and Dajabón, to the east. The name of the Rivière Massacre, so christened in 1728, commemorates the killing of a company of boucaniers: men whose cattle-rounding and pillaging had taken them to this place claimed by the Spanish and situated in the northwest corner of what would become the Dominican Republic.2 Another massacre took place there in the year 1937: “a massacre and sham of such stupendous dimensions,” writes Dominican sociologist José del Castillo (1994), “that it has still not been assimilated into the national psyche.”3 An estimated 12,000–35,000 were struck down in those borderlands. “Haitians” by descent, language, or culture, many of the victims had been born in the Dominican Republic. Members of the army and the police carried out the slaughter simultaneously, at different sites near the border. They used machetes, and not bullets, reinforcing the story that
T
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the killings constituted a spontaneous reaction on the part of the Dominican peasantry to the Haitian presence in their midst.4 Yet evidence indicates that the action was a concerted one, ordered from above, and not a spontaneous outbreak of violence at the grassroots level as claimed by official sources.5 The historical fact of the borderlands pogrom testifies to the power over the life and death of Haitians enjoyed by a Dominican state controlled by a Dominican dictator, one who gave the command to destroy every Haitian man, woman, and child guilty of committing the crime of attempting to eke out a living in the Dominican borderlands. Crystallizing the significance of Trujillo’s violent legacy, the “Haitian vespers” continues to haunt relations between the two countries and peoples to the present day. The massacre has left an image in the collective memory of suffering on a massive scale that must be recalled and understood before it can be redeemed. The Dominican military, only following orders, must shoulder the brunt of the blame for the horrific event, a crime against humanity. At the same time, the event must be interpreted in its relation to the large-scale forces that composed the insular counterpoint, of which the event was, as it were, a conspicuous variation on a basic theme. Looming large on the merged horizons of Haitian and Dominican historical interpretations, the event must be reckoned with so that the past can be overcome, so that a different kind of Haitian– Dominican relationship can be envisioned. Across the lines and under the eyes of dependent dictatorships, movements of migration and flows of communication have linked together the two peoples of Hispaniola. Emigration has created not only the diaspora, but “zones of conflict” where expatriates settled on territories claimed by other groups living in the receiver country. As a space of commutations but also of diffentiations and ruptures, the borderlands have been invested with power—economic, military, political, and representational—to define how the contour and profile of two nations will take shape. Referring to the Haitian–Dominican border, Alcántara Almánzar (1979) observes, “The division has been neither sought out nor desired by the people who inhabit the island. It has been an imposed separation. The border raises itself like a wall that impedes peaceful relations.”6 The systemic view elaborated in the preceding chapters has challenged the assumption, common among observers of Hispaniola, that the interests of Haiti and of the Dominican Republic have always been opposed to one another. Against this Manichaean prejudice, and from a holistic perspective that grasps the complexity of the insular duality, ethnohistorical analysis may view the whole island as a complex chaotic totality of turbulent, dynamic patterns, and as a system in which characteristics of one side
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are reflected in the other. In this regard, it is important to keep in mind that constitutional law has never dominated politics in either of the two republics, but rather the strong-man rule called caudillismo: the personalist, authoritarian form of government exemplified in the overlapping regimes of Rafael Leónidas Trujillo Molina (1930–61) and François Duvalier (1957–71) and son Jean-Claude (1971–86).7 Political and economic linkages between the two countries strengthened, rather than undermined, the authoritarian government of each one. During the 31-year rule of Trujillo, Haitian migrant labor became a necessary, if problematic, resource for a centralized economy organized toward rapid infrastructural development and solvency. During the 30-year rule of the Duvaliers, beginning with François’ accession to the presidency on 22 October 1957, emigration became a matter of sheer survival for many Haitians seeking freedom from hunger and terror.8 Throughout the 56-year period we are examining here, the authoritarian management of the border served two complementary ends: to maintain interdependent economies through the continued exploitation of Haitian labor; and to maintain the power of dependent dictatorships through control of the border and shows of force in round-ups and deportations. The geopolitical dimensions of dependent dictatorship were elucidated in Chapter 1 by Andrés Corten’s thesis on the twin republics as the exemplars of el estado débil. The path by which the Dominicans achieved independence from their insular neighbor, and not from the metropolis, led paradoxically to a renewed dependency on the metropolis and laid the foundations of this “weak state.” In Corten’s reading, the fragile openness of both the Dominican and Haitian states to external influence, the continual subjection to imperialist processes, entails that under normal conditions, “social demands are not addressed to the State,” but instead to external agencies (foreign corporations, hotel chains, tourists, the IMF) or else to largely ineffectual neighborhood associations and workers’ syndicates. Owing to dependency and to the misplaced trust in local institutions, the weak state, far from providing the means for representing the will of the people, does a fine job of enriching the oligarchy, always in collusion with external powers and foreign capital. This type of state, manipulated by officials who regard their office as a means of private enrichment, is the kind that will succumb sooner or later to a form of re-colonization that has acquired the name of transnationalization. And what is transnational in the age of the “Caribbean Basin,” unlike that which occurred amidst the territorializations of the previous stages of imperialism, is the ease with which global transactions take place without impediment of national boundaries. In this admixture of authoritarian rule and economic
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dependency that is the weak state, the military has played an excessively political role in maintaining order, and the political leader will assume the role of intermediary between the state and external powers.9 In the context of what we have been calling a systemic or “contrapuntal” framework, the concept of dependent sovereignty took on new meaning, as the weak states of Hispaniola came to terms with their disempowerment to favor the advancement of international, metropolitan interests. Effecting the denationalization of Dominican territory and industry beginning in the late 1870s, financing for sugar production came from diverse foreign sources: apart from some Dominican elites, it was the countries of Cuba, the United States, Puerto Rico, England, France, Germany, Italy, and Spain that invested in the growing industry.10 The denationalization of the industry preceded a deliberate program, during the U.S. occupation, to dispossess the peasants of the land, and especially of untitled communal lands. Reminiscent of Boyer’s privatizing and reallocation of the tierras comuneras, the expropriation of lands under the United States gave good reason for major sugar producers from the United States and Europe, but mainly from the former, to establish plantations and refineries, for both of which it was necessary to effect a denationalization of labor: which meant in essence, to bring in workers, and in cheap and reliable supply. The recruiting of laborers from Haiti was carried out covertly at least from 1916 to 1920, legally after that period and past the end of the occupation by the United States, and both legally and extralegally afterwards. The ingress of foreign capital into the island, the egress of migrants from Haiti toward the east and of Dominican migrants and capital to the north: these movements further undermined the fiction, strong as an ideological image, of the separate, autonomous state cast in the singularity of its national character and bounded by its borders.11 The theory of the weak state finds its spatial amplification in Joe Painter’s “political geography” of decolonized territories. In the former colonies, forces of government and civil society take part in the creation of political and cultural strategies, both of domination and of resistance, visà-vis their bordering neighbors and their own constituencies. To fill the power vacuum left by the colonizers’ departure, state apparatuses tend to fashion governments in the image of the institutions once established by colonial imposition. Despite their aspiration to develop into modern states on the Euro-American model, postcolonial governments must confront the fact of scarcity—a fact produced by the international division of labor and the weakness of a domestic economy ill-suited to compete in the world system. The scarcity experienced by the third-world nation-state creates want, and want discontent, and discontent a crisis of legitimacy
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that challenges the right of authoritarian government. In response to legitimation crises, authoritarian governments almost inevitably resort to coercive means of controlling the populace, clamping down on protest and arresting the opposition, inspiring fear and compliance, but also undermining their own legitimacy in the eyes of the masses. In such a pass, the dictator seizes upon the opportunity to represent the national borders as power’s reason for being. The border appears as a simple and selfevident fact of the nation’s collective life: illegal immigration, the presence of “foreigners,” the usurpation of national territories—construed as threats to the national sovereignty, these intrusions provoke the call for decisive action on the part of the state that would defend the homeland security. The absence of viable democratic institutions in the postcolonial society, coupled with bureaucratic inefficiency, corruption, the failure to provide for the basic necessities, and a climate of instability: these can be overlooked when the political strong man resorts to playing the game of defending and exploiting the borders, at least until he is replaced by the next political strong man.12 But some are stronger than others. In Hispaniola, the staying power of two regimes can be explained by the skill with which they seized upon the opportunities provided by political geography to complement and depend on one another. Frequently during this 56-year period of double dictatorships, complementarity between Haiti and the Dominican Republic meant collusion, and interdependence, a hand-in-glove complicity.
Dictatorships and the Nation-State System The failed anti-American insurgency led by the Cacos in Haiti resulted not only in the deaths of thousands, but in the exodus, by 1934, of 300,000 Haitians, about a sixth of the 2 million total population, to Cuba and the Dominican Republic. In 1935, some 52,657 Haitians were living in the latter country, according to the official census, although there were likely many more.13 An orderly arrangement on the border dispute had been reached with the treaty of 1929, signed by Presidents Sténio Joseph Vincent and Horacio Vásquez; it was revised on 27 February 1935 and 14 April 1936. With the end of the great depression and the boom that it brought to such sugar-producing islands as Fulgencio Batista’s Cuba, the Haitians were expatriated from these islands, many of them landing on the Dominican side of Hispaniola.14 There, as in other lands, they sold their labor cheap to the U.S.-owned enterprises, and in so doing incurred the resentment of nationals who believed their wage levels had been hit
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hard by the influx of these economic refugees. Batista ordered the deportation of the cane cutters in 1937, thus increasing the land and population pressure on their home country. High Haitian functionaries benefitted from the sale of Haitian migrant labor, permitted by Dominican Law No. 95, which authorized the ingenios, sugar mills, to transport thousands of Haitians in military trucks by a route running past the Morne des Commissaires and across the border. “The question of the frontier is the transcendental problem concerning a border that both divides and unites the two sovereign peoples”—these were Trujillo’s words during the visit of President Vincent, pronounced so as “to reaffirm the amity” between Haiti and the Dominican Republic. That speech, given on 27 February 1936, Independence Day, before the National Congress, gave no warning of hostilities to come. Further on in the speech, Trujillo referred to the problems resulting from the border treaty of 1929, which represented, in his words, “a powerful obstacle cast up from the past to keep us from boldly stepping towards the future.” He said those problems had been resolved, however, through talks held in Ouanaminthe and Dajabón in October 1933 and continued in Port-au-Prince in November 1934. A joint commission on the border delimitation had begun the work of demarcation as agreed in the talks. With the new accord, signed by the two heads of state on 14 April in the National Palace, Ciudad Trujillo, “the old and vexing frontier dispute,” as the Dominican president announced, “has passed to the level of a memory in the history of the Island.” Cooperation and mutual understanding were the key ideas.15 Rafael Leónidas Trujillo y Molina had begun his career as a sugarcane guard. He later enlisted in the Guardia Nacional. Trained by the U.S. military, Trujillo rose up through the ranks and manipulated events so that he could inherit the order they had constructed and imposed, once the national guard had been transformed into a national army. Possessed of the ambition, cunning, and arms with which he would eventually come to dominate the country, Trujillo while still a general enriched himself through building up various monopolistic enterprises: sugar, salt, laundry services for the soldiers, meats, rice, milk, and export fruits. Moya Pons (1995) documents the way in which the government became for Trujillo a means of personal aggrandizement, and how the country, through a system of taxes and contributions, became a wealth-creating machine for the dictator and his family.16 Prostitution and paint, loan-sharking and leather goods came under his control. A dictator from and beholden to the middle class, Trujillo exercised power over it and nearly every aspect of the Dominican economy, positioning himself and his family in such a way as to profit enormously from all the nation’s industries. So much did the Trujillos
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dominate the economy that Dominicans, it was said, “couldn’t eat, sleep, wear shoes, or put on any article of clothing without Trujillo or a member of his family benefitting in some way or another.”17 Rather than to usher in a new era in Haitian–Dominican relations, the accords signed by Trujillo and Vincent dissembled the Dominican magistrate’s anti-Haitian design. Prior to Trujillo’s taking control of the republic and his exploitation of its lands and people as if they were his own encomienda, the frontier regions in the western part of the Dominican Republic had long suffered the consequences of failed speculations and bureaucratic indifference, such that successive Dominican governments, in the chauvinist opinion of Dominican historian José Gabriel García, “have maintained them in the greatest neglect to the point of letting them lose the purity of their language and the morality of custom.”18 Trujillo aimed to change all that. “Trujillo believed,” write Heinl and Heinl (1996), “that the Dominican Republic could never be secure unless it controlled all Hispaniola.”19 Not only did Trujillo seek ways to secure his country against any economic or social threat posed by the Haitians, he displayed a certain strange resemblance to a Toussaint or a Boyer in his dream to unify the island, albeit under Dominican hegemony, striving in the process to align the Haitian economy so as to serve his own interests. With these ends possibly in mind, and despite an intense anti-Haitian sentiment on his part, Trujillo maintained close involvement with Haitian government affairs that often went to the extremes of collusion. In effect, Trujillo reinforced the imbalanced structure of labor on national and insular levels. Haitian labor was still needed in Dominican agriculture, yet this requirement contradicted the long-standing animosity of Dominicans against Haitians. Trujillo harnessed this contradiction to his advantage: in the anti-Haitian sentiment shared by many Dominicans, Trujillo not only found the means of justifying a heavy-handed control of the Haitian migrant labor; he also hit upon the way to unify and control the Dominican populace, precisely through the control of culture. Trujillo in effect intensified and “naturalized” the Dominican distrust of Haiti and the Haitians, elevating it to the status of an ideology that has been called el antihaitianismo.20 The continuing presence of Haitians in Dominican lands thus provided a golden opportunity for Trujillo. Astutely engineered and promulgated, a nationalist ideology could be used to mask, nourish, and otherwise sustain Trujillo’s power, and that nationalist ideology stood upon five pillars of interrelated virtues. These pillars were Hispanity, Anti-Haitianism, Catholicism, Civicism, and Anti-Communism. Founded on what was in essence a defeatist vision of Dominican history, this ideology saw in Trujillo both a messiah to redeem the downtrodden and a paladin to lead
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the crusade into a new era. Thousands of political prisoners, Haitian and Dominican victims of torture and unjust incarceration, saw otherwise during the 31 years of Trujillo’s dictatorship.21 In a letter sent to Trujillo on 22 September 1937, Director General of Statistics Vicente Tolentino informed his president of the urgent need in the agricultural sector for a great many foreign workers, but specified the preference for immigrants belonging to “the white race.”22 In Barahona, Pedernales, and other towns of the western regions, the Haitians were blamed for taking away jobs and keeping down wages. Furthermore, the menace to the national integrity they represented was manifest for many in the use of the Haitian gourde as a common currency in place of the legitimate Dominican peso.23 It was in a message first issued on 27 February (Independence Day), 1938, later published in his book Pensamientos de un Estadista, Tomo III (Thoughts of a statesman, V.III), that Trujillo put together in retrospective fashion the justifications for the bloody border incident without actually claiming responsibility for it. He made reference to the report drawn by the judicial authorities of Montecristi registering a high crime rate in the region from 1910 to 1937, citing theft as the most frequent offense. Of 2,455 cases, 634 were robberies, many of cattle. The Procurer General of the Santo Domingo Court of Appeals, Trujillo’s report goes on to say, registered a total of 11,795 crimes committed by Haitians, infractions “among which predominated the violation of the sanitation law, violation of the immigration law, gambling, violations of property, practice of witchcraft, and robbery.”24 Yet everything appeared well between Dominicans and Haitians. In May 1936 Trujillo had come to Port-au-Prince, for his third time since 1934, to attend Vincent’s second inauguration. His arrival was the occasion not only for distributing free food and copies of Trujillo’s photograph to the multitude, but for the official renaming of le Grand Rue as “Avenue Trujillo.” The Haitian government was returning a favor: to crown previous accords signed by the two presidents, on 14 April 1936, the new Dominican highway running from Montecristi and Dajabón was inaugurated three days later as the “Ruta Nacional Presidente Vincent.”25 Despite the note of amity struck between Trujillo and Vincent, however, there was evidence that Trujillo had plotted with General Demosthènes Calixte for a concerted ouster of the Haitian president. A photograph appearing in a New York newspaper showed a check for $150,000, allegedly made out to Calixte by Trujillo in payment for the Haitian general’s part in the attempted coup. It is conjectured that this revelation precipitated Trujillo’s pronouncement in Dajabón: “Kill every Haitian found on Dominican soil!”26
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The soldiers received their orders and set out in search of Haitians. Because the Haitians lacked birth certificates and identification papers, although they belonged to the group of non-vwayajè settlers, and although the Dominican farmers needed their labor, the Haitians of the borderlands found no mercy at the hands of the Dominican army. Some rumors had caught the Haitians by surprise, sounding too hallucinatory to be believed: according to one, the Haitians were “being killed in the night because they could not manage to trill their ‘r’ and utter a throaty ‘j’ to ask for parsley, to say perejil.” Numerous witnesses testified to the veracity of this report on the test, administered by Dominican soldiers to determine the identity of their victims by determining whether or not they could pronounce the Spanish word for parsley.27 Another rumor told of how the soldiers were tricking their victims with the lie that they would transport them back to Haiti, but Dominican soldiers, in fact, were apprehending and killing Haitians and Haitian– Dominicans in the borderlands. The ruse is depicted in The Farming of Bones (1998), a historical novel by Haitian American writer Edwige Danticat. In one scene that tragically typifies what was happening throughout the frontier, soldiers order Haitian captives to kneel down, lower their machetes, and await the next move. The next move, inevitably, is to be shot or stabbed. Because knifing or bayonetting was the preferred mode of dispatching the victims—it saved bullets and also made the deaths seem the work of enraged Dominican farmers and ranchers—the Haitians refer to the massacre with the Krèyol kout kouto, the “stabbing, like a single knife wound.” The Spanish term for the same event was el corte: the cutting, as in the harvesting of cane.28 And during the first week of October, feme os, farming of bones, meant the mowing down left and right of borderland Haitians, a harvest of death by the thousands. Not all the borderland Dominicans participated in the eradication. There were those who, at great risk to their own lives, attempted to save the lives of Haitians. Dominicans hid their Haitian friends and servants in their houses and tried to direct searchers elsewhere. Pedro Mir writes of the Dominicans whose sympathy with the targeted Haitians came to the fore during the killings. Such feeling was evidenced in the decision of Dominican families to take Haitian children secretly into their homes and later adopt and raise them as their own.29 These children escaped the wrath of the vindictive state powers. Also spared were the Haitians employed by the sugar companies, which continued to depend on the migrant labor in the cane harvests and could entreat Trujillo to make that exception.30 Yet despite the continuing need of Haitian labor, the Dominican government
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required afterwards that 70 percent of employees in national businesses be Dominican.31 Once a significant portion of the unwelcome labor force had been eliminated, press releases produced by Trujillo’s writers justified the massacre after the fact, characterizing the Haitians as inferiors and dangerous usurpers. The Dominican intimidation was registered perhaps in the Gondra Pact of 31 January 1938. Signed by the two countries, the pact included the provision of Article XI to limit arms, but allowed a “higher coefficient” of weapons to the Dominican population than to the larger Haitian population.32 Later that year, Trujillo dictated a law permitting the sugar companies to contract Haitian and West Indian workers to cut cane during the zafra, but with the understanding that this black labor was to return home as soon as the season was finished.33 Haitian President Vincent acceded to this demand, apparently satisfied with the new understanding that had been reached between the two countries.
Trujillo and Vincent Indeed, once news of the massacre broke, Vincent made little noise on the matter, beholden as he was to Trujillo for monies the latter had transferred to him prior to the event. Confronted with the facts, however, Vincent protested mildly and requested reparations. Trujillo for his part expressed his regrets but cast the blame on the Dominican residents of the borderland regions. The two governments agreed to an out-of-court settlement: $750,000 was promised in reparations, of which some $30 was to be tendered to each victim’s family. From the total sum, $25,000 would be skimmed and carried away by Anselmo Paulino-Alvarez to Port-auPrince, where it would be distributed among high functionaries of the bureaucracy.34 So thick were Vincent’s and Trujillo’s organizations on the border matter that the Ministre Plénipotentiare d’Haiti, Son Excellence Evremont Carrié, could send a letter to his president stating that the events of October 1937, however “douloureux et déplorables” they had been, would provide no cause for armed confrontation between the two nations. After the event, however, Vincent would declare by international communiqués, and for whatever specific reason it is not clear, that Trujillo’s government had nothing to do with the slaughter of Haitian immigrants living in the border regions. It was also announced shortly thereafter that Haiti would receive a reduced indemnity of $525,000, as approved by a unanimous vote of the Haitian congress. Trujillo even bestowed on Vincent the Grand
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Cross of the Juan Pablo Duarte Order of Merit “as a symbol of eternal friendship between our two peoples.”35 The “settlement” ultimately settled a pittance of 2 cents upon each Haitian body cut down in the grim harvest. The reparations were a moot point anyway: few Haitian families received any compensation at all for their sorrows. Not all the Haitians experienced bereavement to an equal degree, however: the mulattos of the western and southern regions could feel for the victims—peasant noirs struck down in the Dominican northwest—but not sorry enough to protest very loudly.36 The elite showed little interest in the killings. The massacre was followed up by more borderlands attacks. This time, they occurred on the Haitian side. On 4 December 1937, an armed band of about a hundred Haitians and Dominicans, led by the Caco Excellent Desrosiers, besieged and captured Thomonde, to the south of Ouanaminthe and just 20 miles from the border. On 14 December, the same band, its numbers doubled, seized upon Hinche. Moya Pons (1995) reports that the band was armed and encouraged by Trujillo; the specific motive behind the attacks has remained a mystery. Constituting nonetheless a show of force before the imminent elections, they may have formed part of a plot to stage provocations to justify future Dominican aggressions against Haiti. At any rate, the Dominican government could all the more confidently proceed with its “Dominicanization of the Border.” To settle and reclaim the frontier, the government sponsored public works and constructions. Land was granted for colonies and townships, roads were laid out, irrigation canals were dug, towns were populated. Military posts were installed up and down the line to guard the new Dominican towns.37 The borderlands massacre thus forced a readjustment in the relations both between Trujillo and the Dominican citizenry and between Trujillo and Haiti. Because it constituted a terrifying display of state-sanctioned violence inflicted with impunity, it assured everyone, Haitian and Dominican alike, that the Dominican state could do whatever it liked, even a “crime against humanity,” in the name of national security, and it had demonstrated to the Haitian Garde the muscle of Trujillo’s powerful Ejército Nacional. For Trujillo and the Dominican people, moreover, the massacre achieved a sort of symbolic success or vindication: no one would applaud such atrocities, no one could approve them unreservedly, but the genocide meant secure borders, and secure borders meant a secure country, and what many condemn in public they commend in private anyway. To his self-proclaimed credit, Trujillo brought stability and solvency to his own country (he paid off the foreign debt by June 1947) while cleansing its borderlands and defending its borders. Yet the bayonets and machetes had passed over the Haitians working for the sugar mills, concentrating
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instead on the northern borderlands, where farming and livestock, not sugar cultivation, predominated. During this show of dictatorial strength, the interests of foreign enterprise and especially the sugar enclave were defended as well.38 Not all Haitians reacted to the crime in silence. The Haitian novelist Jacques Roumain, famed for his novel Les gouverneurs de la rosée (1944), expressed his outrage in an article entitled “La Tragédie haïtienne.” Appearing on 18 November 1937 in the Parisian journal Regards, Romain’s article denounced the oppression of both Haitians and Dominicans by dictatorship and economic injustice. The hatred of one people for another, Roumain went on to argue, was the result of an ideological manipulation that had fixed upon racial traits as the explanation for violence. The landscapes surrounding Ouanaminthe and Dajabón on either side are nearly identical, as borne out in Roumain’s description, and yet inequality and racism have motivated the blood bath. Roumain (1937) interprets the event from a perspective broader than nationalist rationalizations: it is doubtful . . . that the difference of race suffices to explain the explosion of hate that made the region of Dajabón-Montecristi the theater of a bloody orgy. I prefer to believe that that people exasperated by the distress to which the dictatorship of Trujillo has reduced it has acted on the same obscure motives that pushed, in the south of the United States, a pack of “poor whites” to lynch a black, and in Hitler’s Germany a ruined petite bourgeoisie to mistreat a Jew. The dominant classes and the dictatorship agree to support, to provoke those sentiments that divert from them, in the manner of a lightning rod, the fury of the wretched.39
Roumain goes on in the article to criticize his own president’s complicity in the matter: the obsequious Vincent betrayed the Haitian peasantry in letting the killings pass with barely a complaint. Those who attempted to escape economic oppression, in the meantime, had to contend with privileged concessionaires who controlled the traffic in labor while personally benefitting officials of the two governments. The Haitian peasants who did succeed in crossing had no choice but to work 12-hour days for the American companies, or they migrated to the cities in a normally futile search for employment, only to end up eking out a meager existence in the shantytowns. One’s alternative was to wander about scavenging and stealing until arrested for vagrancy and consigned to labor in the public works projects, amounting to yet another form of servitude to the two governments in collusion.40 But what Trujillo gave with one hand he could take away with the other: he seemed to be working everywhere, sometimes at cross-purposes
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with himself, toward inscrutable ends. The influx of Haitians into the Dominican Republic had diminished; now Trujillo initiated lengthy negotiations with Haitian authorities to mend relations between the two countries. In a new Dominican–Haitian accord on labor, signed on 16 February 1938 in Washington, D.C., Article IV recognized that the Haitian government would receive and use monies paid in benefit of repatriated survivors of the massacre, whereas Article VII guaranteed the rights of the repatriated survivors to the immovable Dominican properties in their possession. The accord apparently succeeded in raising the number of Haitians in the Republic. In 1938, there were 60,000, including families.41 At the same time, Trujillo continued to exert controls on immigration, as with the Immigration Law of 1939, which required a 500-peso fee on entry of each non-Caucasian. Dominicanization of the frontier proceeded apace. Constructions and military installations were reclaiming lands lost to Haiti since the times of Toussaint and Dessalines.42 Later on, Trujillo would arrange for the ratification of laws, on 24 July and 13 August 1943, that replaced the Haitian names of communes and sections with Hispanic names. And so the section known as Macabón in Montecristi became Santa María; the section Colombié was rechristened Bartolomé; Vegano Yimbi, Peñalva; Fransuá, Mencía. In the same year, the Dominican registries counted 30,000 Haitian cane cutters, and by the period of 1952–60 the Dominican ingenios, sugar mills, were enlisting 6,656 Haitian laborers per year.43 Trujillo continued to play his double games with Vincent’s successor. A secret connection between Trujillo and President Élie Lescot consisted of regular payments sent from the former to the latter. Complicity did not prevent Trujillo, however, from circulating a letter on 1 November 1943 to Haitian recipients, letting them know in detail what little Lescot had done in exchange for the Dominican loans and support on which he had depended since at least 1937. When students demonstrated in protest against the closing of a radical newspaper in 1946, they initiated a general strike that prevented Lescot from taking on another six-year run. The uprising set the scene set for the coup d’etat led by Colonel Paul-Eugène Magloire. Magloire would be ousted and sent packing, soon to be checking into Santo Domingo’s Hotel Concorde and the luxurious quarters that have been named the Haitian Presidential Suite owing to the number of deposed Haitian heads of state who have lodged there.44 In the meantime, a Dr. François Duvalier practiced what he had preached, as negritude’s head ideologue, by supporting Dumarsais Estimé, noir representative of the middle class. Estimé’s 1946 coup d’etat signified the end of a 30-year period of mulatto rule. Duvalier would serve as one of his cabinet ministers.
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The external threat of Trujillo’s large army served to justify Estimé’s continuous state of siege during 1949, his last year in office.45 Nearly 12 years after the massacre, renewed tensions pressured the two governments to seek outside mediation. The charge that a Haitian army officer was plotting insurrections in the Dominican Republic in 1949 led Haiti to invoke, before the Organization of American States (OAS), the 1947 Inter-American Treaty of Reciprocal Assistance (the Rio Treaty). An investigation into similar accusations made several months later found evidence of an anti-Haitian plot involving the Dominican Republic, Guatemala, and Cuba.46 Tensions in the borderlands would motivate in part a $600,000 renovation of Belledère, a town on the frontier, at the behest of Estimé. Spruced up in 1949 as a showcase of progress made possible by the recently instituted income tax, Belledère could look across the division at Elías Piña as one would a poor relation. Not for long, however: Trujillo ordered the closing of the highway to Belledère and the redirection of transborder traffic “via Jimaní and Malpasse on the Cul-de-Sac, leaving Belledère to crumble into a ghost town, or, in the metaphor of a critic, to melt away like ice cream in the sun.”47 The clandestine traffic in Haitians continued throughout the period of 1942–52. In the last of these years, on 5 January, the Dominican government signed an “Accord on Trade in Haiti and the Entrance to the Dominican Republic of Haitian Workers.” This accord was intended to regulate the influx and repatriation of the undocumented. A later accord, of 21 December 1959, provided for the signing of individual work contracts by each bracero.48 Managing immigration by such maneuvers could only strengthen Trujillo’s single-handed dominance over the Dominican economy, giving new meaning to the term “corporate state.” Although most of his land holdings were in ranches and forests, the dictator controlled directly or indirectly much of the cultivation and distribution of the country’s agricultural fruits. Sugar in particular enjoyed a 10-year tax holiday granted by Trujillo and produced $150 million in assets for Trujillo and family. The value of Trujillo’s possessions in 1961 amounted to $500 million, which included not only 1.5 million acres of improved property augmented by undeveloped lands, but also factories giving work to 60,000 employees. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who was glad enough that Trujillo was at least “our S.O.B.,” had stood by giving his tacit approval, thankful that the Dominican Republic could pay its foreign debt by 1947 and expressing as much by ending the U.S. receivership over its customs.49 Trujillo did not demur from direct intervention into Haiti’s domestic politics. Far from it. In the last months of 1949, Trujillo sent armed agents
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to Haiti on a covert operation to eliminate Colonel Magloire and Major Prosper. Estimé, who had not fallen to previous plots to poison him, was possibly targeted as well. The assassins, after setting Port-au-Prince afire, would, according to the plan, connect with a Dominican column. That column, led by the mulatto Astre Roland, colonel of the Garde, awaited word to set out across the Cul-de-Sac from Jimaní. The Dominican ambassador thwarted the conspiracy by informing Haiti’s foreign minister. The operation would become known thereafter as the “Dupuy-Roland plot.” Trujillo was nonetheless rounding off his second decade in power when he and Magloire, elected three months earlier, met between Elías Piña and Belladère in February 1951 to sign an agreement in the form of a joint communiqué to protect one another against exile insurgencies and communist attack. Magloire’s policy was evidently aimed at building up harmonious relations, with both the United States and the Dominican Republic, and between the races and social classes.50 It was during Magloire’s administration that Haitian historiography played its part in countering Dominican propaganda on the role and position of Haiti. Jean Price-Mars’ history of Haitian–Dominican relations (1953), with its distinctly noiriste outlook on Haitian history, revealed an attempt to discredit the antihaitianismo ideology of Trujillo’s intellectual cadre. Price-Mars’ history was met with onslaughts of pro-Dominican polemic and invectives by such authors as Manuel Peña Batlle, Angel S. del Rosario Pérez, Sócrates Nolasco, Joaquín Balaguer, Américo Lugo, and Emilio Rodríguez Demorizi.51 The outcry over 1937 had subsided, and justified in the public mind as he was by a continous outpouring of anti-Haitian propaganda, Trujillo took further steps to appropriate the Dominican sugar industry. In Haiti he sought the cheap labor he needed, meeting with Magloire in 1952 to sign a convenio that guaranteed the delivery of 16,500 Haitians per year. In 1957, Presidents François Duvalier and Trujillo struck up an agreement by which the sugar multinationals could simply contract, direct from the Haitian government, enough Haitian workers to complete the sugar harvest. As a result of this dealing in labor, the Dominican concerns could pay for the delivery of the 16,500 braceros. Some 20 years since the signing of the accord, the Haiti government would be receiving up to $3 million per year in exchange for permitting shipments of Haitians for work in the Dominican plantations.52 Trujillo was succeeding in transforming the Dominican economy into profit-making enterprise for his personal gain.53 In appropriating the main part of the sugar industry, Trujillo took advantage of the post-Second World War boom. As Selden Rodman reports, sugar so dominated the Dominican Republic under Trujillo that it constituted
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half of the country’s export volume and its revenues about a fourth of all salaries and wages. So dependent was the national economy on this single commodity that some three-fourths of the Dominican population was employed in producing it, and yet it was one man and his family who dominated the business, with control over a 12-mill complex of sugar mills centered around the plant of Río Haina. With serious competition coming only from the American-owned South Porto Rico Sugar Company at La Romana, Trujillo could build up a mighty sugar empire, and mainly on the backs of imported Haitian laborers.54 Trujillo’s intellectuals in the meantime continued the deprecation of Haiti and the Haitians on the cultural front. Anti-noirist arguments invoked the principles of racial purity and Hispanic superiority. The pureblooded Dominican, wrote Joaquín Balaguer, displays “finer features” than those of the Haitian. Balaguer made this remark in his 1947 book, La Isla Al Revés (The Island in Reverse, or Upside-Down). Among its illustrations, the book presents a series of full-color photos taken of light-skinned rural families in the Cordillera Central, with the intent of “proving” the Hispanity of the true Dominican racial type. Balaguer attempts in another part of the book to turn the arguments of the pro-negritude writers Denis and Duvalier to the advantage of Dominican ethnocentrism: he agrees with their thesis that the racial majority of a nation should draw leadership from its own race. The principle applies as well to the Dominican interests, declares Balaguer: “In order to protect the country . . . from losing its characteristics of a purely Hispanic people, what was necessary was to put in practice a policy of Dominicanization of the borderlands and at the same time awaken the people’s feeling for the grandeurs of their tradition [el sentimiento de sus grandezas tradicionales].”55 In the domain of legal discourse, jurist and university professor Carlos Augusto Sánchez i Sánchez, in his book El caso domínico-haitiano (1958), argued against accommodation of Haitian immigrants, an act that would invite “absorbing saturation” of the enemy from whom it would be preferable to maintain a healthy distance. To solve the problem of the unwanted Haitian presence, Sánchez i Sánchez proposed a program of relocation and possibly the founding of a second Liberia for the immigrants. In Sánchez i Sánchez’s view, such a program of permanent resettlement, if endorsed by the United Nations, would secure the national territory and prevent war between the two nations.56 At the cost of deprecating the Dominican people’s own African and mulatto heritage, Sánchez i Sánchez and other writers of Trujillo’s coterie defined the ethnic boundaries of the nation in a way that reinforced, through its appeal to deep-seated prejudices, the diplomatic and military defense of the frontier.
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During the three years prior to his 1961 assassination, perceiving new threats to his now 28-year hold on power, Trujillo sought ways to deter attacks from the west. He signed a transborder agreement with Duvalier in Malpasse on 22 December 1958, by which the two commanders-in-chief promised to come to one another’s defense in the event of external aggressions. During the period of tensions with Cuba, when four attempts had been made to invade the Dominican Republic, “Dominican warships and aircraft were in and out of Haitian waters and air space.”57 Trujillo nonetheless directed a number of hostile acts against the neighboring country. He provided refuge and support to Haitian dissidents in exile. He sent security chief Johnny Abbés García to the Haitian capital on a mission to destabilize the Port-au-Prince government. He sponsored broadcasts of anti-Duvalier propaganda into the neighboring country, creating a sort of Dominican version of Radio Martí for the times. François Duvalier, for his part, simply tolerated these overt and covert operations and continued to supply the Dominican canefields with 30,000 Haitian workers annually from 1957 to 1964. For each worker, Duvalier received a payment of $15 and a cut of 50 percent of the worker’s wages. At this rate, Duvalier’s trafficking in Haitian labor garnered $7 million per year, or a total of $54 million for the period.58
Duvalier, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic It is with reason that Haitian writer Claude Moise (1993) observes that political power in Haiti, and even the leadership during the periods of revolutionary fighting, has always been “traditional, autocratic, distrustful and suspicious,” and it was to counteract this authoritarian pattern in the name of democratization that the 1987 constitution established the division and thus mutual limitation of state powers.59 Prior to Jean-Claude’s departure in 1986, the Haitian state under the Duvaliers had become an income-producing machine for foreign investors and the Haitian elite. The plantation system imposed an intensive sugar monocultivation as it contributed to environmental degradation. The scarcity of employment and means of subsistence forced hundreds of thousands of Haitian peasants to relocate in the Dominican Republic, forming part of an already established pattern within the insular system.60 During the brutally repressive rule of the Duvaliers, which spanned the 31 years beginning with François’ accession to the presidency on 22 October 1957, emigration became a matter of sheer survival for many Haitians seeking freedom from hunger and tyranny.61 From 18,772
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Haitians in the Dominican Republic in 1950, the number rose at an average rate of by slightly more than a thousand a year by 1960, with its total of 29,350.62 In the year after Trujillo’s assassination, the Dominican state owned 51 percent of all capital investment in Dominican industries; 7 percent was owned by Dominican companies and some 43 percent owned by foreigners. This centralizing tendency in a country of 3 million inhabitants produced the contradiction of a republic that was indeed impresarial without being socialist. The Dominican bourgeoisie thus rose tardily, under the long shadow of Trujillo’s statist controls.63 With Trujillo’s death in 1961, the ingenios passed into the hands of the Consejo Estatal de Azúcar (CEA: State Sugar Council). The CEA has been plagued by inefficiency, handicapped by corruption, incompetence, and crop disease, competing favorably nonetheless with private corporations such as the Central Romana. Juan Bosch was democratically elected president in December 1962. In April 1963, the occupation of Port-au-Prince’s Dominican embassy drove Bosch’s government to request intervention by the Organization of American States (OAS).64 This is how the sovereignty of the Dominican embassy was violated: after an attempt was made in Port-au-Prince on the lives of Jean-Claude’s children, a Lieutenant François Benoit, the marksman suspected of the attack, sought refuge in the Dominican embassy. Duvalier had the embassy searched. Turning up nothing, soldiers then raided the residence of the Dominican ambassador. Captured in the raid were 22 Haitian refugees, including Benoit. Although Bosch issued an ultimatum demanding safe-conduct passes for the refugees, all of them, along with hundreds of other Haitian prisoners, were summarily executed at Fort Dimanche. The incident raised Bosch’s ire, and it brought the Dominicans to the brink of launching an invasion against their neighbors by sending warships to train their guns on the major Haitian cities. Were it not for the intervention of the OAS, a war with Haiti would have marked a high point in Bosch’s seven months as president.65 The threat to invade, however, may have constituted only so much sabre-rattling at the time on the part of Bosch, who eagerly sought to project the image of a leader strong enough to command the armed forces and tough enough to deal with the Haitians. François Duvalier, nicknamed “Papa Doc” by Haitians and Dominicans alike, soured relations further in that year by granting asylum to the plotters against the Dominican president.66 Bosch may have missed an opportunity to assume the mantle of the anti-Haitian caudillo when, in May 1963, he learned of the existence of a clandestine training camp for exiled Haitians run with support from the Dominican military. Bosch shut down that operation quickly, only for
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another Haitian training operation to start up, this time near Santo Domingo. Bosch shut that one down too, only to hear of the start-up of yet another camp. With support coming directly from Bosch, however, General Léon Cantave, former armed forces commander, could organize an exile army of 100 men with the mission of overthrowing Duvalier. Cantave’s 100 deployed against the military post at Ouanaminthe on 5 August 1963. The siege elicited protests from an OAS council, which accused the Dominican Republic of “complicity” in the matter, and the OAS investigative committee that was sent to Port-au-Prince attempted to mediate between the countries. The rebel band was forced to retreat back to Dajabón on 23 September.67 It seemed that the common cause of Haitian dissidents and Dominican army personnel was pushing Bosch toward invasion despite his intention to reconcile with Haiti. Three invasions did in fact take off from the Dajabón region. The first was late August. The Haitian government protested before the OAS. The third, in early September, drew Haitian gunfire, with bullets striking a customshouse and a schoolhouse on the Dominican side. The Dominican government dispatched its protest to the OAS.68 At that juncture however, U.S. policy with regard to the two island countries held back from intervening. Although committed to putting down the Duvalier dictatorship, and desirous of backing the winner of free elections in 1962, the United States nonetheless impeded the Dominican forces from crossing the frontier in what would have been an intra-insular war of liberation. The reluctance to intervene on this occasion provided but a foretaste of U.S. inaction during the military coup of September 1963, which would unseat Bosch from the presidency and render a stunning blow to Dominican selfgovernment.69 A subsequent armed “constitutionalist” insurrection against the military junta responsible for the coup broke out 24 April 1965. Colonel Francisco Alberto Caamaño Deñó headed the revolt intended to vindicate the election that was in effect stolen from Bosch and his Partido Revolucionario Dominicano (PRD). During the April revolt, violent demonstrations broke out over Santo Domingo, and demonstrators were bombed in the streets. On 29 April 1965, U.S. Marines landed on the beaches of the troubled nation to “restore order.” The OAS convened to address the outbreak of violence, and an Inter-American Peace Force was sent, on 22 May, to intervene in the conflict. The Force comprised troops supplied principally by the United States but also by Brazil, Costa Rica, Honduras, and Nicaragua. Fighting in the resistance against the Inter-American occupiers was a Dominican poet of Haitian origins by the name of Jacques Viaud. Born in
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Port-au-Prince in 1943, Viaud in 1965 was fighting against the invasionary force, on the side of the constitutionalists in the B-3 Command. In one battle he was mortally wounded—the explosion of a mortar grenade blew off his legs. Viaud’s collection of poems in Spanish, titled Permanencia del llanto (Permanence of weeping), was published in 1966.70 After Dr. Héctor García Godoy was elected president and scheduled to take office on 4 September 1965, an OAS commission succeeded in mediating a reconciliation between the constitutionalists and the junta, and the Inter-American force withdrew from the Dominican Republic. Behind the scenes of the conflict, Haiti had been called on support the intervention. An OAS member, Haiti generally voted as did the United States, as when both countries voted to eject Cuba from the OAS in 1965. Haiti did the same in the vote to send the Inter-American force to the Dominican Republic to suppress the civil war. In exchange for the votes against Cuban membership and against Bosch’s constitutionalist movement, Duvalier negotiated an increase in U.S. economic aid.71 After his 1966 election to the presidency, the office he would exercise or control for the next 12 years, Joaquín Balaguer oversaw friendly dealings with Haiti for practical reasons, despite having written some of the key texts of the anti-Haitian propaganda of the Trujillo years. Balaguer assured that the Haitian and Dominican governments could count on the collaboration of the Dominican military forces and Dominican state and private enterprises. An accord signed 14 November 1966 arranged that a yearly quota of Haitian braceros would be brought into the Dominican Republic. In a subsequent agreement signed by the CEA and the Haitian government, Article 11 provided for a tax of up to 5 percent on each worker’s wages. That tax, later converted into a flat capitation tax, was supposed to be returned to the worker at the end of the harvest season, but in reality it was drawn off by the Duvaliers’ personal finance managers.72 Before the year was out, Balaguer and the Haitian Ministry of Social Affairs struck an accord to guarantee certain benefits for the migrant workers. The benefits included a minimum wage per ton of harvested cane, adequate medical care, and a certain standard of housing. The benefits for the most part, however, were so only on paper. In 1970, the Dominican government’s General Direction for Migration reported 42,142 legal resident Haitians and an estimated 45,000 illegals. From 97,142 in 1970 to 109,600 in 1971, the number had risen by 12,458. Over these years, 1967–71, the border was closed off again, to be reopened in the early months of 1972 and closed off yet again during the summer of the same year. The official census counted a Haitian population in the Dominican Republic that fluctuated but by the early 1970s had reached its 1926 levels. In 1972 again, trade relations
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between Haitian and Dominicans improved with the signing of agreements that “provided for the establishment of a joint free zone, for tariff reductions on foreign products, and for simplified trade transactions.” The two governments also agreed to improvements in transportation. In the 1974–5 harvest, the CEA alone employed 35,000 Haitian braceros: that is, 80 percent of the total Dominican agricultural work force of 44,000.73 The monitoring and regulating of immigration from Haiti was intensified in 1978, the year in which, on November 14, the CEA signed a contract with the Haitian government authorizing the recruitment of 15,000 Haitians for work in the canefields. For this shipment of labor, the Haitian government received $1,225,000 from the CEA. A similar contract signed on 18 December 1979 permitted recruitment of 14,000. In 1979 the CEA began to make its own agreements directly with the Haitian government, setting the quotas in private meetings. In the early years of Jean-Claude’s administration, 12,000 Haitians were contracted at a rate of $11 apiece for labor in the Dominican zafras, as reported by the London-based AntiSlavery Society. The 280,000 migrants who entered the country illegally faced a future not only of job insecurity but of still lamentable working and living conditions and the looming threat of deportation.74 Haitians continued to be transported legally to the Dominican centrales, but without the individual contracts that had been required by the 1959 accord. Instead, they were sold “wholesale,” to be repatriated indiscriminately after the work was done, whether they had entered illegally or not. Although the 1979 Basic Cooperation Agreement included a Commercial Protocol that would have formalized and regulated the recruitment of Haitian workers, that accord has yet to be implemented. The CEA in 1980 authorized yet another round-up of Haitians for work in its own canefields. The contraband in labor went on, making it feasible for such mills as the Central Romana, owned by Gulf & Western, to contract undocumented workers on a regular basis as a part of a largely unregulated traffic.75 As if migratory restrictions during these years were not discouraging enough, other transnational issues struck crippling blows to the Haitian economy. Bernard Diederich reports of an epidemic of African swine fever that struck the Dominican Republic in 1978. It soon spread to the Artibonite Valley, whose river, fed by Lake Péligre, flows into both countries. An eradication campaign commenced in May 1982, although the scourge already had seemed to pass over: the hardy survivors hung on to life just as their forebears had done for five centuries, since Columbus transported swine to what was then a Spanish isle. But now the United States Department of Agriculture, fearful that the epidemic could reach
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U.S. shores and wipe out its own porcine population, made the preemptive strike. In a program lasting 13 months and costing an estimated $23 million, U.S. and Haitian officials confiscated the pigs suspected of carrying the infection, replacing them, wherever possible, with feverresistant pigs bred in the United States. The cost of the eradication program to the peasants’ household economies was disastrous. The new pigs, where they could be kept, had to be given a special feed and care in specially constructed compounds, whose cost lay far beyond the average peasant’s means. By the same action the program had eliminated the treasured Haitian pig, a tenacious creature accustomed to feeding on roots, tubers, refuse, and offal—a hardy farm animal that had served the Haitian peasant as investment and bank deposit, as garbage disposal, pest control, waste manager, and digger of soil for the next season’s planting. The loss went even further: the Haitian peasant counted on that semi-feral pig as a source of fertilizing excrement and as the investment that would, upon its sale, yield the money needed for children’s schooling.76 Such a setback as the swine program exacerbated the reasons for leaving the country in search of livelihood. And the Haitian government showed itself as only too willing to facilitate the move. In 1980–1 Jean-Claude received $2.9 million in exchange for the quota of 16,000 Haitian braceros. About 1.5 million Haitians or a quarter of the population were living abroad already, due in great part to the repressions of Jeanclaudisme. “Baby Doc” continued to benefit from the bilateral accord, signed in 1966, providing for the supply of Haitian workers. Other sources of profit and aggrandizement opened up for the Duvalier family. The technology of containerization brought a source of income in the form of more than 250 assembly plants, which took advantage of a cheap, cooperative, and plentiful labor pool. The growing economy in light industry quickened the rural flow into Port-au-Prince, where the available work, if one could get it, might involve manufacturing baseballs or assembling circuitry, among other low-skill and low-paying jobs.77 Unemployment remained high, however, as the quest for survival led a steady stream of Haitians eastward—toward political refuge, toward servitude in canefields and construction sites, toward an uncertain future in a strange land. Jean-Claude profited in still other ways. During his regime, the Dominican borderlands provided a convenient transshipment site for drug traffickers. Overseen by members of his wife Michelle’s family, the business transported cocaine from Colombia and transferred it to smaller planes for delivery to distribution centers. After 1986 this trade was taken over by the military, which operated out of the Casernes Dessalines barracks.78
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The popular uprising that removed Jean-Claude from the presidency in 1986 signaled a breakthrough in the history of the island, as Ernesto Sagás (1994) points out. Hopes were high in Haiti that democracy would take root; Balaguer in the meantime was elected to the Dominican presidency for fourth term, having lost the 1978 and 1982 elections. Instability and turmoil followed on Jean-Claude’s ouster, with the presidency occupied briefly by each of a series of successors. Balaguer acted with circumspection at this juncture, wary of provoking a mass migration of Haitians into the Dominican Republic.79 In January 1986, $2 million was the amount received for the Haitian quota, some of which Jean-Claude carried away in hurried flight from Port-au-Prince at the fall of his regime. At that time, Haitians made up 90 percent of the cane cutters in the Dominican Republic, where their numbers totaled 200,000–300,000, in Veras’ (1985) account. Other countries had received the wayfaring laborers: the Bahamas, 30,000; Africa and France, 6,000 each; Canada 40,000, and the United States, 400,000. The Haitian diaspora spread elsewhere throughout the Caribbean and nearby regions: to French Guiana and the Lesser Antilles. Of the Haitians residing in the Dominican Republic during the 1980s, about a third were working in agriculture, primarily sugar; the rest made a living in domestic service, sales, and construction.80 For every legally registered Haitian there were two to three Haitians who had entered the country illegally. That same year, 15 percent of all men and 30 percent of all women in the Dominican Republic were unemployed. Conditions were tough on both sides, but tougher still in Haiti. According to the World Bank, the Dominican Republic’s 1989 per capita GDP was $957; for Haiti, it was a third of that amount, or $319. Population density continued to disfavor Haiti, where 226 inhabitants per square kilometer exceeded by more than 150 percent the density of Dominicans living in the same area in their republic.81 In retrospect, it seems that the insular inequalities of life ruled over death as well during Jean-Claude’s years in power. Overseen by enterprising Minister of the Interior and Defense Luckner Cambronne, a flourishing business in Haitian cadavers filled demands made for this item by U.S. and Canadian medical schools. Such specimens were sought after, not only for their low cost but also due to their “lack of fat,” which “made them easier for medical students to dissect.”82 Haitian cadavers were sold on the island as well. Yunén (1985) recalls an occasion when he was guiding a tour of Puerto Rican doctors through a health sciences complex of a Dominican university. One visiting doctor noted that of the formaldehydepreserved cadavers exhibited there, most were those of blacks; another observed that since the same cadavers were “young and muscular”
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they would make for excellent dissections. When asked about the corpses’ origins, the resident doctor explained that the cadavers in question were those of Haitian braceros who had died of hard work and malnutrition, their expired bodies easily obtained for medical study, without legal permission, because no one had come to claim them.83 This dealing in death, or trade in post mortem migrations, may possibly have crowned the legacy of Trujillo and the Duvaliers, constituting as it did, at home and in the diaspora, the ultimate commodification of Haitian bodies. In the preceding narrative of transnational dictatorships, all dealings between Haitian and Dominican governments constituted moves in a larger game, that of weak Caribbean states beholden to the United States, of governments often competing but often collaborating with other governments in order to maintain the privileges of family and class. The entrance into modernity also meant the deepening of dependency, for it required that Hispaniola’s two island countries serve the investment, ideological, and strategic interests of their patrons; their subordination in a nation-state system characterized by inequality required them to improvise an unstable counterpoint of moves and countermoves. Still coming to terms with the insular trauma of the borderlands, the history of their shared experience had yet to overcome a legacy in which inequality, injustice, and violence were the norm. Carlos Fuentes insightfully observes that “cultures flourish in contact with one another, and they perish in isolation.”84 Yet in the time of the dictatorships, when Haitians and Dominicans had fostered their contact and valued their interdependence, few would flourish, many would perish, and the nations would clamor for change.
Chapter 7
Close Encounters: Haitians in Dominican Literature
The world was once whole, and now behold, it opened up in two halves, Sunk in the expanse of the sea and of the skies that are Falling down. —Manuel Rueda, “Song of the Rayano”1
n his article “Primitive Borders: Cultural Identity and Ethnic Cleansing in the Dominican Republic” (2000), Fernando Valerio-Holguín traces the development of Dominican discourse on Haiti and Haitians. In Dominican history, literature, journalism, and sociology, he argues, the Haitian has been cast as a primitive Other: the Haitian appears as a figure of barbarity, misery, degradation, and superstition. The barbarization of Haitians in this discourse confirms ethnocentric prejudice, but it also fulfills a sociopolitical purpose: that of defining a Dominican national identity negatively; that is, by asserting that identity’s difference from that which it purports not to be—the Haitian seen as the opposite or antipodes of what is considered authentically Dominican. Valerio-Holguín’s thesis draws theoretical support from the concept of primitivism as defined in the postcolonial cultural critique of Marianna Torgovnick (1990). For Torgovnick, primitivism is a specialized discourse that has an ideological role in the colonizers’ project of subordinating the colonized; it is “an ensemble of diverse and contradictory tropes that construct a grammar and vocabulary with reference to the Other.”2 In Valerio-Holguín’s account, Dominican tropes of Haitian primitivity, operating powerfully in culture and consciousness, have set the boundary between the Haitian Other and the Dominican Self, such that Haitians are identified with the inferior
I
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term in a series of significant binary oppositions: civilized/savage, cultural/natural, Vodoun/Catholic, and Hispanic/African, among others. Such barbarization in and through Dominican discourse has served to legitimize Dominican claims to territory and border delimitations; it has also justified the exploitative treatment of Haitian migrant workers in the Dominican Republic and acts of violence against them, most notably the Trujillo-ordered massacre, in 1937, of at least 20,000 Haitians in the Dominican borderlands. Valerio-Holguín traces the ensemble of anti-Haitian tropes through their complex and often ambivalent inscriptions in twentieth-century cultural and literary texts, including those of Manuel Arturo Peña Batlle, Joaquín Balaguer, and Freddy Prestol Castillo. He furthermore ties in the literary with the geographical dimensions of the Haitian–Dominican border: “The border, as a liminal space of articulation (union/separation) between two nations, gives rise to a privileged discourse in which cultural identity is constructed. If the border demarcates the imaginary nation, it also sets itself forth as the limit that must be transgressed.”3 As reinscribed and projected in literature, the border has become an obsessive image in the national psychology, the fixation of the previously discussed “border mentality.” But the confidence with which this border is invoked masks a deeper anxiety with regard to cultural identity: because some 80 percent of the Dominican people can be classified as mulatto, or of mixed Hispanic and African descent, the desire to differentiate themselves from the African-descended Haitians, those inhabiting territories on either side of the border, becomes a psychological imperative and cause for repression whose mechanisms are psychic differentiation, extroversion, distantiation, and projection. (Shame with regard to the Haitian element in Dominican identity was manifest in Trujillo’s use of pancake make-up to hide a darkness of complexion inherited from Haitian ancestors.) Ambivalence surrounds the existence and growth of a borderlands culture, a culture whose hybrid nature invites both contact and interaction between the two nations. The fact of the borderlands, however, does not gainsay the primitivist discourse that has represented Haitians as inferior beings and thereby justified violence against them. “We are about to reach a new millennium,” Valerio-Holguín states in his article’s concluding sentence, “yet Dominican cultural identity still depends on the rejection of its neighbors, the ‘primitives.’ ”4 Linda M. Rodríguez (1997) rightly asserts that “Dominican literature has tried to come to terms with the historical realities of a nation that has suffered from a particularly disturbing history. Moreover, it expresses a people’s search for a national identity.”5 This is a valid characterization,
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yet there are literary texts in which the question of distinct Dominican national identity unrelated to Haiti itself is questioned and problematized. Giving counterarguments to the hegemonic discourse on identity, such texts have entertained the notion that “Haitian” means more than the place of the Dominicans’ Other, regarded as primitive inferior or alien resident. There are other discourses—writings and representations—that propose the existence of diverse and multiple identities, alternative national selves to those recognized by the dominant anti-Haitianism and the official version of history. The purpose of this chapter is to examine both counterhegemonic texts and subversive subtexts that propose alternative, contrapuntal readings of Dominican national identity. That alternative vision of identity, as will be argued here, affirms the connectedness of Haiti and the Dominican Republic, admits the interdependence of Haitians and Dominicans; it finds, even in the texts that to others have seemed explicitly pro-trujillista and antihaitianista, inquiries into the African otherness within Dominican culture and its articulation with Haitian culture, its reaching for transcendence beyond the secular delimitations. In view of the perennial tension and conflict between the two countries, one may think such a thesis unrealistically utopian. A closer examination of the Haitian–Dominican connection in literature, however, invites us to think the unthinkable. Given the limitations of space, the readings of Dominican literary texts that follow will touch only on their relevance to the intrainsular linkages with which the present study is concerned; and since the texts for this “overture” have not received wide attention in U.S. Hispanic studies, their presentation here can serve as a prolegomenon to more extensive investigations. A quick survey of Dominican literature concerned with Haiti or Haitians reveals the fact that many Dominican writers have considered the Haitian as something more than enemy and primitive Other. Marcio Veloz Maggiolo provides such a survey in a seminal essay, “Tipología del tema haitiano en la literatura dominicana” (1977).6 In explaining his typology, Veloz Maggiolo, who has taught anthropology at the Universidad Autónoma de Santo Domingo, observes that “the Haitian” constitutes a persistent and inescapable theme of Dominican literature, and he goes on to classify the ways in which Haitians have been represented in that literature according to the “position” each writer takes with regard to the Haitian. Sympathetic, sometimes positive attitudes emerge among those positions, categorized as follows: (a) Literature of the Haitian adulated. (b) Literature of the Haitian attacked, or against the Haitian. (c) Literature of the Haitian adulterated.
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(d) Literature of the Haitian pitied. (e) Literature of the Haitian integrated. Each of Veloz Maggiolo’s categories matches a particular period or phase in Dominican history. The Haitians and their leaders were adulated, with the literature of type (a), during the period of the first invasions sent by Toussaint Louverture and that of 1822. Haitians are attacked in the literature of category (b) during the time of the 22-year occupation and the fight for independence from the Haitian Republic—and a strain of this antihaitianismo has continued to the present. Haitians are adulterated in (c), the class of caricatures that prevailed in the nineteenth century and into the twentieth by capitalizing on the imputed primitivism and degeneracy of “superstitious” Haitians. This category extends the attack of category (b). Category (d), that of the Haitian pitied, belongs to the modern period beginning in the 1920s and embraces the radical perspectives of liberal middle-class Dominican youths: those whose sympathy with the Haitians went arm-in-arm with their denunciation of the U.S. invasion of 1916 and with their enthusiasm for the Russian Revolution of 1917. Compassion for the Haitians was also the response to the news of the October 1937 massacres in the borderlands. The fifth category (e), inclusive of the recent literature that seeks to integrate the Haitian into the Dominican world, focuses more on “the human problematic”—on the comprehensible humanity shared by Haitian and Dominican— endeavoring in this way to overcome the distorted representations and negative stereotypes of the past.7 Veloz Maggiolo further distinguishes two literary functions of the Haitians represented in all these classes of literature: either as a member of society, as a character, or as a part of the setting or “landscape” itself, as an object of description.8 With regard for Veloz Maggiolo’s perceptive typology, a rethinking of the Haitian and of Haitian–Dominican relations can be seen to occur in the modern Dominican texts that will be examined in the rest of this chapter. Those texts represent a wide gamut of Dominican genres, insofar as they include poetry, a novel, a play, and short stories. They are Ramón Marrero Aristy’s Over (1940), Manuel del Cabral’s Compadre Mon (1940) and other poems, the poems and manifestos of the Dominican journal La Poesía Sorprendida (1943–6), Manuel Rueda’s “Cantos de la Frontera” (1963), Máximo Avilés Blonda’s Pirámide 179 (1968), and José Alcántara Almánzar’s stories in Las máscaras de la seducción (1983). Applying Veloz Maggiolo’s typology to these and various texts of the Dominican negrista movement, we will see the Haitian as attacked and adulterated in those texts, but also as a figure to be pitied or integrated according to the viewpoints valorized
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in each. The identification with the Haitian fostered by these literary viewpoints argues for renewing the Haitian–Dominican counterpoint, for acknowledging the commonalities and strengthening the connections that link the two peoples in a shared history of oppression.
Over and Under Intellectual and artistic production during Trujillo’s rule felt straitjacketed, or strapped and harnessed to serve the regime. “Outside of trujillismo,” writes Andrés L. Mateo (1993), “no intellectual practice was possible, and not even material survival.” The weakness of the middle class and the dependency of the state meant that “[t]he Dominican intellectual adventure, and in particular its liberal expressions, drew to trujillismo with a poor vision of themselves and with the burden of infinite frustrations of proposals of social regeneration, in their links with political power.”9 Not only prone to pessimism, the prominent intellectuals of Trujillo’s time, if they did not leave the country as did Pedro Mir, were truly Trujillo’s men. What else could they be? Héctor Incháustegui Cabral, author of Poemas de una sola angustia (1940) and Las ínsulas extrañas (1952), a highly sensitive man and Trujillo’s ambassador, formed part of a cadre of writers who served El Benefactor. In his single anguish among the strange islands, Incháustegui Cabral knew of his employer’s monstrous abuse of power. But he kept silent. What other choice did he have? In support of his totalitarian power, intellectuals like Incháustegui Cabral could do their part to create a nationalist mythology of la dominicanidad that buttressed the cult of Trujillo’s own personality. And certainly the ideological uses of Haiti were not lost on the Dominican intellectuals who coupled their writing to the machinery of dictatorship.10 What is amazing in some writings produced under Trujillo is the expression, despite the dominance of el antihaitianismo, of strong signs of attraction towards Haiti and sympathy for the Haitians living in the Dominican Republic. Ramón Marrero Aristy was another writer who contributed his part to the glory of Trujillo: the last volume of his three-volume history of the Dominican Republic praises the achievements of Trujillo’s regime, and the novelist himself received honors and diplomatic assignments from the dictator. At the orders of the man he had glorified, however, his life was ingloriously ended in 1959 at the hands of assassins.11 In addition to the three-part history, Marrero Aristy published his bestknown work, Over, in 1940. The novel describes a particular plantation, its canefields and refinery, in setting the scenes, but it focuses principally on
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activity revolving around the company store run by the novel’s narrator, Daniel. Daniel’s descriptions of Haitians characterizes them with demeaning, if vivid, language and by accentuating their physical features. A group of Haitians, seated on a pile of firewood, “chew their hunger, like oxen that begin tranquilly to ruminate.”12 Another group, whom Daniel is attending in the store, comes up closer: “I see their dirty faces, bristling with whiskers, greasy; their big noses deformed, their mouths generally full of rotten roots and their eyes popping out” (p. 51). Yet another group is said to be drumming “el vudú” (p. 71). When they speak, they cannot pronounce the Castillian r, as when one attempts to call Dominicans parejeros (vain, stuck-up) but this comes out as palejele (p. 70). When a truckload of braceros arrives, they seem as dark as “toasted coffee,” and their faces, looking like “bottoms of old cauldrons,” all appear the same to Daniel, “even at a short distance” (p. 82). The novel cites other prejudicial views on the Haitian workers. An administrator calls them all “muy haraganes,” very lazy (p. 81). The town doctor discriminates against the Haitians, and cuts costs at the same time, by treating any one of them as if for malaria. A little bit of quinine is all he gives, because, he explains to Daniel, “A negro has no right to anything else” (p. 175). At a later point Daniel cannot help but refer to the workers as an anonymous collectivity: they are the haitianaje that plays a drum, or the “ragged, foul-smelling crowd,” a hungry crowd that passes on its way to the fields “like a procession of beings without souls” (pp. 94, 95). As for the Haitian women, for Daniel the only possibly “available” women around, they are all an “ugly and smelly” crowd (p. 112). Previous criticism has noted the author’s recourse to the use of stereotypes to represent Haitians and cocolos in the novel. What that criticism has tended to overlook, however, is the pro-Haitian side of a narrative that denounces both the inhuman conditions of the sugarcane plantations and the dehumanization of the caneworkers under such conditions. The novel expresses sympathy for the Haitian migrant. Daniel tells of the grueling work of cane cutting and harvesting done in the fields by Haitian and cocolo braceros. Such work in Daniel’s account constitutes a form of slavery, but substituting for the foreman’s whips and chains in this context is another instrument of coercion, namely, a ruthlessly efficient system of management that implements surveillance, debt peonage, and the ever-present threat of unemployment to keep the workers in line. In Daniel’s narration, the Haitians may appear as nameless faces and arms for the most part, but not for any fault of their own. Forced to labor in order to keep themselves and their families alive, they have little hope of anything better: “Their lives were sunk in a mire of ignorance and vice, that
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preyed on them ever since they were born.” Not born ignorant and vicious, they have been brutalized by hunger, misery, and a punishing regimen of work. And sharing in their misery while doing his part to create it, Daniel the shopkeeper asks himself why this island, “my land,” which should have been a paradise, could have turned into “such a swamp” (p. 220). The island’s degradation has resulted from unethical practices fostered by the plantation as an economic institution. The English word over is the one by which the Dominican overseers refer to money obtained through cheating the cane cutters. Over is the value the cane weighers keep when they underrepresent the tonnage of the cut stalks; over is the amount the storekeepers keep when they overcharge or underweigh for foodstuff purchases in the company dispensaries; over is the amount the payroll clerks deduct in fines for absences or improper procedure. Realizing surplus value at a cost to the braceros, the predatory personnel stand as a metaphor for a Dominican society callously indifferent to the plight of the Haitians on whose toil it depends, a society that moreover skims as much as it can off their meager wages with ruthless calculation. The systematic fraud required of all by the demand for over underlies the pretense of a wage labor “freely” sold to the owners of the multinational enterprise. In the modern manager is reincarnated the slave driver of yesteryear (see p. 83). The plantation’s system of debt peonage centers on the company store: the worker is paid some 70–90 percent of his earnings in the form of foodstuffs such as rice and dried cod. The inflated prices and fraud allow a 30 percent over to the store and leave only a tiny portion to the worker, which he typically takes again to the company store anyway to squander on rum (p. 204). Indeed, his work has kept him alive enough to fulfill the requirements of the company, but for very little else. Protest is futile, and it can also get one killed. When the cane cutters make demands for higher wages, they are met with the blows of the police and an attack by the administrator on horseback. One man dies, the rest go quietly back to cutting (p. 141). The canefields themselves appear as a green hell, a monotonous inferno of heat and insects and row upon row of cane stalks where no bird sings. The site of inhuman oppression and suffering, for Daniel “it has an abysmal force, and it fascinates”; it infects all comers with its “virus”; they all realize, like Daniel, that “the sugar mill is all-powerful” (pp. 95, 100, 204). The dominance of the monopoly and the latifundio made sugar supreme during the trujillato, leaving the hapless bracero little choice but to accept the industry’s low pay and inhuman work conditions. Life is hard at the sugar-refining central, but life on the outside with no employment would be impossible. Resembling a prison from which there is no escape except by drinking rum, the plantation confirms the idea, “There is no
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freedom in life” (p. 99). What is more, the plantation exerts its baleful influence over all the Dominican Republic and the life of the island. It is an abomination, and yet it has produced the economic foundations and relative success of Dominican society. Marrero Aristy, sensing this doubleness, expresses compassion for the suffering Haitian, indicts the plantation and the violence it inflicts on everyone, Haitian and Dominican alike. Before the power of the almighty over, however, his characters see no choice but to submit.
Self and Other: La Poesía Negrista The literary effort to define a Dominican national identity goes back historically to the second half of the nineteenth century, in the postIndependence search for the foundations of the national culture. Writers sought cultural origins in the stories of Dominican ancestors, and as ancestors they identified the Spanish colonizers and the aboriginal Taíno inhabitants. Blinded by chauvinist or ethnocentric prejudice, these writers in search of the nation’s roots refused to consider the enslaved Africans or Afro-Dominicans as forebears: those whose labor sustained the colony even during the harshest years of misrule and neglect in their eyes barely deserved mention. It was the Quisqueyan indio, rather, who was romanticized and idealized in such “Indianist” narratives as Manuel Jesús de Galván’s novel of 1879 and 1882, Enriquillo, and this fictionalized figure became the stuff of a wholly artificial myth of putative Dominican origins.13 With the suppression of Africanity, the image of the Indian assumed the place of an aboriginal foundation to Dominican culture. Yet paradoxically, the non-survival of the island’s indigenous population, whose visible legacy has been reduced to residual practices and a number of artifacts, has relegated Taíno and Carib culture to a minor importance in the national patrimony.14 The myth of the noble Indian, celebrated at the cost of excluding the African element from what would henceforth be legitimized as the authentic racial mix of Spaniard and Amerindian,15 in reality supported a pro-Hispanic self-identification that favored delivery of a chastened Dominican Republic back into the waiting arms of the Spanish madre patria.16 Added to this negation, popular characterizations of Haitian Vodoun at the time reinforced its marginality or otherness to Dominican culture. One journal in 1875 stressed the threat to civilization of a religion that allegedly included anthropophagy among its rituals.17 Whereas the African element of island culture has been affirmed elsewhere in Caribbean letters, it was the indigenous heritage that was legitimized in
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Dominican letters, as it was not only in Galván’s canonic novel but also in the Fantasías Indígenas (1877) by José Joaquín Pérez.18 As it struggled to redefine the Dominican national identity, literary discourse in the period after the U.S. occupation only slightly warmed to the notion that African-based culture formed a part of its whole cultural patrimony. David Howard is correct in asserting that “Literature of negritud has not established a strong presence in the Dominican Republic.” Indeed, a variation on Afro-Antillean negrismo developed in Dominican literature between the world wars, but it did not coalesce into a school or movement as did its Francophone counterparts. Howard in his Coloring the Nation (2001) identifies the causes for this arrested development in the “racial indecision” of the Dominicans and in “the difficulty of asserting a black identity within a society which rejects blackness.”19 Although it could be said that the negrismo of even some of the more progressive Dominican writers contributes to a perpetuating of stereotypes, their humanizing bent and self-ironizing style support the notion of a new kind of Haitian– Dominican encounter. Blas Jiménez, for one, employs an ironic style in exposing the Dominican stereotypes of the African and Haitian. In the poem “Negra No. 1” (1980), Jiménez describes the “sexy” black woman in clichés that, he shows, gloss over the hardships she must endure to survive. In the poem “Haitiano” (1980), Jiménez points out the common perception that matches the words Haitiano and Negro with “Ugly” and “Bad.” By these misidentifications, however, the Dominican would have to fall into the same category: “By being negro,” apostrophizes the poem, “you are Haitian.”20 Despite the general weakness of AfroDominicanism and the paucity of Africanist assertions in Dominican literature, what appears in the way of Dominican negrismo remains to be recognized and accounted for; and even a brief survey of some representative texts can suggest the way to a retrospective re-visioning of the Haitian Other in twentieth century Dominican literature. Bruno Rosario Candelier’s “Poesía negra en Santo Domingo,” an article that appeared on 30 April 1972 in the cultural supplement of El Nacional de ¡Ahora!, has stimulated a re-examination of the African and/or Haitian contribution to Dominican culture. In that article, Candelier illustrates the expression of African-based values both in works of Dominican music and literary art and in the ideal of liberation. Although this contribution has been little acknowledged by the Dominican academe and critical press, there has emerged, argues Candelier, a strain of poetry bearing much in common with the poetry of négritud exemplified in Martinican poet Aimé Césaire’s Cahier d’un retour au pay natal (Notebook of a Return to the Native Land, 1939) and in the poetry of Senegalese Leopold Sédar
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Senghor, René Depestre in Haiti, and J. McFarland from Jamaica.21 Citing the Afro-Cubanism of Nicolás Guillén’s “Sensemayá,” Candelier reveals the Afro-Haitian dimension of the merengue written by Manuel Sánchez Acosta titled “Papá-bocó.”22 The merengue, its form modeled on the Dominican dance of the same name, evokes a Haitian Vodoun ceremony in which the sorceror-priest invokes the luá, or spirit, as he works a spell: Con un retrato boca-abajo una candela en la boca con una vela en la mano y un rabo de gato en la otra . . .
With a portrait face-down a fire in his mouth with a candle in his hand and a cat’s tail in the other
* * * * * Yo tengo un luá que me ilumina y me protege de la gente con cuatro velas de a centavo y tres frasquitas de aguardiente.23
* * * * I have a luá that illuminates me and protects me from people with four penny-candles and three flasks of rum.
The depiction of the ritual—with its use of portrait, candles, cane liquor, and cat’s tail—and the appeal to the empowering and protective spirit make the poem sound authentic enough as a reenactment of Haitian magic. Although the poem may fall into the trap of primitivist exoticism, it also achieves a certain mystery and rhythmic beauty. It also, perhaps more significantly, evokes the presence of the Dominican version of Vodoun called Gagá by its presentation in Spanish; by its Spanish nonasyllables; and by its reference to the luá, which stands for the Krèyol lwa, and its nearly ethnographic attention to detail. These aspects draw Sánchez Acosta’s poem into a borderlands of both Dominican–Haitian culture and the Dominican literature on the Haitian theme. A widely-known Dominican poet who also entered into the Haitian thematic is Manuel del Cabral, and he did so self-consciously, knowing well of the innovation he was making. In an interview published in 1980, Cabral identified three Antillean poets—Cuba’s Nicolás Guillén, Puerto Rico’s Luis Palés Matos, and himself—as the three founders of “la Poesía Negra.”24 Cabral was born in the Cibao, the northwestern region his poetry evokes time and time again.25 With an interest in Haitian culture and “magic,” Manuel del Cabral launched the negrista movement with his Doce poemas negros (Twelve Black Poems) in 1935. In Cabral’s negrista poems especially, the Haitian appears as an ambivalent figure of both attraction and repulsion for the lyric speaker, who seeks alternately to
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identify with the Haitian and then to distance himself from the Haitian’s otherness. The encounter with the Haitian continues in Cabral’s epic Compadre Mon (1940). The poem’s protagonist and title character is a plainsman of the Cibao, and he embodies the qualities that identify a real macho man: Mon is a braggart and brawler with hair on his chest and pants well put on. For Henríquez Gratereaux, Cabral’s Mon represents “lo popular dominicano,” the popular Dominican world of “the cockpit, the poverty of the country in times of drought, the womanizing caudillo, the alcoholic soldier, the dialectic of the revolver”; the poem itself follows the form of the popular octosyllabic tercet.26 Mon cannot remain in his native Cibao: he is a revolutionary, he has killed a woman-stealing cacique, he flees the authorities. The poem’s third part, entitled “Compadre Mon en Haití,” has the archetypal cibaeño crossing the Haitian–Dominican border. His sojourn in Haiti lasts nine months, which Mon compares with the child’s first life, inside the mother’s womb. While in Haiti, he encounters dangers, meets with protective or tutelary agents, learns of himself while communicating with others in unfamiliar patuá.27 For the hero, the Haitian embodies a forgotten otherness within the Dominican psyche. The border becomes a threshold, and crossing it brings the hero into an ancestral knowledge tied to the blackness of Haití. Cabral’s man senses this uncanny identification—he bears the surname, Mon, “mine” in French—through feelings of sympathy for the poor blacks he encounters during his odyssey. Encountering the Other as “Mine” at every step, Mon undergoes a process of personal expansion preceding his return home. At first, however, Compadre Mon takes pains to differentiate his own Dominican Self from the Haitian Other. Language and cultural codes play a central role in a dialectic of approximations and distantiations. Mon tells of a moment in which his Haitian friend gives him a bone amulet to wear in defense against danger. The Haitian claims that he himself is “in this bone” and that Mon should send him money as long as it protects him. Mon refuses the gift, returning the amulet and reminding the brujo of others “like you” imprisoned on the Dominican side. “If you cross the border,” says Mon, “you will see that we have wizards [the Spanish has fieras, beasts or fiends]/who can tell even what your grandson will die of.” The Haitian foretells of dire consequences for Mon, but Mon knows the “mourning” the Haitian already carries in his own “flesh” [carne].28 Later on, however, Mon becomes more familiar with other Haitians. For one, there is a Haitian woman. Out of lust and hunger he lives with her, but feels like a trapped mouse, restlessly thinking of tomorrow and moving on: “And it was not for the coal that in her skin burned furiously,/nor because
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of a child on the way . . . but because being there,/more for love than for stealing,/one sticks the knife [in oneself] . . . /because the sheath [vaina: also, problem, bother] is Haiti’s.” Macho Mon says goodbye, giving the woman some copper coins, saying she’ll do fine fending for herself “del pantalón” (off of pants, i.e., prostitution), making a living, if you can call it living, from “her climate and her bed.” Mon leaves his Haitian lover, reflecting cynically that her round “teardrop of love” seemed more like the dollar, dólar, than pain, dolor (pp. 141–2). The Haitian revolutionary of the poem’s next section urges Mon to take a map of Hispaniola to find his way to a caudillo, Mon’s compatriot, and kill him. Patriot Mon turns down the assignment, shouting: “mañé [the pejorative term for Haitian], you’re very mistaken/because we were born together on this island, I know,/but I won’t betray, no, the part that’s mine [que me tocó]/if I don’t have a foot in it.” Mon thus refuses to plot against the same Dominican government that sent him into exile. Mon also refuses to take up the map of the divided Hispaniola, of “one face with two colors,” that the Haitian spreads out for him; he refuses to admit “two in one in your Ethiopia: they want to give me in geography/what in blood is not here.” Despite the fact that Mon has left a mulatto son with his Haitian woman, he is something else other than Haitian, he belongs to the “half ” of the island “which is mine.” Nationalist sentiment wells up in Mon’s breast: he must “be with [ser con, as in to be identified with]” his land the way the British pirate feels toward England. He adds: Although some call all of the island “Haití,” Haiti and “Domingo” are indeed separate, different like day and night, light and dark like the peony or domino. Besides that, there was a Haitian, Boyer in 1822, who played havoc with the boundary by annexing the Dominican part: “He stepped in and he handled the half.” This geography lesson leaves Mon admitting, however, that the separateness of Santo Domingo does not save it from the legacy of sweat (sudor) and violence (la navaja, the knife) that the entire island is heir to (pp. 142–3). Other characters contribute to Mon’s growing acceptance of connections that bind together the two parts of the island. In the section “El Herrero,” Mon speaks with a Haitian neighbor, the ironsmith of the title, who reminds him, “don’t forget that once our island was a/yoke [yunta, also oxen team] with which that lawless Saxon carried two oxen and/made two sorrows one; because yesterday the moon saw us/—as it will see us tomorrow—in the same geography,/but without this company only the outsider wins” (pp. 143–4). A common oppressor united and unites the two peoples. The blacks are further symbolized, continues the ironsmith, in the laboring black who earns but a copper a day, to whom the white allows repose only in death or the dungeon, el calabozo. It was the United States
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that applied a divide-and-rule logic in the 1915–34 occupation, during which marines often treated the Haitian blacks with the same prejudice and violence meted out to African Americans. Mon reflects that negro means pobre, poor, here in Haiti, and that “the black man on earth/continues being the best ox.” And Mon will defend his ironsmith friend, not for any reason having to do with his skin, but “for something that’s inside” [en el fondo, at bottom] (pp. 145–6). The friend in the section “El Polvito,” “The Magic Powder,” offers Mon a talisman of sorts: the advice to carry a knife, along with a bit of salt to protect against zombification. He also urges Mon to speak as much French as possible (pp. 146–7). In the section that follows, entitled “Ritos,” rites or rituals, the ironsmith has brought Mon to a magical place, the Vodoun temple called houmfort or ballí, where a kind of misa negra is being celebrated. Mon there sees a pregnant woman, unclothed and dancing with snakes wrapped around her waist. This dance, explains Mon’s friend, aims to protect the unborn infant from the mal de ojo—the evil eye. Later on, he sees other ceremonies. In one, a dog is sacrificed in the making of a safeguard, called guanguá. Another ceremony reminds him of one he witnessed already in his native Cibao: it is the baquiní (Mon metathetically calls it baniquí), which is the ritual and fiesta dedicated to remembrance of a child, el angelito, who has died prematurely: “so I did not see this rite as belonging to distant lands/,” reflects Mon, taking comfort in seeing the familiar rite, “because hearing well its notes it seems that the little angel/we hear him the same on this planet, everyone . . . .” These admissions could indicate that Mon is thinking and acting more and more in a “Haitian” style, as when he saves himself from bad luck at cards by throwing out pinches of salt from his charm-bag (pp. 148–9). Another explanation could be that the stay in Haiti forces Mon to rely more than ever on a magical habit of thinking that was already there in him, as a part of Dominican custom. Mon’s Haitian odyssey continues, as does his Haitian–Dominican transformation. In his “Segunda aventura,” Mon feels troubled on seeing a Haitian man who is beating a widow accused of stealing the soul of her dead husband. Chivalrous Mon wants to save her, much as he saved the Dominican woman from rape by the cacique, but he doesn’t want to do harm to the dead husband in the process. What to do? The answer arrives when the torturer challenges Mon’s manhood: now the Dominican hero has reason to shoot him down. With two deaths now on his hands, Mon must move on once again, fleeing justice after once again committing an act of justice. Mon survives his flight through hostile Haiti because he is mistaken for a white creole, adding that, “because I spoke patois/even the bokor defended me” (pp. 150–1).
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In the section “Last Stage in Haiti,” Mon, now a fugitive from both countries’ authorities, has another Haitian encounter, one with a bokor who performs magic with a candle and keeps the heartbeat of a woman in the body of a toad. The bokor advises Mon: To gain good fortune and protection, sell your soul to the devil. Mon declines the invitation, rejecting the magical remedy, thus separating himself a bit from this darker magic. Now he receives a message in Spanish beckoning him to return home, and off he goes. Feeling “como macho enterito” (like a real or all macho) in returning to his Dominican homeland, Mon chooses to face justice at the hands of his compatriots. The first countryman he meets upon his return, however, is a self-proclaimed border guard who attempts to rob him. Mon kills the offender and dumps the body into a ditch. Later he meets an old sorceror, by implication a Haitian–Dominican, who magically cures Mon’s horse of a tick or worm that was eating its hoof. Mon offers to pay but the brujo refuses, saying Mon is del pueblo, “and I/don’t want to charge the people.” In exchange for the favor, Mon promises to save the brujo’s son from prison. Soon, however, Mon is arrested under orders of the cacique whose persecution drove him away from the country in the first place. Mon in prison makes friends with the strange metaphysician Don Pulla, who helps to confirm his opposition to the despotic caciques and prepare for his next escape. There he realizes that the Dominican who speaks criollo but does harm is “un extraño”—a stranger or outsider. Such reflections indicate that Mon’s immersion into the Haitian element has sharpened his thinking on being Dominican in a land in which a citizen can feel a foreigner, dead citizens vote in elections, and the cacique can act as “jail, commissioner and judge” (pp. 152–4). Having been “born” after his nine-month refuge in Haiti, Mon has also visited an Antillean underworld, and so returns from a kind of death, realizing that in his own country, “hay cosas que con la muerte es que empiezan a vivir” (there are things that with death begin to live) (p. 184). Mon has learned from Haiti, and although the lesson learned will not open the doors to any grand reconciliation, it will have presaged a different kind of community with the insular allies. But this “Haití” does not exhaust all the meanings of the name. Other verses of Cabral’s project the male fantasy of the Haitian mulata. She of Cabral’s “Trópico suelto” (Tropics let loose, 1942)29 belongs to a sleepless dream in which appear bone necklaces, smoke, drums, cannibals, jungles, blood, bokors, and rites; it is a “sweaty” dream that is “naked and sticky and barely absent.” The mulata thereby figures as doubly “Other”—Haitian and female—in the gaze of the desiring speaker. And whereas the “hot”
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mulata of another poem by that name was like a “fever” inside the speaker30; here, in the “loose” or unleashed tropics, the speaker tells her, “Haití trembles in your belly,” and soon thereafter he reflects, “Here is Haiti put in a female.” Haiti is hypostasized in the mulata’s body and movements: she is a “black flame,” and her song, he says, “knows the secrets that Vodoun gave you.” The poem’s last two verses have the mulata moving rhythmically against the background of drums as she once again becomes an ambivalent or dreamlike figure of presence and absence: for “against the silence of their hoarse noises/the naked negress seems a voice.” The Haiti of Cabral’s poem speaks as a voice: a mysterious presence and objectification of desire, betokening otherness, but in the Spanish language and from a distinctly Dominican perspective. Surprised by Poetry It was during the last years of the Second World War that Dominican poets sought an opening, a new start for poetry beyond the narrow borders of nationalism: they searched for this opening in profound interiority, in panAmericanism, and in a universal culture. Midway in the Trujillo era, looking out beyond the horizon of dictatorship, appeared the first numbers of La Poesía Sorprendida, the Dominican literary journal dedicated to creating a culture of free creativity, but by “the path of evasion.”31 The editors of the journal were Franklin Mieses Burgos, Freddy Gatón Arce, Mariano Lebrón Saviñón, and Alberto Baeza Flores. Although the sociopolitical impact of such a poetic breakthrough would be difficult to gauge—it always is— La Poesía Sorprendida contested the dominant paradigm by proposing a more inclusive poetry, one unfettered by the unthinking chavinisms of the preceding indianismo, costumbrismo, and modernismo. As declared in the manifesto published in the initial number, dated October 1943, We are for a national poetry nourished in the universal, the only proper form of being; with the classics of yesterday, today and tomorrow; with the creation without limits, without borders and permanent; and with the mysterious world of humankind, universal, secret, solitary and intimate, always.32
Reveling in the free flight of words, affirming a sense of a timeless tradition, making its humanist cosmopolitan appeal to an international readership, La Poesía Sorprendida offered balm to the aching republic weary of dictatorship and foreign control. Not for nothing did the editors in the December 1943 issue declare, parenthetically, that “(Art is the only thing
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that not even the businessmen have managed to subject to the tyranny of the watch).”33 The February 1944 number of La Poesía Sorprendida (No. V) made its nod to the “Tiempo de cien años,” or the time of one hundred years in the issue’s title, without other explicit reference to the centenary of Dominican independence. It appealed instead to what is universal and essential in human nature, “the truth of the complete man.”34 Boldly, in the light of the prevailing anti-Haitianism, this number included translations of poems by the Haitians Roussan Camille, Clement Magloire-Fils, and Hérard C. L. Roy. The inclusion of Haitian poets did not effect a dismantling of hallowed ethnocentrisms, of course, but the transcendent embrace of La Poesía Sorprendida’s centennial issue constituted a literary attempt, though implicit and indefinite, to reconsider the Haitian: as human, as writer, as fellow of the insular community. The Last Frontier Manuel Rueda taught music at the Conservatorio Nacional de Santo Domingo. He later directed the Instituto de Investigaciones Folklóricas at the Universidad Nacional Pedro Henríquez Ureña. Rural Cibao figures in Rueda’s poetry, as it did in the poetry of Freddy Gatón Arce and Manuel del Cabral before him. Rueda was born in 1921 in Montecristi, the arid borderland region that Hazard in 1873 believed could become the “perfect paradise” if it had more water for irrigation. Rueda’s “Cantos de la Frontera” (Songs of the Border) together form a long part of the book La criatura terrestre (The terrestrial creature, 1963). The cantos sing from between cultures and societies, and the lyrics offer a radical analysis of the insular dilemma as they seek out reconciliation in the myth of an integral past. In his foreword to the series of poems that make up the collection, Rueda explains their significance for him (p. 25): These Songs of the Border have remained closely linked to my concerns as problems of grave consequence, both geographic and spiritual. The border, our border, has been fusing itself gradually to the life and feeling of our people, who carry it deep within their concern. It is a real line that divides in two, in addition to the earth, the spiritual liberty of the islander. If one may properly speak of an “island mentality,” it is also true that there exists a “border mentality” before which our most urgent necessities of expression are dashed to bits. [Italicized in the original.]
The border mentality of which Rueda speaks has dominated Dominican thought ever since boucanier and filibustier set foot on Tortuga; which is to
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say, ever since the people of Santo Domingo began to see themselves as a people distinct from those they saw as trespassers and usurpers. What Rueda attempts in the cantos is to find an alternative to the division and the incomprehension perpetuated by the border mentality. Rueda’s positive contribution, in the words of Alcántara Almánzar, consists of an “effort at demystification” and an “explicit condemnation of an unjustified separation.”35 Rueda’s alternative perspective offers a new reading of the east–west dilemma. That perspective belongs to the individual of the borderlands, the rayano who, like Rueda himself, belongs to either side of the line—la raya—and to neither. Living in the frontier zone, the rayano bears in his own being and body the pain of separation. Yet with that pain goes the hope of a future dissolution of antagonisms and a promise of healing. Rueda declares his article of faith as follows (p. 25): we have in the rayano, that indecisive type who always fluctuated between two adjacent countries, lacking the strength to decide for either one, an extraordinary symbol of our land, single [única] and undivided until man marked it with the necessary opprobrium of a line. [Italicized in the original.]
For Alcántara Almánzar, Rueda’s poem strikes at the rationale for separation by searching for the bases of a sense of commonality and brotherhood across the politico-ethnic barrier. Authoritarian governments, both colonial and postcolonial, and not the nations, bear the weight of responsibility for maintaining the division and the antagonisms it engenders. Alcántara Almánzar correctly states, “At bottom, the Haitian and the Dominican become siblings [se hermanan] for many reasons: because their genealogical origin is common, because both are victims of the exploitation of humans by humans, because they have endured tyrannical governments supported by a parasitic class, etc.”36 Rueda’s borderlands genealogy reveals furthermore the Afro-Haitian dimension of the Dominican experience. This dimension contains a “source of deep meditation,”37 an intimate otherness in which lies the key to Hispaniola’s amalgamate identity. “Cantos de la frontera” seizes upon the figure of the line itself as an artifice or fiction laid cruelly upon the dreams of humanity; the series of poems express a search for its meaning, but in order to imagine what existed before the lines, what lies behind or beyond the division. The whole section begins with an evocation (p. 37): There where the Artibonite runs distributing leaves there is a line, an end, a barrier of dark and light stone that infinite soldiers patrol and never cease to guard.
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That is, infinite soldiers recorren: they scout, watch, police, and overrun the line. The unnatural division enforces the natural markers of the leafcarrying Artibonite: the barrier of dark and light stone is crossed by the uncoiling “meditative” reptile whose presence betokens “a habit of death.” What was once whole has been split apart. Among the terrestrial creatures, a bird can fly freely back and forth across the division, a privilege denied to humans by maps and guardposts and their own border mentality. Yet the poet’s imagination takes him beyond the border and past the limits of the familiar, to be embraced by otherness (p. 37): Let us go to the end, let us go to the edge of the earth to dance with the secret maidens who love us in dreams.
So the listener or reader is beckoned toward the outer edge, or borde, which is also the verge, margin, fringe, or brink of some mystery. The edge is at the same time a door that opens to an oneiric space where dance las doncellas secretas, figures perhaps of a psychic fulfillment or mystical re-union. The Line and the Pyramid In his prologue to Máximo Avilés Blonda’s collection of plays, Héctor Incháustegui Cabral finds in Pirámide 179 (1968) “[a]n intent to examine our arguments and its arguments. That is: an effort to prove that, at least in the theses, we Haitians and Dominicans are mistaken every time we pose the problem of the border that separates us or rather that of the coexistence [convivencia] to which geography obliges us.”38 What arguments, what mistake, what problem of the border? These questions go to the heart of the Haitian– Dominican problematic, the point counterpoint fugue of the border itself. With Pirámide 179, Avilés Blonda has written an avant-garde drama that displays something of the absurdist vision of Ionesco, the metatheater of Pirandello, and the “epic,” engaged drama of Brecht.39 Avilés Blonda’s introductory didascalia describe the significant object named in the play’s title and merits citation (p. 137): Pyramid 179 is not geometrically a pyramid. It is a bourn or landmark situated on the very border line that divides the Dominican Republic from the Republic of Haiti. It was constructed, as others, with different numbers along the line, on the occasion of marking the limits established in the Border Treaty of 1929.
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It is of a white color always renewed, with black letters and numbers of a bright black color. It signals a division and for this reason they make it stand out [lo destacan]. On the one side is written 179 RD and on the other 179 RH 1929. Thorny plants surround it. Aridity and silence. A few fugitives passing by, sometimes a shot by accident or intentionally, some lost goats and the strong military guard [custodia] to the East and to the West of the bourn or landmark. The residents [vecinos] of the place, on this side of the line, call it “The Pyramid.”
The play begins, and actors wheel in four towers, placing the two taller ones upstage and the two shorter ones apart from one another en primer plano. Now, the actors are ready to begin their “rehearsal” of the play. The division itself is marked with a “rag,” and the Pyramid, “a furnishing that simulates a great block of stone with the number 179,” will be lowered from above. The Director will sit, a mock divinity, upon that structure. A fishbowl will simulate the river, presumably the Massacre-Dajabón (pp. 152–3). Stagecraft is exhibited as such: its self-referring realness evokes the artificiality of the geopolitical itself. The Director then reads the opening narration, a Quisqueyan genesis tale (p. 155): And God created the earth, and in the center of a bright blue sea He put an island to be a point of expiation in the world. Effects of light and sound. And God, thinking profoundly, divided the island. The sound of the military (marching?), and chains. And God availed Himself of men for it. He used the treaties of men for it. The papers signed by men to divide the island. And He made use of the arms of men. And of the carelessness of some men and of the trade declared illegal by some.
And so it was in the beginning, with business and diplomacy, and diplomacy by other means, that the division was drawn and enforced. The Director continues narrating: we are reminded that some tried to reunite the island and “love one another as brothers”; vain endeavor, for they were only humans, and they had been placed, after all, “on an island of expiation.” God in His inscrutable wisdom produced everything needed to maintain the founding separation: hostile governments, ancient rancors,
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“wounds that seemed scars,” plus the assistance of the Princes of the North (p. 156): And God saw that it was no good and he persisted in his experiment [or test, prueba].
The Black Actor will later on voice his fear: “I think sometimes that the Great God in the night sits down on [the Pyramid] to have fun with us, with our dreams . . .” (p. 175). Someone does sit atop the pyramid at night and plays a drum, but in reality he is a soldier who keeps guard from his post on the line (p. 178). The symbolism is apt, for the army of either side benefits from patrolling and exploiting the border. When the Third Actor makes gestures toward the Black Actor from afar on the opposite side of the line, the Black Soldier expresses his consternation: trouble begins with a look, then a word, and then an action, he says to another soldier, because “That is the beginning of a plot against our security, yours and mine. The hate must be maintained. Without hate there are no armies and without armies we don’t get paid” (p. 196). Yet nationalist hatred and division, the dialogue reveals, mask a deeper contradiction: the antagonism of class interests. Border issues distract the Dominican masses from their own victimization, which is doubled by that of the Haitian masses. The Third Actor declares, “Poverty is the same everywhere, bitter fruit of exploitation. That pyramid and that line [raya] . . . divide the land, but not the misery of people” (p. 168). To illustrate the point, the Black Actor and the Black Actress perform a sort of “Haitian” tableau vivant displaying a shack and rags and the drawing of water from the river (p. 170). The same Black Actor will soon repeat the lament he earlier sang, that he will never return to Guinea, but he looks hopefully to the east, beyond the soldiers and the towers and the looming pyramid, from whence beckons the mirage of a better life among the people of “the hills of the other side” (p. 175). Those on the near side would like to cross over, and they want their child to “breathe better air,” and there are “organizations,” like that led by “Moisé” (i.e., Moses, or possibly one of Toussaint’s officers), to help them in their struggle. But the “terrible” division marked by the pyramid separates a “we” from a “they,” if the migrants undertake the journey “of us to them or of them to us.” But neither this fundamental distinction, the Black Actor reflects, nor the idea of “journey” makes any sense once “we” and “they” are confounded: “Journey? Who arrived first? To subsist. All one . . .” (p. 173). Still, the sentinels of the border stand watch at their posts, and they belong to a different class of men who stick together, drink together, and together
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hunt the birds that civilians are forbidden to hunt (p. 191). The Black Soldier states his mission: “to discover any enemy of the national sovereignty,” and the enemy includes the clandestine organizations or brotherhoods formed with the intent to breach the barrier (p. 192). The same soldier reflects on the sadness of the young man who decides to stay on the Haitian side: “It’s probably the Pyramid that makes people sad. It reminds us more of our misery. The throne of God when he plays the drum. That sound makes us sad. They say that that’s like the sound made by the horses of the coach of death” (p. 198). Death, from whose bourn no traveler returns, consummates the terrible, god-like power of the state. Avilés Blonda’s Brechtian de-realization exposes the scaffolding of this “naturalized” construct of nationhood formed of enmity; through the self-referring mechanism of its metatheatrical artifice, the play raises consciousness as it dismantles a constructed reality. The stakes are high in this performance: the real consequence of the construct is war: “War of yours against mine./War of mine against yours” (p. 198). What comes after the wars, when there is no war? The answer reveals the deepest desire of the play, voiced by the chorus (p. 201): When what is mine is the brother to what is yours, when what is yours is the brother to what is mine and what is mine is yours, and what is yours is mine, then there won’t be any mine, nor yours, but only an enjoyment of everything for everybody.
Calling for a new law of solidarity to replace the old law of separation, the actors as Haitians and Dominicans imagine an end to the division—of territories and private properties. The pyramid should disappear, as should “every object that separates people” (p. 201), not only because it engenders inequalities and antagonisms, but also because it maintains the domination of elites and officers. Yet the drumming continues to sound from atop the structures. The Black Actor has to shout the “great word,” the “prohibited word,” to those within earshot on the other side of the line. That word is hermano, brother. For that crime of treason or heresy, the Black Soldier has to shoot him (p. 201). The time comes for wrapping up the rehearsal. Surmounting fiction and representation, the chorus of actors noisily climbs the towers, then descends and exits. The Director, left alone on stage, says good night; a slow curtain comes down (p. 205). The order has only temporarily been disrupted: the towers and the central pyramid remained standing, ready
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for the return of actors and director. Yet a strange inversion has just occurred: the actors have thrown off their masks and roles to become “real people,” whereas the real people of the audience have yet to “find their destiny,” which would consist of losing a scripted and assigned identity, casting off divisive habits of thought, and deciding to free everything for the enjoyment of everybody.
Dominican–Haitian Counterpoint José Alcántara Almánzar, sociologist, essayist, and prolific writer, is Profesor de Hombre y Sociedad at the Instituto Tecnológico de Santo Domingo. He holds a second position as Cultural Director of the Banco Nacional, where he directs operations of the library and administers cultural productions and awards. Insight on Dominican culture and its relation to Haiti is conveyed in several of Alcántara Almánzar’s stories collected in Las máscaras de la seducción (1983). “The Officiant” has to do with Afro-Dominican or Haitian–Dominican characters; “Travelers” shows the activities of Dominicans in Haiti; and “He and She at the End of an Afternoon” examines the persistence of anti-Haitianism in Santo Domingo. In “The Officiant,” Alcántara Almánzar evokes some of the particulars of African-based religion practiced in Dominican society, with the effect of illuminating the African dimension of Dominican culture. Toñita, who is black and “thick of nose and lip,” lives in a dark, squalid room dominated by an altar on which chromolithographs of the saints and figures of African divinities represent her “allies.” The air of these quarters, heavy with the odor of pigeon dung, tobacco stubs, and coconut oil, carries the sound of a song, played on a jukebox in the vicinity, that is dedicated to the Yoruba god Changó. Toñita, we read, makes love to Magino within these four walls; she holds power over Magino through magic arts; she pleads with Santa Marta, “madre mía,” to keep Magino by her side, for he has threatened to abandon Toñita now for the third time. She has offered the saint her favorite foods, which include unsalted sweet potato and herring. She has also invoked the snake that Santa Marta wears wrapped around her, one that could wind itself around her lover’s body, insinuating itself in her own serpentine embrace. Magino, for his part, condemns Toñita’s brujería, tells her to abandon it, smashes her sacred portraits, beats her up, and flees, as if to contradict and yet affirm the message of another jukebox song: “María Cristina me quiere gobernar/y yo le sigo, le sigo la corriente/porque no quiero que diga
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la gente/que María Cristina me quiere gobernar” (María Cristina wants to control me, and I go along and humor her, because I don’t want people to to say that María Cristina wants to control me) (p. 68). What’s going on here? The story tells of sex, control, manipulation, and acquiescence, all wrapped up in magic. The serpent and Santa Marta, with the intercession of Saint Cyprian, may bring back Magino, who will submit in order to prove, precisely, that he is not under Toñita’s control. Or maybe not. The story thus accounts for Afro-Dominican practices among members, here represented, of the lowest class of Dominicans, for whom magic provides a source of comfort and perhaps a certain limited empowerment within its cultural context. Although the connection with Haiti and Haitians remains indefinite to the end, the story at least expresses a concern with a body of practices that ties Dominican culture to Haitian religious tradition. Alcántara Almánzar’s “Travelers” takes us along the journey to Haiti of two Dominicans, a recently married couple expecting their first baby. They are carrying a hidden package and letters—why, we don’t know yet— but in the meantime we see Port-au-Prince through their eyes. Crowds of the homeless line the Boulevard Jean-Jacques Dessalines, some placing cardboards and newspapers on the sidewalk where they will spend the night. More unsettling, however, are the unidentified men who follow the wife and husband through the dark streets. They continue onward, passing Albert Mangones’ statue of Le Marron Inconnu, whose figure seems to rise up in the plaza, with one hand raising the lambi-conch in a frozen call to rebellion, the other hand grasping a machete in readiness for revolt. The couple go down to the docks, meet their Haitian contacts, and finally reveal their mission: “We had to deliver the letters of the exiled Haitians to Françoise and Michel and to Denise the novels of Alexis and Roumain that Marta had sewn in the lining of her skirt.”40 Thus we are reminded, the Dominican Republic provided refuge to expatriated Haitians, and proscripted writings can return from exile as well. The novels could be the aforementioned Gouverneurs de la Rosée of Jacques Roumain (1944) and also Mon Compère Général Soleil by Jacques Stephen Alexis (1955). The word of liberation defies the Duvalierist censorship and comes in from the other side of the border. Literature and letters create ties of solidarity and indict the dictatorship. In the story “He and She at the End of an Afternoon,” the otherwise unnamed central characters, homeless people, dark-skinned and shabby, make love in a Dominican park. That is, they are minding their own business, enjoying one another’s warmth, but passers-by pronounce disgust, throw rocks and bottles, curse the loving couple. A dog barks; someone yells, “The pervert [maldito] is Haitian, we have to get him!”41
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A chase ensues; she is apprehended; he flees, uncomprehending, and his flight recalls the time of slavery and posses: “He doesn’t understand why he almost doesn’t feel pain, why he has not fallen in the middle of the road, riddled with bullets, perforated like a runaway [cimarrón] in the solitude of the mountain.”42 The mob beats up the vagrant, calls him a murderer, wants to take him to the police station or “lynch him right there.” It is then the man awakes: the attack was just part of a nightmare; a guard is growling, “Dirty black bum . . . Get your ass outta’ here [con tu cuero].”43 Though only a dream, the incident recapitulated, if satirically, the history of marronage, the marginalization of both Haitian and Dominican poor, and the anti-Haitian, anti-African aversion that fired up the mob. If Alcántara Almánzar has expressed an openness to the cultural ties between Haitians and Dominicans in the first two stories discussed above, this last story reveals a compassion for one who could be Haitian or Dominican or both: the runaway’s ethnicity is indeterminate, but not his pain and poverty. Indeed, these stories suggest, a condition of perpetual hurt and exile seems the norm of Haitian–Dominican experience. The post-1937 Dominican literature on this condition carries us along, one could say, with Alcántara Almánzar’s contraband-bearing couples, straight into the borderlands, smuggling in goods to destabilize an already shaky economy of signs. Crossing the line takes us back into the pays-arrière of la marronage culturelle, which for Haitian writer René Depestre meant a resistance to the hegemonic culture and self-defense against racist discourse.44 Such flights (of imagination) challenge the ethnic and national boundaries, and the powers that set them in place. In Marrero Aristy’s indictment of the plantation, in Cabral’s incursion into Haiti, in Avilés Blonda’s testing of limits, and in Rueda’s rayano music: in all these fictional encounters we find, once again, new imaginings of an insular community, one that embraces its own Otherness. Not surprisingly, these articulate visions wheel us back into the semi-familiar borderlands of la Poesía Sorprendida: “creation without limits, without borders and permanent; and with the mysterious world of humankind, universal, secret, solitary and intimate, always.”
Chapter 8
Searching Out the Boundary, 1986–2003
So if anti-Haitianism and anti-Dominicanism have in good measure been the result of past colonialist activity and present imperialist activity, both peoples should bury all the prejudices that have kept them divided for the sake of foreign interests, in order to begin to confer on establishing a real and effective peaceful coexistence on which they could concert positive and beneficial bilateral relations. —María Elena Muñoz, Las Relaciones Domínico–Haitianas 1 Krèyon pèp pa gen gonm (The people’s pencil has no eraser). —Haitian proverb 2
n an address before the United Nations General Assembly on 27 September 1991, Haitian president-in-exile Jean-Bertrand Aristide, speaking in Spanish, denounced the violation of Haitians’ rights in the Dominican Republic. On 14 June of that year, said Aristide, Haitians in the Dominican Republic were subjected to a brutal campaign of repatriations: mass arrests, detentions, and deportations were unilaterally mobilized against them without due regard for identity verification. No such treatment can be tolerated between neighbors, asserted the Haitian president; Haiti and the Dominican Republic should respect one another, for they are “two wings of the same bird, two nations that share the beautiful island of Hispaniola.” He concluded his speech with the message,
I
Hearing the voice of all the victims whose rights are trampled, engaged in respecting human rights despite the social problems and financial
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difficulties created by this forceful repatriation, we must respect both wings of the bird.3
What provoked this call for respect was Presidential Decree 233-91, by which President Joaquín Balaguer, on 13 June, ordered repatriation of all foreign nationals working in the Dominican canefields who were 16 years or younger, and 60 years or older. From Avenida Duarte in Santo Domingo to the streets of San Pedro de Macorís and Boca Chica, the Dominican armed forces rounded up a total of about 50,000, including many Dominican-born “Haitians,” never mind their years of residency, and transported them westward across the border. With this sweep, authorities separated families and confiscated considerable private property. Balaguer justified the edict: he did as Trujillo before him, ridding the republic of the foreign menace. Coffee, tobacco, and cacao growers of the Northwest Line protested the deportation of braceros in the press. Their removal was regretted not only in the agricultural sector, but also in public and private construction enterprises.4 In addition to the injury and offense of the round-ups, the forced return of so many to Haiti swelled the already large numbers of the country’s unemployed, further destabilizing an already shaky political situation.5 The denunciations did not stop there: Aristide accused the Dominican government of permitting that Haitians work and live under conditions resembling those of slavery. Soon after these charges had been made, the U.S. trade representative placed under review the Dominican Republic’s qualification for favored trade status certification under the Generalized System of Preferences (GSP). Aristide’s advocacy for the expatriate Haitians gravely jeopardized the Dominican economy; Dominican leaders and elites did what they could to discredit the Haitian president-in-exile, whose defense of human rights, respected leadership of the grassroots movement Lavalas (for “cleansing flood”), and espousal of liberation theology gave credence to his denunciation. Balaguer’s cabinet responded to Aristide’s protests with a barrage of invective against his movement and his character. Even some of Balaguer’s Dominican opponents joined in the common defense of the national interest by statements that derogated and defamed Aristide. Such clashes between the heads of state of the two countries have proved the exception to the rule during the last century. As Ernesto Sagás (1994) correctly points out, diplomatic relations between the two countries have generally appeared “non-confrontational and sometimes even cordial.” Diplomatic accord did not entail benevolence, however, toward the working masses of either country. The harsh treatment of Haitian laborers in Dominican agriculture and industries has belied this apparent
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harmony, a fact underscored by the borderland killings of October 1937. Collusion between the two countries’ governments has signified moreover a shared, not-so-benign neglect of Haitian pro-democratic movements. Indeed, “the Dominican government has been indifferent to and not supportive of democratic change in Haiti,” viewing such movements as potential threats to the Dominican national security.6 Underlying this indifference are the gross inequalities that characterize the two countries: respect is found wanting in their economic imbalance. As their shared history reveals, their inequality has had an economic utility for each nation’s elites: those with a stake in the exploitation of cheap labor and the suppression of dissent have an interest in maintaining the separation and asymmetry of the two countries. Is greater respect possible? Can a relationship of rational and mutually beneficial cooperation be established between the two republics? Can they collaborate in a way that takes advantage of their differences for the good of all their citizens? Aristide’s U.N. address revealed the painful contradiction that has existed between diplomatic arrangements and domestic practice. Already in the year 2002, in its condition of near-complete failure, Haiti is looking to the Dominican Republic for assistance, seeking to build a new kind of mutually advantageous relationship with its neighbor. Recent developments have shown some positive signs. In the Summit of the Americas held in spring 2001, President George W. Bush refused to confer with Aristide. Dominican President Hipólito Mejía broke the deadlock: he requested that Bush see him in a joint meeting that included the Haitian president. Only then, through Mejía’s mediation, did Bush and Aristide finally meet to talk. Such rapprochements, though seemingly minor, suggest the limitations of the one-country focus of previous research. In his book La Isla Como Es (1985), Rafael EmilioYunén rejects the Dominican scholarship that has perceived the republic as an entity separate from Haiti. Yunén finds the “study of the half-island” to be no better than a “half-study,” one whose artificially narrow scope blocks the understanding of shared problems and the finding of shared solutions. Similar limitations distort the study of the “site”—read plantation, border, industrial complex, assembly plant, etc.— as opposed to the more encompassing analysis of a dynamic “situation” enmeshed in a network of relations dominated by metropolitan centers and international capital. Rather than to focus on the half-island or the site, the study of the insular dimensions of the crisis requires a grasp of Hispaniola’s complexly articulated duality and its transnational situatedness, whereby intra-insular linkages are accounted for in their relation to
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each country’s “internal articulation” of activities.7 International capital supports the authoritarian ideology that has dominated the politics of either country, seeing in the strongman rule the promise of stability and protection needed to assure a sound return on investments. There are compelling reasons on the Dominican side to support Haitian dictators, even in contradiction to the official code of anti-Haitianism: the centralized control of migration continues to facilitate the opening of channels for a flourishing contraband trade and for a continuing supply of Haitian labor when needed in agriculture and construction.8 Continuing dependence on Haitian labor is undeniable. The need originates in a relative scarcity of Dominican labor that persists despite a 30 percent unemployment rate in the receiver country and with an even higher rate of 40 percent in the same country’s rural sectors.9 This of course is not the first instance in which need has joined Santo Domingo with Haiti. Preceding chapters have illustrated how the unique symbiosis connecting the two countries has sustained a virtual insular system: whatever impacts the one will impact the other, as it was since the French privateers landed on Tortuga. Since the late nineteenth century, the débâcle of the Haitian state has been tied to the progress and eventual ascendancy of the Dominican Republic. The fact of this connection suggests the possibility of a more progressive complementarity. Should the more successful of the two countries resolve to help the other, such help could take on the form of a tutelary role involving the giving or lending of needed economic and technological support. Although there are those among the intelligentsias of either nation who view the prospect of conciliation with disdain, the background of Haitian–Dominican relations provides numerous precedents for the finding of transnational solutions to the crisis. Articulations and interdependencies are already a fact, since for thousands of Haitians, migration provides the way to employment in the Dominican Republic as well as an escape valve for the pressures created by overpopulation and land scarcity at home. During the 1990s, some 30,000 Haitians were entering the Dominican Republic each year, and about half that number were repatriated. Some 15,000 Haitians who remained from the previous 20 years would make a total of 250,000–300,000 emigrés, and these would join the estimated 100,000 Dominican-born of Haitian parents. The presencia haitiana in Dominican society could therefore involve, by this reckoning, some 350,000–400,000 persons of Haitian descent, whether born in Haiti or in the Dominican Republic. In addition to the sugar industry, Haitian labor has gone to Dominican construction, as in the highway projects, the beautification of the capital, and the building, among other edifications, of the monumental Columbus Lighthouse,
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intended to commemorate the quincentennial of the Encounter. In the agricultural sector, Haitians can be seen harvesting not just sugar but also coffee, tobacco, and rice.10 The persistence of economic problems pushing this eastward stream of labor suggests that only a program of accelerated development and education, one that would counteract patterns of primitive economy and unchecked demographic expansion, would remove the pressures that Haitian emigration poses for Dominican society. With its comparative advantage, the receiver country could find the resources to do so. The Dominican per capita income of $3,070 in 1998 dwarfs even the Haitian average of $870 by four times (but note that the Dominican average would constitute only a fourteenth part of the U.S. per capita of $27,500). Haiti has little in the way of resources other than a burgeoning population. Its little mineral wealth comprises bauxite, copper ore, manganese, and lignite, but development of deposits has rendered so little profit as to discourage future exploitation. Haiti’s neighbor seems to have been favored by its greater endowment of minerals, which include nickel, bauxite, and some gold and silver.11 Owing to the Dominican Republic’s dependence on Haitian labor, the imbalance has produced conditions in which Haiti’s most profitable export is indeed Haitians. The continuing Haitian crisis thus involves the Dominican Republic, but it implicates the United States for its support of dictatorship, for its tolerance of human rights violations, for its willingness to sacrifice freedom for the sake of stability and profits. Created or exacerbated in great part by U.S. intervention, the crisis calls for a new American stance toward Haiti: one that would respect the people’s struggle to establish democracy and allow the increased involvement of the Dominican Republic in a new working relationship. A more rational intervention, respectful of the people’s demand for economic and political justice, could help to effect a break in the circle of underdevelopment, dependency, dictatorship, and corruption, and it could lend support for establishing the kinds of government and civil institutions that could steer policy towards a just equilibrium.12 In the meantime, disequilibrium prevails. Continued exploitation of the Haitian laborers already working in the east has drawn condemnation against the corporations hiring them in hotel construction and sugar production. In its protest statement, the Québécois Committee for the Rights of Haitian Workers urged a 1988 boycott of the Dominican tourist resorts. The U.N. Human Rights Committee faulted the Dominicans for delaying to report on conditions on the plantations. Americas Watch, Caribbean Rights, and the National Coalition for Haitian Refugees denounced the standard employment practices as “enslavement” and called for the divestment of
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$200 million by the United States in preferential trade benefits until the work and living conditions of the braceros had been improved. Still, there was money to be made in Dominikana; some of it kept flowing back to the homeland as remittances constituting a major source of income. Two years after the Duvaliers’ departure, an estimated $64 million came into Haiti from the Dominican Republic.13 With such interdependencies in mind, Muñoz (1995) correctly states that the “superstructural frame” that integrates countries into multinational blocs is not nationalities, but rather markets. Although “national identity and consciousness, by their own nature, cannot be negotiable”— in the sense that they have their own dynamic coherence—they do have functions within the nation-state system articulated by economics and migration.14 Contradictory processes occur at such a time: the state loses much of its meaning as the representative of national identity and community; the state gains in its instrumental function as a mediator of transnational and global exchanges. And in the case of Hispaniola, both nation and state of one country draw their strength from a comparative advantage over those of the other country. Advantages bring mixed blessings, however. The Dominican economy needs Haitian labor, but because of that need, the Dominican economy, as well as the Haitian, remains at a backward, pre-industrial stage. Some would view such a detrimental interdependence as “dysfunctional” and call, again, for a more rational and progressive joining of forces. Public opinion on rapprochement is divided, however. In the interviews conducted by Sagás in the 1990s, conservative Dominicans expressed divergent views on the question of trade with Haiti. Those he characterized as “nationalists” among the conservatives rejected the idea of trade with the insular neighbor; those conservatives with more entrepreneurial orientations, however, agreed with the liberal view, that trade with Haiti made good business sense.15 Not only economic need, but political upheaval has compelled thousands of Haitians to go into voluntary exile. In February 1986, the popular anti-Duvalierist uprising called Operation Dechoukaj (“Uprooting”) went into full force. Macoutes were the principal targets, many of them dragged out into the streets to be beaten and mutilated by angry mobs, when they were not “necklaced” with an automobile tire that was ignited, a punishment and death sentence that acquired the name Père Lebrun. Jean-Claude’s removal from the presidency and hurried departure from Port-au-Prince in the midst of the tumult signaled a breakthrough in the political history of the island. Yet the violence did not cease after Jean-Claude’s departure: more than 4,000 were killed in the terror that followed. Political bosses whose word was law controlled their “zones” in the provinces.
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Bodies, bloody from bullet or machete wounds, littered the streets.16 It was the horror of continued bloodshed that moved the Haitian citizenry to listen to Aristide, whose words of reconciliation brought hope to a people weary of violence. Hopes remained high that democracy would take root when, in December 1990, the United States allowed free elections in Haiti, backing former World Bank official Marc Bazin. The winner nonetheless, with 67 percent of the vote, was Father Jean-Bertrand Aristide. Once inaugurated, Aristide got busy: he launched a program to reorganize and rehabilitate the country. He stimulated investment; he increased foreign exchange reserves, from next to nothing up to $12 million; he reduced the foreign debt; he reformed the customs agency; he fought corruption, downsized the bureaucracy, declared war on contraband and narcotrafficking. His commitment to “empowerment of the poor” won him increased devotion among the Haitian masses. The same commitment, however, won him the enmity of the elites and the distrust of the anticommunists.17 Foremost on “Titid’s” agenda of social reform was a purging of the dreaded army, because, as the political priest once put it in a 1990 homily, Pwason toujou kòmense pouri nan tet (The fish always starts to rot in the head).18 Shortly after Aristide’s election, violence broke out between the pro-Lavalas factions and their opponents. Military discontents, outraged by the purging, staged a coup led by Lieutenant General Raoul Cédras on 30 September 1991 that sent Aristide into exile.19 Later that year, Joaquín Balaguer was elected to the Dominican presidency for his fourth term. During this administration, when the Haitian presidency was occupied briefly by each of a series of presidents, Balaguer acted with circumspection, wary of taking any action that could provoke mass migrations into his country. The migratory outflow did in fact decrease during the interim between Jean-Claude’s ouster and Aristide’s election, but a complex interplay of forces resulted afterwards in record numbers of Haitians departing their native land. An analysis of these forces is telling in what it reveals about recent developments in the Haitian–Dominican counterpoint.20
A Tierra Morena Vengo Demand for Haitian labor in the Dominican economy fluctuated according to both political and economic factors during the 1980s. By a series of agreements struck early in the decade between the two governments, Haitian braceros were transported as needed to the state and privatesector plantations. Yet the desire to stem the flow of Haitians to the east in the mid-1980s probably motivated the termination of a project to build
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a highway to Haiti, begun in Las Matas and extending only for 20 miles toward the border. The Haitian labor supply was in fact cut short in 1986, during the turmoil that forced Jean-Claude out of office. To fill the need, the Dominican military rounded up Haitian workers and took them to cut the cane.21 As an indication of the industry’s dependence on this source of manpower, the 1990 cut-off of Haitian labor had left the Dominican sugar industry so strapped that the CEA zafra of that year fell short 304,000 tons of its objective, followed by a shortfall of 35,000 tons the next year.22 Due to the cut-off, the Dominican Republic had received only an estimated 450 exiles and refugees from Haiti. The need was critical: recruiters sought to fill the vacuum left by the outflow of Dominicans seeking employment in other countries. Of the middle-level Dominican workers, some 15,000 went to Venezuela, and more than 900,000 Dominicans all told were living in the United States. That made for one in eight Dominicans living there. The relative scarcity of workers called for major readjustments in the labor structure, compelling the enclave industries to look overseas for technical specialists, to Haiti again for low-cost labor, and to the Dominican rural sectors for workers to labor in urban-based manufacturing or services. Indeed, the vacuum effect produced by the mass displacement of Dominican workers was sucking in replacements from elsewhere.23 Further into the 1990s the influx of Haitians periodically rushed in to fill up the vacuum left by the exodus. This flow continued on northward to the United States, swelling the U.S. Dominican population toward the million mark, with around 60 percent of them concentrated in the New York City area. The remittances of money sent from the United States back to the native republic added up to a yearly total of about $1 billion.24 A scarcity of land on the Haitian side continues to push peasants toward the east and to the north. Subdivision of each subsistence plot among family heirs, continuous since the nineteenth century, has reduced the size of each holding. The average size of a farm in the 1940s and 1950s, according to Haitian geographer Georges Anglade (1990), was a maximum 1 or 2 hectares. In the 1990s, the division of holdings diminished to half a hectare, with much of it difficult to farm.25 According to the 1986 report of the Port-au-Prince-based Fédération des Amis de la Nature (FAN), some 75 percent of Haiti’s land is mountainous, with about a third of it sloping at more than 20º. Columbus was correct in comparing the island to a crumpled-up piece of paper. FAN also reports that “33 percent of the country is either extremely eroded, or abandoned, or sterile, or lost forever.”26 With plenty of reason to depart the impoverished countryside, peasants migrating to the national capital in search of a living have raised the
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urban concentration to unprecedented levels. The number of Haitians in Port-au-Prince has multiplied 10 times over the last 50 years, bringing its population to over 1.5 million. The provincials arrive at a rate of 100,000 per year, only to have to settle in the unhygienic bidonvilles, the shantytowns of the peripheric zones surrounding the urban center. In both city and shantytown, life is generally nasty, brutish, and short. The urban house generally lacks a basic water supply and sanitation. Children living there are probably undernourished, and whole families suffer from tuberculosis and parasitic diseases. Males may expect to live to an average maximum of 43 years; females, 47. Under such conditions, one feels the push to look elsewhere, beyond the borders of the country, for a better place.27 The proportions of the Haitian socioeconomic crisis are extreme. In the 1980s and 1990s, the “predatory state” (Arthur and Dash, 1999) siphoned off surplus and made token gestures of investment in public works. In a society plagued by grotesque inequalities of income and assets, 5 million people of a total 7.2 million suffered under the conditions of grinding poverty. More than 3.6 million had no access to health care and only about two million could get potable water. One of 10 Haitians had to rely on the food provided by international relief agencies just to stay alive. Indeed, “Haiti has the worst health indicators, the lowest school enrolment and the highest illiteracy rates in the continent.”28 Unemployment is compounded by underemployment, with industries simply not paying enough wages for a decent living. In the sugar industry, for instance, prices are driven down by competition among the three sugar-producing sectors of state, private capital, and the multinationals. Multiple factors working to keep salaries down include disorganization, inappropriate technology, corruption, the instability of international markets, unhealthy conditions in the bateyes, or cane worker compounds, the harshness of work on the plantations, and mass unemployment itself.29 On both sides of the border, technological progress is stymied within the insular system. As Muñoz (1995) argues, the practice of forcing laborers in the Dominican Republic to employ primitive harvesting methods of slashing and hand-carrying perpetuates, in effect, the technological backwardness that reinforces the island’s reliance on export agriculture and discourages the development of new agricultural methods, limiting the overall economic development.30 In an economy where agricultural production has experienced a steady decline since the middle of the nineteenth century, that production accounted for half of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in 1970 but for less than a third in the 1990s with production drastically diminished after the 1986 people’s revolution. Having been the colony that boasted the largest volume of sugar produced in the
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Americas, the former Saint-Domingue became a country that produced 90,000 metric tons in 1951, only to diminish its production to the point of having to import sugar by the end of the 1980s.31 Today, owing to such factors and conditions, an estimated 1 million Haitians, a seventh of the population, live outside of Haiti, with up to 400,000 in the Dominican Republic, since migration remains an outlet for population that the land will not support. Ferguson (1992) accounts for three groups of Haitian braceros working in the Dominican enterprises and categorized according to their mode of entry or length of stay. There are the legally recruited and contracted Haitians, popularly referred to as kongos, who work and then, once their contract is fulfilled, return to Haiti. Then there are those who remain after the end of the harvest season for lack of means to return or other reasons, thus earning the name of viejos. Those of the third category have entered the country illegally, and so are called les ambafils because they may have slipped through “under the wire.” Similarly according to their residence status, Nicholls (1985) divides the Haitian nationals in the Dominican Republic into three classifications: (1) official and legal residents, some long-time and some born there, some working in small businesses and skilled trades; (2) contracted laborers recruited by government agents for work in the zafra, consigned to living in the bateyes, and numbering about 12,000–17,000 per year; and (3) indeterminate thousands of illegal residents, particularly vulnerable to incarceration, abuse, or repatriation owning to their undocumented status. In their hapless situation, they may even be subjected to re-contracting to a sugar ingenio.32 The fact that Haitian migrants find the means to make the overland trip to the Dominican Republic indicates, as Nicholls points out, that the braceros come not from the poorest sectors of the population but from those of the landowning families who have the resources to send them into the neighboring country.33 Whatever their categorization, the migrant cane-cutters by all indicators occupy the lowest ranks of Dominican society, and, in the judgment of Amnesty International, their plight has constituted the major violation against human rights during the “democratic” 12 years of Balaguer. During the harvest season, usually from October and November until May or June, it is normal for cane-cutters to put in 12-hour work-days for an average work-week of 6.4 days, earning an average of 31¢ per hour or $23 per week.34 And although Dominicans for their part generally seek work elsewhere, considering cane-cutting too low-paying, hard, and demeaning an occupation, many do end up working in sugar, often doing the less demanding tasks of weighing, supervising, transporting, or refining. These
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Dominican workers, like their Haitian co-workers, receive little protection of their interests from the trade unions, although the FENAZUCAR division of the Confederación General de Trabajadores has taken some initial steps in this direction.35 Despite the need for Haitian labor, opposition to the Haitian presence is still voice among many Dominican political groups. Surprisingly, even the populist-reformists of the Partido de la Liberación Dominicana (PLD), led by Bosch, have supported the removal of the Haitians. In giving this support, Bosch’s party took a rightward turn: the party radicalism that raised U.S. fears of the rise of “another Cuba” in 1965 was replaced during the 1990 election campaign by a plan to privatize state-run enterprises. Evidently converted to the free market developmental model, Bosch in the same campaign held up Puerto Rico as a shining exemplar of what a little neoliberalism and a lot of foreign capital can accomplish in the Caribbean. In 1991, the born-again Bosch, prompted by reports of human rights violations at the state-operated ingenios, went so far as to back Balaguer’s decision to repatriate all Haitian workers ages 16–60. In the meantime, a new enclave drawing on Haitian as well as Dominican labor was taking root in most urban centers of the Dominican Republic. In Santo Domingo, Santiago, San Pedro de Macorís, and other large cities, the Industrial Free Zones (IFZs) have been created to exploit cheap labor at a salary scale similar to Haiti’s. In guarded industrial-park complexes, the U.S. companies of the IFZs impose a regimen of repetitive, low-tech assembly work in 10-hour days. Assembly workers earned $1 per hour in the 1980s, and the rate dropped down to 35¢ by 1990. This meant that workers were taking home a monthly pay of about 700–800 pesos: their monthly total had gone down to $62.50. Employed in the manufacture of various goods consumed in the United States, IFZ workers may turn out any of a variety of mechanically assembled products, from sportswear, footwear, and electronics to textiles and pharmaceuticals. They are also engaged in a relatively new growth industry: that of data processing—the tedious, monotonous activity of entering import–export data for use in the United States. There are no trade unions in the IFZs, which is not surprising, for their absence provided an incentive to the U.S. firms to locate in Dominican cities in the first place, and organizing or even joining a union can get one fired. With the growth of the IFZs, the Dominican Republic is experiencing a shift in the labor market, from its concentration on the plantations and construction sites, to its distribution throughout the export-processing and service sectors.36 Again, although the labor of Haitians is welcome, by and large their personal presence is not. Dominicans of all classes interviewed by
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David Howard (2001) from 1992 to 1995 expressed distrust and dislike of Haiti and Haitians. Howard’s survey revealed a stronger antipathy toward the Haitians expressed by rural folk than by the urban dwellers of Gazcue and Los Guandules, but those of the city tended to favor opening the border only to those Haitians needed to fill the demand for labor and able to obtain residency permits.37
La Tierra del Rayano David E. Johnson (1997) has theorized the foundationally constitutive role that difference plays at borders in general. Epitomizing Johnson’s theory is the specific claim, “There will be no difference between the birth of U.S. cultural identity and Mexican cultural identity: both will depend on the border and its determinations.”38 A similar differentiation process has defined cultural identities of Haitians and Dominicans. At the same time, the determinations of the border make it a site not only of differentiations but of convergences and syntheses: that is, a virtual third space of culture between nations.39 In the borderlands, territorial divisions are negotiated and renegotiated, a new culture emerges from the hybridization of cultures, and there appears a new sort of person: the “inhabitant of the line,” the rayano. Negative stereotypes of the rayano abound in Dominican discourse. Miguel Román in his 1949 novel Compay Chano characterized the rayano as the “mestizo, child of the Dominican and Haitian races,”40 often born east of the border. The negro cabriza, for instance, is “one Haitian type” of rayano; by Román’s disparaging profile, he is “idle and rapacious,” and his nickname “comes from his hard fibrous and yellowish hair.”41 In Balaguer’s (1947) characterization, the rayano is the ambiguous type of Dominican, the “subject of a doubtful nationality who lives at the margin of the two frontiers and expresses himself with the same naturalness in Spanish and in the Haitian dialect, participating to the same degree in both nationalities.”42 In this view, the rayano has cut off ties of nationalist identification, which consist in “the community of feelings and the community of aspirations,”43 one that the projects of dominicanización under Trujillo and Balaguer were intended to restore by sponsoring settlement and construction in the Dominican frontier zones. Such negative representations have had the effect of marginalizing the borderlands dwellers from the mainstream of Dominican society and justifying both their dispossession and, as in 1937 and 1991, their violent removal. While striving to distance themselves from the Haitians, Dominicans tend to affirm their affinity to the Puerto Ricans, living nearby on the island to the
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east, regarded as fellow Hispanics who speak the same language and whose purchase of Dominican exports has ranked fourth among trading partners after the United States, Spain, and the Netherlands.44 The town of Jimaní, 4 miles from the Haitian border, has seen comparatively little activity since the Dominican government closed access in 1991. The occasional tuc-tuc, or uniquely painted Haitian bus, can be seen driving across, to and fro, bringing in and taking back loads of day-workers. Armed Dominican soldiers patrol the border, manning checkpoints, searching vehicles. Garrisons in Dajabón, Elías Piña, and Pedernales stand in watch over similar border crossings.45 To back up the checkpoints, Dominican authorities have created frontier agricultural colonies in the borderlands as a buffer against squatters from the west. Haitian authorities, in compliance with international accords, have proscribed home construction within a zone of 1 kilometer along the frontier, creating a virtual cordon sanitaire to discouraged Haitians from taking up residence where they are not wanted.46 Although checkpoints continue to guard comings and goings across the border, the degree of monitoring by the guards varies in the extreme: it ranges from close inspections to indifferent watching, with petty smuggling frequently overlooked. Most cross on foot, some on mules, scooters, and motoconchos, motorcycles. But before they can actually pass the inspection post, the multitudes of women, men, and children must traverse the intermediate zone set between the two countries, the “no man’s land”—tierra de nadie—where they must sometimes wade across rivulet or creek. Many of the border-crossers are Haitian vendors and artisans. Their business revolves around carrying products destined for the markets in Dajabón, Pedernales, Elías Piña, and other frontier cities where the Dominican government authorizes special market days for cross-cultural commerce.47 Many border-crossers do a brisk business in acquiring and transporting contraband goods for the Haitian black market as well. Enterprising women engaged in this purchase and reselling activity are called madames sara.48 Some of them, reports Nicholls (1985), internationalized their business, moving not only between the Dominican Republic and Haiti but also from Miami to Puerto Rico and back again to Port-au-Prince, by way of the Aeroport François Duvalier (today the “Mais Gâté”).49 The frontier markets and contraband trade indicate that, despite the stereotypes and notwithstanding the barriers to immigration, a vigorous economic life has created borderlands “communities,” which offer a flexible pattern of culture more accommodating of Otherness than that of the interior zones. “Here along the border,” writes Cambeira (1997), “there is general receptiveness to cultural modes of an interchangeable nature. There is a fluidity and seeming ease with social interactions, including
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exchange of language (Haitian Krèyol and Spanish).” Another type of exchange involves money, the Haitian gourd being valued here as is the Dominican peso. Intermarriages occur frequently, mostly of Dominican men with Haitian women.50 The exchanges of the borderlands remind the people of two countries that they share a background that embraces the history of colonialism, the experience of underdevelopment, and the struggle to survive. In view of the mulattization process, race can be seen as much as a marker of national difference as one of ethnic commonality. Despite the popular Dominican notion that “Africa” begins only on the other side of the Pedernales, African influences appear every day in Dominican culture. As witnessed in the borderlands, music and dance especially exhibit African motifs, as in the calenda and dances the derived from it: the sarandunga, the congo, the jaiba. African-based percussive instruments in the Dominican Republic include the balsié, which is the trio of drums often accompanied by the clacking sticks called claves. For keeping rhythm in more tonal fashion, the plucked metal staves of the marímbula play a kind of ground bass for the dance. Another of the affinities tying Haitian and Dominican cultures together is the common basis of syncretic African-based religion, briefly discussed in Chapter 1. Whereas it is true that many Dominicans look down on the folk religion of Vodoun, considering it a congeries of barbaric practices and superstitions, there are many Dominicans who subscribe to Vodoun-based practices like brujería, which combines a belief in the saint-deities called santos or luases with acts of magic and healing. The Dominican version of Vodoun has acquired the name Gagá, derived from the Dahomeyan Aradá, the West African port city. It also traces to Rará, which names the pre-Lenten carnival processions of music and dancing associated with the religion. Gagá ceremonies are said to be more subdued than those of Vodoun, but devotees of Gagá, called servidores, are akin to the Kréyol serviteurs in their devotion to the spirits. One luá native to Gagá, a powerful one, is the machete-brandishing Belié Belcán. Double to the Catholic San Miguel, Belié Belcán is the peacemaker, an articulate mediator who shows up as ready for diplomacy as for the argument of arms. Red and green are the colors of this resolver of conflicts.51 Many Dominicans familiar with elements of African-based belief and practice may not take them seriously as articles of faith, but can cling to them out of superstitious idiosyncrasy or as part of folkloric tradition. It may take a real-life Belié Belcán to reconcile the tensions that have beset the two nations of Hispaniola. The settling of divisive conflict between them will require an expanded vision, patient negotiation, and abundant good will. Although the challenges seem daunting, conflict
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resolution, as Haitian journalist Guy Antoine (1999) urges, should become “a long-term priority.”52
The Green Inferno Revisited In 1991, the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights interviewed Haitian children of the Batey Duqueza, Ingenio Río Haina. Ranging from eight to 16 years of age, those child laborers told of 12-hour days of hard and dangerous work, of compounds without schools, electricity or running water, of payments with vouchers that could be redeemed only in the company store, which automatically reduced the face value of those vouchers by 20 percent. Discrimination against Haitian children nowadays takes on other, subtler forms: those children whose parents cannot produce acceptable documentation may be shut out of school.53 Life in the bateyes and plantations is hard for all their residents, young and old. The employer of more Haitian labor than any other enterprise is the Consejo Estatal de Azúcar (CEA), whose employees are about 70 percent Haitian. The bateyes run by the CEA have been policed and guarded like concentration camps. Some are surrounded by barbed wire. Some workers escape, in many cases to be rounded up and transported back to the plantations. Although living conditions in the privately owned compounds of the Central Romana and the Vicini reputedly surpassed those of the CEA estates, the Dominican batey generally offers only bare accommodation and unhealthy conditions, often lacking running water, electricity, and sanitation systems. The batey in San Isidro in January 1996, for example, had no schoolhouse, no toilet facilities, and no recreation hall, although a busy cockfighting ring stood just 5 minutes’ walk from the compound’s front entrance. The residences usually have floors of impacted earth and lack electricity, plumbing, and sanitary facilities. Veras reports that the Haitian workers at the batey of the Central Esperanza had to drink the same water in which they bathed, washed their clothes, and “[did] their physiological necessities.”54 Workers often sleep on the floor. A Dominican foreman summed it up well: they “lived like animals.”55 The existence of such oppressive living arrangements affects the whole of Dominican society. “Dominicans have kept themselves apart” from such quarters, writes Manuel Rueda (1987), where “Cocolos and Haitians bear their condition of pariahs, of indispensable although eternally marginalized people.”56 Howard (2001) points out the central contradiction inherent in this marginalization: “The Haitian experience is one of internal colonialism as a core element of Dominican economy yet peripheral to polity.”57
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The obstacles to bettering conditions in the bateyes include not only the expense that would undermine attempts to ensure profitability: indeed, such betterment could stimulate a demand for improving the living conditions of all the republic’s citizens and residents. There is, moreover, an ideologically-based disincentive to improvement. The internalized, “naturalized” distinction between the exploited Dominican and the superexploited Haitian bracero keeps a virtual lid on the potential protest of Dominican proletariat and peasantry, who, forced to work under brutal conditions as well, console themselves with thought of those whose status is more miserable than their own. This cultural and psychological distinction discourages the building of solidarity and class identification between groups of similarly oppressed workers.58 Howard infers that anti-Haitian feeling works to excuse abuses by creating a “false racialized hierarchy” by which even the poorest Dominicans can feel superior to others whose similar economic conditions are stigmatized by somatic-racial traits. AntiHaitianism therefore acts as “a divisive force” separating lower-class groups that could otherwise build formidable alliances to oppose the power of the corporations and the corporate state.59 Investigations by Americas Watch revealed that abuses against Haitians occurred even before they were employed, in their very recruitment. Many of the cane workers were contracted through the agents of the Dominican government or industry referred to as buscones, the name meaning “searchers” but also connoting “cheaters” or “petty robbers.” For each Haitian handed over, the buscón may receive $10–$25, and among the Haitians lured by their false promises are many children and teenagers. Recently, this practice has been reduced, though not eliminated completely, by a Dominican law prohibiting the recruitment of Haitians from across the border. The military nonetheless finds ways around the prohibition. In such border towns as Jimaní or in numerous roadblocks erected for the purpose, Dominican military have forcibly rounded up migrants for transport to CEA-run plantations. It was the Americas Watch report on coercive recruitment practices that pressured the U.S. trade representative to investigate the charges, after which the U.S. government threatened to limit preferential access to the U.S. market with a trade sanction that would mean a loss of $550 million.60 It was only after Balaguer ordered limited reforms in 1991 that the trade representative decided against revoking the Dominican privilege.61 Ousted by the coup led by Raoul Cédras in early September 1991, Aristide went into exile in Venezuela in 1992, and then on to Washington, D.C., where he awaited the opportunity to return to Haiti and serve the remainder of his term. U.S. leaders vacillated, fearing a violent backlash upon Aristide’s
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restoration, and pondered alternatives to an Aristide-led government. In October 1991, the Bush administration, after initial reservations about joining the OAS trade embargo against the military regime, ordered a stop to all U.S. trade with Haiti apart from the export of humanitarian aid. But oil and other goods, including sugar, continued to trickle into Haiti through the Dominican Republic, undermining the embargo that the United States refused to enforce. The embargo did have one beneficial impact: it brought home the mutual dependence of the two countries in the eyes of Dominican producers and distributors, who now sorely missed the access they had enjoyed to millions of Haitian consumers. Subsequent five-year agreements would be drawn up between the two republics, permitting about 20,000 Haitians to enter legally each year, though their numbers would be swelled by the additional 60,000 who entered illegally. From his exile in the United States, Aristide signed a Protocole d’Accord à Washington in February 1992, granting amnesty to all army personnel who participated in the coup and recognizing as legitimate all legislation passed after the coup. Soon after Aristide signed the protocol, however, he declared the amnesty as valid only for those guilty of committing “political” crimes and not “common law” crimes, which he accused Cédras of committing. Washington was none too happy with this qualification and delayed the U.S. intervention until the Lavalas demonstrations against the Cédras regime became too violent and widespread to tolerate. In May 1992 U.S. Ambassador Robert Pastorino attempted to convince the Dominicans to establish a Haitian immigrant “processing center” at the border. Pastorino argued that maintaining a camp at the center with room for holding 15,000 asylum-seeking refugees would stem the flow of immigrants and keep a lookout for illegal trade during the days of the embargo. The Dominicans, looking on the suggested solution as too little, too late, refused to set up such a camp, arguing that too many Haitians had entered already. Undocumented Haitians continued to enter, providing the plantations with more than enough hands and arms to cut the cane during the upcoming harvest.62
Elective Affinities Lavalas demonstrations and riots against the regime that unseated Aristide brought on the martial law crisis of 1994. In that year, President Bill Clinton sent 20,000 troops to restore the legally elected Aristide, while the deposed president maintained the government-in-exile. Dominican politicians sounded the alarm again, this time against the anticipated
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flood of Haitian immigrants threatening to inundate their already strained economy. As the Cédras-led junta continued to defy the embargo imposed by a United States anxious to restore the exiled Aristide, Balaguer’s vice-president Jacinto Peynado warned of epidemics and the threat to Dominican sovereignty. Prominent voices from the political scene urged a rapprochement. Presidential candidate José Francisco Peña Gómez, of the Partido Revolucionario Dominicano (PRD), had proposed an improvement in the incentives for hiring Dominicans in the sugar industry as well as cooperation between Santo Domingo and Port-au-Prince. Expressing his support for Aristide in mid-1994, Peña Gómez fought to defend the rights not only of caneworkers in the Dominican Republic but of the victims of the Duvalier dictatorships. Peña Gómez also expressed approval of the blockade directed against the junta.63 In the 1994 presidential campaign, the opposition to the PRD resorted to antihaitianismo propaganda to denigrate the dark-skinned Peña Gómez: it accused the candidate of staging Vodoun ceremonies and favoring closer Dominican ties to Haiti. Despite the libelous sensationalism of his opponent’s negative approach, Peña Gómez appeared to have won the majority of the vote. Balaguer’s party, the Partido Reformista Social Cristiano (PRSC), nonetheless managed to steal the election by plain fraud. On the Dominican Restoration Day, 16 August 1994, a spuriously re-elected Balaguer accepted his seventh term as president with an inaugural speech that fanned the embers of nationalist anxiety. In his inauguration speech Balaguer accused the international monetary community of plotting, in Wucker’s words, “to force the two nations of Hispaniola to be fused” by way of a proposed refinancing of the Dominican foreign debt. The gesture would be effective in provoking calls for Balaguer to finish a complete 4-year term. Faced with the protests of the electorate, Balaguer consented to allowing a special make-up election in 1996 to resolve the question of legitimacy, but during the two years prior to this election he authorized the expulsion of thousands of Haitians, countering in this way the pro-Haitian overtures of Peña Gómez. Balaguer held on power through an appeal to the anti-Haitianism of the Dominican citizenry.64 Mistrust of Haiti and Haitians definitely figured as a key issue in the 1996 Dominican presidential elections: racist attacks on Peña Gómez once again impugned the candidate’s supposed Haitian background. In 1996 as previously in 1990, the issue of Peña Gómez’s family background, rumored to be Haitian, put in question his loyalties with regard to foreign policy.65 In Santo Domingo’s “little Haiti” on the Avenida Duarte, in the area surrounding the Mercado Modelo with its numerous Haitian-owned
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businesses, Haitian merchants load up trucks and buses with goods awaited by buyers in Port-au-Prince and other Haitian cities. During the 1996 presidential campaign, in a nearby restaurant next to the Parque de Independencia and El Conde, Matías Marte, limpiabotas (bootblack) and fervent Leonel Fernández supporter, sits down to eat rice and fish. Wearing the purple T-shirt, purple hat, and purple buttons of the PLD campaign, Matías says he makes something like 50 pesos a day ($4.00), cannot read, is 21 years old although he looks much younger. He has no home. Where does he sleep? “Donde Dios me ayude” (Where God helps me). Why does he like Leonel? Simply because he’s the better candidate. And why doesn’t he like Peña Gómez? Because, says Matías, after brief reflection: “Es haitiano.” Other, more public appeals to el antihaitianismo would be made during the campaign. On Independence Day, 27 February 1996, President Balaguer addressed the Dominican congress on national television, saying that he advocated a close relationship with Haiti. Mutual concerns of commerce, health, ecology, and forestal conservation had to be developed in cooperation with Haiti. Cooperation, yes; but unification—no. Balaguer clarified: there will “never be a union” with Haiti, for its citizens belong to “another ethnia,” and they are “rabidly nationalist.” Although the two countries shared “152 years of history” (since independence in 1844), and although the manner should be sought in which to bring the two countries together, it should be remembered nonetheless, “Cada quien debe vivir en su propia casa” (Each should live in their own house). To oppose the plurality Peña Gómez was gaining in 1996, Bosch and Balaguer formed the odd alliance that threw their combined support behind José Leonel Fernández, a mulatto of much lighter skin than Peña Gómez’s.66 Balaguer even went so far as to reject his party’s own candidate, his own vice-president, Jacinto Peynado, in order to promote the chances of the more favored Leonel Fernández. Simply put, Balaguer’s PRSC, resorting to the tactic of besmirching Peña Gómez’s probable Haitian ancestry, reminded voters of the need, in Balaguer’s words, for a “truly Dominican” president. Leonel Fernández’s PLD, while distancing itself from the explicit Haitian-baiting of the PRSC, hitched its campaign to the outpouring of anti-Haitian sentiment by claiming that its poll-watchers would look out for the Haitians who had been illegally registered to vote, an alleged 150,000. In response to this anti-Haitian offensive, the PRD issued statements in defense of the maligned morenos. A consequence of the PRD counterploys was the projection of the PLD among the barrio voters as the party of rich whites connected with powerful foreign interests. Perhaps owing to an anti-Peña Gómez arrangement among the PLD,
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the PRD, and Balaguer-Peynado’s administration, a joint operation during the 1996 elections rounded up and deported some 3,000 Haitians, including a number of legal residents or potential legal voters.67 In that sweep, police raided the barrios and streets, checking the identification of anyone who even looked Haitian. Ostensibly searching for thousands of Haitians who allegedly would vote in the upcoming presidential elections, sending the message that the dark-skinned vote would not be welcomed, the dragnet succeeded not only in reducing the vote for Peña Gómez but also in disparaging Leonel Fernández’s strongest rival in the most racist of terms.68 In the face of this offensive, Peña Gómez struggled to substantiate his Dominican pedigree. His efforts included hiring historian Julio Genaro Campillo Pérez, director of the Dominican Genealogical Society, to compile documentation that proved the candidate’s family history. The result was a book, published a few days before the election, that displayed identity cards, photographs, consular letters with notary seals, certificates of baptism, certificates of death, and “depositions from people who knew both Peña Gómez’s birth family and his adoptive parents.” The publication did not of course secure the presidency for Peña Gómez, for whom the race-based suspicion among the masses, along with polling fraud on the part of the PLD, came between the candidate’s hopes and his election. Some two years afterwards, when Peña Gómez died of cancer in 1998, eulogies and tributes denounced the racism that had long stymied his political career.69 A 1996 meeting in Miami between the newly-elected Leonel Fernández and Haitian President René Préval, also newly elected, generated expressions of goodwill and intentions to improve relations. The two chief executives sought solutions to problems surrounding the migration of workers. Observing guidelines set down by the U.N. and the OAS, the presidents approved the formation of the Haitian–Dominican Mixed Commission (CMHD), of which the Inter-Institutional Technical Committee on Migratory and Border Questions (CTIQMF) formed a key part. The CMHD addressed the aspects of environmental protection, agricultural development, tourism, health, and migration that concerned both countries. Delegates to the CTIQMF have signed documents of understanding with regard to the hiring of nationals from the two countries. The flow would be reduced; those permitted to work would be provided with the necessary documentation, and the whole system of documentation, control, enforcement, and repatriation would be regularized. In cases of repatriations, when they occur, the rights of the deported persons would have to be respected.70 It still remains to be seen if the good intentions of
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the signataries have led to the implementation a humane migration policy regarding Haitian nationals in the Dominican Republic. Race, as the events of 1996 bore out, continued to matter in a country where the common desire is to marry a partner with lighter skin than oneself, under the assumption that whitening the race, emblanquecimiento, was the same as “improving the race.”71 Attitudes regarding racial superiority reinforce anti-Haitian sentiment. In the surveys he carried out in the Dominican Republic and published in 2001, Howard found that “Haitians are perceived by many interviewees to be totally incompatible with Dominicans.” Howard adds that for the same interviewees, “Haitian culture represented the antithesis of Dominican society.”72 As this recent shared history shows, the Dominican resistance to the eastward movement of Haitians and to their presence in the Dominican Republic continues to take on diverse forms.
An Insular Geopolitical Will? Although the vista of new accords and linkages between the two nations is clouded by the memories of strife, past collaborations set the precedent for taking a more rational approach to common problems in the future. Given their current status as separate-but-joined, each country could profitably make use of its differences in relation to the other country. Haiti would benefit from ameliorating both the conditions that impel workers to emigrate and the conditions under which they work in the Dominican Republic. Through improvements in the lot of Haitian employees, Dominican industry would create incentives for Dominicans to work in the same enterprises. Benefits could be maximized all around.73 Steps have been taken in this direction. Dominican corporate officers have sought to approach Haiti as a market for Dominican products and as a partner in joint ventures, requisite status for the full participation of both countries under the terms set by the Fourth Lomé Convention of the European Economic Community (EEC) and the Caribbean Basin Initiative.74 Asserting the potential of a “national geopolitical will” that could contradict the fiat of the state zealous of guarding its borders, Yunén (1985) proposes alternatives to antagonism. The alternatives fall into three categories: those of (1) exchange, (2) collaboration, and (3) the internal market. Innovation in these three modes would necessitate a shift in investment strategy focus away from economic and cultural “externalities” and toward increased attention to “internalities,” that is, on the possibilities present within the insular situation itself. Explore the potential of
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complementarity, recommends Yunén; optimize divisions of labor, invest in the country and in the neighbor. Others prescriptions for curing the ailing economies would be to reduce the power of the enclaves by utilizing appropriate technology; provide informal as well as formal education; collectivize clusters of minifundios, creating new linkages for commerce and new channels for the flow of capital and labor; decentralize the economy; draw the formerly marginalized zones into a new articulation.75 The embracing of national differences may seem at first glance a move that would perpetuate inequality and unequal development founded on the old insular division of labor. But seeking to exploit the advantages of difference could begin there and lead to modernization on both sides of the border through nationalist-oriented credit policies financed by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Such development would create jobs in each country and thereby stem the eastward flow of labor by eliminating the factors pushing Haitians to look elsewhere for work. Investors and managers on the Dominican side would see themselves obligated both to modernize and to diversify industrial technology and consequently make it worthwhile for locally available labor to seek employment locally.76 Much remains to be changed before such arrangements can be made. Despite Leonel Fernández’s statements promising repaired relations with Haiti, mass deportations of those identified as undocumented Haitian migrants began during the first year of the new president’s administration. Alleging that an organized crime ring had smuggled in thousands of Haitians, the newly installed PLD government oversaw the expulsion of 30,000 from November 1996 to March 1997.77 The pretense of another sweep purported to apprehend a network of Haitian beggars served to justify another mass removal of Haitians. In both actions, Leonel Fernández asserted his nation’s right to defend its sovereignty, and cited in his defense comparable deportations of Dominican migrants from Puerto Rico and of Mexican migrants from the United States. In December 1996, however, the campaign did not prevent the financially-strapped CEA from obtaining permission to import 16,000 Haitians to cut the cane. For such trampling of human rights, the UNESCO Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights censured the Dominican government in July 1997. The committee’s report on the country’s violation of the terms set forth in its convention cited slavery-like exploitation, illegal confiscation of identity cards, and inhuman conditions in the bateyes. Perhaps in reaction to such moves and maneuverings, Leonel Fernández decided to sell off the old state companies, calling them relics of the Trujillo era and conduits of corruption, and imposed a program of austerity.
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Despite the abuses and the inequities, the two countries continued to forge new linkages on the diplomatic front. Talks at a 1998 summit in Port-au-Prince between Leonel Fernández and Préval centered on soliciting aid in the form of a borderlands project to be financed by the European Union (EU).78 The two heads of state produced a joint declaration of commitments in which they expressed their intent to protect the island’s ecosystem. To do so, the two governments, said the declaration, would take steps to discourage pollution, stop the traffic in endangered species, and counteract desertification of the soil. Shared wildlife zones and bodies of water would be protected. The declaration also acknowledged the need to continue the fight against illicit drug traffic and stated the shared intent to engage in consultations prior to participation in a Free Exchange Zone of the Americas, planned for 2005.79 Another linkage was formed in their joint application for admission into the EEC’s Lomé Convention, whose membership is limited to the African, Caribbean, and Pacific (ACP) countries. If the Dominican Republic had not applied with Haiti, the latter would have been excluded due to the potential threat posed by its crippled economy and large population in relation to the convention’s 13 Caribbean ministates.80 Other joint initiatives could prove profitable in the context of the global market. By an optimal utilization of its low-cost labor, and should the island as a whole emulate not the Cuban but rather the Puerto Rican model, Hispaniola has the potential to become more like a Singapore of the Antilles, an island center of small industries and finance.
Krèyon Pèp Interdependence and cultural exchange continue within the asymmetrical frame of the Haitian and Dominican Republics. The problem of their contiguous coexistence, together with the flow of braceros across the shared border, expresses again the situation of “weak states” whose populations must to seek the ad hoc solutions to social ills in flight and emigration. The aforementioned estado débil, as described in Corten’s theory (1993), earns its name from the inability of the state, owing to the displaced and dependent character of state power, to fill the social demands put to it. This condition is contrasted with that of the estado nutricio of the industrial and petroleum-rich countries, those that have resources and capital sufficient to maintain equilibrium within their frontiers. With its comparative scarcity of natural resources, the weak state on the other hand is all the more subject to the agendas of the transnational corporations and the
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vicissitudes of international markets.81 Following a line of thought similar to Corten’s, Howard (2001) sees in the traditional enmity an obstruction to development. “Both countries,” writes Howard, “are weak states on the global stage; political antagonism and confrontation only weakens them further.”82 To strengthen their international standing, both countries will have to seek alternatives to antagonism, and confront one another—not as perennial rivals, but as potential partners. For some, however, the investment climate in Haiti remained far from inviting partnerships. In January 1997, the new year rang in tumultuous scenes of street violence in Port-au-Prince, gang warfare in Cité Soleil, a strike on 16 January, demonstrations everywhere, and calls for the resignation of Prime Minister Rosny Smarth. Public unrest broke out anew in February and resulted in the deaths of 50, with more blood shed in yet a third wave of disturbances on 20 March. Responsibility for the upheavals was attributed to the followers of former President Aristide. Joined in a registered party called Fanmi Lavalas (Lavalas family), the Aristide supporters fought unsuccessfully for the ouster of Smarth and his replacement by their leader.83 Despite this background of unrest, the business sectors have indicated their willingness to consolidate efforts in order to improve investment and development. Since 1994, representatives of both countries and those of the United States have discussed creation of a trilateral accord, one that, if realized, would obtain a debt reduction of the two island countries by the United States. Proceeds from the reduction would finance an International Hispaniola Fund, with the mission of initiating joint development projects. Presidents of two entrepreneurial organizations—the Chamber of Commerce and Industry of Haiti and the Chamber of Commerce and Production of Santo Domingo—signed an accord of cooperation and mutual assistance in 1998. In July 2000, another accord was signed by leaders of the Association of Industries of Haiti and the Dominican Association of Free Zones. On another level of economic planning, the Lomé IV Convention, CARICOM, and CARIFORM accords have created new economic blocs in the region, with understandings requiring new forms of cooperation between the two countries. Recently, in response to the outcry by the advocacy group Plataforma Vida against the authorizing of discriminatory detentions and expatriations of undocumented “foreigners,” Dominican President Hipólito Mejía sent representatives to talks in which it was proposed that aid coming from the United States, France, and Venezuela be collected in a fund to support development projects in the frontier regions. It is generally acknowledged by news media representatives that information must flow more freely between the two countries. To this end, the
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Association of Haitian Journalists and the Dominican College of Journalists met in Santo Domingo. One result of their meeting was the creation of a Permanent Forum of Dominican-Haitian Journalists. Another point of contact currently consists of the work of Cuban medical specialists on the Haitian side of the border. Significantly, these health workers staffing health centers on the Haitian side have often admitted and treated Dominican patients. Another sign of international cooperation was the announcement recently issued by Dominican authorities that four hospitals would be constructed in the frontier regions, presumably in collaboration with Haitian agencies.84 Reciprocity in both economic and political dealings could achieve other goals: it could mean the building up of credit with increased investor trust in both countries; a check on aggressions of either one against the other; and an impediment to the installation of “unipersonal tyrannies” in the home government of either state. Under an “organic” constitution for the island, should one ever be ratified, its nations’ peoples could enjoy all the benefits of dual citizenship. Jacobson (1997) counts the Dominican Republic as one country showing willingness “to accept and even promote dual citizenship,” but Jacobson is referring here to citizenship in both the island homeland and in the United States.85 In view of the exigencies imposed by the situation, could Haitians and Dominicans accept dual citizenship for their own nationals as well? Integration could be realized in a fair and efficient regulation of the commercial traffic between the two countries. Such regulation would facilitate trade while providing for the revenue needed to develop each country’s infrastructure. The project would necessarily include the construction of an extensive system of irrigation canals to support agriculture in the semi-arid borderlands, work that has already begun in such sites as Villa Isabel and Guayubín.86 Thriving commerce in the frontier towns already indicates ways in which a less encumbered cross-border trade can profit the two national economies. In the Haitian southeast, Haitians and Dominicans come to do business at the rural market of Fonds-Verrettes. Situated at a crossroads of major access routes, the market draws farmers, hawkers, and revendeuses (retail dealers) from towns like Pedernales, Saltrou, Neiba, and Barahona. The setting up of stalls and stands takes place from Monday afternoon on. The market stays open the 24 continuous hours from Tuesday morning to Wednesday morning, illuminated at night by burning wax torches. As many as 2,000 people gather at FondsVerette, eager to buy or sell their produce, fabric, and hardware, or simply to enjoy the music and food and commotion.87 During the weekday fairs in Dajabón, 5,000–7,000 Haitians can be seen mingling with the
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Dominicans, many bringing gourdes to exchange with the local pesos. As illustrated in the examples of Fonds-Verettes and Dajabón, informal linkages of commerce and culture have blurred the division between nations. They also point to the fact that Haitian and Dominican “sister towns” have become interdependent. Such pairings include not only Dajabón and Ouanaminthe, but also Elías Piña and Belladères; Jimaní and Fonds Parisien; and Pedernales and Anses-à-Pitres. In the address he delivered on 28 February 2001 before the United Nations, Haitian Ambassador Edwin Paraison described the bilateral proposals that have been made for humanizing the conditions under which Haitians are employed by Dominican industries. Proposed measures include reducing child labor, recognizing Haitian cane-cutter syndicates, sending workers individualized contracts in both Krèyol and Spanish language, using “adequate” vehicles for transportation of laborers, initiating social projects inside the bateyes, and the granting of six-month work permits by the Dirección General de Migración at a cost of $18 each. Paraison reports as well that methods of recruitment and living conditions in the bateyes have come under scrutiny by international organizations and agencies. He lists the following institutions involved in monitoring the treatment of Haitian workers: the United Nations, the Organization of American States, the Episcopal and Catholic Churches, the Bureau International du Travail, Anti-Stavery International, Americas Watch, the Coalition Nationale pour les Droits des Haïtiens, the Comités des Avocats pour les Droits de l’Homme, and the Comité Québécois pour la Reconnaissance des Droits des Travailleurs Haïtiens en la Republique Dominicaine.88
After the Flood Haitian politics during the first years of the new millenium has already gone past the reformist, “cleansing” phase of the Lavalas movement. The movement has entered into the defensive-consolidating stage, involving sometimes violent struggles with Lavalas’ opponents. Disputes between Fanmi Lavalas and the oppositional coalition of Convergence Democratique (CD) have taken place over accusations of a widespread fraud in the parliamentary elections of 2000 that gave a landslide majority to the incumbent party. Aristide himself has been accused of employing the dictatorial tactics of terror that he opposed before 1986. Throughout this phase, the Dominican Republic not only watched from the sidelines but got involved. On 17 December 2001, armed commandos
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made a coup attempt against the National Palace in Port-au-Prince. Thirteen people died in the palace assault, including several police officers. The man Haitian authorities accused of leading the attack, Guy Philippe, former police chief of Cap Haïtien, was said to be hiding in the Dominican Republic as of 26 December 2001. Four suspects were arrested in the case, and a cache of weapons was discovered in the home of a former army colonel implicated in the coup attempt. Haitian National Police were seeking Philippe’s extradition and return to Haiti to stand trial for allegedly leading some 30 armed men in the attempt to oust Aristide.89 In response to the coup attempt and in apparent support of the Aristide government, thousands of Dominican troops assembled at the Haitian-Dominican border on 19 December 2001. The soldiers were stationed along a 45-mile stretch of the frontier with orders to block any of the coup conspirators from escaping into the Dominican territory. The coup attempt underscored the seemingly unending stream of violence that has occurred since Aristide first took office. During Préval’s term, opposition leaders Antoine Leroy and Mireille Durocher Bertin were killed. During Aristide’s second term, radio news director Brignol Lindor was killed in Petite Goâve, apparently by a mob of machete-wielding Lavalas supporters, for pro-Convergence statements he had broadcast from his station, Echo 2000. Crowning Haiti’s woes, however, is the U.S.imposed freeze on loans already approved by the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), which has stymied efforts of the Aristide administration to address the problems of political gridlock and the HIV/AIDS epidemic. Some $562 million in loans have been held up by the embargo, imposed as a sanction to encourage democratization in Haiti. Tensions were raised at the border, too. On 10 December 2001 four Dominican military officers were indicted and accused for allegedly opening fire on a lorry as it was crossing the border. The lorry was said to be carrying 30 undocumented Haitians; 6 Haitians and 1 Dominican were killed in the shooting as the lorry driver attempted to run the checkpoint.90 In the first week of 2002, the 15 opposition parties joined in the Convergence Democratique coalition have called for the removal of the Aristide-Lavalas regime. Speaking for the CD, Evans Paul denounced the continuing deterioration of social conditions under Lavalas and the violence of government supporters against opposition members. Paul accused Lavalas organizations furthermore of staging the December coup attempt against the National Palace as a pretense to justify further repressions. Despite such setbacks to rapprochement, more joint solutions to the crisis that acknowledge the reality of the international market have been proposed by each country’s representatives. Proposals recommend that,
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with the assistance of the Dominican Republic, Haiti undergo a long period of nation-building, during which it would require investments, new technology, and economic aid from the outside. Before granting loans and other forms of help, bilateral and multilateral financial institutions would require privatization of major sectors of the national industries. The proposals assume that neoliberalism will dominate the insular and regional economies—but the form it takes and the terms under which it is adopted can be shaped by the insular and regional markets and negotiated in response to the problems in common. Events that transpired during the writing of this study show promising signs of collaboration: President Aristide, accompanied by First Lady Mildred Trouillot, visited the Dominican capital on 16 January 2002, where he was officially greeted by Foreign Relations Minister Hugo Tolentino Dipp. Later that day, Presidents Mejía and Aristide met for the first time at the National Palace. The two heads of state signed an agreement of cooperation on economic concerns and border issues. The latter category will include matters of extradition, for which the countries lack a treaty. Also on Aristide’s itinerary were visits to the Senate, the Chamber of Deputies, the Surpreme Court, and former presidents Leonel Fernández and Balaguer.91 On 21 January 2002, spokespersons for the Dominican Association of Exporters and the Herrera Industrial Association advanced a proposal for opening a Haitian–Dominican trade corridor. The representatives stated that such a corridor, with its terminal for processing freight transport between the two countries, would triple the volume of trade, now estimated at $80–100 million per year. In an interview on 26 January 2002, Cuban writer Carlos Alberto Montaner told the Dominican newspaper Diario Libre of his proposals for assisting Haiti. Visiting as a guest of former president Leonel Fernández and the Fundación Global Democracia y Desarrollo, Montaner recommended the establishing of a trust fund for fomenting sustainable development in the impoverished nation. He stated in addition that responsibility for creating and managing the fund should go to the Dominican Republic. The DR1 Daily News of 30 January 2002 reported the World Bank estimate of 515,000–600,000 Haitians then living in the Dominican Republic, with half of them born there. Some 88 percent of them lack legal documentation, including up to 1,000 refugees. Haitian ambassador Guy Alexandre said in an interview with Cadena Noticias that some 20,000 return to Haiti each year. He added the opinion that Haitians do not suffer discrimination in the Dominican Republic but rather from the hardships of the work.92
To reiterate a proverb: “The people’s pencil has no eraser.” What people have written as nations, beyond the confines and constraints of state
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power, cannot be erased. By surpassing the limits of sovereign states, the new, holistic mapping of Hispaniola can serve as a new paradigm of cooperation, interdependence, collaboration, and articulation between nations. Its articulation of insular counterpoints can legitimate and support initiatives for joint plans and projects for expanding commerce between the Haitian Republic and the Dominican Republic. By a synergistic uniting of forces, the two countries can create new ways of coexisting, valuing their contrasts rather than decrying their differences. Continued analysis of Hispaniola’s history and geography should contribute to the shaping of a geopolitical will, one truly responsive to the needs and desires of the island’s peoples. Although Haiti and the Dominican Republic are the “two wings of the same bird” envisioned in Aristide’s metaphor, duality continues to present the greatest stumbling block to conceiving the insular identity. For the many who cling to the image of two distinct peoples of opposed interests who occupy the same island, the fact of duality will continue to sound a jarring note. But it need not. The way beyond distrust and despair, as hopefully indicated by the foregoing pages, lies in the task of searching out a new kind of boundary, in working with the insular difference, in using duality “for the benefit of each of the peoples.”93 In respecting both wings of the bird.
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Notes
Preface and Acknowledgments 1. Antonio Benítez-Rojo, The Repeating Island: The Caribbean and the Postmodern Perspective. Trans. James Maraniss (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 1992), p. 175. 2. Edward Soja and Barbara Hooper, “The Spaces That Difference Makes: Some Notes on the Geographical Margins of the New Cultural Politics,” in Place and the Politics of Identity, Michael Keith and Steve Pike (eds.) (London and New York: Routledge, 1993), p. 184. Emphasis is in the original. 3. David E. Johnson, “The Time of Translation: The Border of American Literature,” in Border Theory: The Limits of Cultural Politics, Scott Michaelsen and David E. Johnson (eds.) (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), p. 153. Chapter 1
Introduction: Point Counterpoint
1. Freddy Prestol Castillo, El Masacre se pasa a pie (Santo Domingo: Ediciones de Taller, 1989), p. 49. The translation of this quote is mine, as are all other translations of quotes from the original French or Spanish except for those otherwise indicated under “Notes” and “Bibliography.” 2. Manuel del Cabral, Obra Poética Completa de Manuel del Cabral (Santo Domingo: Editora Alfa y Omega, 1987), pp. 486–8. 3. The first quote is from Carlos Augusto Sánchez i Sánchez, El caso domínicohaitiano (Ciudad Trujillo: Editora Montalvo, 1958), p. 3; the second from J. Marino Incháustegui, “Relaciones entre España, Santo Domingo y Haití,” Eme Eme V.26 (September–October 1976, dated “Madrid, 1965”), p. 42. 4. David Howard, Dominican Republic in focus: a guide to the people, politics and culture (New York: Interlink Books, 1999), p. 7. 5. Michele Wucker, Why the Cocks Fight: Dominicans, Haitians, and the Struggle for Hispaniola (New York: Hill & Wang, 1999), p. 13. 6. María Elena Muñoz, Las Relaciones Domínico-Haitianas: Geopolítica y Migración (Santo Domingo: Editora Alfa & Omega, 1995), p. 209. 7. Alan Cambeira, Quisqueya la Bella: The Dominican Republic in Historical and Cultural Perspective (Armonk, NY and London: M. E. Sharpe, 1997), p. 148.
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8. Cambeira, Quisqueya la Bella, p. 33. 9. Paul Farmer, The Uses of Haiti (Monroe, ME: Common Courage Press, 1994), p. 56. 10. Gérard Pierre-Charles, “Presentación,” in Política y sociología en Haití y la República Dominicana. Coloquio Domínico-Haitiano de Ciencias Sociales, Suzy Castor, André Corten, Lil Despradel, Gérard Pierre-Charles, et al. (eds.) (Mexico: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Instituto de Investigaciones Sociales, 1974), p. 10. 11. Patrick Bellegarde-Smith, “Haiti: Perspectives of Foreign Policy; An Essay on the International Relations of a Small State,” Caribbean Quarterly (September–December, 1974): 21–38, pp. 32–3. Also, Patrick BellegardeSmith, In the Shadow of Powers: Dantes Bellegarde in Haitian Social Thought (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1985), p. 107, from which the quote is taken. 12. Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Haiti, State Against Nation: The Origins and Legacy of Duvalierism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1990), p. 230. Emphasis is in the original. 13. On the formación de la frontera, see Frank Moya Pons, Manual de Historia Dominicana, 10th edn. (Santo Domingo: Caribbean Publishers, 1995), pp. 143ff. Of interest may be the fact that Pierre-Charles formerly supported Haitian president Jean-Bertrand Aristide but, at the time of writing, represents Convergence Democratique, the 15-party coalition that has opposed Lavalas and contested the elections that restored Aristide to the presidency. 14. See David E. Johnson and Scott Michaelson (eds.), Border Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), p. 2. 15. Pedro Mir, Las dos patrias de Santo Domingo, tesis acerca de la división política de la isla en dos naciones (Santo Domingo: Editora Cultura Dominicana, 1975). 16. Franklin J. Franco, Santo Domingo: cultura, política e ideología (Santo Domingo: Editora Nacional, 1974), p. 7. 17. Franco, Santo Domingo, p. 8. 18. Muñoz, Las Relaciones Domínico-Haitianas, p. 114. 19. The concept of insularity gained visibility in the 1934 study of Antonio S. Pedreira, Insularismo: Ensayos de interpretación puertorriqueña. Presenting an elitist interpretation of Puerto Rico’s economic and cultural crisis during the inter-war period, Pedreira’s book blamed the island’s problems on the passivity and backwardness of its peasant majority, the jíbaros, whose vices Pedreira attributed to racial mixing and climatological factors. Cited in Ernesto Sagás, Race and Politics in the Dominican Republic (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2000), p. 120. 20. Otto Bauer, The Austrian Revolution, trans. H. J. Stenning (New York: Burt Franklin, 1970). 21. See Otto Bauer, The Austrian Revolution; cited in Rafael Emilio Yunén Z., La Isla Como Es: Hipótesis Para Su Comprobación (Santiago de los Caballeros,
NOTES
22. 23.
24. 25. 26.
27.
28.
29. 30. 31. 32.
33. 34.
35. 36. 37.
219
Dominican Republic: Universidad Católica Madre y Maestra, Colección Estudios, 1985), p. 188. Sagás, Race and Politics, p. 116. Jean Price-Mars, La République d’Haïti et la République Dominicaine. Les aspects divers d’un problème d’histoire, de géographie et d’ethnologie, V.1 (Portau-Prince: Collection du Tricinquantenaire de l’Indépendance d’Haïti, 1953), p. 165. Elizabeth Abbott, Haiti: The Duvaliers and Their Legacy (New York, London, Toronto, Sydney, Tokyo, and Singapore: Simon & Schuster, 1988), p. 162. Farmer, The Uses of Haiti, p. 294. From José Ricardo Roques Martínez, El problema fronterizo domínico-haitiano (Santo Domingo: La Cuna de América, n.d.), p. 3; and Roberto Cassá, “El racismo en la ideología de las clases dominantes dominicanas,” Revista Ciencia III.1 (January–March 1976), pp. 64–5; quoted in José Alcántara Almánzar, Narrativa y sociedad en Hispanoamérica (Santo Domingo: Editora Corripio, 1984), pp. 36–7n.3. Edward Soja and Barbara Hooper, “The Spaces That Difference Makes: Some Notes on the Geographical Margins of the New Cultural Politics,” in Place and the Politics of Identity, Michael Keith and Steve Pike (eds.) (London and New York: Routledge, 1993), p. 198. David E. Johnson, “The Time of Translation: The Border of American Literature,” in Border Theory: The Limits of Cultural Politics, Scott Michaelsen and David E. Johnson (eds.) (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), p. 132. Manuel Rueda, La criatura terrestre (Santo Domingo: Editora Taller, 1987 [1963]), p. 25. Richard L. Morrill, The Spatial Organization of Society (Belmont, CA: Wadworth Publishing Co., 1970), p. 19. José del Castillo, “Demografía de la inmigración haitiana,” in Ensayos de sociología dominicana (Santo Domingo: Ediciones Siboney, Taller, 1984), p. 178. Carlos Esteban Deive, Diccionario de Dominicanismos (Santo Domingo: Politecnia Ediciones, 1986), p. 79; Ramón Francisco, “Macaraos del cielo, macaraos de la tierra. El hombre, sus dioses, sus creencias,” in De tierra morena vengo. Imágenes del hombre dominicano y su cultura, 2nd edn., Soledad Alvarez (ed.) (Santo Domingo: Editora Corripio, 1987), pp. 119–55. Francisco, “Macaraos del cielo,” pp. 121, 125. Margarite Fernández Olmos, “Trans-Caribbean Identity and the Fictional World of Mayra Montero,” in Sacred Possessions: Vodou, Santería, Obeah, and the Caribbean, Margarite Fernández Olmos and Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert (eds.) (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1997), p. 272. Cambeira, Quisqueya la Bella, p. 213; cf. p. 216. See José Alcántara Almanzar, Los escritores dominicanos y la cultura (Santo Domingo: Editora Amigo del Hogar, 1990), p. 168. Cf. Cambeira, Quisqueya la Bella, p. 10.
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38. Hubert Herring, with the assistance of Helen Baldwin Herring, A History of Latin America from the Beginnings to the Present, 3rd edn. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1968), p. 427. 39. Carolyn E. Fick, The Making of Haiti: The Saint Domingue Revolution from Below (Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 1990), p. 56. 40. José Alcántara Almánzar, Estudios de poesía dominicana (Santo Domingo: Editora Alfa y Omega, 1979), p. 324. 41. Franklin J. Franco, La Aportación de los Negros (Santo Domingo: Editorial Nacional, 1967), pp. 5, 28; quoted in Bruno Rosario Candelier, “Poesía negra en Santo Domingo,” El Nacional de ¡Ahora! Suplemento Cultural de 30 Abril 1972, p. 2. 42. Wucker, Why the Cocks Fight, p. 28. 43. See Morrill, The Spatial Organization, p. 16. ´ 44. Jan Rogozinski, A Brief History of the Caribbean: From the Arawak and the Carib to the Present (New York: Penguin Books, 1994), p. 5; Rosaline Ng Cheong-Lum, Haiti (New York, London and Sydney: Marshall Cavendish, 1995), pp. 8–9. 45. See Cambeira, Quisqueya la Bella, p. 20. 46. Selden Rodman, Quisqueya: A History of the Dominican Republic (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1964), p. 191. 47. Thomas E. Weil, Jan Knippers Black, Howard I. Blustein, Kathryn T. Hongston, David S. McMorris, and Frederick P. Munson, Haiti: A Country Study (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1982 [research completed February 1973]), p. 6. 48. Rodman, Quisqueya, p. 191. 49. Cambeira, Quisqueya la Bella, p. 241. 50. See Cambeira, Quisqueya la Bella, p. 23. 51. Wucker, Why the Cocks Fight, p. 28. 52. See Morrill, The Spatial Organization, p. 18. 53. Figures from Population Reference Bureau, 1998, and Caroline Rayner (ed.), Encyclopedic World Atlas, compiled by Richard Widdows (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996); cited in David Howard, Coloring the Nation: Race and Ethnicity in the Dominican Republic (Oxford: Signal Books and Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2001), p. 2. 54. Andrés Corten, El estado débil: Haití, República Dominicana. Trans. Cecilia Millán and rev. Pilar Espaillat (Santo Domingo: Editora Taller, 1993), p. 129. 55. Paul Goodwin, Jr., Global Studies: Latin America, 6th edn. (Guilford, CT: The Dushkin Publishing Group, 1994), p. 124; Tom Barry, Beth Wood, and Deb Preusch, The Other Side of Paradise: Foreign Control in the Caribbean (New York: Grove Press, 1984), p. 330. 56. See Morrill, The Spatial Organization, p. 12. 57. Goodwin, Global Studies, pp. 120, 124. 58. See Sánchez i Sánchez, El caso domínico-haitiano, pp. 31, 32, 34, 39. 59. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism: Or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991), p. 12.
NOTES
221
60. In this way it partakes of the abstract corporeality that Antonio Benítez-Rojo evokes in his chaos theory-inspired The Repeating Island: The Caribbean and the Postmodern Perspective, trans. James Maraniss (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 1992). For Benítez-Rojo, the insular “machine of machines” is reiterated in island after island. That is, like fractal patterns, the power of the plantation and the trope of syncretism are mirrored again and again on ever-widening scales throughout the archipelago, and we are reminded that the very word archipelago derives from the Greek archos ⫹ pelagos, first applied to the Aegean as a sea of many islands, meaning “original sea.” 61. James Ridgeway (ed.), The Haiti Files: Decoding the Crisis (Washington, D.C.: Essential Books/Azul Editions, 1994), p. 1. Chapter 2
Limits of Colonialism, 1492–1750
1. Frank Moya Pons, Manual de Historia Dominicana, 10th edn. (Santo Domingo: Caribbean Publishers, 1995), p. 143. 2. Moya Pons, Manual, pp. 54–5. 3. Franklin J. Franco, Santo Domingo: Cultura, Política e Ideología (Santo Domingo: Editora Nacional, 1974), p. 120. 4. Rondo Cameron, A Concise Economic History of the World: From Paleolithic Times to the Present (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989); quoted in Carlos Fuentes, El espejo enterrado (Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1992), p. 223. 5. Fuentes, El espejo enterrado, pp. 63, 66, 71, 72, 78. 6. Moya Pons, Manual, pp. 41, 42. 7. Juan Bosch, Composición Social Dominicana. Historia e Interpretación, 16th edn. (Santo Domingo: Alfa y Omega, 1988 [1968]), pp. 56, 81. 8. Moya Pons, Manual, pp. 51–3, 215. 9. Selden Rodman, Quisqueya: A History of the Dominican Republic (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1964), p. 23. 10. Alan Cambeira, Quisqueya la Bella: The Dominican Republic in Historical and Cultural Perspective (Armonk, NY and London: M. E. Sharpe, 1997), p. 76. 11. Fradique Lizardo, Cultura africana en Santo Domingo (Santo Domingo: Taller, 1979), pp. 43, 47–8. 12. Franklin J. Franco, Los negros, los mulatos y la nación dominicana (Santo Domingo: Editora Nacional, 1970), p. 121; Andrés Corten, El estado débil: Haití, República Dominicana, trans. Cecilia Millán and rev. Pilar Espaillat (Santo Domingo: Editora Taller, 1993), p. 30. 13. See Cambeira, Quisqueya la Bella, pp. 78, 107–8. 14. Moya Pons, Manual, p. 36. 15. Samuel Hazard, Santo Domingo, Past and Present; with a Glance at Hayti (Santo Domingo: Editora de Santo Domingo, 1974; reprint of the original, published New York: Harper & Brothers, 1873), p. 189.
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NOTES
16. See J. Marino Incháustegui, “Relaciones entre España, Santo Domingo y Haití,” Eme Eme V.26 (September–October 1976, dated with the note “Madrid, 1965”), p. 40. 17. Corten, El estado débil, p. 29. 18. Moya Pons, Manual, pp. 59–60. 19. Cambeira, Quisqueya la Bella, pp. 69–70. 20. Moya Pons, Manual, pp. 59–60. 21. Bosch, Composición, pp. 56, 81. 22. Ramón Francisco, “Macaraos del cielo, macaraos de la tierra. El hombre, sus dioses, sus creencias,” in De tierra morena vengo. Imágenes del hombre dominicano y su cultura, 2nd edn., Soledad Alvarez (ed.) (Santo Domingo: Editora Corripio, 1987), p. 120. 23. Michele Wucker, Why the Cocks Fight: Dominicans, Haitians, and the Struggle for Hispaniola (New York: Hill & Wang, 1999), p. 31. 24. Moya Pons, Manual, pp. 59–60. 25. Bosch, Composición, p. 67. 26. Moya Pons, Manual, pp. 65, 103. 27. Wucker, Why the Cocks Fight, p. 31. 28. Tirso Mejía Ricart, “Haití en la Formación de la Nacionalidad Dominicana,” Eme Eme XIV.79 (July–August 1985), p. 65. 29. Hazard, Santo Domingo, p. 65. 30. Mejía Ricart, “Haití,” p. 65. 31. Moya Pons, Manual, p. 61. 32. Rodman, Quisqueya, pp. 27–8. 33. Corten, El estado débil, p. 29. 34. Wucker, Why the Cocks Fight, p. 31. 35. Rodman, Quisqueya, p. 22. 36. See Mejía Ricart, “Haití,” p. 63. 37. Moya Pons, Manual, p. 68. See also Jean Price-Mars, La République d’Haïti et la République Dominicaine. Les aspects divers d’un problème d’histoire, de géographie et d’ethnologie, V.1 (Port-au-Prince: Collection du Tricinquantenaire de l’Indépendance d’Haïti, 1953), p. 16. 38. Moya Pons, Manual, p. 68. See also Price-Mars, La République, V.1, p. 16. 39. Marcio Veloz Maggiolo, Sobre cultura dominicana y otras culturas (ensayos) (Santo Domingo: Editora Alfa y Omega, 1977), p. 12. 40. Veloz Maggiolo, Sobre cultura dominicana, p. 12. 41. Hazard, Santo Domingo, p. 87. 42. Cambeira, Quisqueya la Bella, p. 68. 43. Miguel Alberto Román, Compay Chano (Ciudad Trujillo: Editorial El Caribe, 1949), p. 23n. 44. Moya Pons, Manual, pp. 92–3, 95. 45. That is, had not Ogeron’s untimely death prevented him from taking over the Spanish portion at that juncture. Rodman, Quisqueya, pp. 21–2. 46. Corten, El estado débil, p. 29.
NOTES
223
47. On this history of the French incursions, see Moya Pons, Manual, pp. 80–111. 48. See Franco, Los negros, pp. 126–7. 49. The intention of the authorities was to “utilize the Canarians as a living border that, in defending their newly acquired lands, would at the same time defend the Colony against the French” (Moya Pons, Manual, p. 109). 50. Moya Pons, Manual, pp. 107–9, 111, 143–4. 51. Mejía Ricart, “Haití,” p. 64. 52. Thomas E. Weil, Jan Knippers Black, Howard I. Blutstein, Kathryn T. Honston, David S. McMorris, and Frederick P. Munson, Haiti: A Country Study (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1982 [research completed February 1973]), p. 29. 53. Moya Pons, Manual, p. 113. 54. Lizardo, Cultura africana, pp. 55, 61. Against the proclivity toward another kind of marronage, Toussaint L’Ouverture will launch his campaign to eliminate “vagabondage,” instituting compulsory labor on the restored plantations. See Corten, El estado débil, p. 30. 55. Moya Pons, Manual, pp. 116, 122. 56. Mejía Ricart, “Haití,” p. 68. 57. Moya Pons, Manual, pp. 122–3. 58. Lizardo, Cultural africana, p. 102. 59. Moya Pons, Manual, pp. 135, 148. 60. Cambeira, Quisqueya la Bella, p. 72. See also p. 99, where Cambeira refers to the two groups as “enclaves” composing one extra-legal group that “elected to operate their affairs, their lives outside the restrictive margin of colonial order and management.” 61. Mejía Ricart, “Haití,” p. 63. Chapter 3
The Great Opening, 1751–1801
1. Marx V. Aristide and Laurie Richardson, “Haiti’s Popular Resistance,” in The Haiti Files: Decoding the Crisis, James Ridgeway (ed.) (Washington, D.C.: Essential Books/Azul Editions, 1994), p. 65. 2. C. L. R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution, 2nd rev. edn. (New York: Vintage Books, 1989), p. 89. 3. See Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity (Stanford University Press, 1990), p. 67. 4. Wilson Harris, Tradition, the Writer and Society: Essays (London and Port of Spain: New Beacon, 1967), p. 45. 5. Frank Moya Pons, Manual de Historia Dominicana, 10th edn. (Santo Domingo: Caribbean Publishers, 1995), p. 217. 6. Carolyn E. Fick, The Making of Haiti: The Saint Domingue Revolution from Below (Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 1990), pp. 127–8. 7. Tirso Mejía Ricart, “Haití en la Formación de la Nacionalidad Dominicana,” Eme Eme XIV.79 (July–August 1985), p. 69.
224
NOTES
8. Martin Ros, Night of Fire: The Black Napoleon and the Battle for Haiti, trans. Karin Ford-Treep (New York: Sarpedon, 1994), p. 62. 9. Mejía Ricart, “Haití,” p. 68. 10. Moya Pons, Manual, pp. 149, 150, 152. 11. Juan Bosch, Composición Social Dominicana. Historia e Interpretación, 16th edn. (Santo Domingo: Alfa y Omega, 1988 [1968]), p. 150. 12. Elizabeth Abbott, Haiti: The Duvaliers and Their Legacy (New York, London, Toronto, Sydney, Tokyo, and Singapore: Simon & Schuster, 1988), p. 11. 13. Fradique Lizardo, Cultura africana en Santo Domingo (Santo Domingo: Taller, 1979), p. 62. 14. Moya Pons, Manual, pp. 57, 140. 15. Samuel Hazard, Santo Domingo, Past and Present; with a Glance at Hayti (Santo Domingo: Editora de Santo Domingo, 1974; reprint of the original, published New York: Harper & Brothers, 1873), pp. 499, 506. 16. Moya Pons, Manual, p. 141. 17. Fick, The Making of Haiti, pp. 51–2; 297n.20. 18. Alan Cambeira, Quisqueya la Bella: The Dominican Republic in Historical and Cultural Perspective (Armonk, NY and London: M. E. Sharpe, 1997), pp. 113, 117. 19. Bosch, Composición, pp. 159–60. 20. Ros, Night of Fire, p. 12. 21. See Rodman, Quisqueya: A History of the Dominican Republic (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1964), p. 31. 22. Ros, Night of Fire, p. 11. 23. Emilio Cordero Michel, La Revolución Haitiana y Santo Domingo (Santo Domingo: Editorial Nacional, 1968), p. 22. 24. Cordero Michel, La Revolución, pp. 17–19, 28–30, 32. 25. Moya Pons, Manual, p. 167. 26. Ros, Night of Fire, pp. 24, 26–7. 27. Mejía Ricart, “Haití,” p. 70. 28. Rodman, Quisqueya, p. 33. 29. Ros, Night of Fire, pp. 30, 34, 35, 49, 64, 66. 30. Rodman, Quisqueya, p. 36. 31. See Jean Price-Mars, La République d’Haïti et la République Dominicaine. Les aspects divers d’un problème d’histoire, de géographie et d’ethnologie, V.1 (Portau-Prince: Collection du Tricinquantenaire de l’Indépendance d’Haïti, 1953), pp. 19, 21. 32. Ros, Night of Fire, p. 70. 33. Cordero Michel, La Revolución, pp. 42–3. 34. Fick, The Making of Haiti, p. 182. 35. Ros, Night of Fire, pp. 72, 73, 85. 36. Cordero Michel, La Revolución, p. 55. 37. Quoted in Bosch, Composición, p. 175. 38. Rodman, Quisqueya, p. 36. 39. Moya Pons, Manual, pp. 170–1. 40. Price-Mars, La République, V.2, p. 203.
NOTES
41. 42. 43. 44.
45. 46. 47.
48.
49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67.
225
See Cambeira, Quisqueya la Bella, p. 132. Ros, Night of Fire, p. 98. See Cambeira, Quisqueya la Bella, p. 132. In Emilio Rodríguez Demorizi (ed.), Poesía Popular Dominicana, 2nd edn. (Santiago: Universidad Católica Madre y Maestra, 1973), p. 17; see also Joaquín Balaguer, La Isla Al Revés. Haití y el Destino Dominicano (Santo Domingo: Librería Dominicana, 1984 [1947]), p. 85n.33. Wucker, Why the Cocks Fight, p. 243. Ros, Night of Fire, p. 117. Robert Debs Heinl, Jr. and Nancy Gordon Heinl, Written in Blood: The Story of the Haitian People, 1492–1995, 2nd edn., rev. and expanded by Michael Heinl (Lanham, MD, New York, and London: University Press of America, 1996), p. 87. Pedro Mir, Las dos patrias de Santo Domingo, tesis acerca de la división política de la isla en dos naciones (Santo Domingo: Editora Cultura Dominicana, 1975), p. 39. Ros, Night of Fire, pp. 118, 119, 120. Balaguer, La Isla, pp. 227–8. Ros, Night of Fire, p. 120. This was an important precedent: the 1816 constitution would echo the earlier document in recognizing the Île d’Haïti as one united island. J. Marino Incháustegui, “Relaciones entre España, Santo Domingo y Haití,” Eme Eme V.26 (September–October 1976, dated “Madrid, 1965”), p. 44. Ros, Night of Fire, p. 120. The university was reopened in 1815 but would be closed again during the Haitian Domination of 1822–44. Moya Pons, Manual, pp. 193–5. Mejía Ricart, “Haití,” p. 70. Mejía Ricart, “Haití,” p. 70. Fick, The Making of Haiti, p. 206. Price-Mars, La République, V.1, p. 26. Cordero Michel, La Revolución, pp. 58–9. Ros, Night of Fire, pp. 117–18. Patrick Bellegarde-Smith, Haiti: The Breached Citadel (Boulder, CO, San Francisco, and London: Westview Press, 1990), p. 44. Quoted in Rosaline Ng Cheong-Lum, Haiti (New York, London, and Sydney: Marshall Cavendish, 1995), p. 24. Price-Mars, La République, V.1, p. 31. Cordero Michel, La Revolución, pp. 100–1. Price-Mars, La République, V.2, pp. 325–6.
Chapter 4
Haiti and Santo Domingo, 1802–44
1. Máximo Aviles Blonda, Teatro. La Otra Estrella en el Cielo. Yo, Bertolt Brecht. Pirámide 179 (Santo Domingo: Editora del Caribe, Ediciones de la Sociedad
226
2.
3. 4.
5.
6. 7.
8. 9. 10. 11.
12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19.
NOTES
de Autores y Compositores Dramáticos de la República Dominicana, 1968), p. 155. Jean-Pierre Boyer in later years would join horizontal blue and red bands on the flag as background to a national coat-of-arms. The colors would go back to black and red in 1964, as an affirmation of Haitian négritud during François Duvalier’s présidence-à-vie; and then, with the ouster of Jean-Claude Duvalier in 1986, back to the pre-Duvalier blue and red. Rosaline Ng Cheong-Lum, Haiti (New York, London, and Sydney: Marshall Cavendish, 1995), p. 34. Juan Bosch, Composición Social Dominicana. Historia e Interpretación, 16th edn. (Santo Domingo: Alfa y Omega, 1988 [1968]), p. 181. Samuel Hazard, Santo Domingo, Past and Present; with a glance at Hayti (Santo Domingo: Editora de Santo Domingo, 1974; reprint of the original, published New York: Harper & Brothers, 1873), pp. 150–1. Howard J. Wiarda and Michael J. Kryzanek, The Politics of External Influence in the Dominican Republic (New York: Praeger/Hoover Institution Press, 1988), p. 27. Michele Wucker, Why the Cocks Fight: Dominicans, Haitians, and the Struggle for Hispaniola (New York: Hill & Wang, 1999), p. 81. Robert Debs Heinl, Jr. and Nancy Gordon Heinl, Written in Blood: The Story of the Haitian People, 1492–1995, 2nd edn., rev. and expanded by Michael Heinl (Lanham, MD, New York, and London: University Press of America, 1996), p. 104. Alan Cambeira, Quisqueya la Bella: The Dominican Republic in Historical and Cultural Perspective (Armonk, NY and London: M. E. Sharpe, 1997), p. 138. Emilio Cordero Michel, La Revolución Haitiana y Santo Domingo (Santo Domingo: Editorial Nacional, 1968), pp. 81–2, 96. Frank Moya Pons, Manual de Historia Dominicana, 10th edn. (Santo Domingo: Caribbean Publishers, 1995), p. 202. Jean Price-Mars, La République d’Haïti et la République Dominicaine. Les aspects divers d’un problème d’histoire, de géographie et d’ethnologie, V.1 (Port-au-Prince: Collection du Tricinquantenaire de l’Indépendance d’Haïti, 1953), p. 34. See Cambeira, Quisqueya la Bella, pp. 141–2. Selden Rodman, Quisqueya: A History of the Dominican Republic (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1964), pp. 43–4. Cordero Michel, La Revolución, pp. 85–7. Hazard, Santo Domingo, p. 151. Patrick Bellegarde-Smith, Haiti: The Breached Citadel (Boulder, CO, San Francisco, and London: Westview Press, 1990), p. 44. Bellegarde-Smith, Haiti, p. 51. Elizabeth Abbott, Haiti: The Duvaliers and Their Legacy (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1988), p. 20. Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Haiti, State Against Nation: The Origins and Legacy of Duvalierism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1990), p. 106.
NOTES
20. 21. 22. 23. 24.
25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38.
39. 40. 41. 42. 43.
44.
45.
46. 47.
227
Hazard, Santo Domingo, p. 152. Abbott, Haiti, p. 19. Bosch, Composición, p. 190. Cordero Michel, La Revolución, p. 80. Gordon K. Lewis, Main Currents in Caribbean Thought: The Historical Evolution of Caribbean Society in Its Ideological Aspects 1492–1900 (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983), p. 285. Price-Mars, La République, V.I, p. 208; V.2, p. 103n.1. Cordero Michel, La Revolución, p. 97. Hazard, Santo Domingo, p. 155. André Corten, El estado débil: Haití, República Dominicana (Santo Domingo: Editora Taller, 1993), p. 31. Abbott, Haiti, p. 21. Abbott, Haiti, p. 24. Heinl and Heinl, Written in Blood, p. 140. Abbott, Haiti, pp. 18, 24. Bosch, Composición, p. 185. Bosch, Composición, pp. 198, 202–3. Rodman, Quisqueya, pp. 43–4. Cambeira, Quisqueya la Bella, p. 21. Cordero Michel, La Revolución, p. 106. Tirso Mejía Ricart, “Haití en la Formación de la Nacionalidad Dominicana,” Eme Eme XIV.79 (July–August 1985), p. 71; see also José Alcántara Almánzar, Los escritores dominicanos y la cultura (Santo Domingo: Editora Amigo del Hogar, Publicaciones del INTEC, Monografía 21, 1990), p. 173. Hazard, Santo Domingo, pp. 156–7. Joaquín Balaguer, La Isla Al Revés. Haití y el Destino Dominicano (Santo Domingo: Librería Dominicana, 1984 [1947]), p. 159. Heinl and Heinl, Written in Blood, p. 154n.12. Bosch, Composición, pp. 198, 202–3. José Alcántara Almánzar, Narrativa y sociedad en Hispanoamérica (Santo Domingo: Editora Corripio, Ediciones del Instituto Tecnológico de Santo Domingo, 1984), p. 44. Silvio Torres-Saillant, “The Dominican Republic,” No Longer Invisible: AfroLatino Americans Today, Minority Rights Group (ed.) (London: Minority Rights Group, 1995); cited in David Howard, Coloring the Nation: Race and Ethnicity in the Dominican Republic (Oxford: Signal Books and Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2001), p. 27. Georges Rouma, L’Île de Saint-Domingue ou de Haïti (Brussels: Maison de l’Amerique latine, 1939; an 8-page mimeographed copy in the library of the Universidad Autónoma de Santo Domingo), pp. 1–2. J. Marino Incháustegui, “Relaciones entre España, Santo Domingo y Haití,” Eme Eme V.26 (September–October 1976; dated “Madrid, 1965”), p. 45. Cambeira, Quisqueya la Bella, p. 148.
228 48. 49. 50. 51. 52.
53. 54. 55. 56.
57. 58. 59.
60. 61. 62.
63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76.
NOTES
Price-Mars, La République, V.2, p. 169. Moya Pons, Manual, p. 219. Quoted in Cambeira, Quisqueya la Bella, p. 149. Wucker, Why the Cocks Fight, p. 38. Rayford Logan, Haiti and the Dominican Republic (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968), p. 32; quoted in Paul Farmer, The Uses of Haiti (Monroe, ME: Common Courage Press, 1994), p. 79. Quoted in Price-Mars, La République, V.1, pp. 141–2. Moya Pons, Manual, p. 229. Rodman, Quisqueya, p. 47. Rafael Emilio Yunén Z., La Isla Como Es: Hipótesis Para Su Comprobación (Santiago de los Caballeros, Dominican Republic: Universidad Católica Madre y Maestra, 1985), p. 146. Franklin J. Franco, Los negros, los mulatos y la nación dominicana (Santo Domingo: Editora Nacional, 1970), pp. 130–1. Franklin J. Franco, Santo Domingo: Cultura, Política e Ideología (Santo Domingo: Editora Nacional, 1974), p. 131. Gérard Pierre-Charles, “Génesis de las Naciones Haitiana y Dominicana,” in Política y sociología en Haití y la República Dominicana. Coloquio DomínicoHaitiano de Ciencias Sociales, Suzy Castor, André Corten, Lil Despradel, and Gérard Pierre-Charles (eds.) (Mexico: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Instituto de Investigaciones Sociales, 1974), p. 37; Carlos Esteban Deive, Diccionario de Dominicanismos (Santo Domingo: Politecnia Ediciones, 1986), p. 63. Mejía Ricart, “Haití,” p. 72. Balaguer, La Isla al Revés, pp. 14, 15. Balaguer, La Isla al Revés, p. 188; Ramón Francisco, “Macaraos del cielo, macaraos de la tierra. El hombre, sus dioses, sus creencias,” in De tierra morena vengo. Imágenes del hombre dominicano y su cultura, 2nd edn., Soledad Alvarez (ed.) (Santo Domingo: Editora Corripio, 1987), p. 120. Cambeira, Quisqueya la Bella, p. 150. Balaguer, La Isla al Revés, p. 24. Moya Pons, Manual, p. 234. Cambeira, Quisqueya la Bella, pp. 149–50. Moya Pons, Manual, p. 233. Bosch, Composición, pp. 241, 248. Hazard, Santo Domingo, pp. 165–7. Moya Pons, Manual, pp. 240–1. Pierre-Charles, “Génesis,” p. 38. Moya Pons, Manual, p. 235. Rodman, Quisqueya, pp. 47–8. Cambeira, Quisqueya la Bella, p. 149. Mejía Ricart, “Haití,” p. 73. Rodman, Quisqueya, pp. 61–2.
NOTES
229
77. Heinl and Heinl, Written in Blood, p. 185. In 1842, American bishop Msgr. Joseph Rosati renewed the initiative by heading the effort to draw up a concordat satisfactory to both parties, but this occurred in the year in which Boyer was deposed at the hands of his enemies, the dissatified mulattos, and so the endeavor to bond together the two portions of Hispaniola by ecclesiastical means was frustrated. 78. Balaguer, La Isla al Revés, p. 28. 79. Mejía Ricart, “Haiti,” p. 73. 80. Moya Pons, Manual, pp. 229–30. 81. Hazard, Santo Domingo, p. 170. 82. Bosch, Composición, p. 235. 83. Franco, Santo Domingo, pp. 132–3; Moya Pons, Manual, p. 270. 84. Abbott, Haiti, p. 24. From the movement at Praslin was spawned the mulattoled revolt, whose success was followed by the exile of Boyer and then a 15-year period of regimes headed by noir generals: Philippe Guerrier, Louis Pierrot, Jean-Baptiste Riché, and then Faustin Soulouque. 85. Rodman, Quisqueya, p. 52. 86. Howard, Coloring the Nation, p. 28. 87. Yunén, L Isla Como Es, p. 146. 88. Hazard, Santo Domingo, p. 424. 89. See Price-Mars, La République, V.1, p. 202. 90. Price-Mars, La République, V.2, pp. 109, 113–4, 177. 91. Bosch, Composición, pp. 228, 232. 92. Max Lovatón, “Prólogo” to El problema fronterizo domínico-haitiano, by José Ricardo Roques Martínez (Santo Domingo: La Cuna de América, n.d.), p. 12. 93. Fradique Lizardo, Cultura africana en Santo Domingo (Santo Domingo: Taller, 1979), p. 68. 94. Carlos Augusto Billini, El caso domínico-haitiano (Separata de la 2a edición del Curso de Derecho Internacional Público Americano) (Ciudad Trujillo: Editora Montalvo, 1958), p. 51. 95. See Price-Mars, La République, V.1, p. 12. 96. See Cambeira, Quisqueya la Bella, p. 148. 97. Rodman, Quisqueya, p. 179. Chapter 5 Territorial Imperatives, 1845–1929 1. Quoted in Jean Price-Mars, La République d’Haïti et la République Dominicaine. Les aspects divers d’un problème d’histoire, de géographie et d’ethnologie, V.2 (Port-au-Prince: Collection du Tricinquantenaire de l’Indépendance d’Haïti, 1953), pp. 210–11. 2. Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990), pp. 64–5, 169. 3. Gordon K. Lewis, Main Currents in Caribbean Thought: The Historical Evolution of Caribbean Society in Its Ideological Aspects 1492–1900 (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983), pp. 276–7.
230
NOTES
4. Price-Mars, La République, V.1, pp. 226–7. 5. Samuel Hazard, Santo Domingo, Past and Present; with a Glance at Hayti (Santo Domingo: Editora de Santo Domingo, 1974; reprint of the original, published in New York: Harper & Brothers, 1873), p. 248. 6. María Elena Muñoz, Las Relaciones Domínico-Haitianas: Geopolítica y Migración (Santo Domingo: Editora Alfa & Omega, 1995), p. 32. 7. J. Marino Incháustegui, “Relaciones entre España, Santo Domingo y Haití,” Eme Eme V.26 (September–October 1976; dated “Madrid, 1965”), p. 46. 8. Carlos Augusto Billini, El caso domínico-haitiano (Separata de la 2a edición del Curso de Derecho Internacional Público Americano) (Ciudad Trujillo: Editora Montalvo, 1958), pp. 51–2. 9. Joaquín Balaguer, El centinela de la frontera: vida y hazañas de Antonio Duvergé, 2nd edn. (Santo Domingo: Fuentes Impresores, 1974), pp. 68, 70. 10. Price-Mars, La République, V.2, p. 167. 11. Alan Cambeira, Quisqueya la Bella: The Dominican Republic in Historical and Cultural Perspective (Armonk, NY and London: M. E. Sharpe, 1997), p. 126n.2. 12. Robert Debs Heinl, Jr. and Nancy Gordon Heinl, Written in Blood: The Story of the Haitian People, 1492–1995, 2nd edn., rev. and expanded by Michael Heinl (Lanham, MD, New York, London: University Press of America, 1996), p. 183. 13. Heinl and Heinl, Written in Blood, pp. 193, 198. 14. Heinl and Heinl, Written in Blood, p. 193. 15. Heinl and Heinl, Written in Blood, p. 211. 16. Price-Mars, La République, V.2, p. 180. 17. Selden Rodman, Quisqueya: A History of the Dominican Republic (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1964), pp. 64, 65. 18. Price-Mars, La République, V.2, p. 191. 19. Billini, El caso, p. 62. 20. Juan Bosch, Composición Social Dominicana. Historia e Interpretación (Santo Domingo: Alfa y Omega, 1988 [1968]), p. 280. 21. José Ricardo Roques Martínez, El problema fronterizo domínico-haitiano (Santo Domingo: La Cuna de América, n.d.), p. 19. 22. Heinl and Heinl, Written in Blood, p. 200. 23. Heinl and Heinl, Written in Blood, p. 201. 24. Quoted in Fradique Lizardo, Cultura africana en Santo Domingo (Santo Domingo: Taller, 1979), pp. 69, 73. 25. Quoted in Lizardo, Cultura africana, pp. 69, 73. 26. Gérard Pierre-Charles, “Génesis de las Naciones Haitiana y Dominicana,” in Política y sociología en Haití y la República Dominicana. Coloquio DomínicoHaitiano de Ciencias Sociales, Suzy Castor, André Corten, Lil Despradel, and Gérard Pierre-Charles (eds.) (Mexico: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Instituto de Investigaciones Sociales, 1974), p. 38. 27. Pierre-Charles, “Génesis,” p. 39. 28. Pierre-Charles, “Génesis,” p. 38.
NOTES
231
29. Joaquín Balaguer, La Isla Al Revés. Haití y el Destino Dominicano (Santo Domingo: Librería Dominicana, 1984 [1947]), p. 31. 30. Rodman, Quisqueya, p. 70. 31. Frank Moya Pons, Manual de Historia Dominicana, 10th edn. (Santo Domingo: Caribbean Publishers, 1995), p. 338. 32. Price-Mars, La République, V.2, pp. 210–11, 228–9. 33. Bernardo Vega, Trujillo y Haití, V.I (1930–1937) (Santo Domingo: Fundación Cultural Dominicana, 1988), p. 25. 34. Heinl and Heinl, Written in Blood, pp. 212–13. 35. Hazard, Santo Domingo, pp. 429–30. 36. Rodman, Quisqueya, p. 77. 37. Hazard, Santo Domingo, p. 170. 38. Moya Pons, Manual, p. 345. 39. David Howard, Coloring the Nation: Race and Ethnicity in the Dominican Republic (Oxford: Signal Books and Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2001), p. 28. 40. David Nicholls, Haiti in Caribbean Context: Ethnicity, Economy and Revolt (Basingstoke and London: St. Anthony’s/Macmillan, 1985), pp. 177–8. 41. Hazard, Santo Domingo, p. 265. 42. Cambeira, Quisqueya la Bella, p. 155. 43. Vega, Trujillo y Haití, p. 25. 44. Heinl and Heinl, Written in Blood, p. 212. 45. Rodman, Quisqueya, p. 73. 46. Heinl and Heinl, Written in Blood, p. 212. 47. Heinl and Heinl, Written in Blood, pp. 212, 225. 48. Price-Mars, La République, V.2, pp. 233, 259. 49. Heinl and Heinl, Written in Blood, pp. 229, 239, 264. 50. Price-Mars, La République, V.2, p. 277. 51. Vega, Trujillo y Haití, p. 19. 52. Rodman, Quisqueya, pp. 86–90. 53. See Muñoz, Las Relaciones Domínico-Haitianas, pp. 84–5. 54. Rodman, Quisqueya, pp. 93–4. 55. Ramón AntonioVeras, Migración caribeña y un capítulo haitiano (Santo Domingo: Editora Taller, 1985), p. 20. 56. Rodman, Quisqueya, p. 95. 57. Moya Pons, Manual, p. 426; cf. Rodman, Quisqueya, p. 100. 58. Heinl and Heinl, Written in Blood, p. 293. 59. Moya Pons, Manual, p. 426. 60. Balaguer, La Isla Al Revés, p. 71. The Dominican jurist Sánchez i Sánchez alleges that a questionable alteration was made in the text of Article 3 of the seventh conference, the one that ratified the “current possessions.” This alteration in effect annulled the 1874 treaty. The Haitians played the game, according to Sánchez i Sánchez, of never committing themselves steadfastly to any accord or treaty, as in the case of President Canal’s annulation of the
232
61. 62. 63. 64.
65. 66.
67. 68. 69.
70. 71. 72. 73.
74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80.
NOTES
1874 treaty in 1876. See Carlos Augusto Sánchez i Sánchez, El caso domínicohaitiano (Ciudad Trujillo: Editora Montalvo, 1958), pp. 14–15. Veras, Migración, p. 20. Moya Pons, Manual, pp. 458–9. Moya Pons, Manual, pp. 477, 479, 482. Suzy Castor, “El Impacto de la Ocupación Norteamericana en Haití,” in Política y sociología en Haití y la República Dominicana. Coloquio DomínicoHaitiano de Ciencias Sociales, Suzy Castor, André Corten, Lil Despradel and Gérard Pierre-Charles (eds.) (Mexico: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Instituto de Investigaciones Sociales, 1974), p. 55. Heinl and Heinl, Written in Blood, p. 359. The production boom would reach record levels in 1930 with its 345,980 tons, yet its export value, appraised at $9.9 million, constituted a considerable drop from 1920’s rate of $45 million for a yield of 159,000 tons. It was the great depression that brought on this decrease in revenues, prompting U.S. refiners to look to Haiti again as the primary source of low-cost cane-cutting labor during the crisis. José del Castillo, Ensayos de sociología dominicana (Santo Domingo: Ediciones Siboney, Taller, 1984), pp. 180–1; Vega, Trujillo y Haití, p. 19. Castillo, Ensayos, p. 183. Balaguer, La Isla Al Revés, p. 133. Senaida Jansen and Cecilia Millán, Género, Trabajo y Etnica en los Bateyes Dominicanos (Santo Domingo: Editora de Colores. Instituto Tecnológico de Santo Domingo, Programa Estudios de la Mujer, 1991), p. 37. Bosch, Composición, p. 287; quoted in Castor, “El Impacto,” p. 60. Moya Pons, Manual, pp. 477, 479, 482. Castor, “El Impacto,” pp. 56–60. José Alcántara Almánzar, Narrativa y sociedad en Hispanoamérica (Santo Domingo: Editora Corripio, 1984; Ediciones del Instituto Tecnológico de Santo Domingo), p. 53. See James Ferguson, The Dominican Republic: Beyond the Lighthouse (London: Latin American Bureau, 1992), p. 17. Castillo, Ensayos, pp. 180–1. Elizabeth Abbott, Haiti: The Duvaliers and Their Legacy (New York, London, Toronto, Sydney, Tokyo, and Singapore: Simon & Schuster, 1988), p. 40. Rodman, Quisqueya, p. 124; Monika Latzel, Dominican Republic (Hong Kong: Apa Publications, 1996), p. 12. Michele Wucker, Why the Cocks Fight: Dominicans, Haitians, and the Struggle for Hispaniola (New York: Hill & Wang, 1999), p. 102. Veras, Migración, p. 23. Ramón Francisco, “Macaraos del cielo, macaraos de la tierra. El hombre, sus dioses, sus creencias,” in De tierra morena vengo. Imágenes del hombre dominicano y su cultura, 2nd edn., Soledad Alvarez (ed.) (Santo Domingo: Editora Corripio, 1987), p. 120.
NOTES
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81. Ferguson, The Dominican Republic, p. 17. 82. Heinl and Heinl, Written in Blood, p. 497. 83. José Alcántara Almánzar, Los escritores dominicanos y la cultura (Santo Domingo: Editora Amigo del Hogar, Publicaciones del INTEC, Monografía 21, 1990), p. 61. Chapter 6
Transnational Dictatorships, 1930–86
1. Graham Greene, The Comedians (New York: Viking Press, 1966 [1965]), p. 250. 2. Robert Debs Heinl, Jr. and Nancy Gordon Heinl, Written in Blood: The Story of the Haitian People, 1492–1995, 2nd edn., rev. and expanded by Michael Heinl (Lanham, MD, New York, and London: University Press of America, 1996), p. 498. 3. José del Castillo, Ensayos de sociología dominicana (Santo Domingo: Editora Taller, 1984), p. 175. Paul Farmer, The Uses of Haiti (Monroe, ME: Common Courage Press, 1994), p. 103, puts the range of victims from 18,000 to 35,000. 4. See Mario Vargas Llosa, La Fiesta del Chivo (Madrid: Grupo Santillana de Ediciones, 2000), p. 220. 5. See Carolyn Fowler, A Knot in the Thread: The Life and Work of Jacques Roumain (Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press, 1980), p. 180n.8. 6. José Alcántara Almánzar, Estudios de poesía dominicana (Santo Domingo: Editora Alfa y Omega, 1979), p. 323. 7. See Richard A. Haggerty, “Introduction,” in Richard A. Haggerty (ed.), Dominican Republic and Haiti: Country Studies, 2nd edn. (Washington, D.C.: Library of Congress, Federal Research Division, 1991), p. xix. 8. See Aaron Segal, Cartography by Patricia M. Chalk and J. Gordon Shields, An Atlas of International Migration (London, Melbourne, Munich, and New Jersey: Hans Zell Publishers, 1993), p. 38. 9. Andrés Corten, El estado débil: Haití, República Dominicana, trans. Cecilia Millán and rev. Pilar Espaillat (Santo Domingo: Editora Taller, 1993), pp. 201, 262, 263, 273. 10. David Howard, Coloring the Nation: Race and Ethnicity in the Dominican Republic (Oxford: Signal Books and Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2001), p. 23. 11. On the implications of insular duality, see Rafael Emilio Yunén Z., La Isla Como Es: Hipótesis Para Su Comprobación (Santiago de los Caballeros, Dominican Republic: Universidad Católica Madre y Maestra, 1985), p. 31. 12. Joe Painter, Politics, Geography and “Political Geography”: A Critical Perspective (London, New York, Sydney, and Auckland: Arnold/Halstead Press, 1995), pp. 53, 113–14. 13. Ramón Antonio Veras, Migración caribeña y un capítulo haitiano (Santo Domingo: Editora Taller, 1985), p. 26. 14. James Ferguson, The Dominican Republic: Beyond the Lighthouse (London: Latin American Bureau, 1992), p. 82.
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NOTES
15. Quoted in Alfred Viau, Le Président Raphaêl L. Trujillo M. et la République d’Haïti (Ciudad Trujillo: Impresora Nacional, 1956), pp. 57–8, 60. 16. Frank Moya Pons, Manual de Historia Dominicana, 10th edn. (Santo Domingo: Caribbean Publishers, 1995), pp. 514–15, 518. 17. Cited in Alan Cambeira, Quisqueya la Bella: The Dominican Republic in Historical and Cultural Perspective (Armonk, NY and London: M. E. Sharpe, 1997), pp. 179–80. 18. Quoted in Bernardo Vega, Trujillo y Haití, V.1 (1930–1937) (Santo Domingo: Fundación Cultural Dominicana, 1988), p. 27. 19. Heinl and Heinl, Written in Blood, p. 526. 20. See Gérard Pierre-Charles, “Génesis de las Naciones Haitiana y Dominicana,” in Política y Sociología en Haití y la República Dominicana. Coloquio DomínicoHaitiano de Ciencias Sociales, Suzy Castor, André Corten, Lil Despradel, and Gérard Pierre-Charles (eds.) (Mexico: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Instituto de Investigaciones Sociales, 1974), pp. 40–1. On antihaitianismo as state-sanctioned ideology, see Ernesto Sagás, Race and Politics in the Dominican Republic (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2000). 21. Howard J. Wiarda and Michael J. Kryzanek, The Dominican Republic: A Caribbean Crucible, 2nd edn. (Boulder, CO, San Francisco, and Oxford: Westview Press, 1992), p. 138. 22. Veras, Migración, p. 21. 23. Ferguson, The Dominican Republic, p. 83. Prestol Castillo writes, in reference to Dajabón in the time of the massacre, that “they didn’t use the money of the Dominican Republic in the village, except occasionally, when some travelers was passing through. Days and suns and abstinences and the ‘gouls’—Haitian money—increased the pile of savings.” Freddy Prestol Castillo, El Masacre se pasa a pie, 8th edn. (Santo Domingo: Ediciones de Taller, 1989), p. 97. 24. Presented in Viau, Le Président, p. 105. 25. Viau, Le Président, p. 68. 26. Selden Rodman, Quisqueya: A History of the Dominican Republic (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1964), p. 144. 27. Edwidge Danticat, The Farming of Bones: A Novel (New York: Soho, 1998), p. 114. 28. See Danticat, The Farming of Bones, pp. 299, 307. 29. Pedro Mir, Las dos patrias de Santo Domingo, tesis acerca de la división política de la isla en dos naciones (Santo Domingo: Editora Cultura Dominicana, 1975), p. 62. 30. Moya Pons, Manual, p. 519. 31. Eric Williams, From Columbus to Castro: The History of the Caribbean, 1492–1969 (New York: Vintage Books [Random House], 1984), p. 438. 32. Carlos Augusto Sánchez i Sánchez, El caso domínico-haitiano (Ciudad Trujillo: Editora Montalvo, 1958), p. 21. 33. Veras, Migración, p. 21. 34. Heinl and Heinl, Written in Blood, pp. 500–1.
NOTES
35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40.
41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46.
47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56.
235
Danticat, The Farming of Bones, p. 236. Heinl and Heinl, Written in Blood, p. 501. Moya Pons, Manual, p. 520. See María Elena Muñoz, Las Relaciones Domínico-Haitianas: Geopolítica y Migración (Santo Domingo: Editora Alfa & Omega, 1995), p. 162. Jacques Roumain, “La Tragédie haïtienne,” Regards (18 November, 1937: 4–6), p. 5, quoted in Fowler, A Knot, p. 182. Fowler, A Knot, pp. 184–5, tells that the Dominican representative in Haiti, in response to Roumain’s denunciation, demanded the arrest of both the Haitian author and journal editor, Pierre Saint-Dizier, both residing in France at the time. Although the charge, “outrages à un chef d’état étranger,” had been prohibited by the Laval Decree of 30 October 1935, the French government acted on the demand in April 1938, arresting Roumain and Saint-Dizier. The arrests sparked a widespread protest by liberal and radical newspapers and labor unions, which denounced both the arrests and the decree that authorized them as acts of censorship. In the trial of 13 December 1938, the French court nonetheless found the accused guilty as charged, finding justification not in the Laval Decree but in a 57-year-old law forbidding public ridicule of heads of state. Roumain and his editor at least were each given a lenient sentence, a fine of 300 francs, with suspended term of imprisonment, which would have been from 3 to 12 months. Both defendants successfully appealed the decision the month following the judgment. Veras, Migración, p. 25. Cambeira, Quisqueya la Bella, p. 185. Castillo, Ensayos, p. 188. Michele Wucker, Why the Cocks Fight: Dominicans, Haitians, and the Struggle for Hispaniola (New York: Hill & Wang, 1999), p. 125. Heinl and Heinl, Written in Blood, p. 529. Thomas E. Weil, Jan Knippers Black, Howard I. Blutstein, Kathryn T. Honston, David S. McMorris, and Frederick P. Munson, Haiti: A Country Study (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1982; research completed February 1973), pp. 122–3. Heinl and Heinl, Written in Blood, p. 522. Veras, Migración, pp. 26, 27. Williams, From Columbus to Castro, p. 465. Heinl and Heinl, Written in Blood, pp. 528, 532. See Sagás, Race and Politics, pp. 52–5. Wucker, Why the Cocks Fight, p. 105. Juan Bosch, Composición Social Dominicana. Historia e Interpretación (Santo Domingo: Alfa y Omega, 1988 [1968]), p. 405. Rodman, Quisqueya, p. 139. Joaquín Balaguer, La Isla Al Revés. Haití y el Destino Dominicano (Santo Domingo: Librería Dominicana, 1984 [1947]), p. 131. Sánchez i Sánchez, El caso domínico-haitiano, pp. 75, 77.
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NOTES
57. Heinl and Heinl, Written in Blood, p. 574. 58. Heinl and Heinl, Written in Blood, p. 627n.4. 59. Claude Moise, “La Constitución de 1987, en la transición política haitiana,” Ciencia y Sociedad XVIII. 3 (July–September 1993), pp. 323, 332. 60. See Andrés Corten, El estado débil: Haití, República Dominicana, trans. Cecilia Millán and rev. Pilar Espaillat (Santo Domingo: Editora Taller, 1993), p. 21. 61. See Segal, An Atlas, p. 38. 62. Castillo, Ensayos, p. 188. 63. Bosch, Composición, p. 416. 64. Weil et al., Haiti, pp. 122–3. 65. Wucker, Why the Cocks Fight, p. 144. 66. Amy Wilentz, The Rainy Season: Haiti Since Duvalier (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1989), p. 39. 67. Ernesto Sagás, “An Apparent Contradiction? Popular Perceptions of Haiti and the Foreign Policy of the Dominican Republic,” paper presented at the Sixth Annual Conference of the Haitian Studies Association (Boston, MA, 14–15 October, 1994), p. 4. 68. Wucker, Why the Cocks Fight, pp. 144–5. 69. Rodman, Quisqueya, p. 170. 70. Marcio Veloz Maggiolo, Cultura, Teatro y Relatos en Santo Domingo (Santiago de los Caballeros: Universidad Católica Madre y Maestra, 1972), p. 251; Abelardo Vicioso, “Poesía y nacionalismo en la República Dominicana,” Scriptura I.4 (1981), p. 78. 71. Weil et al., Haiti, p. 122. 72. Wucker, Why the Cocks Fight, p. 106. 73. Castillo, Ensayos, p. 188. 74. Abbott, Haitií, p. 218. 75. Muñoz, Las Relaciones Domínico-Haitianas, pp. 211–12. 76. Bernard Diederich, Swine Fever Ironies (1985), in Libète: A Haiti Anthology, Charles Arthur and Michael Dash (eds.) (Princeton, NJ: Markus Wiener Publishers/Latin America Bureau, Ian Randle Publishers, 1999), pp. 104–5. 77. Ferguson, The Dominican Republic, p. 82. 78. Farmer, The Uses of Haiti, p. 231. 79. Sagás, “An Apparent Contradiction?,” p. 5. 80. Report of the Liga Contra la Esclavitud para la Protección de los Derechos Humanos (1979). Reprinted in Veras, Migración, p. 258. 81. Ferguson, The Dominican Republic, p. 82. 82. Heinl and Heinl, Written in Blood, p. 643. 83. Yunén, in La Isla Como Es, p. 186, concludes the scene with the remark, “I couldn’t stand it anymore and loudly left the room, later falling into a profound depression on finding out that, even after they were dead, we continued exploiting our island neighbors.” Cambronne also did a brisk business in selling Haitian blood, which, due to the high resistance of the survivors of numerous contagions, was especially rich in antibodies and therefore
NOTES
237
prized by immunological researchers. Also, Heinl and Heinl, Written in Blood, p. 643. 84. Carlos Fuentes, El espejo enterrado (Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1992), p. 523. Chapter 7
Close Encounters: Haitians in Dominican Literature
1. Manuel Rueda, La criatura terrestre (Santo Domingo: Editora Taller, 1975 [1963]), p. 32. Subsequent citations in parentheses will refer to this edition. 2. Marianna Torgovnick, Gone Primitive: Savage Intellectuals, Modern Lives (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990); Fernando Valerio-Holguín, “Primitive Borders: Cultural Identity and Ethnic Cleansing in the Dominican Republic,” Returning Gaze: Primitivism and Identity in Latin America, Erik Camayd-Freixas and José Eduardo González (eds.) (Tucson, AZ: The University of Arizona Press, 2000), p. 75. 3. Valerio-Holguín, “Primitive Borders,” p. 77. 4. Valerio-Holguín, “Primitive Borders,” p. 83. 5. Linda M. Rodríguez, “Dominican Republic: 19th- and 20th Century Prose and Poetry,” in Encyclopedia of Latin American Literature, Verity Smith (ed.) (Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn Publishers, 1997), p. 263. 6. Marcio Veloz Maggiolo, “Tipología del tema haitiano en la literatura dominicana” in Sobre cultura dominicana y otras culturas (ensayos) (Santo Domingo: Editora Alfa y Omega, 1977), p. 93. 7. Veloz Maggiolo, Sobre cultura, pp. 94–5. 8. Veloz Maggiolo, Sobre cultura, p. 95. 9. Andrés L. Mateo, Mito y cultura en la Era de Trujillo (Santo Domingo: Editora de Colores, 1993), p. 52. 10. See Mateo, Mito y cultura, p. 13 and passim, on the key role of the Trujillist intellectual in the creation of a whole “mythological system.” 11. See José Alcántara Almánzar, Los escritores dominicanos y la cultura (Santo Domingo: Editora Amigo del Hogar, Publicaciones del INTEC, Monografía 21, 1990), p. 193. 12. Manuel Marrero Aristy, Over, 12th edn. (Santo Domingo: Librería Dominicana, 1983 [1940]), p. 49. Subsequent citations in parentheses will refer to this edition. 13. See Fradique Lizardo, Cultura africana en Santo Domingo (Santo Domingo: Taller, 1979), p. 12. 14. See Alcántara Almánzar, Los escritores, p. 171. 15. See Rodríguez, “Dominican Republic,” p. 265. 16. Alcántara Almánzar, in Los escritores dominicanos y la cultura, p. 23, writes that “the indigenist expedient, so logical in the conception of the South American bourgeoisie, appears among us as a late product, lacking in strength and only valid for the dominant class.” And so it is that among the Hispanic values affirmed in Enriquillo stand out those virtues associated with the hidalgo class
238
17.
18.
19.
20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25.
26.
27. 28.
29. 30. 31. 32. 33.
NOTES
of lower nobility: fidelity and the sense of honor. See also José Alcántara Almánzar, Narrativa y sociedad en Hispanoamérica (Santo Domingo: Editora Corripio, Ediciones del Instituto Tecnológico de Santo Domingo, 1984), p. 12. Gordon K. Lewis, Main Currents in Caribbean Thought: The Historical Evolution of Caribbean Society in Its Ideological Aspects, 1492–1900 (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983), p. 284. See Joaquín Balaguer, La Isla Al Revés. Haití y el Destino Dominicano (Santo Domingo: Librería Dominicana, 1984 [1947]), p. 212. José Joaquín Pérez, enamored of a heroic past, shows his exclusive love of Hispanity in “El Junco Verde,” on Columbus: Pérez expresses the belief that “not all was negative” in this past, “and that there were also visionary men, of progressive ideas, who loved the good, justice, and peace.” Quoted in Alcántara Almánzar, Narrativa y sociedad, p. 12. David Howard, Coloring the Nation: Race and Ethnicity in the Dominican Republic (Oxford: Signal Books and Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2001), pp. 120, 122. Both poems quoted in Howard, Coloring the Nation, pp. 138–9; see commentary, idem. Bruno Rosario Candelier, “Poesía Negra en Santo Domingo,” El Nacional de ¡Ahora! Suplemento Cultural (30 April 1972), p. 2. “[R]ecited by memory” on the record Papá-bocó, Industria Mozart, OMD-01. Quoted in Candelier, “Poesía negra,” p. 2n.48. Candelier, “Poesía negra,” pp. 2, 6. Manuel del Cabral, “Poesía Negra y Metafísica” (interview), Letra Grande 2.1 (April 1980), p. 44. Cabral, “Poesía negra,” p. 47; Sócrates Nolasco, “Aparición y Evolución del Cuento en Santo Domingo. Noticias Preliminares,” in El Cuento en Santo Domingo. Selección Antológico, Sócrates Nolasco (ed.) (Santo Domingo: Biblioteca Nacional, 1986), p. 21. Federico Henríquez Gratereaux, “Andrajos intelectuales,” in Literatura del Caribe. Antología. Siglos XIX y XX. Puerto Rico, Cuba, República Dominicana, 5th edn., Eliseo Colón Zayas (ed.) (Madrid: Editorial Playor, 1988), p. 264. Candelier, “Poesía negra,” p. 239. Manuel del Cabral, Compadre Mon, 4th edn. (Buenos Aires: Editorial Losada, 1957), p. 135. Subsequent citations in parentheses will refer to this edition of the poem. Manuel del Cabral, Obra Poética Completa de Manuel del Cabral (Santo Domingo: Editora Alfa y Omega, 1987), pp. 214–15. Manuel del Cabral, Antología tierra (1930–1949) (Madrid: Editorial Escelicer, 1949), p. 8. José Alcántara Almánzar, Narrativa y sociedad, p. 16. La Poesía Sorprendida I (October 1943 [Facsimile, Santo Domingo: Editora Cultural Dominicana, 1974]), p. 8 [unnumbered]. La Poesía Sorprendida I (December 1943), p. 8 [unnumbered].
NOTES
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34. La Poesía Sorprendida V (February 1944), pp. 1–2 [unnumbered]. 35. José Alcántara Almánzar, Estudios de poesía dominicana (Santo Domingo: Editora Alfa y Omega, 1979), p. 323. 36. Alcántara Almánzar, Estudios, p. 47. 37. Candelier, “Poesía negra,” p. 6. 38. Héctor Incháustegui Cabral, “Prólogo” to Teatro. La Otra Estrella en el Cielo, Yo, Bertolt Brecht, Pirámide 179 by Máximo Avilés Blonda (Santo Domingo: Ediciones de la Sociedad de Autres y Compositores Dramáticos de la República Dominicana, 1968), p. 12. Subsequent citations in parentheses will refer to this edition. 39. José Alcántara Almánzar (ed.), Antología de la literatura dominicana (Santo Domingo: Editora Cultural Dominicana, 1972), p. 67. 40. José Alcántara Almánzar, Las máscaras de la seducción (Santo Domingo: Editorial Taller, 1983), p. 62. 41. Alcántara Almánzar, Las máscaras, p. 107. 42. Alcántara Almánzar, Las máscaras, p. 109. 43. Alcántara Almánzar, Las máscaras, p. 111. 44. René Depestre, “Problemas de la identidad del hombre negro en las literaturas antillanas,” Casa de las Américas 31 (1970): 51–9; quoted in Howard, Coloring the Nation, p. 134. Chapter 8
Searching out the Boundary, 1986–2003
1. María Elena Muñoz, Las Relaciones Domínico-Haitianas: Geopolítica y Migración (Santo Domingo: Editora Alfa & Omega, 1995), p. 211. 2. James Ridgeway (ed.), The Haiti Files: Decoding the Crisis (Washington, D.C.: Essential Books/Azul Editions, 1994), p. 1. 3. Quoted in Michele Wucker, Why the Cocks Fight: Dominicans, Haitians, and the Struggle for Hispaniola (New York: Hill & Wang, 1999), p. 136. 4. Muñoz, Las Relaciones Domínico-Haitianas, p. 191. 5. Article 1 of the “Decreto Presidencial 233-91,” is appended in Ernesto Sagás, “An Apparent Contradiction? Popular Perceptions of Haiti and the Foreign Policy of the Dominican Republic,” a paper presented at the Sixth Annual Conference of the Haitian Studies Association (Boston, MA, 14–15 October, 1994), pp. 7–8. The text itself states, however: “Se dispone la repatriación de todos los menores que hayan alcanzado la edad de dieciséis (16) años de edad, de nacionalidad extranjera, que venían trabajando como braceros en la siembra, cultivo, corte y acarreo de la caña.” 6. Sagás, “An Apparent Contradiction?,” pp. 1, 5. 7. Rafael Emilio Yunén Z., La Isla Como Es: Hipótesis Para Su Comprobación (Santiago de los Caballeros, Dominican Republic: Universidad Católica Madre y Maestra, Colección Estudios, 1985), p. 42. Yunén refers to the “internal articulation” of the Dominican Republic, but the concept would apply equally well to Haiti.
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8. Sagás, “An Apparent Contradiction?,” p. 7. 9. See Muñoz, Las Relaciones Domínico-Haitianas, p. 190. 10. James Ferguson, The Dominican Republic: Beyond the Lighthouse (London: Latin American Bureau, 1992), pp. 90–1. Ferguson here cites CEA general manager Juan Arturo Biaggi’s claim that only 3 percent of the country’s Haitian population was employed in the cultivation and harvesting of sugarcane in 1991. 11. Paul B. Goodwin, Jr., Global Studies: Latin America (Guilford, CT: Dushkin/McGraw Hill, 1998, 8th edn.), pp. xi, 120, 124. 12. See Muñoz, Las Relaciones Domínico-Haitianas, pp. 137, 198. 13. Dominican remittances from the United States on the other hand totaled $328 million. Aaron Segal, An Atlas of International Migration, cartography by Patricia M. Chalk and J. Gordon Shields (London, Melbourne, Munich, and New Jersey: Hans Zell Publishers, 1993), p. 152. 14. See David Jacobson, Rights Across Borders: Immigration and the Decline of Citizenship (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), p. x. 15. Ernesto Sagás, Race and Politics in the Dominican Republic (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2000), p. 92. 16. Jean Bertrand Aristide, with the collaboration of Christophe Wargny, Tout moun se moun, trans. Jaime Vergara (Madrid: IEPALA Editorial, 1994), pp. 16–17. 17. Paul Farmer, The Uses of Haiti (Monroe, ME: Common Courage Press, 1994), pp. 25, 26. 18. Aristide, Tout moun se moun, p. 36. 19. Bella Stumbo, “A Place Called Fear,” Global Studies: Latin America, 6th edn., Paul Goodwin, Jr. (ed.) (Guilford, CT: The Dushkin Publishing Group, 1994), p. 225 (originally appearing in Vanity Fair, February 1994). 20. Sagás, “An Apparent Contradiction?,” p. 5. 21. Ferguson, The Dominican Republic, p. 58. 22. Ferguson, The Dominican Republic, p. 60. 23. Yunén, La Isla Como Es, p. 175. 24. Silvio Torres-Saillant and Ramona Hernández, The Dominican Americans (Westport, CT and London: Greenwood Press, 1998), p. xix, give a 1990 total of 511,297 Dominicans permanently residing in the United States; Wucker, Why the Cocks Fight, p. 96. 25. Georges Anglade, Coup d’oeil sur le passé (1990), trans. James Ferguson, in Libète: A Haiti Anthology, Charles Arthur and Michael Dash (eds.) (Princeton, NJ, London, and Kingston: Markus Wiener Publishers/Latin America Bureau, Ian Randle Publishers, 1999, p. 99. 26. Fédération des Amis de la Nature, Quelques données sure la réalité dramatique de l’environment en Haïti (1986), trans. James Ferguson, in Libète, Arthur and Dash (eds.), p. 101. 27. Anglade, Coup d’oeil, p. 99.
NOTES
28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34.
35. 36. 37. 38.
39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44.
45. 46.
47.
48. 49.
241
Quoted in Arthur and Dash (eds.), Libète, p. 111. Yunén, La Isla Como Es, pp. 167–8, 174. See Muñoz, Las Relaciones Domínico-Haitianas, p. 190. Arthur and Dash (eds.), Libète, p. 111. Ferguson, The Dominican Republic, p. 58; Nicholls, lls, Haiti in Caribbean Context, pp. 189–90. Nicholls, Haiti in Caribbean Context, p. 198. Ferguson, The Dominican Republic, p. 60. Another estimate puts the population of Haitians in the Dominican Republic between 200,000 and 300,000, with only as much as 20 percent of the total working in the sugarcane fields. These figures were provided by Danilo Díaz, director of the television program Matinal, September 1999; quoted in Edwin Paraison, “La Migration et les Relations Bilatérales entre Haiti et la République Dominicaine: A la recherche d’un solution finale” (http://www.windowsonhaiti.com/w299021.shtml), p. 4. Ferguson, The Dominican Republic, pp. 13, 58. Ferguson, The Dominican Republic, p. 74. David Howard, Coloring the Nation: Race and Ethnicity in the Dominican Republic (Oxford: Signal Books and Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2001), p. 71. David E. Johnson, “The Time of Translation: The Border of American Literature,” in Border Theory, Scott Michaelson and David E. Johnson (eds.) (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), p. 133. See Alejandro Lugo, “Reflections on Border Theory, Culture, and the Nation,” in Johnson and Michaelson, Border Theory, pp. 50–1, 57. Miguel Alberto Román, Compay Chano (Ciudad Trujillo: Editorial El Caribe, 1949), p. 30n.27. Román, Compay Chano, p. 35n.33. Joaquín Balaguer, La Isla Al Revés. Haití y el Destino Dominicano (Santo Domingo: Librería Dominicana, 1984 [1947]), p. 89. Balaguer, La Isla Al Revés, p. 89. Howard J. Wiarda and Michael J. Kryzanek, The Dominican Republic: A Caribbean Crucible, 2nd edn. (Boulder, San Francisco, and Oxford: Westview Press, 1992), pp. 140–1. David Howard, Dominican Republic in Focus: A Guide to the People, Politics and Culture (New York: Interlink Books, 1999), p. 15. Thomas E. Weil, Jan Knippers Black, Howard I. Blutstein, Kathryn T. Honston, David S. McMorris, and Frederick P. Munson, Haiti: A Country Study (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1982; research completed February 1973), p. 6. Alan Cambeira, Quisqueya la Bella: The Dominican Republic in Historical and Cultural Perspective (Armonk, NY and London: M. E. Sharpe, 1997), pp. 229–30, 236. Paul Goodwin, Jr. (ed.), Global Studies: Latin America, 6th edn. (Guilford, CT: The Dushkin Publishing Group, 1994), p. 106. Nicholls, Haiti in Caribbean Context, p. 126.
242
NOTES
50. Cambeira, Quisqueya la Bella, p. 230. 51. Wucker, Why the Cocks Fight, p. 244. 52. Guy S. Antoine, “Another Haitian–Dominican Crisis,” http://www.windoson haiti.com/w99462.shtml (November 1999), p. 2. 53. Howard, Dominican Republic in Focus, p. 69. 54. Ramón Antonio Veras, Migración caribeña y un capítulo haitiano (Santo Domingo: Editora Taller, 1985), p. 29. 55. Elizabeth Abbott, Haiti: The Duvaliers and Their Legacy (New York, London, Toronto, Sydney, Tokyo, and Singapore: Simon & Schuster, 1988), p. 235. In light of such abuses, Yunén in 1985 proposed that profits gained by sugar companies established in the Dominican territories be entailed for “humanizing” the industry. Producers would be obligated by this entailment to improve living conditions in the bateyes and to guarantee protection of the workers’ rights to decent salary and adequate living conditions. Yunén, La Isla Como Es, p. 192. 56. Manuel Rueda, “Cinco temas sobre el hombre dominicano,” in De tierra morena vengo. Imágenes del hombre dominicano y su cultura, 2nd edn., Soledad Alvarez (ed.) (Santo Domingo: Editora Corripio, 1987), p. 41. 57. Howard, Coloring the Nation, p. 30. 58. See Yunén, La Isla Como Es, p. 193. 59. Howard, Coloring the Nation, p. 37. 60. Ferguson, The Dominican Republic, p. 13. 61. Americas Watch, Haitian Sugar Cane Cutters in the Dominican Republic (New York: Americas Watch, 1989), pp. 13–19; cited in Ferguson, The Dominican Republic, pp. 86–8. 62. Wucker, Why the Cocks Fight, p. 155. 63. Cambeira, Quisqueya la Bella, p. 205. 64. Wucker, Why the Cocks Fight, p. 165. 65. See Andrés Corten, El estado débil: Haití, República Dominicana, trans. by Cecilia Millán and rev. Pilar Espaillat (Santo Domingo: Editora Taller, 1993), p. 192; and Ferguson, The Dominican Republic, p. 36. 66. Wucker, Why the Cocks Fight, p. 4. 67. Howard, Dominican Republic in Focus, p. 52. 68. Wucker, Why the Cocks Fight, p. 187. 69. Wucker, Why the Cocks Fight, p. 189. 70. Wucker, Why the Cocks Fight, p. 5. 71. See Gordon K. Lewis, Main Currents in Caribbean Thought: The Historical Evolution of Caribbean Society in Its Ideological Aspects 1492–1900 (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983), p. 285. 72. Howard, Coloring the Nation, p. 35. 73. See Yunén, La Isla Como Es, p. 193. 74. Ferguson, The Dominican Republic, pp. 91, 110. 75. Yunén, La Isla Como Es, pp. 34–5. 76. See Muñoz, Las Relaciones Domínico-Haitianas, pp. 201–2.
NOTES
77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83.
84. 85. 86. 87. 88. 89. 90. 91. 92. 93.
243
See also Howard, Coloring the Nation, pp. 25–6. Howard, Dominican Republic in Focus, p. 70. Paraison, “La Migration,” p. 9. See Thomas E. Skidmore and Peter H. Smith, Modern Latin America, 3rd edn. (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), p. 297. Corten, El estado débil, p. 23. Howard, Coloring the Nation, p. 185. Sarah Cameron, Book of the Year [1998]: World Affairs: “Haiti,” in file://C:/Program files\Britannica\Bdvd\Cache\_\_4_PreviewRil.htm (18 December 1999), p. 1. Paraison, “La Migration,” pp. 5–10, 12. See Jacobson, Rights Across Borders; also Balaguer, La Isla Al Revés, p. 80. Balaguer, La Isla Al Revés, p. 80. P. Baltenweck, Bulletin météorologique du Collège Saint-Martial (1992), trans. Charles Arthur, in Arthur and Dash (eds.), Libète, p. 91. Paraison, “La Migration,” pp. 3–5. Michael Deibert, “Haiti seeks alleged leader of coup attempt,” Reuters News Service (Port-au-Prince: 26 December 2001), p. 1. “Dominican military faces accusations of human rights abuses,” Christian Aid press release, 10 December 2001 (
[email protected]). DR1 Daily News, 16 January 2002 (www.dr1.com). DR1 Daily News of 30 January 2002 (www.dr1.com). Yunén, La Isla Como Es, p. 31.
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Index Abad Alfau, Antonio, 117, 124 abolition, 67, 74, 100 accord, of 1966; 152; on cooperation and assistance, 210; on labor, 151; on trade in Haití, 152 affranchis, 54, 61–2, 71; domingüois, 32 African swine fever, 159–60 Africanity, 16, 164, 170 Africanization, 5, 79 Afro-Dominicans, 170–1, 184 Afro-Haitianism, 119, 172, 179–80 Alcántara Almanzar, José, 18, 140, 166, 179, 184 Alfau, Felipe, 97, 120 Alvarez de Toledo, Fradique, 38 Americas Watch, 191, 212 annexation, 3, 9, 95–6, 119–21, 124, 126, 136 anti-Communism, 145, 193 anti-Dominicanism, 187 anti-Haitianism, 10, 18, 145, 153, 166–7, 178, 184, 186–7, 205 Aranjuez, Treaty of, 59, 113, 122, 127 Aristide, Jean-Bertrand, 187, 193, 202–3, 210, 213–14 arrondisements, 74, 94 Artibonite, the, 21, 59, 62, 159, 179–80 Audiencia, 27, 35–6 authoritarianism, 137, 141, 143, 155 Avilés Blonda, Máximo, 81, 166, 180, 186 Azlor, Manuel, 56–7 Azua de Compostella, 36, 61, 71, 88, 96, 112–3, 118, 123, 132, 140
Báez, Buenaventura, 103–4, 106, 115–17, 124–5 Bahoruco, 20, 33, 60 Balaguer, Joaquín, 135, 153–4, 158, 161, 164, 188, 193, 197–8, 202, 204–5 Barahona, 118, 123, 132, 146, 211 Barón, Juan, 75 Basle, Treaty of, 45–6, 69–71, 72, 73, 83, 93, 109 bateyes, 14, 15, 196, 201–2, 208, 212 Belladère, 152–3, 212 Bellegarde-Smith, Patrick, 5 Biassou, Georges, 66, 69 bidonvilles, 23, 195 binary oppositions, 10, 13, 164 blacks, 74, 85–6, 95 Bobadilla, Tomás de, 102–3, 105, 108, 113 Bois Caiman, 51 Boisrond-Canal, Pierre Théomas, 127–8 Bonaparte, Napoleon, 12, 72–3, 76, 84, 89, 92 border, 3, 5, 10, 13, 16, 19–21, 24–7, 45, 47, 54, 56–7, 60, 66, 70, 82, 106, 111–12, 116, 127–9, 132, 140–4, 158, 164, 176–8, 180–2, 189, 195, 199, 202–3, 208–9, 213 borderlands, 14–15, 21, 25, 31, 43–4, 83, 85, 89, 115, 117, 119, 130, 132,134, 140, 147, 162, 164, 166, 179, 186, 189, 198–200, 211
264
INDEX
border mentality, 14, 164, 178, 180 Borgella, Bernard, 74, 88, 104–5 Borno, Luis, 136 Bosch, Juan, 156–7 bourgeoisie, Dominican, 84, 98, 107, 122, 156 boundary, 8, 5, 14, 30, 36, 44, 58, 109, 154, 163, 174, 186 Bourbons, kings, 48, 69; reforms, 56 Boyer, Jean-Pierre, 94, 98, 101–103, 105, 107, 114, 142, 145, 174 braceros, 12, 13, 132, 152–3, 158–60, 168, 188, 202, 209 buccaneers, 34, 38, 50, 139, 178 Cabral, José María, 121–3, 125, 166, 172, 178, 186 Cabral, Manuel del, 1, 7, 172–7 Cabrera, General, 66–8, 122–3 Cachimán, 114, 118 Cacos, 126, 130, 132, 135, 143 Cambronal, 108, 118 Cambronne, Luckner, 161 Campos Tavares, José, 82, 92, 97 Canary Islands, 43, 48, 49, 55, 56, 105 caneworkers, 161, 168; syndicates, 212 Cap Français, 37, 41–2, 49, 61, 68–9, 83 Cap Haïtien, 71, 82, 88, 107, 115, 122, 125, 136 Catholic Church, 29, 79, 98, 106, 145, 212 cattle, 27, 31, 35, 49, 58, 61, 73, 91, 146; cattle-raising, 28, 45, 54, 79, 133 caudillism, 25, 125, 156, 173–4 Central Romana, 14, 156, 159 Christophe, Henry, 53, 74, 76, 81, 83, 89–90, 92 Cibao, the, 20–1, 37, 49, 56, 61, 78, 83, 85, 92, 95, 100–1, 105, 126–8, 172–3, 178 cimarrones, 31–4, 38–9, 50, 58, 186 cincuentenas, 44, 46, 118 citizenship, 88, 95
Clervaux, Jacques, 74, 76, 81 Coalition Nationale pour les Droits des Haïtien, 212 cockfights, 16, 26, 99, 173 Code Noir of 1685, 62–3, 76 coffee, 37, 57, 61, 84, 87, 93, 133, 188, 191 Colbert, Jean Baptist, 41, 54, 63 colonization, 10, 24, 199 Columbus, Christopher, 24, 31, 73, 190 communal lands, 100, 134, 142 community, 6, 10, 50, 86, 99, 167, 176, 179, 178, 192, 198–9 complementarity, 4, 10, 37, 49, 60, 143, 190, 208 Consejo Estatal de Azúcar (CEA), 156, 158–9, 201, 202, 208 contraband, 28, 31, 33–5, 38, 41, 47, 49, 50, 58, 190, 193, 199 conucos, 37, 75, 94 Convergence Democratique (CD), 212–13 corporate state, the, 152, 202 corporations, 136, 202 Cotuí, 47, 71, 88–9, 96, 123 counterpoint, 3, 4, 8, 10, 12–13, 16, 24, 26, 112, 140, 142, 162, 165, 167, 180, 193, 215 Cuba, 55, 64, 73, 121, 124, 128, 134, 142–3, 152, 155, 158, 209, 211 Cul-de-Sac, 62, 152–3 D’Ogeron, Bertrand, 40 Dajabón, 21, 47, 59, 48, 83, 115, 118, 122, 131, 139, 140, 144, 146, 150, 157, 199, 211–12 Dartiguenave, Sudre, 5, 131 Daut, General, 75–6 Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, 51, 62, 74 Decree of 16 of Pluviôse, 77 demarcation, 45, 59, 113, 116 democracy, 5, 155, 189, 191, 193 dependency, 30, 134, 136, 137, 140, 141, 162, 167, 191
INDEX
Depestre, René, 172, 186 Desrosiers, Caco Excellent, 149 Dessalines, Jean-Jacques, 53, 66, 78–9, 81, 83, 85, 87–88, 92, 126, 151, 185 Devastations, the, 27–9, 34–5 development, 195, 210 dictatorship, 9, 118, 150, 167, 177, 191 difference, 4, 9, 13, 14, 16, 24, 25, 26, 43, 150, 163, 198, 208, 215 Domination, the Haitian, 9, 97, 103, 109, 122, 142, 127 Dominican Genealogical Society, 206 Dominican military, 194 Dominican Republic, 1, 143, 214 Dominicanization of the Border, 149, 151, 154, 198 Du Casse, Jean, 42, 46 duality, 5, 10, 12, 189, 215 Duarte, Juan Pablo, 97, 106, 112, 149 Duvalier, 9, 25, 162; François, 9, 141, 153, 155–8, 204; Jean Claude, 9, 141, 158–61, 192–4 Duvergé, Antonio, 113–14 earthquakes, 30, 41, 107 ecological degradation, 57, 155 education, 104–5, 208 El caso domínico-haitiano, 154 emancipation, 67, 74, 96, 99–100, 106 embargos, 98, 203–4 encomienda, 47, 100, 145 England, 42, 54, 108, 120, 142 Era de Francia en Santo Domingo, 83 Estado Independiente de Haití Español, 95 Estimé, Dumarsais, 5, 151–3 ethnocentrism, 154, 163, 170, 178 ethnohistorical processes, 3, 6, 8, 12, 15, 26, 140 export, 36–7, 55, 57, 79, 84, 91, 93, 98, 101, 125, 154 expropriations, 108, 142 Family Pact of 1761, 48, 56 Fédération des Amis de la Nature, 194
265
Fernández de Fuenmayor, Ruy, 38 Fernández Leonel, José, 208 Fernando VII, 91, 93 Ferrand, Jean Louis, 76, 79, 82, 84–5, 91, 93, 115 filibustier, 33, 178; see FREEBOOTER Floreal law, 79, 87 foreign debt, 149, 152 France, 42, 44–5, 55–7, 66–7, 69–72, 74, 98, 108, 113, 115–21, 142, 161, 210 Francis I, 17, 30 Franco-Spanish War, 69 French Assembly, 67, 74 French Revolution, 52, 63 frontier, 2, 10, 17, 20, 29, 33, 43, 44, 49, 52, 129, 145, 149, 210 Gagá, 14–15, 16, 172, 200 García, Joaquín, Viscount of Choiseul, 59, 67, 76, 73, 113 garrisons, 53, 199 Geffrard, Fabre, 89, 111, 120, 123 geography, 19, 20, 24, 54, 112, 174, 178, 180, 215; see also POLITICAL GEOGRAPHY Girondins, 64, 67 González, Ignacio María, 127–8 Gran Colombia, 95, 106 grands-blancs, 54, 61, 63, 69, 76 Guadeloupe, 82, 87 Guardia Nacional, 131, 144 Guarico, 42, 45, 46, 64 Guayubín, 59, 122 Haiti, 1, 52, 62, 134, 172, 174; and the Domination, 25; emigration from, 191; as labor source, 9, 81, 133, 141, 144–5, 147, 154–5, 168, 190–1, 193; occupation by, 96; and the state, 78, 87 Haitian Revolution, 8, 24, 43, 54 Haitian-American Sugar Company (HASCO), 132 haitianización, la, 90, 98
266
INDEX
harvest, 134, 147, 148, 159, 168, 195–6, 203 hateros, 36, 49, 57–8, 74, 76, 78, 89, 91, 94–5, 98, 103, 105, 107, 117, 119, 122, 125 Hédouville, Gabriel-Théodore-Joseph, 71 hegemony, 9, 25, 145, 186 Hérard-Rivière, Charles, 108 Heureaux, Ulises, 127–8, 130 Higüey, 32, 88, 99 Hincha, 49, 113, 118, 122, 132, 149 Hispaniola, 19, 57, 70, 145, 174, 179 Hispanity, 145, 154 hommes de couleur, 64, 67 houngan, 55, 60 identity, 3–5, 7, 9–10, 16, 163, 215 ideology, 5, 7, 11, 13, 150, 202 immigration, 4, 79, 119, 120, 133, 146, 151, 159 indemnification, 102, 107, 116 Independence Day, 144, 146, 205 independence, 76, 79, 85, 91–2, 94, 109, 112, 141, 178 Independencia Efímera, la,106 insular system, 2, 4, 6–9, 10–11, 13, 16, 24, 25, 28, 49, 52–3, 70, 140, 155, 157, 162, 165, 176–8, 186, 189, 190, 195, 207, 214 interdependence, 2, 3, 8–9,16, 24–5, 41, 120, 143, 165, 190, 192, 209, 212, 215 intermarriage, 43, 109 Jamaica, 39, 55, 79, 125, 133 Jimaní, 152, 199, 212 Jimenes, Juan Isidro, 130–1 joint free zone, 159 Joseph, Dalbemar Jean, 130 Junta Central, 102, 108, 113 Kerverseau, General, 72, 76, 83–3, 93, Krèyol, 21, 51, 147, 172, 200; see also PATOIS
La Banda del Norte, 27 Las Caobas, 113, 118, 122 Las Matas de Farfán, 114, 118, 123, 135, 194 latifundios, 75, 76, 78, 87–8, 90, 97, 119 Lavalas, 188, 195, 213; Fanmi, 210, 212 Laveaux, Etienne, 64, 67–9 La Vega, 47, 88, 90, 96, 123 Law, of Floreal, 30, 77; of Immigration, 128; on the Colonization of the Frontier, 131 Le Cap, Haïtien, 78, 83 Leclerc, Victor-Emmanuel, 76, 87 Leconte, Cicinnatus, 126, 130, 132 Lemba, Sebastián, 32, 33, 47 Leonel Fernández, José, 205, 209, 214 Les Cayes, 61, 107 Levasseur, M. de, 113–14 linkages, 2, 3, 4, 5, 8, 10, 14, 56, 189, 212 livestock, 36, 37, 50, 55, 56, 101, 118, 150 Lomé IV Convention, 207, 210 López de Castro, Baltasar, 27–8 Louis XIV, 40–1, 54 L’Ouverture, François Dominique Toussaint, 52, 66–7, 69–71, 73–4, 78, 112, 122, 145, 151, 166, 182 L’Ouverture, Paul, 52, 75 lumber, 84, 103 Luperón, Gregorio, 45, 122–3, 125, 128 Lysius Salomon, Louis Félicité, 129 madames sara, 199 Magloire, Paul Eugène, 151, 153 Malpasse, 152, 155 Manicheanism, 11–12, 140 manieles, 32, 60 Manifest Destiny, 115, 131 Manifestación de Independencia, 108 Manzanillo, 130, 139 mapping, 25, 26, 180, 215 markers, 26, 192, 199, 207, 211, 213 Marrero Aristy, Ramón, 166, 167, 170, 186
INDEX
marronage culturelle, 186 marronage, 17, 46, 54, 56, 60, 186 Marte, Matías, 205 Massacre River, 78, 115, 139, 181 massacre, 21, 48, 58, 59, 148; of 1937, 25, 139–40, 147–8 Mejía, Hipólito, 189, 210, 214 Mercado Modelo, 14, 204 migration, 12, 13, 14, 190, 135, 158, 194 Moca, 88–9, 123 modernization, 74, 98, 208 monopoly, 29, 30, 31, 34, 35, 42, 44, 144 Monte Plata, 89, 99 Montecristi, 21, 35, 49, 56, 31, 34, 83, 95, 118, 122–3, 125, 132, 146, 150, 178 Montero, Hernando de, 35 Morfy, Guillermo de, 47 mulatto/a, 45–6, 49, 50, 62–3, 69, 75–7, 83, 85, 87–8, 94, 100, 102, 105, 114, 149, 151, 164, 200; elite, 90, 100, 106, 174 narrative, 50, 52; of liberation, 53 nation, 5, 6, 11, 15, 19, 26, 86, 214 national identities, 7, 14, 18, 25, 170 nationalism, 9–11, 23–4, 52, 87, 122, 145, 150, 174, 177, 182, 192 nation-state, 12, 99, 109, 111–12, 162, 192 negrismo, el, 171 négritude, la, 5 Neiba, 20, 96, 211, 213 Netherlands, 30, 199 Nigua, 64, 72, 99 Nissage-Saget, 126 Nord Alexis, Pierre, 126, 129 Northern Band, 31 Northwest Line, 123, 130, 188 Núñez de Cáceres, José, 95, 106 oligarchy, 95, 102, 119, 125, 141 Operation Dechoukaj, 192
267
Organization of American States (OAS), 152, 156, 206 Osorio, Antonio de, 34–5 Other, the, 5, 10, 13–14, 18, 24, 25, 31, 53, 54, 99, 107, 163, 165, 176 Otherness, 170, 173, 179, 186, 199 Ouanaminthe, 64, 122, 129–30, 132, 139, 144, 150, 157, 212 Ozama Fortress, 73, 93 Ozama, 33, 36, 43, 84–5, 108 parcellization, of Haitian lands, 23, 75, 100 Partido de la Liberación Dominicana (PLD), 197 Partido Reformista Social Cristiano (PRSC), 204 Partido Revolucionario Dominicano (PRD), 157, 204 pastoral mode of production, 31, 49, 97, 61, 63, 100, 103 patois, 99, 173, 175 peasantry, 6, 20, 90, 100, 102–3, 142, 149, 150, 160, 202 Pedernales, 21, 59, 131, 146, 199, 211–12 Peña Batlle, Manuel Arturo, 153, 164 Peña Gómez, José Francisco, 204–5 Pérez Caro, Ignacio, 42, 47 Pétion, Alexandre Sabès, 53, 76, 81, 89, 91 petit-blancs, 62, 64, 67 Petite Goâve, 59, 60, 213 Pierrot, Louis, 108, 115 Piña, Elías, 152–3, 199, 212 pirates, 33, 37–8, 40–1 Plaine du Nord, 20, 51, 55, 62 plantations, 27–8, 37, 42, 45–6, 49, 58, 61, 75, 77, 87, 98, 100, 102, 133, 136, 142, 155, 169–70, 189, 203 poesía negra, la, 171–2 Poesía Sorprendida, La, 166, 177–8 political geography, 142–3 Pons, Moya, Frank, 144, 149 population, 22, 23, 93, 117, 191
268
INDEX
Port-au-Prince, 12, 19, 20, 22, 23, 61, 76, 88, 104, 115, 118, 121–2, 128, 144, 146, 153, 156–7, 161, 185, 192, 199, 205, 209–10, 213 Port-de-Paix, 39, 69, 78 Pouancey, Seigneur de, 41 Praslin Movement, 106 Préval, René, 206, 209, 213 Price-Mars, Jean, 11, 79, 112, 116, 153 primitivism, 163–4, 166, 172 privatization, 197, 214 property ownership, 13, 97, 100 Puello, José Joaquín, 97, 115 Puerto Plata, 36, 40, 96, 123–4, 129 Puerto Rico, 35, 55, 91, 121, 124, 128, 134, 142, 172, 195, 197, 199, 208–9 Québécois Committee for the Rights of Haitian Workers, 191 Quisqueya, 3, 96, 181 ranchers, 27, 49, 58, 60, 75, 100, 104, 152; see also HATEROS rayano, el, 179, 198 Real Cédula, 34, 46 recolonization, 82, 112, 119 Reconquista, la, 29; 91–3 repatriation, 187–8 restoration, 25, 82, 124 Rigaud, André, 64, 66 Rivière-Hérard, Charles, 107, 112, 115 Robles, Andrés de, 41, 44 Rochambeau, Donatien-Marie-Joseph de, 78, 83, 86 Rosario Sánchez, Francisco, 106 Roumain, Jacques, 150 Roume, Philipe, 71, 73 Rueda, Manuel, 14, 163, 166, 178, 186, 201 Sagás, Ernesto, 10, 161, 162, 188 Saint-Domingue, 11, 24, 36, 37, 48–51, 54, 56–7, 76–7, 87, 104 Saint-Denys de Juchereau, 106–7
St. Thomas, 115, 129 Salnave, Sylvain, 122, 125 Samaná, 33, 39, 40, 41, 71, 76, 89, 92, 96, 97, 99, 108, 125, 127 San Cristóbal (St. Kitts), 38, 99, 114 San Juan de la Maguana, 36, 41, 58, 96, 123, 135 San Lorenzo de los Mina, 33, 56 San Miguel, 56, 90, 122 San Pedro de Macorís, 89, 132, 134, 188, 197 San Rafael, 66, 68, 122 Sánchez Ramírez, Juan, 91–2 Santa María, 114, 151, 184 Santana, Pedro, 97, 112–17, 122 Santiago de los Caballeros, 35, 36, 40, 42, 56, 78, 83, 88–90 95–5, 107, 113, 120, 123–4, 134, 197 Santo Domingo, 22, 24, 28, 31, 30, 35, 36–7, 41, 47, 52, 61, 69, 73, 76, 81, 83–5, 89, 92–3, 99, 104, 124, 134, 179 Senghor, Leopold Sédar, 171 Seybo, 99–100 shantytowns, 23, 150, 195; see BIDONVILLES situado, el, 36, 41, 89 slave revolt, 14, 18, 32–3, 47 slavery, 13, 45, 50, 77, 84, 114–15, 135, 168, 186, 188, 208 slaves, 7, 11, 14–15, 17, 27, 31, 32, 35, 37, 42, 44, 48–9, 52, 54, 57–8, 60, 68, 70, 73, 77, 88, 96, 101–2, 115, 154, 165, 170, 200, 209 Solano Bote, José, 55, 58, 59 Sonthonax, Léger Felicité, 53, 64, 67 Soulouque, Faustin, 112, 115–18 sovereignty, 96, 108, 112–14, 119–21, 124, 126, 143, 183 Spain, 28, 45, 56–7, 67–8, 70, 108, 115–16, 124, 199 spatial organization, 6, 24 state, the, 5, 19, 24–5, 26, 100, 109, 140–3, 147, 162, 183, 195, 197, 207, 209, 214
INDEX
subsistence farming, 42, 90–1 sugar plantations, 15, 20, 28, 31–3, 37, 39, 45–7, 57, 61–1, 84, 87, 91, 94, 98, 100, 127–9, 133, 134, 147, 152, 155, 161, 168, 191, 194, 196; and industry, 104, 133, 190, 195 sugar mills, 134, 136, 154 syncretism, 14–15, 36, 200 Tarin de Cussy, 41, 42, 46 taxation, 31, 49, 98, 101, 104–5, 133, 158 territory, 6, 23, 99, 154, 164, 183; expansion of, 112, 141 tobacco, 34, 37, 41, 43, 49, 56, 61–2, 84, 92–3, 101, 103–5, 125, 188, 191, 188 Tortuga, 33, 39, 40, 41, 55, 74, 178, 190 trade, 39; embargo, 90; restrictions, 37 transnationalization, 10, 141, 162, 192, 209 Treaty, of Guadalupe Hidalgo, 114; of Paris, 71, 93; of Tordesillas, 17 Trinitaria, La, 106; trinitarios, los, 104–05 Trouillot, Michel-Rolph, 5, 47, 86
269
Trujillo Molina, Rafael Leónidas, 9, 25, 131, 141, 144, 153, 156, 158, 162, 164, 167, 177, 188, 198 United Nations, 154, 187, 212; U. N. Human Rights Committee, 191 United States, 12, 20, 22, 72, 79, 84, 90, 97, 114, 116–17, 120, 123, 126, 131, 139, 142, 161, 191–4, 197, 199, 202, 210; U. S. Department of Agriculture, 159; U. S. occupation, 9, 25, 118, 134, 136–7, 144, 152, 166, 171 Vásquez, Horacio, 130, 136, 143 Vásquez, Juan, 71, 89 Venezuela, 194, 202, 210 Vincent, Sténio Joseph, 143–4, 148 Vodoun, 15, 68, 168, 170, 172, 175, 177, 200, 204 War of Restoration, 3, 122–3 War of Succession, 45, 126 Yunén, Rafael Emilio, 161, 207 Zorrilla de San Martín, Pedro, 49, 55
