The author of this book, a thirty year-old sociology student at the University of Santo Domingo, indicates his viewpoint in the dedication: “ To the martyrs and heroes of the Dominican Republic, fallen in defense of our sovereignty in the struggle against the Yankee aggressor.” This is a Marxist interpretation of Dominican history, and it won a prize from its Cuban publishers. Franco plays up United States intervention, the Trujillo dictatorship, and the recent civil conflict in the Dominican Republic. He sees the economic underdevelopment of the nation as a result of a conspiracy in which nearly all classes—large landowners, aristocracy, military, “bourgeosie” (always “atrophied”), and North American “capitalists”—have plundered the country at the expense of the proletariat. The laboring classes are represented as the only elements with a social conscience in the class struggle.
According to this view, the establishment of a constabulary under the control of Rafael L. Trujillo, following the occupation of United States Marines (1916-1924), led directly to the brutal “Trujillato,” which lasted until 1961. Numerous tables and statistics are included to bolster the author’s thesis of economic monopoly by “El Jefe” and foreign and domestic economic interests. Only when Trujillo ceased being useful, according to Franco, did the United States Central Intelligence Agency engineer his assassination in 1961. The dictator’s successors, Joaquín Balaguer, Rafael F. Bonelly, Donald Reid Cabral, Héctor García Godoy, and others, are generally dismissed as tools of United States imperialism. Juan Bosch and his short-lived administration in 1963 receive favorable treatment, but Franco criticizes the former president when he denies the existence of a Dominican class struggle in traditional Marxist terms.
Franco writes of the American intervention in 1965 following the outbreak of civil strife: “From that date forward it is impossible to ignore imperialism…. It is evident that [United States] intervention constitutes an act of desperation, appropriate to a decaying imperialism. In so far as our society is concerned, one must note that their attitude is intended to rescue from the abyss our oligarchical groups and our atrophied bourgeosie, incapable on their own of maintaining themselves in power in the class struggle with the working class and the popular masses” (p. 263). Not surprisingly the author discounts efforts by the United States to reach a solution to the conflict between contestants for the presidency, even after the arrival of the mediators of the Organization of American States. In his opinion, the only useful purpose served by the intervention was to reveal the “real culprits”—the United States, the oligarchs, the bourgeosie, and reactionary military groups.
Since publication of the book the representative of the “oligarchs,” Joaquín Balaguer, has been overwhelmingly elected as president, in opposition to the hero of the “proletariat,” Juan Bosch. One wonders how Franco will explain this in terms of the class struggle, now that the people have made a clear choice.
