Word: dominicans
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...prevent clandestine landings. In Port-au-Prince, a spate of political murders sent oppositionists into hiding and kept nerves taut. Behind the crisis lay President Francois Duvalier's fear that he would become a stepping stone in Cuban Prime Minister Fidel Castro's planned invasion of the Dominican Republic, which shares the island of Hispaniola with Haiti. "Haitian exiles are being trained in Havana," said Duvalier. Exhorting his people to fight back, he raised the war cry of famed Patriot Jean Jacques Dessalines (1758-1806): "Coupe tetesl Boulé cailles!" (Cut off heads! Burn houses...
Haiti is caught in a bind between Castro's Cuba, only 50 miles to the northwest, and Rafael Trujillo's bordering Dominican dictatorship. Duvalier would rather be accounted a member of the anti-dictatorial bloc, but that invites attack from Trujillo, whose gunboats already patrol Haitian waters and whose British-made Vampire jets fly patrols over Haitian soil. On the other hand, throwing in with Trujillo would be risky...
Beach v. Mountain. In Cuba, preparations by Castro's bearded veterans to invade the Dominican Republic are indeed under way. Colonel Alberto Bayo, sometime Spanish Loyalist soldier who trained Castro in Mexico three years ago, has been put in charge of strategy and training. The expedition leaders have been picked. But since hitting the beaches in Trujillo's well-armed police state could prove suicidal, the invaders would like to slip in through underarmed Haiti and set up guerrilla operations in the rugged mountains along the Haitian-Dominican border...
...time or another all three of them were in the same line of work; outsiders might easily picture ex-Dictator Juan Peron, 63, and ex-Dictator Fulgencio Batista, 58, gathered around Dictator Rafael Leonidas Trujillo's warm swimming pool in the Dominican Republic, reminiscing about the good old days. Instead, there was trouble in Trujillo's paradise. Peron was too scornful to speak to Batista; Batista was too scared to talk to Peron; aging (67) Dictator Trujillo obviously wished that both of them would go away. Reason: Cuba's bearded rebel leader, Fidel Castro, who toppled Batista...
...Caracas' Central University, Castro himself tossed the first coin into a hat to launch a drive for $300,000 to start an invasion. Only 155 miles away from Trujilloland, bearded members of Castro's 26th of July Movement are already gazing longingly at maps showing the Dominican Republic's Cordillera Central, a forest region much like Cuba's Sierra Maestra. As Dominican exiles plot and plan, Castro's soldiers talk knowingly of landing strips and beaches, of living off the land Trujillo has cut up into agricultural colonies...