Word: dominicans
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Considering the island's ugly history (see box), it is a wonder that the Dominican Republic's leftists did not make their move long before. The tinder for revolution has been building for generations, and in the unstable years after Dictator Rafael Leonidas Trujillo, the Dominican military has been the strongest anti-Communist influence. Most often it was in the person of Wessin y Wessin...
...poor Lebanese immigrants, Wessin is a rare bird among the fine-feathered Dominican officers. He prefers fatigues or suntans to fancy uniforms, scorns the usual fruit-salad decorations, and no one has ever accused him of growing rich on graft. He lives in a modest $12,000 concrete house with his wife and two sons, enjoys cockfighting and baseball. He is painfully shy among strangers, speaks only Spanish, and seldom says much. But he is a devout Catholic in a part of the world where males pay little attention to their religion, and he regards Communism with a bleak, uncompromising...
...Bring Them to Us." The Dominican air force was loyal to Wessin y Wessin. Up to this point he had only watched from the sidelines at San Isidro. At last he took a hand. Instead of a DC-3 to San Juan, he ordered his F-51s to strafe the palace and the approaches to the Duarte Bridge, which his tanks would cross to reach the city. Several people were killed in the raids, which roused the rebel radio and TV stations to a new frenzy. Well-known members of three Communist groups, including the 14th of June, appeared...
List of Reds. In San Juan, Bosch had his kind of answers. He charged that the U.S. had been duped into intervening by military gangsters in the Dominican Republic. "The only thing that Wessin y Wessin has done," he said, "is to bomb the first city of America like a monster." Bosch conceded that "a few Communists" might be fighting on his side, but insisted that his supporters were in complete command of the rebels. In reply, the State Department released a list of 58 Communist agitators, many of them graduates of Red Chinese and Czechoslovakian political warfare schools...
...active antiCommunists. We are fighting for the constitution, for Bosch. When the constitution is restored, we will keep the Communists out. We can handle them." Very possibly those youngsters genuinely thought that they were fighting for democracy. But before anyone could talk rationally about restoring anything in the Dominican Republic, there had to be a ceasefire, and at week's end that still seemed beyond any immediate grasp...