Word: trujillos
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...winds of war scudded across the Caribbean last week. For the most part, it was a shouting war, between the Dominican Republic and Cuba. It was, in a way, a shooting war too, as Dictator Rafael Leonidas Trujillo sent a 350-man force into the hills around the Dominican Republic town of Constanza to hunt down 20-odd survivors of a Cuba-based airborne rebellion (TIME, July 6). At the same time, Trujillo readied his guns-and bought new ones-to fight off a new invasion he said was headed his way from Cuba and Venezuela...
...Puerto Plata front, the government countered rebel claims of a successful landing with a communiqué full of gore. The "liberators" who survived an air and naval bombardment, it said, "waded ashore apparently hoping still to march on Ciudad Trujillo with the aid of peasants. It did not work that way. Machete-swinging farmers beat government troops to the beach. The invasion ended in a murderous flailing of razor-sharp machetes on the reddened sands. Army patrols found only dismembered bodies...
...Flag. Trujillo threw his 15,000-man army into the fighting, called up reserves, sent his "AntiCommunist Foreign Legion'' of retired army men to guard the Haitian border, mobilized the "Horsemen of the East"-a private army led by Cattleman (and former consul in New York) Felix Bernardino. At sea, suspicious Dominican gunboats stopped the U.S. freighter Florida State three times on one of its regular cement-carrying round trips between Puerto Rico and Florida. In the air, a Dominican PSI fired a burst of machine-gun fire and lowered its wheels to force a U.S. Air Force...
Despite U.S. demands for explanation of the C-47 force-down and U.S. charges that the Dominican Republic tricked Ambassador Farland into being photographed giving Pilot Ventura Simó an apparently congratulatory handshake, Trujillo last week greeted the crews of three visiting U.S. Coast Guard vessels as though he did not have a care in the world. He swapped toasts with the U.S. officer in charge at a palace reception, passed around a muddy U.S. flag he said one of the invasion boats was flying when it was sunk...
...rebels were still stubbornly refusing to be mopped up in the hills around Constanza; Dominican intelligence said it had learned that a new 1,000-man invasion force, financed with $8,000,000 provided by Cuba's Trujillo-hating Fidel Castro, was preparing to board a pair of U.S. war-surplus landing ships in Cuba's Oriente province for a new invasion. Feeding the fire at week's end, Cuba broke off diplomatic relations with the Dominican Republic and had its U.N. delegate announce that he would go before the U.N. to ask world action in support...