Word: trujillos
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...plots in Santo Domingo these days are, in fact, just rumors. The tiny country, which occupies two-thirds of an island, still faces serious problems and is living from month to month. Even so, it is more stable, united and optimistic than at any time since Dictator Rafael Trujillo was gunned down by assassins...
...attempts to starve out its enemies have hardly been more successful. Washington tried to topple Dictator Rafael Trujillo by refusing to buy Dominican sugar and cutting off his supply of oil and auto parts. But it was an assassin's bullet, not dollar pressure, that brought him down. Cuba's Fidel Castro, with massive support from Russia, has managed to survive six years of U.S. embargo. U.S. pressure to cut off all trade with Red China was another notable flop: Canada alone in the past six years has sold Peking a whopping $926 million worth of wheat...
Ohio-born Martin, a freelance magazine writer for 25 years, and a campaign speechwriter for John F. Kennedy, took perceptive daily notes throughout his diplomatic stint. He was appointed to the Dominican post by Kennedy during the power vacuum that followed the assassination of Dictator Rafael Trujillo. Martin's near-impossible assignment was to try to establish rudimentary democracy in a land that had known nearly five centuries of despotism. As he bade the ambassador goodbye Kennedy jestingly warned: "If you blow this one, you'd better not come home...
Intrigues & Failures. Martin proved an honorable and patient diplomat in Santo Domingo. He did his utmost to shore up the republic's first post-Trujillo constitutional President, Juan Bosch. In the end, it was Bosch who blew it. Martin pictures him as a suspicious and erratic tropical, whose Machiavellian intrigues and "very real failures to meet the people's needs" invited the military coup that set the stage for the 1965 crisis...
Martin reports that Fidel Castro's agents, exploiting the country's "politics of annihilation," had plotted ever since Trujillo's assassination "to seize control of the capital's streets, the first step in the classic Marxist revolutionary pattern." Francisco Caamano Deno, the rabble-rousing, opportunistic army colonel who led the revolt, was portrayed by New York Times Correspondent Tad Szulc as a well-meaning nationalist. Martin has a slightly different assessment: "I had met no man who I thought might become a Dominican Castro-until I met Caamano. He was winning a revolution from below...