HISPANIOLA: A History of Hate

'THERE, in that high and mountainous land, is the land of God." The date was Sept. 12, 1504, the speaker was Christopher Columbus, and the occasion was his fourth and final departure from the island he discovered in 1492. Columbus named it La Isla Espanola because it reminded him of Spain. For the Spaniards and French who followed him, for the Indians they slaughtered, for the Negro slaves they imported, and for anyone within a bullet's range last week, Hispaniola was more like hell on earth than the warm, jasmine-scented paradise it might be. Last week marked the third time in 50 years that U.S. troops have been forced to intervene in the affairs of the forlorn, hate-filled little Caribbean island.

Hispaniola became Spain's first permanent colony in the New World, its key harbor and free port to all the Indies. From the Santo Domingo capital, Ponce de Leon sailed forth to Florida, Balboa discovered the Pacific, Pizarro invaded Peru, and Cortes conquered Mexico. It was the site of Latin America's first cathedral in 1514, its first university in 1538. Even then it was a land of violence, where men carried the law in their knives, and the captains from Castile thought nothing of shearing an ear from a disobedient Indian or letting their dogs disembowel him.

Through war, wile and treaty, France managed to get possession of the 30,000-sq.-mi. island toward the end of the 18th century. Concentrating on the western third of the mountainous land, the French brought in thousands of colonists, and with them came vast numbers of Negro slaves from Africa. The French called their Caribbean possession Saint Domingue, termed it the "Queen of the Antilles." So it was. In the 1780s, its foreign trade approached $140 million a year, with vast profits from sugar, coffee, cocoa, cotton and indigo flowing back home. Before long, 40,000 whites were lording it over 450,000 blacks. Then one night in August 1791, the island's painfully oppressed slaves rose in bloody revolt. Armed with pitchforks, torches and machetes and chanting voodoo dirges, they massacred 2,000 French planters and their families on the western third of the island.

Haiti

The fighting lasted more than a decade. France sent 20,000 troops to end the rebellion?only to see half of them wiped out by yellow fever and the rest thrown into disarray. In 1804, a former slave named Jean Jacques Dessalines proclaimed Haiti a free and independent nation and became its Governor General. "To draw up the charter of our independence," he felt, "would require the skin of a white man as parchment, his skull as an inkwell, his blood as ink, and a bayonet as a pen." Dessalines died by an assassin's bullet within three years. His successor, Henri Christophe, cared little for charters?black or white. He proclaimed himself King, set up a ludicrous aristocracy (including such titles as the Duke of Marmelade and Count of Limonade), and ruled as a merciless despot until 1820, when his officers revolted, and he committed suicide by firing a silver bullet into his brain.

Over the next century, dictator followed dictator in Haiti. By 1910, rebellions had ousted 13 of Haiti's first 18 Presidents. Then, in the space of 47 months, one President was blown up in his palace, another was believed poisoned, three were deposed, and the last was grabbed by a mob and hacked into small pieces. President Woodrow Wilson finally ordered U.S. Marines to occupy the country in 1915. They remained 19 years?and gave Haiti the only true peace it has ever known. Acting through puppet Presidents, they disarmed rebels and bandits, built roads, irrigation projects, sanitation facilities, and organized schools and hospitals. F.D.R. withdrew the marines in 1934, and Haiti returned to its old ways: nine governments in 20 years, the last headed by Franc,ois ("Papa Doc") Duvalier, 58, a onetime country physician who took office in 1957, proclaimed himself "President for life," and rules through voodoo mysticism and the strong-arm terror of his 5,000-man Tonton Macoute secret police.

Of Haiti's 4,500,000 people, 90% are illiterate. Life expectancy is 32.6 years; per-capita income has slipped to $70 a year, lowest in the hemisphere. "Haitians," says Duvalier in his soft whisper, "have a destiny to suffer." And if his people complain, they can pray?from a 63-page Catechism of the Revolution turned out by the Government Printing Office and circulating last week in Port-au-Prince. The Lord's Prayer: "Our Doc who art in the National Palace for Life, hallowed be Thy name by present and future generations, Thy will be done at Port-au-Prince and in the provinces. Give us this day our new Haiti and never forgive the trespasses of the enemies of the Fatherland, who spit every day on our Country. Let them succumb to temptation and under the weight of their own venom. Deliver them not from any evil. Amen."

Dominican Republic

In the Dominican Republic, the people speak Spanish rather than Creole French. Its soil is more fertile, and its population density only half that of its smaller neighbor. What it shares is a common history of chaos. As in Haiti, bloody rebellions drove out the European governors, first the French in 1809, then the Spanish who had tried to reassert their dominion. No sooner had the Dominican Republic declared its independence in 1821 than it was invaded by neighboring Haiti, which occupied the country for 22 brutal years. The Haitians banned all foreign priests, severed papal relations, closed the University of Santo Domingo, and levied confiscatory taxes. Not until 1844, when Haiti was torn by one of its many civil wars, did the Dominican Republic finally break free?only to stagger through 22 revolutions over the next 70 years, including a brief period (1861-65) when it once again reverted to Spanish rule.

At one point, in 1869, the hapless Dominicans actually sought annexation by the U.S. and won support from President Ulysses S. Grant. Congress refused on the grounds that it would violate the country's sovereignty. In 1916 the U.S. did the next best thing?it sent in the marines after a bloody series of revolts. Unlike the intervention in Haiti, there were no puppet Presidents. In the words of the U.S. Navy's official order, it was "military occupation . . . military government . . . military law." The occupation lasted eight years, and along with their public works the marines created a national police to keep peace after their departure. The police became the instrument for one more dictator: Rafael Leonidas Trujillo Molina, an ambitious colonel who rigged elections in 1930 and ruled the country for 31 deadening years.

Trujillo's favorite titles were "Benefactor of the Fatherland," "Chief Protector of the Working Class," "Genius of Peace." In a grim way, there was something to the brags. He imposed a rare order on his powder-keg country, built efficient hospitals, crisscrossed the country with good roads, built housing projects for his 2,900,000 people, improved the water supply and increased literacy. Business prospered, and so did Trujillo?to the tune of an estimated $800 million fortune. He and his family owned 65% of the country's sugar production, twelve of its 16 sugar mills, 35% of its arable land. Home was a dozen palaces and ranches dotted around the country, each with a full staff of servants who faithfully prepared every meal every day in case the Benefactor stopped by.

Thousands of political opponents died in his secret police dungeons, mysterious "auto accidents" and "suicides." There were electric chairs for slow electrocution, another many-armed electrical device attached by tiny screws inserted into the skull, a rubber collar that could be tightened to sever a man's head, plus nail extractors, scissors for castration, leather-thonged whips and small rubber hammers. P.A. systems in the torture rooms carried every blood-curdling scream to other prisoners waiting their turn. If Trujillo favored variety, he also favored volume. One October night in 1937, he ordered his army to eliminate all Haitian squatters in the Dominican Republic. In a 36-hour bloodbath, some 15,000 men, women and children were massacred.

Trujillo's end came in 1961 when four gunmen intercepted his car on a lonely road outside the capital and riddled him with shotgun and pistol fire. In the four years since, the Dominican Republic has suffered four coups and five changes of government, trying to find its way out of the political vacuum created by Trujillo's death. Democracy is still hardly more than a word in a land that has never known any law save force.

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