THE TRUJILLO ERA, 1930-61

On 23 February 1930, the government of President Horacio Vásquez in the Dominican Republic was overthrown by a coup d'état led by the commander-in-chief of the army, General Rafael Leónidas Trujillo. Unlike other military uprisings headed by caudillos during the nineteenth century and the early part of the twentieth century, this coup marked a definitive rupture with the traditional political order. The Dominican people were forced to submit to a totalitarian dictatorship that lasted for thirty-one years, during which the personal interests of the dictator were fused with those of the Dominican state itself. Never before in the history of Latin America had a single ruler been able to impose such a comprehensive control over the minds and properties of his people.

A nation which had endured more than a hundred ‘revolutions’, uprisings and coups d'état during the seventy years between its definitive separation from Haiti in 1844 to its occupation by the United States in 1916 was subjugated to a long-lasting tyranny capable of surviving the economic crisis of the 1930s as well as the upsurge of democratic sentiment following the Second World War and brought to an end only by the assassination of the tyrant in 1961.

The key to understanding the longevity and stability of Trujillo's thirty-year regime lies in the general disarmament imposed by the U.S. Marines, who governed the country from May 1916 until July 1924. This disarmament destroyed forever the power and influence of the traditional guerrilla leaders and made possible the establishment of a professional national police force obedient only to the central government.

Since its ‘discovery’ in 1501, the Isthmus of Panama has been a crossroads. During the Spanish colonial era mule trains carried cargo across the isthmus, connecting Spain with the Pacific. Annual fairs in the town of Portobelo on the Caribbean coast attracted agents from great merchant houses, as tons of Peruvian silver were traded for European goods. Even after the eclipse of the fairs Panama continued to thrive on commerce and shipping, in the eighteenth century still under Spanish rule and in the nineteenth century as a province of the independent republic of Colombia.

People of different backgrounds settled in Panama. The first Spaniards founded a handful of towns, divided Indians into encomiendas and farmed the best lands along the Pacific watershed. Several hundred of these families formed a rural oligarchy that was not particularly wealthy but controlled both land and people. In addition, the Spanish government designated Panama City as a key commercial and defence site in the Pacific, which it regarded as its private sea. Bureaucrats, military officers, merchants, seamen, artisans and African slaves dominated its population. Later, agents of Caribbean merchants also settled in Panama.

The colonial and nineteenth-century experience of Panama affected its history as a nation after 1903. There was an enduring tension between two elites, one rural and descended from the early settlers, often called interiorano; and another cosmopolitan, racially and culturally mixed, and based in Panama City and the northern transit port of Colón. Panama's multiple connections with the outside world brought people, capital and other benefits, yet also tied its fortunes to international economic cycles.

Mexico stands out as a paragon of political stability within contemporary Latin America. There have been no successful military coups since the nineteenth century and hardly any serious attempts since the Revolution of 1910–20. Presidential successions have become genteel negotiations within the semi-official party, the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI), which has dominated the electoral arena for more than half a century. Civilians have gained control of the ruling apparatus. Consensus appears to prevail on most policy questions, and the Constitution of 1917 – forged in the heat of armed conflict – has continued to provide the regime an aura of legitimacy. Claiming a revolutionary heritage and wielding a practical monopoly over the instruments of power, the Mexican state has appeared to function smoothly, steadily and (in its own way) efficiently. The consequent achievement of stability has thus come to be hailed as the political component of the post-war ‘Mexican miracle’.

Indeed, the perception of Mexico's political stability has imbued much of the scholarly literature on contemporary Mexico with a tacit presumption of continuity, a sense almost of timelessness. There tends to be an unspoken assumption that nothing much has changed in Mexican politics since the late 1930s, much more attention being given to the workings of the system and the mechanisms of authority than to historical events or discrete occurrences; most existing literature reveals a general, abstract quality. This may illustrate one of the implicit biases of what has come to be called ‘systems analysis’ in political science: preoccupation with the maintenance of the political system rather than with patterns of transformation. Viewed in this perspective, post-war Mexico often looks flat and one-dimensional.

After the outbreak of Revolution in 1910, Mexico experienced a decade of armed upheaval followed by a decade of political and economic reconstruction. The revolutionary campaign destroyed the old regime of Porfirio Díaz, liquidated the Porfirian army, and brought to power a coalition that was heterogeneous yet strongly influenced by forces from the north and broadly committed to a project of state-building and capitalist development. If, in regard to these broad ends, the revolutionary leadership pursued Porfirian precedents, the means they employed were markedly different, as was the socio-political milieu in which they operated. It is true that Mexico's economy had not been revolutionized by the Revolution. The old pattern of export-led capitalist growth – desarrollo hacia afuera – had not fundamentally changed. The economic nationalist leanings of the regime, expressed in the Constitution of 1917, led to wrangles with the United States, but there was no complete rupture, and U.S. direct investment in Mexico was higher in 1929 than it had been in 1910. Furthermore, despite the decline in petroleum production after 1921, the economy recovered and grew, at least until 1927. In contrast, Mexico's social and political life was dramatically changed by the Revolution, albeit in an often unplanned and unforeseen manner. The armed mobilization of 1910–20 gave way to new forms of institutional mobilization: peasant leagues, trade unions and a mass of political parties, left and right, great and small. The result was not a decorous liberal politics, such as Francisco Madero had advocated in 1910; but neither was it a closed, personalise, autocratic system of the kind Díaz had maintained to the end.

In the first century after independence from Spain Honduras fought a mainly unsuccessful battle to overcome the constraints on national integration imposed by its geography. The country's high mountains and narrow, steep-sided valleys had crippled internal communications, inhibited agricultural development and produced a marked localism in national politics. In the late 1920s, the land frontiers with Guatemala, El Salvador and Nicaragua were all still in dispute, leading to occasional military conflict, while the lack of national integration encouraged neighbouring governments to intervene in Honduran affairs. Even the off-shore territories were subject to the same centrifugal tendencies; the Bay Islands, recovered from Great Britain in 1860, remained largely autonomous, sovereignty over the Swan Islands was disputed with the United States, and possession of several islands in the Gulf of Fonseca was contested with El Salvador and Nicaragua. The country's difficulties were compounded by the size of its population. The 1930 census estimated the number of inhabitants at 854,184, giving a population density of less than 20 per square mile. The overwhelming majority were scattered throughout the rural areas, leaving the capital Tegucigalpa with a mere 40,000 souls. Large areas of eastern Honduras were virtually uninhabited.

Geography had given a different twist in Honduras to the liberal reforms which swept Central America from the 1870s. While Liberal caudillos implemented and participated personally in programmes to foster coffee and other agro-exports in the neighbouring republics, in Honduras Presidents Marco Aurelio Soto (1876–83) and Luis Bográn (1883–90) emphasized mining, both becoming shareholders themselves in newly formed companies.

Fulgencio Batista had been the dominant figure in Cuban national affairs for a quarter of a century. He had ruled Cuba, directly or indirectly, since the military coup of 4 September 1933, except for an interlude of Auténtico rule from 1944 to 1952. He had seemed confident and powerful until the last weeks of his last presidency. But suddenly Batista was gone. On New Year's Eve 1958 he quit, taking with him much of the top echelon of his government. A new leader, young and bearded, who for two years had led a guerrilla war in eastern Cuba, gradually spreading the influence of his forces to the western provinces, slowly assuming the leadership of the urban and the rural resistance to the Batista regime, marched into Havana. Audacious and effective in his military campaign and political skills, persuasive and commanding in his public speech, Fidel Castro had become the leader of the future. Power had passed, somewhat unexpectedly, to a new generation of Cubans.

In January 1959 the old regime collapsed in Cuba and a revolution came to power. The old rules of the game no longer applied and the armed forces that had shaped the life of independent Cuba for so long had crumbled. The rebel army became the defender of the new revolutionary state, sweeping aside the parties that had structured political life in previous decades. Only the Communist party (Partido Socialista Popular, PSP), which had been banned by Batista in the 1950s but reappeared in 1959, was left intact.

The establishment of stable nation states and permanent economic links with the world market through agricultural – especially coffee – exports took place in Central America during the second half of the nineteenth century. This process occurred first and most successfully in Costa Rica; later, and after much bloodshed, in Guatemala and El Salvador; and belatedly and incompletely in Honduras and Nicaragua. The backwardness inherited from the Spanish colonial period, the cyclical crisis in the international coffee market and the political struggles of the oligarchy for control of the government all slowed down economic growth, social progress and the development of institutional stability. Nevertheless, by the beginning of the twentieth century important changes had taken place in social stratification with the appearance of a coffee bourgeoisie and a small urban middle class, and political life was stable, though not democratic.

In 1914 the total population of Cental America was a little under 4 million, of whom nearly 60 percent lived in Guatemala and El Salvador. The basis of society – the agrarian structure – had three characteristics: large coffee estates controlled by national farmers producing for export; banana plantations, foreign-owned, with a vertically integrated production and marketing structure tied directly to the North American market; and small landholdings belonging to peasants who cultivated basic grains and other products for their own consumption or to satisfy internal demand. (Coffee and bananas accounted for 80 per cent of Central American exports.) The labour market was composed of mozos colonos, farmhands tied to the coffee haciendas by lifelong indebtedness; agricultural workers on U.S.-owned banana plantations; and – the largest sector – peasant smallholders, sharecroppers and migrant day-labourers who worked for wages during the harvest season.

After four hundred years of Spanish colonial rule Puerto Rico fell under the direct control of the United States in 1898. It has remained so ever since. Its status within the U.S. political system has always been uncertain and anomalous. Unlike Hawaii and Alaska – considered territories ‘incorporated’ into the United States and thereby candidates for future inclusion in the federal system as states of the Union – Puerto Rico was placed in the novel judicial category of an ‘unincorporated territory’. No one in political authority in the United States ever accepted that Puerto Rico, unlike Cuba and the Philippines, should be directed towards even nominal independence.

The island's colonial dependency continued, therefore, into the twentieth century under a new and culturally alien power. Indeed, as the century draws to a close dependency is still in issue. After ninety years under the U.S. flag, of participation of its youth in U.S. wars in Europe and Asia, large migrations to and from the northern metropolis, complete economic integration, and subjection to U.S. sponsored ‘modernization’ in all its forms – Puerto Rico remains a fundamentally Spanish-speaking ‘Latin American’ country with a clear sense of cultural and political seperateness from the system of which it is, for better or worse, part.

In 1940 on the eve of U.S entry into the Second World War the executive power on the island was still exercised by presidentially appointed governors; the educational system remained firmly committed to the imperial idea of ‘Americanization’; the major industry, sugar, hard-hit by the world depression of the 1930s, was in clear decline; unemployment, poverty and discontent were rampant; political violence was increasing; and a wave of nationalism and aggressive movements for Hispanic cultural affirmation were gathering force and influence.

During the first three decades of the twentieth century the economy of El Salvador became the most dynamic in Central America. Unlike the rest of the region, El Salvador had no banana enclave, but the success of its coffee economy was such that the country gained a reputation as ‘the Ruhr of Central America’. The efficiency of the coffee sector owed a great deal to the capacity of a new generation of landlords to exploit the comprehensive alienation of communal lands in El Salvador's central zone in the years which had followed the Liberal revolution of 1871. The altitude and fertility of these lands was particularly well suited to the crop, and because El Salvador is by far the smallest Central American state (21,040 square kilometers) while possessing a large population – even in 1930 it was approaching 1.5 million – the density of settlement was extremely high and the opportunities for peasant migration correspondingly low. As a result, large numbers of rural inhabitants were not so much physically displaced as deprived of their status as small freeholders or members of the municipal commune and converted into waged harvest labourers or colonos paying labour rent for subsistence plots on the edges of the new coffee fincas. Thus the Salvadorean agro-export sector was unique in the isthmus in that it was blessed with a high availability of local labour. Moreover, the remarkably rapid and all-encompassing alienation of common land – the Church, that other traditional target of nineteenth-century liberalism, possessed very little rural property – encouraged an early concentration of commercial estates and propelled the formation of one of the most compact and confident landed oligarchies in the world.

In 1930 Costa Rica, with a landmass of 50,000 square kilometers (more than twice the size of El Salvador), had a population of scarcely half a million inhabitants. The capital, San José, had 50,000 inhabitants; no other town had a population of more than 8,000. More than 60 per cent of the economically active population of some 150,000 worked in agriculture. Production revolved around the cultivation of coffee, which was exported principally to the United States and the United Kingdom. The cultivation of bananas, the second most important export product, was controlled by the United Fruit Company. The country also exported cocoa beans, although in smaller quantities, to practically all of Europe. These three crops accounted for 94.3 per cent of Costa Rica's total income.

The traditional coffee economy had produced a social pyramid with the plantation workers at the base and the growers and exporters, the latter primarily of German descent, at the apex. The coffee growers and merchants also controlled credit, directly or indirectly, through the private banking institutions. Between the two extremes of the pyramid was an important group of small and medium-sized producers who maintained a relative social and economic independence, which had great significance in the national political system.

The development of banana production from the end of the nineteenth century on the Atlantic coast, together with the economic impact of the First World War, had produced some social and economic differentiation, but this was still of a secondary order. A new stratum of waged labour clearly began to take shape during this period, although it remained diversified and could not be strictly described in terms like ‘working class’ or ‘proletariat’ more appropriate to developed societies.

During the half century from the 1930s to the 1980s, Haiti, the poorest country of Latin America, experienced a gradual decline in the standard of living, a deterioration in the condition of the land – with an alarming growth of soil erosion throughout the country – and a dramatic growth of its population, from 2.5 to approximately 6 million. Despite occasional efforts by Haitian governments and ambitious schemes sponsored by an endless procession of foreign missions, little was done to halt the country's decline. Indeed, very often the results of these foreign interventions was positively harmful. In most cases the improvements required were not in the individual interests of the peasants and would only work if undertaken as co-operative enterprises among all the landholders in a particular area. Haitian governments were generally unable or unwilling to give the kind of guarantees which would make such projects viable.

Throughout these years Haiti remained a largely agricultural economy, producing food for local consumption together with a few export crops. The principal cash crop was coffee. Efforts to encourage large-scale production of other crops such as sugar, cotton and sisal, met with only limited success. Most manufactured consumer goods were imported, principally from the United States. Attempts to develop copper and bauxite mining achieved no more than modest results. From the late 1960s there was a rapid growth in light manufacturing industries and assembly plants, situated mostly in and around the capital. These accounted for well over half the country's foreign earnings in 1985 when Haiti enjoyed the distinction of being the world's largest producer of baseballs.

No part of Cuba escaped the ravages of the war with Spain that ended in 1898. From the eastern mountains across the central plains to the western valleys, the scene of desolation and devastation was the same. It was a brutal conflict in which the opposing armies seemed determined more to punish the land than prosecute the war, practising pillage of every kind for almost four years. More than 100,000 small farms, 3,000 livestock ranches and 700 coffee fincas were destroyed. Of the estimated 1,100 sugar mills registered in 1894, only 207 survived. Property-owners, urban and rural, were in debt and lacked either access to capital or sources of credit.

This devastation was neither unforeseen nor unplanned. In fact, it was the principal purpose for which Cubans, who understood well the political economy of colonialism, had taken up arms. It was indeed a war against property, and by 1898 separatist tactics had vindicated the goal of separatist strategy: Spain was on the brink of collapse. But the success of the Cuban military campaign did not produce the desired political results. Rather, it precipitated United States intervention, and at this point all the Cubans' plans went awry. They had thrown everything into the campaign against Spain. Victory over Spain left them exhausted, weak and vulnerable.

Armed intervention led to military occupation, at the end of which, in May 1902, the United States had effectively reduced Cuban independence to a mere formality. The Platt Amendment denied the new republic treaty-making authority, established limits on the national debt and sanctioned North American intervention for ‘the maintenance of a government adequate for the protection of life, property and individual liberty’.

A regional approach to social history obviously works primarily within geographical boundaries, and it is the long accumulation of the effects of topography and its influence on patterns of settlement and administrative and economic structures which is at the root of those regional identities that can be observed though the many superimposed layers of national and international forces, religious and class divisions, and inward and outward migration. A simplified picture suggests that by the early seventeenth century Britain possessed a reasonably unified and integrated ruling class, predominantly landed, following on the union of the crowns and the Tudor development of central power. Although the eighteenth century was to be half over before many of the Scottish elements slotted firmly into place in this class, it was one which was broadly homogeneous in culture, in life style and aspirations; its members spoke the same language, if not always the same dialect, until the second half of the nineteenth century, they intermarried freely, and any surviving regional differences between them were romantic displays of custom rather than matters of serious social or political consequence. By the mid-eighteenth century the professional, financial, and mercantile middle class were similarly broadly unified, with value systems and social customs which transcended regional boundaries, although the marked differences between the legal systems of England and Scotland meant that professionally the British legal world has never become fully integrated. It is true that manufacturers and industrialists, who in any case were only beginning to rise above provincial obscurity in the early nineteenth century, stood apart from this bourgeois circle, and to some extent continued to do so into the twentieth century.

Conventional wisdom about the fortunes and significance of this region in the two centuries after 1750 comes trippingly off the tongue. Below a thin crust of banal generalisations, however, the questing historian uncovers shifting, unstable strata of diverging and conflicting accounts and interpretations, often venting as emissions of superheated debate which alarm and confuse the innocent bystander, obscuring the view with steam and volcanic gases and dispelling the illusion of clarity, security and control. Explanations of the social circumstances surrounding the spectacular rise, sustained heyday and precipitous decline of the cotton industry and its associated towns form a staple of historical debate, although the first two phases have received much more attention than the third. The early and intensive interaction of the steam engine, the factory system and an unprecedented rate of urban growth, concentrated within a narrow area of south Lancashire and north Cheshire, proved irresistible to social commentators then and has remained so for social historians ever since. Cotton Lancashire became ‘the first industrial society’ and ‘the cradle of the Industrial Revolution’. The cotton industry became a much debated ‘leading sector’ in British industrialisation, while at the same time its assumed characteristics tended to be misleadingly paraded as a surrogate for the more complex pattern of changes in British economy and society as a whole. The industrialising experience of a small corner of Lancashire and its adjoining counties became at once exciting exception and all-embracing norm in the treatment of Britain's industrial revolution. Moreover, there were political dimensions to the changes.