“El Año del Desarrollo”: Aftermaths of Revolution in Dominican Labor Organizing

• In Event: Mid-20th Century Black Resistance Struggles - Blackness in Latin America and the Caribbean, pt. 1

Description for Program

In the summer of 1967, the Dominican Republic was two years removed from a revolutionary uprising and a United States military invasion. In the aftermath of these events, Dominican people were grappling with the violent, autocratic policies of Dominican president Joaquin Balaguer. “El Año de Desarrollo,” centers sugar cane workers in La Romana as the central site of organizing against the Balaguer regime and U.S. corporate interests. Central Romana, the largest sugar company in the country, became a site of convergence for Afro-Dominican and Haitian labor organizing, Dominican military violence and imperialist economic motivations. This paper analyzes the interplay between Teobaldo Rossell, the Batista exile general administrator of Central Romana, and the Sindicato Unido labor union of Central Romana. Sindicado Unido [SU] workers rejected visions of “revolution” offered by the leftist organizations at the center of the 1965 Dominican revolution. To Balaguer, Central Romana became the most critical space of resistance in the country. Dominican and U.S. corporate interests combined through the vector to Cuban exile Teobaldo Rossell to quell the largest labor organizing movement in modern Dominican history. This paper analyzes the forces that combined to silence an Afro-Caribbean labor organizing movement that created new conceptions of liberation and radicalism both in the DR and the Caribbean more broadly.

Author

• Genesis Lara, University of California, Irvine