Cuba holds the dubious distinction of being one of the few countries in the world where the international community not only tolerates a murderous communist dictatorship, they openly defend and support it.
Rolando Alum in Jersey Journal:
Six decades after dictator’s assassination, Dominican Republic flourishes while Cuba is miserable
As we commemorate Memorial Day this weekend in the U.S., the Dominican Republic’s people mark 60 years since the fall of Rafael Trujillo’s dictatorship on May 30, 1961. Considered Latin-America’s bloodiest dictator, Trujillo beleaguered Dominicans for 31 years, until a patriots’ cabal executed him with the secret assistance of U.S. officials.
Up to the 1959 rise of the Fidel & Raúl Castro brothers in Cuba, Trujillo was unmatched as the despotic model in the Americas, as historian Lauren Derby noted in “The Dictator’s Seduction” (2009). It behooves us to draw some chronological contrasts from both countries in the last six decades, developments that — incidentally — have affected our own local demographics.
Indeed, northern New Jersey is home to sizable and dynamic Hispanic communities of Cubans and Dominicans; some of them have attained prominent positions in every walk of life (admittedly, sometimes to the chagrin of self-appointed “guardians-of-the-gate”).
Ironically, the geneses of the Dominican and Cuban emigration are opposite. Dominicans began to emigrate en masse after 1961, when freedom of movement became guaranteed; while Cubans fled in disapproval of the Castros’ converting the previous Pearl of the Antilles into a bankrupt vassal state of the now defunct Soviet empire. In summer-1980 alone, about 1.5 percent of Cuba’s population “voted with their feet” via the unprecedented Mariel Freedom Flotilla, many of whose refugees and their descendants flourished in this great Garden State of ours.
Both countries emerged from traditional militaristic dictatorships around the same time, 1961 for the D.R., and 1959 for Cuba, after Afro-Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista fled the island-nation. Cuba’s undeniably remarkable economic prosperity was accomplished despite Batista’s relatively brief authoritarianism (1952-58) and the pitfalls of the preceding 1902-1952 republican epoch.
Conversely, conditions were wretched in the D.R. while Trujillo was ruling the country as a private fiefdom. The instability that followed ended with the U.S. military intervention that eventually fostered a classic tripartite constitutional government, with multiple competing political parties alternating in power. Moreover, the jobs-creating business sector and the labor movement thrive. A year ago, Dominicans elected their eighth post-Trujillo president: successful businessman Luis Abinader (born in 1967), D.R.’s first chief executive born after Trujillo’s downfall.
All this sharply contrasts with socialist Cuba, a stagnant, closed society controlled by the Castro family and its hand-picked, mostly military, non-elected cronies still chanting discredited Marxist slogans. True, the Castros counted on initial popular support, but it soon vanished as they hijacked the liberal-inspired anti-Batista political rebellion and turned Cuba into a nightmarish dystopia. While the D.R. steered toward the Open Society ideal, Cuba rushed in the opposite direction with the Castros’ tropical version of the failed Soviet-Russian mold.
Continue reading HERE.
Alas, Cuba was light years ahead of the Dominican Republic in 1958, and look at things now. Trujillo was a living stereotype, a classic “Latin” banana republic dictator (who was always looked down upon and derided in Cuba), but you’d better believe he would never have made the grave error Batista did with Fidel Castro.