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

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. Balaguer unleashed a wave of austerity practices and military violence, aimed at quelling political dissidence hoping to gain United States corporate investment. Instead of focusing on urban organizing in the capital of Santo Domingo, “El Año de Desarrollo,” centers sugar cane workers in La Romana as the central site of organizing against not just the Balaguer regime, but U.S. corporate interests.

Central Romana, the largest sugar company in the country owned by the U.S. Gulf & Western at the time, 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 SU workers, these leftist organizations failed to include the realities of Afro-Dominican, Haitian and Haitian Dominican sugar workers into their vision for the future of the country. 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 transnational forces that combined to quell an Afro-Caribbean labor organizing movement that created new conceptions of liberation and radicalism not just in the country but in the Caribbean more broadly