Juan Bosch

Juan Bosch was the first democratically elected president of the Dominican Republic after thirty-one years of Trujillo, lasted seven months, and was removed by a coup that produced an American invasion. He was a short-story writer of real standing who spent twenty-four years in exile organising against the dictatorship, founding the Dominican Revolutionary Party in Havana in 1939. He returned after Trujillo's assassination and won the 1962 election with about sixty per cent. His constitution separated church and state, legalised divorce, guaranteed labour rights and limited large landholdings, and it was denounced from pulpits and by the business associations as communist; he was overthrown by the military in September 1963. When constitutionalist officers rose in April 1965 to restore him, Lyndon Johnson sent 42,000 troops to prevent what he called a second Cuba, in the first American armed intervention in Latin America for a generation. Bosch did not return to power. He broke with his own party in 1973 to found another, ran repeatedly and lost, and wrote steadily throughout - his study of Caribbean history and his fiction are still read in Spanish. He is a rare case of a writer whose political career and literary reputation were both substantial. The 1965 intervention was justified publicly as protecting American lives and privately as preventing communism, and it produced the Johnson Doctrine. Some three thousand Dominicans died. Bosch lived to see his own former protege Leonel Fernandez elected in 1996, and died in 2001 at ninety-two, by then treated as a national figure by parties that had spent decades opposing him.

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