US Occupation of the Dominican Republic and Haiti

We have been rereading parts of Calder's The Impact of Intervention: The Dominican Republic during the U.S. Occupation of 1916-1924 and thinking about the role of US imperialism in Haiti and the Dominican Republic. Calder's book should be read in conjunction with Hans Schmidt on the US Occupation of Haiti for a similar but distinct experience of US military imperialism and interests in the Caribbean region. And the two occupations were definitely linked, involving some of the same personnel and leadership (Russell, Knapp) and engaging in finalizing the Haiti-US border as well as requiring Haitian labor in Dominican sugar plantations and other projects, like roads. 

Despite overlapping for several years and probably achieving the same result (no major systemic reforms in "democracy" or government), there are still some noticeable differences in the US military occupations of the island. And these differences cannot be found solely in the fact that the US Marines ruled the Dominican Republic directly while using puppet presidents in Haiti. Of course, the longest lasting legacies of the US in the DR appear to have been in public works and the Guardia, probably the same for Haiti in terms of the reforms of the Haitian military. The various military dictators of Haiti post-1934 and the Trujillo regime cannot be understood without taking this into account, despite some of the very different aspects of the military under the Duvaliers and Trujillo. But clearly the political and economic centralization in the two capitals and the defeat of the cacos and gavilleros, the caudillos and regional strongmen, by the US Marines, facilitated authoritarian regimes. 

Calder's book explores several examples of areas in which the US Occupation intervened or changed the DR. Some of the same goals were pursued in Haiti, such as reforms in taxation, military, public works projects, elementary education (more schools) and favoring US exports to the Dominican market. Legislation beneficial to sugar companies in 1920 also furthered tensions in the east of the DR, where an uprooted peasantry manifested into the gavillero "bandits" or rebels fighting the Marines. The US Occupation also implemented additional reforms in both countries but ultimately failed as the only arena in which Haitians or Dominicans were allowed to express any opinion was in education. In the Haitian case, we have well-known examples of US discriminatory attitudes, racist beliefs which also manifested in US interactions with the Dominican population. But perhaps because they are generally speaking lighter-skinned than Haitians, Calder suspects the US was willing to end their occupation of the Dominican Republic before that of Haiti.

The gavilleros in some way resemble the cacos of Haiti, but the areas of staunch caco resistance in Haiti does not appear to have developed in areas of the country under the influence of HASCO or other sites with large-scale agro-industrial projects (which were on a far smaller scale than US investments in the DR). The Haitian peasant did experience uprootedness, dispossession and labor migration to Cuba and the DR during this period (1915-1934), but the cacos appear to have been less active in, say, the Leogane area or Cul-de-Sac plain, regions where HASCO had an impact on the rural population. However, the two do seem to resemble each other in the disconnect between them and their respective elite opposition movements. According to Calder, the Union Patriotique in did not become a mass movement until the late 1920s, while the Union Nacional in the DR received more international support than their Haitian counterpart.  And while both elite opposition groups included intellectual resistance to the Occupation, perhaps the huge numbers of Haitian laborers in the DR and US racism precluded any elite Dominican attempt to rethink the nation's relationship to "blackness." Perhaps another legacy of the US Occupation was to ensure the somewhat deeper integration of the DR into the US "co-prosperity" sphere at slightly better terms than what they were willing to offer Haiti?