THE CARIBBEAN: Shouting War

The hot winds of war scudded across the Caribbean last week. For the most part, it was a shouting war, between the Dominican Republic and Cuba. It was, in a way, a shooting war too, as Dictator Rafael Leonidas Trujillo sent a 350-man force into the hills around the Dominican Republic town of Constanza to hunt down 20-odd survivors of a Cuba-based airborne rebellion (TIME, July 6). At the same time, Trujillo readied his guns—and bought new ones—to fight off a new invasion he said was headed his way from Cuba and Venezuela.

Gunrunners. There were arms aplenty available for the purpose, even though Washington has embargoed all weapons shipments to the Caribbean, except for Haiti, caught between Cuba and the Dominican Republic. In Miami last week, U.S. Supervising Customs Agent Joseph A. Fortier reported as a matter of fact that the arms business is booming. Many of the arms are bought in Northern centers, such as Newark, New York and Chicago, but almost all of them are shipped through Miami. For lack of an adequate staff, says Fortier, four out of every five shipments got through.

In London, Fidel Castro’s ambassador said that Trujillo has organized an arms-buying network across Europe, North Africa and the U.S.* Trujillo is believed to have agents and transshippers in Amsterdam, Antwerp, Tunis, London, New York and Rome, negotiating for bazookas, bazooka ammunition, tanks, armored cars, field artillery, shells, even British Vampire jets. He is also said to be recruiting mercenaries, including some from Franco’s Spain, who are flown via Bermuda, manifested as farm laborers. Reacting to the

Castro ambassador’s statement in London, the Dominican envoy there agreed that it was “most logical” for a country to build a force to defend its shores.

Rifle Toters. Last week, as Trujillo guided U.S. newsmen to bloodstained landing beaches and through military installations, he bragged of his strength. He has 25,000 regulars under arms, he said, and another 600,000 men with military training who could readily be called up. His fast frigates and whining jets patrol both his own coasts and those of next-door Haiti, and he has a special Anti-Communist Foreign Legion of ex-army men, ready to march into Haiti if anti-Trujillo invaders land there.

Cuba’s Fidel Castro and his bearded rebels are probably not up to Trujillo’s. Castro’s warriors carry good U.S. arms, number 25,000. His defection-ridden air force includes 18 B-26s, seven T-33 Lockheed jet trainers, no jet fighters.

Peacemakers. At his press conference last week. President Eisenhower said that “there is no sense closing our eyes to the situations in Central America and the Caribbean; but we do look primarily to the OAS to take the initiative, otherwise we again could be called dollar imperialists or something else of that kind.”

Trujillo, who had already charged at the U.N. that 25 Soviet “guerrilla warfare experts” were training 3,000 men in Pinar del Rio for Castro’s Caribbean “subversive activities,” reacted quickly. He had his OAS delegate demand a special session of the OAS council to ask for an investigation. Castro snapped back angrily that he would permit no “interference” in his territory by OAS.

* One of the buyers named by the Cuban envoy: Colonel Hubert Fauntleroy Julian, the “Black Eagle of Harlem,” who started a spectacular career by stunt parachuting over Harlem in red tights, playing a saxophone.