DOMINICAN REPUBLIC: The Jolly Bedfellows

For lack of a cast, Dictator Trujillo had feared the curtain might never rise on next May’s comedy, “Free Presidential Elections.” Although he had ordered the formation of opposition parties, Dominicans did their best to sidestep. But last week Director Trujillo had fresh hopes. Help had come from an unexpected group of actors: the Communists.

Actually, Trujillo had two Communist parties in rehearsal. One had been formed abroad by refugees; the leaders were now in Ciudad Trujillo to see how the Dictator proposed to pay off. The other was strictly home town hocuspocus. Trujillo had created it on paper and manned it with his stooges while he waited for the real Communists to show up. Anyway, he would keep the bogus party alive, just in case some of the real actors should prove unfit for their roles in the Dominican puppet theaters.

What did Trujillo stand to gain by playing with the Communists? Locally, the appearance of any new party aided his frenetic efforts to make dictatorship look like democracy. And internationally, he could count on some support from the Communists who control labor unions. Vicente Lombardo Toledano’s C.T.A.L. (Latin American Workers’ Federation) had taken in Trujillo’s fake labor unions last year, was expected to give him a fresh boost of some kind any minute. Already the strong, communist-dominated Cuban Federation of Labor had promised to send delegates to Trujillo’s Dominican Labor Congress.

As a mark of the new friendship, Havana’s Communist Hoy lashed out at democratic Dominican exiles as “reactionary adventurers.” Said one such adventurer, who remembered previous pacts between Stalinists and Latin American dictators: “First Nicaragua, then Brazil and now Dominica. Lombardo Toledano and his Communist friends have become the technicians for the salvaging of Latin American tyrannies.”