DOMINICAN REPUBLIC: Blood on the Beach

“If aggressors want to see their beards and brains flying like butterflies, let them approach the shores of the Dominican Republic,” warned Dictator Rafael Leonidas Trujillo. A pair of Cuba-based rebel invasion forces—one of 63 men arriving by C46 at the mountain-ringed, mid-island town of Constanza, and another of 150 aboard two Chris-Craft launches that landed near Puerto Plata on the north coast—put the strongman’s boast to the test of arms. Last week, both by government and rebel account, Trujillo proved that he meant what he said.

Meeting a Spy. Set down at Constanza by Juan de Dios Ventura Simó, a Dominican air-force captain who purportedly defected to Trujillo’s Cuba-based opponents in May, the C46 load of rebels fanned out into the hills to begin a hot running fight. Five days later, Ventura Simó, freshly decorated and newly promoted to colonel, sat down in Ciudad Trujillo at a government microphone to read a statement that he had been a spy all along, had delivered the rebels into a trap. After the broadcast he appeared at a Foreign Ministry reception to bephotographed shaking hands with a dozen hastily invited ambassadors—including the U.S.’s Joseph F. Farland.

Trujillo’s government announced that Trujillo himself went to the Constanza area to oversee the counterattack, that Rebel Commander (and onetime Castro Captain) Enrique Jiménes Moya was killed. The rebels fought back with reports that Trujillo was nervously hiding out at San Isidro Air Base, that Jiménes Moya was still alive and fighting, that Pilot Ventura Simó had been executed by a San Isidro firing squad when his propaganda value had been used up.

On the Puerto Plata front, the government countered rebel claims of a successful landing with a communiqué full of gore. The “liberators” who survived an air and naval bombardment, it said, “waded ashore apparently hoping still to march on Ciudad Trujillo with the aid of peasants. It did not work that way. Machete-swinging farmers beat government troops to the beach. The invasion ended in a murderous flailing of razor-sharp machetes on the reddened sands. Army patrols found only dismembered bodies.”

Mud on the Flag. Trujillo threw his 15,000-man army into the fighting, called up reserves, sent his “AntiCommunist Foreign Legion” of retired army men to guard the Haitian border, mobilized the “Horsemen of the East”—a private army led by Cattleman (and former consul in New York) Felix Bernardino. At sea, suspicious Dominican gunboats stopped the U.S. freighter Florida State three times on one of its regular cement-carrying round trips between Puerto Rico and Florida. In the air, a Dominican PSI fired a burst of machine-gun fire and lowered its wheels to force a U.S. Air Force C-47 to land at Ciudad Trujillo for identification.

Despite U.S. demands for explanation of the C-47 force-down and U.S. charges that the Dominican Republic tricked Ambassador Farland into being photographed giving Pilot Ventura Simó an apparently congratulatory handshake, Trujillo last week greeted the crews of three visiting U.S. Coast Guard vessels as though he did not have a care in the world. He swapped toasts with the U.S. officer in charge at a palace reception, passed around a muddy U.S. flag he said one of the invasion boats was flying when it was sunk.

A few rebels were still stubbornly refusing to be mopped up in the hills around Constanza; Dominican intelligence said it had learned that a new 1,000-man invasion force, financed with $8,000,000 provided by Cuba’s Trujillo-hating Fidel Castro, was preparing to board a pair of U.S. war-surplus landing ships in Cuba’s Oriente province for a new invasion. Feeding the fire at week’s end, Cuba broke off diplomatic relations with the Dominican Republic and had its U.N. delegate announce that he would go before the U.N. to ask world action in support of the Dominican rebels—if there are any.