Dominican Republic 1962
Written: 1962;
Source: The Militant, Vol. 26, No. 17, 1962, p.4;
Transcribed: by Amaury Rodriguez, 2014.
Transcriber’s note§ This appeared in The Militant, organ of the US Socialist Workers Party (SWP), which sympathized with the Fourth International.
NEW YORK. – An organization seeking the right to return to the Dominican Republic for all persons exiled during the regime of the late tyrant, Rafael Trujillo, has appealed for support here. The appeal was issued April 15 by Dr. Roberto Sánchez, Licenciada Lydia Castro, and Dylce Grullon Vda. Alvarez, in the name of the Organization for the Return of Anti-Trujillo Exiles.
The organization is appealing internationally to those interested in democratic rights to join a campaign against the continued barring of many anti-Trujillo exiles from return to their own land.
U.S. authorities have refused to allow some anti-Trujilo Dominicans exiled here to embark for their homeland – a blatant interference in the internal affairs of another country. Other exiles, upon arriving in the Dominican Republic from exile in various parts of the world, have been refused entry sorely on grounds of their alleged political beliefs. The Council of State, which presently rules Dominican Republic fears the return of exiles because a condition of “veiled Trujilloism” still prevails in the government and the ruling circles of the island republic.
The March 26 Miami Herald, for example, admitted that “the same people are still running multi-million dollar businesses and properties that belonged to the Trujillos.
An example of the lengths to which the Council goes to keep out political dissenters is the incident last month where Bishop Richard R. Wright, Jr; a leader of the African Methodist Church and a resident of Philadelphia, was held up at the airport in Santo Domingo as a Communist suspect.”
The Bishop, who had flown to Santo Domingo to visit an AME church there, was finally cleared after he was able to convince the authorities that he was not the late Richard Wright, the famous Negro novelist.
Wright’s novel Native Son brought him to pre-eminence among American writers before World War II when he was sympathetic to the Communist party. In the post-war period, he was active in the Pan-African movement and known for his sharp criticism of the Communist Party. Wright the novelist – on the list of the “politically dangerous” who can’t visit the Dominican Republic – died on Nov. 29, 1960.
The Organization for the Return of Anti-Trujillo Exiles hopes to mobilize “the broadest democratic sectors of Dominicans and others” to protest the arbitrary denial of the right of honest persons to return to their homeland.