Word: gunboat
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Gunboat Diplomacy. The week started off brightly. General Antonio Imbert Barreras, leader of the loyalist forces, and Colonel Francisco Caamaño Deñó, commander of the rebel army entrenched in downtown Santo Domingo, were honoring the ceasefire. Both sides appeared close to an agreement on the choice of a man to head an interim government until elections can be held. He was Héctor García Godoy, 44, a middle-roading liberal who once served as Foreign Minister in the Cabinet of deposed President Juan Bosch...
Then things threatened to come unstuck again. Caamaño agreed to permit an OAS tanker to enter the rebel-held harbor one afternoon and supply a city power plant. But behind the tanker came an unexpected junta gunboat, bristling with 3-in. artillery and .50-cal. machine guns. If the junta's intention was to provoke an incident, it failed. Caamaño's troops held their fire, and the gunboat churned out of the harbor 45 minutes later. Next night, however, rebel troops started firing their rifles in the air, drawing fire from the junta side...
...Dominican crisis, as in the Cuban fiasco, the deepest source of disquiet is the widespread assumption-at home and abroad-that the U.S. intervention marks a return to "gunboat diplomacy." Many persistent critics, particularly in academic circles, further argue that the Administration acted, in fact "overreacted," without provocation; that the rebels in Santo Domingo represent a legitimate democratic revolution. "On the evidence presented so far," wrote Notre Dame History Professor Samuel Shapiro in the Nation, "the Dominican revolution is no more Communist-controlled than the C.I.O. or the civil rights movement." Poet Archibald MacLeish attributed the U.S. response...
...Yankee imperialism in Latin America. It was a decision that is making a lot of Latin Americans hate us." Then Kuralt and Quint turned for guidance to Eric Sevareid, CBS National Correspondent. And like a fatherly professor reproving wayward journalism students, Sevareid offered some corrections: "The specter of American gunboat diplomacy, I would suggest, is a much more outworn specter than the very present one of Communism in this hemisphere. I don't see frankly how any President of the United States in 1965 can sit in the White House and send Americans to die against Communists across...
...talk to Caamaño "any time, any place." He quickly cleared the decks of six high-ranking military men unacceptable to the rebels, unceremoniously giving them each $1,000 pocket money, permitting one phone call to their families, then shipping them off to Puerto Rico aboard a Dominican gunboat. The one man he did not exile was Brigadier General Elías Wessin y Wessin, leader of the loyalists in the early stages of the revolt. At one point, Wessin y Wessin seemed on the verge of resigning, then changed his mind. Imbert refused to force his hand...