Dominican Republic 1961

Dominican Danger Signal


Source: The Militant, Vol. 25, No. 26, 1961, p. 3;
Transcribed: by Amaury Rodriguez, 2014.

Transcriber’s note: This editorial appeared in The Militant, organ of the US Socialist Workers Party (SWP) which sympathized with the Fourth International.


The State Department announces the situation in the Dominican Republic necessitates “ close and continuing study, which might well involve further on-the-spot observation” by the Organization of American States. This is another move in creating a device for U.S. intervention. The U.S. military built the Trujillo machine and U.S. corporations are still profiting from the brutal system of exploitation it protects. But its ability to withstand a revolutionary storm such as that which swept Cuba is questionable. So Washington is now considering intervening in the name of the OAS and parlaying such an intervention into an attack on Cuba. As William V. Shannon reports in the June 13 New York Post: “There has developed within the administration a proposal of a two-pronged military operation against Cuba and the Dominican Republic simultaneously. The idea behind it is that the U.S. would be moving in the name of democracy against dictatorships of the left and of the right.”