Juan Bosch (politician)

Juan Emilio Bosch y Gaviño (30 June 1909 – 1 November 2001) was a Dominican politician, historian, writer, essayist, educator, and the first democratically elected president of the Dominican Republic for a brief time in 1963.

Previously, he had been the leader of the Dominican opposition in exile to the dictatorial regime of Rafael Trujillo for over 25 years.

To this day, he is remembered as an honest politician and regarded as one of the most prominent writers in Dominican literature.

Juan Bosch Gaviño was born in the city of La Vega on June 30, 1909.

His father was a Spaniard from Catalan origin, and his mother was a Puerto Rican from Juana Diaz, Puerto Rico.

He lived the first years of his childhood in a rural community called Río Verde, where he began his primary studies.

He did his secondary studies at the San Sebastián de La Vega school, only reaching the third level of high school.

In 1924 he moved to Santo Domingo, where he worked in several commercial stores.

Later in 1929 he traveled to Spain, Venezuela and some Caribbean islands.

In 1934, he married Isabel García and had two children with her: Leon and Carolina.

During Trujillo's dictatorship, Bosch was jailed for his political ideas, being released after several months.

In 1938, Bosch managed to leave the country, settling in Puerto Rico.

He founded both the Dominican Revolutionary Party (PRD) in 1939 and the Dominican Liberation Party (PLD) in 1973.

By 1939 Bosch had gone to Cuba, where he directed an edition of the completed works of Eugenio María de Hostos, something that defined his patriotic and humanist ideals.

In July, with other Dominican expatriates, he founded the Partido Revolucionario Dominicano (PRD), which stood out as the most active front against Trujillo outside the Dominican Republic.

Bosch heavily sympathised with leftist ideas, but he always denied any communist affiliation.

He collaborated with the Cuban Revolutionary Party and had an important role in the making of Cuba's 1940 Constitution.

Bosch met his second wife, Carmen Quidiello, a Cuban poet and playwright, in Matanzas in 1941.

The couple married in 1943 and had two children, Patricio and Barbara.

At the same time, his literary career was ascending, gaining important acknowledgments like the Hernandez Catá Prize in Havana for short stories written by a Latin American author.

His works had a deep social content, among them "La Noche Buena de Encarnación Mendoza", "Luis Pié", "The Masters" and "The Indian Manuel Sicuri", all of them described by critics as masterpieces of their sort.

Bosch was one of the main organizers of the abortive Cayo Confites expedition of 1947, in which a military force backed by the Caribbean Legion unsuccessfully attempted to invade the Dominican Republic from Cuba.

Bosch fled to Venezuela after the expedition's failure, where he continued his anti-Trujillo campaign.

In Cuba, where he returned by requirement of his friends in the Authentic Revolutionary Party, he played a notorious part in the political life of Havana, being recognized as a promoter of social legislation and author of the speech pronounced by President Carlos Prío Socarrás when the body of José Martí was transferred to Santiago de Cuba.

When Fulgencio Batista led a coup d'état against Prío Socarrás and took over the presidency in 1952, Bosch was jailed by Batista's forces.

After being liberated, he left Cuba and headed to Costa Rica, where he dedicated his time to pedagogical tasks, and to his activities as leader of the PRD.

Molasses tycoon Jacob Merrill Kaplan earned his fortune primarily through operations in Cuba and the Dominican Republic.

In 1959 the Cuban Revolution took place, led by Fidel Castro, causing a major political, economic and social upheaval in the Caribbean island.

Cord Meyer, a CIA official, was chief of International Organizations Division, a CIA-sponsored group for promoting democracy in international groups.

He used the contacts with Bosch, Volman, and Figueres for a new purpose – as the United States moved to rally the hemisphere against Cuba's Fidel Castro, Rafael Trujillo, the strongman caudillo that ran the Dominican Republic for 30 years had become a liability.

The United States needed to demonstrate that it opposed all dictators, not just those on the left.

Bosch accurately perceived the process that had begun from those events and wrote a letter to Trujillo, dated 27 February 1961.

He told Trujillo that his political role, in historical terms, had concluded in the Dominican Republic.

For over a year, the CIA had been in contact with dissidents inside the Dominican Republic who argued that assassination was the only certain way to remove Trujillo.

According to Chester Bowles, the Undersecretary of State, internal Department of State discussions in 1961 on the topic were vigorous.

Richard N. Goodwin, Assistant Special Counsel to the President, who had direct contacts with the rebel alliance, argued for intervention against Trujillo.

The J.M. Kaplan Fund was found in a 1964 congressional investigation to be a conduit for funneling CIA money to Latin America, including through the Institute of International Labor Research (IILR) headed by Norman Thomas, six-time presidential candidate for the Socialist Party of America.

These funds were used in Latin America by José Figueres Ferrer, Sacha Volman, and Juan Bosch.

Via the Fund, the CIA gave Figueres money to publish a political journal, Combate, and to found a left-wing school for Latin American opposition leaders.

Funds passed from a shell foundation to the Kaplan Fund, next to the IILR, and finally to Figueres and Bosch.