The US Invasion That Worked: Why the Dominican Republic Isn’t Cuba (Howard Husock, January 03, 2025, AEIdeas)
It was then, four years after the failed Bay of Pigs invasion meant to topple the Communist Castro regime in Cuba, that Lyndon Johnson dispatched Marines to the Dominican Republic, another island nation some 600 miles east of Cuba. Architecture was not the only similarity between the countries. The DR, like Cuba, had long been run by a local dictator, Rafael Trujillo. After his 1961 assassination and a military coup that deposed the country’s first elected president, civil war broke out; one side was led by pro-Castro forces, who had commandeered the major radio station. Faced with the prospect of another Cuba in the Caribbean, Lyndon Johnson dispatched the Marines. As with Vietnam, the left objected, as per folk singer Phil Ochs’ protest song, “The Shores of Santo Domingo,” where he sang “up and down the coast, the generals drink a toast.”
In reality, the Marines, who left the next year, ushered in an era of democracy and prosperity; there have been free elections since 1966. During the same period there’s been a striking economic divergence between the DR and Cuba. The World Bank writes most recently,
The economic growth of the Dominican Republic has tripled the regional average over the past two decades, resulting in 2.8 million people rising out of poverty, a middle class that now surpasses the poor population, and an improvement in access to basic services, housing and education.
Cuba, with a nearly identical 11 million population, saw its GDP fall by 1.9 percent in 2023. It has had trouble keeping its electric grid functioning. And, of course, it is a Communist dictatorship—ranked 178th in economic freedom by the Heritage Foundation.
Pity the Frenchified Haitians.