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Ernesto Sagás, Race and Politics in the Dominican Republic, Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2000, xii+ 160 pp.
Ernesto Sagás offers, in a mere 160 pages, a very lucid history of the relation between race and politics in the Dominican Republic. Recognizing that the critical historical backdrop to race in the Dominican Republic is the letter's relationship with Haiti, Sagas takes us back to the colonial period, when the island was shared by two European powers. The cultural prejudice entertained by the Spanish part of the island against the French part was, it turns out, the forerunner of antihaitianismo.
The tendency to identify the Spanish culture as superior merged with racial prejudice against Haiti's majority black (slave and free] population to ensure that antihaitianismo became the defining variable in Dominican nationalism, when the first Republic was established in 1844. Sagas discusses very ably the reality that antihaitianismo had/has a dual purpose.
On the one hand, it is an inevitable aspect of foreign policy since the two nations - the Dominican Republic and Haiti - share the island of Hispaniola. Good fences, we have been told, make good neighbours, and the two countries have never enjoyed good fences. The Haitians invaded and occupied Santo Domingo in 1801, and abolished slavery there. In 1822 the Haitians invaded once more, and again abolished slavery, which had been reimposed after Toussaint left Santo Domingo. In 1821, a few months before the Haitians invaded, the Dominicans under the leadership of Núñez de Cáceres declared Santo Domingo independent of Spain, and proclaimed themselves linked to Simon Bolivar's Gran Colombia. I am not clear why Sagas sees a "paradox" in the fact "that most of the lower classes favoured annexation to Haiti . . . while the white Hispanic elites of Santo Domingo sought to become a part of Gran Colombia". It was entirely logical that the black slave masses of the Dominican Republic would have favoured a tie with Haiti that would have ensured their liberation from slavery. It was also logical that the whites would have favoured a political association with Gran Colombia because in 1822 Colombia was still a slave state. However, Dominican historians prefer to adhere to the fiction that Núnez de Cáceres's proclamation of independence from...