Taste of Democracy

Citizens of the Dominican Republic do not have much practice in free elections--the last one was in 1924, under the watchful eye of occupying U.S. Marines. Then came the era of Rafael Leonidas Trujillo. and for 31 years the small Caribbean country that shares the island of Hispaniola with Haiti was the demesne of the dictator, his relatives and his cronies. Last week, 19 months after Trujillo's assassination, Dominicans got another try at democracy. In calm and free elections, more than 1,000,000 voters went quietly to the polls to choose a constitutional president to lead their country for the next four years.

Plans for Reform. He is Juan Bosch. 53, a novelist, journalist and longstanding political friend of such charter members of the Latin American "democratic left'' as Puerto Rico's Governor Luis Munoz Marin and Venezuela's President Romulo Betancourt. Like Munoz Marin, Bosch has great plans for reforming and developing his island country. Like Betancourt, he spent much of his life in exile plotting revolution--and then modified his views in favor of constitutional government.

The largely self-educated Bosch left the Dominican Republic in 1937, disgusted with Trujillo after "The Benefactor" personally ordered the massacre of 15,000 Haitian squatters. With Cuba as a headquarters, Bosch organized his political party, traveled widely throughout Latin America as an unofficial emissary of the anti-Communist left.

Hounded out of Cuba in 1958 by Dictator Fulgencio Batista, Bosch did not return when Dictator Castro took power. "I don't say I knew he was a Communist." says Bosch. "But I felt he was not a democrat. I was afraid of what might happen."

Man of the People. After Trujillo was assassinated, Bosch went home, not to promote a revolution, but to run for President. He turned his Dominican Revolutionary Party into a peasants' and workers' party, proclaimed himself the candidate of the havenots, promised to distribute 16-acre farm plots among 70,000 rural families, first using former Trujillo holdings, then buying land with money from an agrarian reform tax. His most worrisome tendency, at least to outside eyes, was his habit of resigning his candidacy when things did not go right, in a manner reminiscent of Brazil's unstable ex-President Janio Quadros. A week before election, Bosch furiously withdrew when a minor Roman Catholic priest said that some of his old writings had a Marxist ring. Bosch confronted the priest in a TV debate, got him to withdraw the charge and used the incident to advantage.

On election day he got 648,000 votes for a 2-to-1 margin over his more conservative opponent, Viriato Fiallo. Bosch's party also won firm command of the legislature, and a clear mandate to put its promised reforms into action. Eight days after the great election there was a clash between troops and members of a weird religious cult in the back country that left at least 23 dead. But that had little to do with politics.

Traveling to the U.S. to visit his son in a South Bend, Ind., prep school last week, Bosch hopes to make his return by way of Washington for a visit with President Kennedy. The U.S. has already come through with $48 million worth of aid, plus a contingent of Peace Corpsmen and technical advisers. But the Dominican Republic still needs more. Encouraged by the orderly election results. U.S. officials are in a mood to help.

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