Social Composition of the Dominican Republic

Juan Bosch

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317495468
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia de Latinoamérica y el Caribe

Composición social dominicana (Social Composition of the Dominican Republic), first published in 1970 in Spanish, and translated into English here for the first time, discusses the changing structure of social classes and groups in Dominican society from the first encounter between Europeans and Natives until the mid-twentieth century. This influential and pioneering book details the struggles of the Dominican people as they evolved from pre-colonial and colonial subjects to sovereign actors with the task of moving a republic forward, amidst imperialist desires and martial ambitions.

Juan Bosch, one of the most well-known and best-loved Dominican politicians and scholars, here sets out the important themes that define modern Dominican society. He tackles topics such as the inter-imperialist rivalry between France, Spain, England, and Holland and its subsequent impact on the Caribbean region, as well as the U.S. occupation of the Dominican Republic from 1916-1924. He also discusses the aftermath of political alliances between liberals and conservatives during the birth of the Dominican Republic, the Restoration War fought against the Spanish Crown, the role of the petit bourgeoisie and the hateros (cattle-ranchers) in the formation of a Dominican oligarchy, the emergence of dictator Rafael Trujillo, and the composition of society during his time in power.

This translation, introduced and contextualized by leading Dominican Studies scholar Wilfredo Lozano, opens up Bosch's work for a new generation of scholars studying the Caribbean.

Chapter 1
The Origin of Social Classes in Santo Domingo

At what moment did social classes in our country begin to be formed?

Answering this question requires taking into consideration the fact that, when they reached our island, the Castilian conquistadores came from several classes or sectors of classes; however, these were classes within Castilian society, not indigenous society, which was the one inhabiting the island that Columbus christened with the name of La Española. In indigenous society, which occupied a level corresponding to peoples at the stage of development known as the Upper Neolithic, there were no classes, because the stage of dissolution of communal property had yet to be entered, and likewise the stage of private property had not been reached. Where there is no private property, there are no classes, although there are functions deriving from the division of labor, which can separate men and women according to the tasks they carry out in service to the group; among these functions may be those related to governance and the priesthood. It is likely that in some parts of La Española in 1492, there were caciques and priests who had inherited their functions, which would indicate that the indigenous peoples of those places were relatively close to the historical point at which the system of private property would be established. But in general, the Indians of La Española were still in the stage of communal property, as were those of Venezuela when Amerigo Vespucci reached its shores as a member of the expedition commanded by Alonso de Ojeda in 1499. A description of the lifestyle of the indigenous peoples in the western region of the Venezuelan coast was written by Amerigo Vespucci and synthesized by Fray Bartolomé de las Casas in his Historia de las Indias (1927, Vol. II, 43–51).

The conquest of our island engendered a class struggle between Spaniards and Indians, on the one hand, and sparked another class struggle among the conquistadores. These two class struggles would blend into a single one, with regard to the indigenous people, and hasten the establishment of the institution of private land-ownership, with regard to the Castilians or Spaniards. The final result of these struggles would be the enslavement and physical annihilation of the island’s Indians and the formation of the first known slave-owning oligarchy in the New World. In the first stage of the entire process that led to the formation of a slave-owning oligarchy in our country, a role of the highest importance was played by the poverty of the Spanish state, which did not possess the means to finance the conquest of the island; in the second stage, the primary role was played by the rebellion of Francisco Roldán Ximénez and his followers; throughout the whole process, a determining influence was exerted by the overall poverty of La Española, an island which was never rich, despite the legend of its wealth circulated by Christopher Columbus, Peter Martyr of Anglería, Father Las Casas, and a good many of our historians.

The first indigenous people of America to be subjected to slavery were not destined to work for the conquistadores but to be sold in Spain to pay the Conquest’s expenses; 500 Indians from La Española were dispatched to Seville by Christopher Columbus in four ships that departed from Isabela on February 24, 1495. In 1496, Don Bartolomé, Columbus’s brother, sent 300 Indians to the port of Cádiz. In 1498, upon returning to La Española on his third voyage, the Discoverer wrote the following to the Catholic Monarchs: “From here, in the name of the Holy Trinity, may be sent all the slaves that can be sold” (Saco 1932, Vol. I, 102 ff.).

In this first facet of the class struggle initiated in La Española, Columbus and his brother assumed the role of representatives of the Spanish State— or rather, the government of Castile—not of a dominant class enslaving the indigenous people in order to put them to work for their profit. But ultimately, the sale of Indians in Spain did not prosper, because Queen Isabella believed that by consenting to this business, she was committing a grave sin, and in addition, it happened that the Indians of our country died quickly in the metropole.

Now, the fact that indigenous people were captured in order to send them to Spain as slaves and sell them there led the Castilians living in La Española to demand that they be granted the right to have slaves, and this right was recognized, at least on a de facto level, by Columbus’s brother, Governor Bartolomé Colón. The latter, who had remained at the head of the island’s government after the Discoverer had left for Spain in early March of 1496, found himself compelled to indulge those Castilians who asked him for Indians whom they could use as slaves because La Española’s situation was critical, both economically and politically: economically, because there were not enough hands to produce life’s necessities, and politically, because of Roldán’s uprising, which had been provoked precisely by the general misery in which the Castilians found themselves. Furthermore, shortly after Columbus had left La Española in March 1496, it was arranged for the work of planting in several places to be carried out by Indians, under the command of their caciques, without receiving any payment, and that those who refused to do this work or fled into the mountains would be punished with whippings and enslavement (Saco 1932, 250).

Up until then, private ownership of land had not been instituted in La Española—nor, of course, in America, since the Conquest was being carried out on our island alone—and the conquistadores raised a hue and cry begging for land concessions. It was in July 1497 that the government of Castile granted the petitions for land distribution, but at that time Columbus was in Castile and the order was suspended until he could implement it upon his return to La Española (Saco 1932, 250). The application of this order was said to have given rise to the institution of the encomienda, given that the gift of parcels of land had no value unless Indians were allocated to them in order to make them productive, and the encomienda was swiftly converted into the indispensable legal instrument for imposing exploitation on the Indians, not only in La Española, but throughout the Caribbean region as well; in addition, the encomienda was the prerequisite to the establishment of the slaveholding oligarchy of the Americas.

Some historians have wanted to see Roldán’s rebellion as a movement for the liberation of the Indians of La Española, and describe Roldán as the first champion of social justice in the New World. Analysis of the historical facts says otherwise: in order to put an end to his uprising— and that of the 102 Castilians who followed him—Roldán demanded, and obtained, lands for himself and the other Roldanistas, and this demand went hand-in-hand with a demand for indigenous people to work these lands. Roldán can be called, without exaggeration, America’s first encomendero, since his rebellion led to the creation of the encomienda at least four years before its legal establishment.

Placed in an extremely weak political situation, because of the restiveness of the island’s Castilian population, the Discoverer had to bow to Roldán’s pressure. This happened in 1499. Las Casas states that the Admiral himself, on October 29 of that year, gave Roldán “land or plots or haciendas belonging to the unfortunate Indians” and that “the Admiral granted more to Roldán, than to the Cacique and lord whose ears Alonso de Ojeda had cut off. . . and his people worked it for him,” adding with scathing irony, “you see here how this truly just governance they called repartimiento (division) was carried out, and thereafter the honest encomiendas ” (Casas 1927, Vol. II, 28–29).

When he arrived in our country in April 1502, Governor Nicolás de Ovando found that the encomienda had been a fait accompli for over two years, since there were already at least a hundred Castilians who owned land along with the Indians working on it. These landowners, who made use of indigenous laborers whom they did not pay wages, were the Roldanistas, those who had rebelled under the command of Francisco Roldán Ximénez. The word encomienda was still not in use; the term employed was repartimiento, or division, to indicate that land and Indians were being divided up, since the division of land was carried out by bestowing on the conquistadores, in each case, lands that the Indians cultivated, and along with these lands came the Indians who were making use of it, first and foremost and as leader of the divided-up Indians, the cacique of the group, and secondly the women, children, and elders. The word encomienda stemmed from the phrase with which Ovando began the formula for dividing up the indigenous people, as follows:

To you (here followed the name of the Castilian beneficiary) we do grant through the Cacique (here followed the name of the cacique) (this number of) Indians so that you may make use of them in your mines and farmlands in the Cacique’s person.

The words “in the Cacique’s person” meant that he was the one to whom the encomendero had to give the work orders and that the cacique was responsible for the conduct of his Indians.

Ovando arrived in La Española with very clear instructions from Queen Isabella. According to these instructions, all the island’s Indians had to be “free from servitude and unmolested by anyone, and that they should rather live as free vassals, governed and with their justice preserved in such wise as were the vassals of the monarchs of Castile” (Saco 1932, Vol. II, 254–255). But Ovando found the encomienda already established on the island and exerted such strong pressure on the queen that she ordered, by means of the Provision of December 20, 1503 drawn up in Medina del Campo, that

henceforth you shall compel and impress upon the said Indians that they address and converse with the Christians of the said island and work in their establishments to remove and gather gold and other metals, and to fashion farmlands and other means of maintenance for the Christians, vecinos, and habitantes in said island, and you shall cause each one to be paid for the day on which he works that daily wage and maintenance which according to the quality of the land and the person and his duties it seems meet to you he should have, commanding each Cacique who has charge of a certain number of said Indians that he shall make them go and work where it is best. . . so that they shall work at that which such persons shall command them, paying to them the daily wage as appraised by you, which they shall perform and carry out as the free people they are, and not as serfs; and cause the said Indians to be well treated, and those who are Christians better than the others; and do not consent or allow any person [to] do them ill or harm or any other disagreeable thing. . . with a penalty of being at my mercy and of ten thousand maravedis for my Chamber to be paid by each one who should do the contrary.

From this Royal Provision, Ovando formulated the legal foundations of his encomiendas. Using Las Casas’s words, José Antonio Saco says that Ovando destroyed

the great villages there and gave one Spaniard a hundred, others fifty, and others more, and others less, according to the grace in which each stood with him and to his own pleasure: and gave children and elders, pregnant women and women who had given birth, and noblemen and commoners, and to the natural lords of the villages and of the land the Spaniard did take and then give of these in a repartimiento to those he wished to grant most honor and profit.

(Saco 1932, 257)

And indeed, so it was: Ovando used his power as a repartidor as a political instrument, to reward his partisans on the island and to punish those who opposed him. The Commander of Lares became the arbiter of the class struggle that had been set up in La Española, and as such, he disposed at his convenience of the indigenous people, who had become the subordinate class. As for the Queen’s recommendations favoring the Indians, such words were carried off by the wind. After Queen Isabella’s death, which occurred eleven months after she had issued her Provision of December 20, 1503, the fate of the Indians who had been subjected to the encomiendas became a tragic one; in reality, they had been transformed into the slaves of the encomenderos, and the latter into their masters who did them to death. Over time, it came to pass that royal functionaries were paid their salaries in Indians.

The following year two more royal officials were named to La Española, having accorded the position of bookkeeper to Gil González Dávila and that of factor to Juan de Ampués, allocating them 200 Indians as repartimiento in partial payment of their salary. When in 1511 the first Assize Court in La Española was founded, each of the appellate judges that formed it was given, along with his allotted salary, a repartimiento of 200 Indians. Similar favors were granted of 100, 60, and 50 Indians to servants of the Royal House, members of the Council [of the Indies], many courtiers, and other people who without residing in La Española enjoyed their encomiendas by means of stewards whom they had on that island for that purpose,

says José Antonio Saco, quoting Herrera (Saco 1932, 271; my parentheses—J.B.).

As Ovando’s successor, Don Diego Colón had the authority to carry out a repartimiento on the Indians of La Española, but in 1514 this authority was conferred upon Rodrigo de Alburquerque, who bought it with money and devoted himself to meting out a repartimiento on the Indians of the island to whomever paid him. According to Saco, in the first repartimiento carried out by Don Diego Colón, 33,523 Indians were repartidos, and those repartidos at Alburquerque’s hands four years later numbered only 20,995:

that is, a reduction of 12,533 in the brief period of four years between these repartimientos. And so great was the reduction, that according to the licenciado Suárez, Investigative Judge in La Española, already in January 1518, or three years after Alburquerque’s repartimiento, there were not eleven thousand Indians on the island.

(Saco 1932, 306)

To the extent the Indians of La Española were disappearing, the island’s Castilians—who numbered 715 in 1516—bought Indians who had been enslaved on other islands or on the Venezuelan coast, so that the encomienda gave way to the enslavement of the indigenous peoples of the Caribbean. The next step would be the acquisition of African slaves, and with this, the establishment of a slave-owning oligarchy dedicated to producing sugar to be sold in Spain. As late as 1525, when sugar was already being produced with African slaves, a public prosecutor of the Royal Assize Court of La Española, Pedro Moreno, who had been sent to the Hibueras—the present-day location of the Republic of Honduras—in order to resolve the bloody disputes in which the conquistadores of those places had been embroiled, took advantage of the voyage and brought back 40 Indians whom he sold as slaves in La Española. The conquistador of Mexico, Hernán Cortés, demanded that the Royal Assize Court on the island return those 40 Indians to him. The judge of that Court, Lucas Vásquez de Ayllón, went as far as the Bahamas to capture Indians whom he brought to La Española to sell as slaves.

Given all this, we know that by 1509, when Don Diego Colón arrived on the island, there was in La Española a subordinate class, composed of Indians subjected to the encomienda, who although they were not legally slaves, were so in fact. And based on what Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo relates, there were also rich Castilians, given that the ladies-in-waiting of Doña María de Toledo, the wife of the Viceroy Don Diego, “most of whom were maidens, were married in this city and on the island to dignitaries and rich men among those who were living here” (Fernández de Oviedo y Valdés 1959, Vol. II, 249). Thus, by 15...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Series Editor's Introduction
• Acknowledgments
• A New Introduction
• A Necessary Preface
• 1 The Origin of Social Classes in Santo Domingo
• 2 The Emergence and Decline of a Sugar Oligarchy
• 3 From Sugar Mills to Cattle
• 4 The Development of a Ranch Society
• 5 The Curious Society of the Buccaneers
• 6 The French Colony of Saint-Domingue
• 7 The Century of Misery
• 8 From the 17th Century's Immobility to the 18th Century's Dynamism
• 9 A Half-Century of Relative Development
• 10 Santo Domingo within the Caribbean Panorama
• 11 The Haitian Revolution
• 12 The Emigration Issue
• 13 The Ranchers' Government and the Tobacco Harvesters' Society
• 14 The Causes of the 1822 Haitian Invasion
• 15 The Petty Bourgeoisie in Dominican History
• 16 The Petty Bourgeoisie against the Power of the Ranchers
• 17 1857–1861: Struggles within the Petty Bourgeoisie
• 18 The Restoration: An Achievement of the Petty Bourgeoisie
• 19 The Long Reign of the Petty Bourgeoisie in the Nation's Political Life
• 20 Social Composition and Political Parties of the Period
• 21 The Government of the Azules, or the Road to Bourgeois Society
• 22 From the Death of Heureaux to the Death of Cáceres
• 23 Imperialism in Action
• 24 Social Composition until 1930
• 25 Trujillo, or: From Petty Bourgeoisie to Bourgeoisie
• 26 Social Composition at Trujillo's Death
• Bibliography
• Names and Places Index
• Subject Index