“Open Our Eyes ... Defend Ourselves” against “Caribbean Revolutionaries That Are Perfectly Allied”: The Caribbean Basin Anti-Communist Network, 1947–55

This paper examines how Dominican, Nicaraguan, Honduran, Venezuelan, Colombian, and Cuban officials defined ‘communism’ and ‘anti-communism’ in the first years of the international Cold War. In contrast to the growing body of scholarship that examines the rise of radical New Right conservatism in Latin America after the Cuban Revolution, this paper analyzes how Caribbean Basin leaders shared an indigenous anticommunist ideology between 1947 and 1955. In the mid-1940s, anti-fascism inspired loosely-formed organizations of anti-dictatorial militants to challenge regimes throughout the region. According to never-before consulted diplomatic and intelligence files, Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo, Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza, and Honduran dictator Tiburcio Carías formed their own unofficial network to combat their rivals. By 1949, these regimes’ officials denounced the governments of Guatemalans Juan José Arévalo and Jacobo Arbenz, Venezuelan Rómulo Betancourt, and Costa Rican José Figueres as the products of Soviet, Mexican, and international communism. 

Joined by Honduran president Juan Manuel Gálvez, the Venezuelan military junta, the Conservative Colombian governments, and Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista, the network identified Arévalo, Arbenz, Betancourt, Figueres, and Caribbean revolutionaries as communist threats to hemispheric stability and American democracy in the early 1950s. On one hand, the network’s anti-communism bolstered the US government’s Cold War-oriented policy against the Arbenz government. On the other hand, the network undermined US officials’ policies as members opposed US allies Figueres, Betancourt, and Puerto Rican Luis Muñoz Marín. The network’s members utilized their shared ideology to target these democratic leaders, organize the 1955 Invasion of Costa Rica, and castigate US officials’ unwillingness to persecute all alleged communists in the Caribbean Basin. Ultimately, the analysis of the network’s ideology reveals how Caribbean Basin leaders interpreted and shaped events in their region according to their own goals and worldviews.