Dominican Republic and Haiti: Country Studies

Dominican Republic and Haiti: Country Studies
ment ending the United States customs receivership allowed
him to assume the title of "Restorer of Financial Independence."
High prices for Dominican produce during World War
II (1941-45) enabled him to liquidate the country's outstanding
debt in 1947. At the same time, he introduced a national
currency, the Dominican Republic peso (RD$—for value, see
Glossary)
Although Trujillo initiated substantial industrialization and
public works projects, his interest in promoting economic
development was largely for his own and his supporters' benefit.
Corruption and blackmail helped him amass an enormous
fortune and made him the country's largest landowner. His primary
means of self-enrichment was the national sugar industry,
which he rapidly expanded in the 1950s, despite a depressed
international market. At the time of his death in 1961, Trujillo
and his coterie reportedly controlled 60 percent of the total
sugar, cement, tobacco, and shipping industries and owned
more than 600,000 hectares of improved land. In the process
of consolidating his enormous wealth, Trujillo looted the
national treasury and built a personal fiefdom similar to those
of the Somoza and the Duvalier families in Nicaragua and
Haiti, respectively.
The Dominican economy's GDP experienced growth under
Trujillo at the rate of about 6.5 percent a year from 1950 to
1958 but dropped to 0.3 percent from 1959 to 1961. However,
the unequal distribution of that growth impoverished rural
Dominicans. The period between Trujillo's assassination in
1961 and the 1965 civil war was both politically and economically
chaotic, prompting simultaneous capital flight and
increased demands for spending on social programs. Cash
infusions (mostly from the United States) and loans helped to
sustain the economy. During the first three presidencies of
Joaquin Balaguer Ricardo (1966-78), the country experienced
a period of sustained growth characterized by economic diversification
and a more equitable distribution of benefits among
Dominicans. During its peak growth period, from 1966 to 1976,
the economy expanded at an annual rate of nearly 8 percent,
one of the highest growth rates in the world at the time. But in
1979 two hurricanes killed more than 1,000 Dominicans and
caused an estimated US$1 billion in damage, and by the early
1980s, rising oil prices and a forty-year low in sugar prices had
stifled the local economy. The average rate of economic growth
dropped to almost 1 percent a year.
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