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Jules and gang – Mombassa – West Pac 74, originally uploaded by jjlamont.

]]> http://donjuliodomrepblog.wordpress.com/2008/11/03/jules-and-gang-mombassa-west-pac-74/feed/ 0 Don Julio http://donjuliodomrepblog.wordpress.com/2008/10/26/98/ http://donjuliodomrepblog.wordpress.com/2008/10/26/98/#comments Sun, 26 Oct 2008 00:21:21 +0000 Don Julio http://donjuliodomrepblog.wordpress.com/2008/10/26/98/ ]]>

Somewhere Over the Rainbow

Daddy Yankee – Ella Me Levanto

A very interesting early map of Hispaniola, 1534. Click map for detail views. See details below and “Maps” in side bar.

(1534) Ramusio, Giovanni Battista (also Peter Martyr, Fernández de Oviedo). In Raccoita di Navigationi et Viaggi… Isola de Spagnvola. Venice. This edition: second (1556). This state: second. Size: 270 x 190 mm. Language: Italian. Region: Hispaniola. Medium: woodblock. Comments: This second edition (and state) was printed in 1556, and it can be distinguished by damage to some lettering (e.g., see first “N” in PONENTE”). It is said that this block was destroyed in a fire in printing house of Tomaso Guinti so had to be recut for future editions.

Below is an updated version of same map… with waves, galleons and sea monsters.

Venice, 1565. Woodcut, printed area 190 x 270mm. Slight age-toning. Slight age-toning. Hispaniola, surrounded by galleons and seamonsters, from Ramusio’s ‘Raccolta di Navigationi et Viaggi’. This example was printed from the second block, cut in 1565 after the first was destroyed by a fire in the printing house of Thomaso Guinti after only a year’s use. A noticeable difference is that the original had no decoration or waves. The 1606 edition is recognisable by evidence of woodworm damage to the printing block.

A mother and her children. Wide eyed and inquisitive. My friends and the children enjoying a day on Luperon Beach. We rented a four seater van holding 15 people, purchased a whole roasted pig [lechone] and filled the van. Heads, elbows and knees everywhere. The kids were thrilled with the waves, the surf, the food and the excitement… just full of joy. And then, climbing a Almendras tree, wow!

Long ago visiting Yosemite National Park in California in 1974 with my USS Enterprise shipmates. We drove there from our ship ported in Alameda. A magnificent vista. Those were the days.

100_1027, originally uploaded by jjlamont.

A day at Luperon…, originally uploaded by jjlamont.

Haina, Dominican Republic

Haina could be called the capital of lead poisoning for its 85,000 citizens and most particularly for those in the area known as Bajos de Haina. see map below. A former battery plant has caused high soil and blood levels of lead (in blood this amounts to lead poisoning). The good news is that there is concerted action to improve the situation.

[sourced from Forbes magazine, Robert Malone]

US occupation of Santo Domingo… 1916 – 1922

[sourced from Wikipedia]

United States Marines landed in Santo Domingo on May 15, 1916. Prior to their landing, Jimenes resigned, refusing the exercise an office ‘regained with foreign bullets.’^[20] On June 1, Marines occupied Monte Cristi and Puerto Plata, and, after a brief campaign, took Arias’s stronghold Santiago by the beginning of July. The Dominican Congress elected Dr. Francisco Henríquez Carvajal as President, but in November, after he refused to meet the American demands, Woodrow Wilson announced the imposition of a U.S. military government, with Rear Admiral Harry Shepard Knapp as Military Governor. The American military government implemented many of the institutional reforms carried out in the United States during the Progressive Era, including reorganization of the tax system, accounting and administration, expansion of primary education, the creation of a nation-wide police force to unify the country, and the construction of a national system of roads, including a highway linking Santiago to Santo Domingo.

Despite the reforms, virtually all Dominicans resented the loss of their sovereignty to foreigners, few of whom spoke Spanish or displayed much real concern for the nation’s welfare, and the military government, unable to win the backing of any prominent Dominican political leaders, imposed strict censorship laws and imprisoned critics of the occupation. In 1920, U.S. authorities enacted a Land Registration Act, which broke up the terrenos comuneros and dispossessed thousands of peasants who lacked formal titles to the lands they occupied while legalizing false titles held by the sugar companies. In the southeast, many of the dispossessed peasants formed armed bands, called gavilleros and waged a guerilla war that lasted the duration of the occupation, with most of the fighting in Hato Mayor and El Seibo. At any given time, the Marines faced eight to twelve caudillos, each of whom commanded several hundred followers. The guerrillas benefited from a superior knowledge of the terrain and the support of the local population, and in order to defeat them the Marines relied on increasingly brutal counterinsurgency methods. However, rivalries between various caudillos often led them to fight against one another, and even cooperate with occupation authorities. In addition, cultural schisms between the campesinos and city dwellers prevented the guerillas from cooperating with the urban, middle-class nationalist movement. In the San Juan valley, near the border with Haïti, followers of a Vodu faith healer named Liborio resisted the occupation and aided the Haitian cacos in their war against the Americans, until his death in 1922. The principle legacy of the occupation was the creation of a National Police Force, used by the Marines to help fight against the various guerillas, and later the main vehicle for the rise of Rafael Trujillo.

In what was referred to as la danza de los milliones, with the destruction of European sugar-beet farms during World War I sugar prices rose to their highest level in history, from $5.50 in 1914 to $22.50 per pound in 1920. Dominican sugar exports increased from 122,642 tons in 1916 to 158,803 tons in 1920, earning a record $45.3 million.^[21] However, European beet sugar production quickly recovered, which, coupled with the growth of global sugar cane production, glutted the world market, causing prices to plummet to only $2.00 by the end of 1921. This crisis drove many of the local sugar planters into bankruptcy, allowing large American conglomerates to dominate the sugar industry. By 1926, only twenty-one major estates remained, occupying an estimated 520,000 acres. Of these, twelve U.S.-owned companies owned more than 81% of total acreage.^[22] While the foreign planters who had built the sugar industry integrated into Dominican society, these corporations expatriated their profits to the United States. As prices declined, sugar estates increasingly relied on Haitian laborers. This was facilitated by the military government’s introduction of regulated contract labor, the growth of sugar production in the southwest, near the Haitian border, and a series of strikes by cocolo cane cutters organized by the Universal Negro Improvement Association.

In the 1920 United States presidential election Republican candidate Warren Harding criticized the occupation and promised eventual U.S. withdrawal. While Jimenes and Vásquez had sought concessions from the United States, the recession discredited the military government and gave rise to a new nationalist political organization, the Dominican National Union, led by Dr. Henríquez from exile in Santiago de Cuba, which demanded unconditional withdrawal pura y simple. They formed alliances with frustrated nationalists in Puerto Rico and Cuba, as well as critics of the occupation in the United States itself, most notably The Nation and the Haiti-San Domingo Independence Society. In May 1922, a Dominican lawyer, Francisco Peynado, went to Washington and negotiated what became known as the Hughes-Peynado Plan. It stipulated immediate establishment of a provisional government pending elections, approval of all acts of the U.S. military government, and the continuation of the 1907 treaty until all the Dominican Republic’s foreign debts had been settled. On October 1, Italian-born sugar planter and merchant Juan Bautista Vicini was named provisional president, and the process of U.S. withdrawal began.