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The Soviets, Red Chinese and Cubans reacted with howls about imperialist aggression. In a shrill May Day speech, Castro called the U.S. landing "one of the most criminal and humiliating actions of this century." The comment from the rest of Latin America was surprisingly mild. Few of the expected mobs materialized to hurl rocks at U.S. embassies. Chile's President Eduardo Frei and Venezuela's Raúl Leoni issued public statements deploring the U.S. landings. But privately, many Latin American statesmen admitted the necessity for quick U.S. action. Some even went on record about it. Mexico's Foreign Ministry said that it regretted a move "which evokes such painful memories," but recognized the humanitarian reasons and hoped the marines' stay "will be as brief as possible." Added Argentina's Foreign Minister Miguel Angel Zavala Ortíz: "Sometimes those who appear as intervening actually are only reacting against a hidden intervention."
The Argentine was talking directly to Fidel Castro. The 1962 missile confrontation may have taken Russian IRBMs out of Cuba?or so the U.S. believes?but it did nothing to halt Castro's campaign of subversion around the hemisphere. According to U.S. intelligence, Cuban training schools turn out more than 1,500 American graduates each year as guerrilla cadres. Venezuela's army has been chasing them through the interior without notable success. Colombia's even more expert army no sooner cleaned out the country's bandits than a pair of Castro-style guerrilla bands cropped up in the same Andean hills. There have been reports of Communist guerrillas in Guatemala, Honduras, Peru, Argentina, Brazil?and of course the Dominican Republic, for which Castro has a special affinity. Way back in September 1947 Fidel himself, then a student, was involved in an unsuccessful attempt to launch a 1,100-man invasion force from Cuba.
Considering the island's ugly history (see box), it is a wonder that the Dominican Republic's leftists did not make their move long before. The tinder for revolution has been building for generations, and in the unstable years after Dictator Rafael Leonidas Trujillo, the Dominican military has been the strongest anti-Communist influence. Most often it was in the person of Wessin y Wessin.
The son of poor Lebanese immigrants, Wessin is a rare bird among the fine-feathered Dominican officers. He prefers fatigues or suntans to fancy uniforms, scorns the usual fruit-salad decorations, and no one has ever accused him of growing rich on graft. He lives in a modest $12,000 concrete house with his wife and two sons, enjoys cockfighting and baseball. He is painfully shy among strangers, speaks only Spanish, and seldom says much. But he is a devout Catholic in a part of the world where males pay little attention to their religion, and he regards Communism with a bleak, uncompromising hatred. As commander of the military training establishment at San Isidro airbase, he instituted mandatory Sunday Mass for recruits, taught courses in how to spot Communists. He also has at his disposal a sizable chunk of the Dominican Republic's firepower: eight F-51 propeller-driven fighters, eight Vampire jets, a company of 23 tanks, and two infantry battalions totaling 1,700 men.