Sabine Cadeau has succeeded in historicizing a very grave and largely underexplored subject in Haitian-Dominican relations in a manner that is significantly insightful. The very title of her book is a clear signal of Sabine Cadeau's intention to depart from mainstream interpretation of the book's central theme, the 1937 Haitian Massacre. Cadeau insists that the slaughter of Haitians in the neighboring Dominican Republic in the first half of the twentieth century constituted full-blown genocide. Thus, she is perturbed that “Publications on genocide studies do not include the 1937 massacre” (34). She insists, nevertheless, on locating the event alongside “other twentieth-century genocides in Nazi-occupied Europe, Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia” (148).
Cadeau also expands the chronology of the state-ordered executions of Haitians in Dominica. She rejects readings limiting the attacks to the tenure of the dictator Rafael Trujillo from the 1930s and posits instead that Haitians were heinously victimized both before and after that period, simply because of their presence in Dominican Republic.
Searching for the factors responsible for these particularly vicious crimes, the author deepens and widens the historiography. She differs from other writers by pointing out that Trujillo was the prime culprit, but not the only one (146). She presents sufficient evidence to prove that the United States’ occupation of the Dominican Republic (1916–24) set in motion a series of events that culminated in the Haitians’ cruel fate (88). Referencing Executive Order 372, Cadeau demonstrates that the United States “brought a new wave of legally codified racial discrimination” (60) that made even Haitian Dominicans illegal immigrants in their homeland and victims of Trujillo's Dominicanization program.
Cadeau also directs accusing fingers at Trujillo's leading henchmen, especially director of immigration Reynaldo Valdez (180). She also underscores the role of “neighbourly violence” (147) in the genocide, recording that “some [civilians] killed, some looked on powerlessly but supported the murders tacitly [and] others benefitted materially when property and goods and livestock were abandoned after their owners were killed” (19). The author concludes that racism and immigration regulations aside, an economic agenda fed the onslaught and asserts that the genocide was “motivated by opportunities to confiscate land and other property” (140, 152).
In her thematic exploration of this episode of Haitian-Dominican relations, Cadeau makes the point that despite contrary claims, the genocide was not spontaneous but ideological (146, 188). She declares that “a racially explicit, anti-Haitian ideology of Hispanidad and aspirational whiteness . . . fascism—which Trujillo explicitly praised and emulated” (18)—were the principles guiding the Haitian holocaust.
Although her main narrative highlights Haitian victimization, Cadeau succeeds in interspersing a minor but unmistakable account of their resistance. She notes that after the mass killings of the late 1930s, survivors either took flight, falsified their identity, or secretly carried on with conuco cultivation on the borders (252).
Perhaps the richest feature of Cadeau's book is her reading and use of the sources. Fully cognizant of the sensitive nature of her subject matter, she acknowledges that “The historian has to read the surviving records with a refined degree of caution and suspicion” (164). She alerts the reader that Dominican officials deliberately covered up their inhumane actions in a “fog of official concealment” (173). She reveals that some people born in Haiti lied about their place of birth, hoping to escape roundup, deportation, and injury or death (77).
Cadeau also points out that the sources are replete with “tension between the official narrative and the local reality” (193). Thus confronted with problematic sources, Cadeau is to be commended for staying the course. She demonstrates a clear working knowledge of the publications of Edwidge Danticat, René Philoctète, Zora Neale Hurston, Sidney Mintz, and Michel-Rolph Trouillot on the subject, and combed through tons of primary sources including constitutions of the Dominican Republic and police and judicial records. But Cadeau relies most heavily on “oral interviews with the survivors and their descendants” (56). The consistency of the details these testimonies produce furnish the historiography with a much-needed level of veracity in a stash of records that has often been manipulated.
Cadeau's book is sure to become a leading historical account of the systematic campaign to purge the Dominican Republic of Haitians. A rigorous and scholarly tone undergirds the narrative, substantiated by both primary and secondary sources, even though some are problematic. The book is highly recommended to scholars whose research is focused on the history and treatment of Haitians in the Dominican Republic, in the past as well as in the present.
