In 1939, during the build-up to World War II, the St. Louis carried more than 900 Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany intending to escape antisemitic persecution. The refugees first tried to disembark in Cuba but were denied permission to land. After Cuba, the captain, Gustav Schröder, went to the United States and Canada, trying to find a nation to take the Jews in, but both nations refused. He finally returned the ship to Europe, where various countries, including the United Kingdom, Belgium, the Netherlands and France, accepted some refugees. Many were later caught in Nazi roundups of Jews in the occupied countries of Belgium, France and the Netherlands, and some historians have estimated that approximately a quarter of them were killed in death camps during the Holocaust.
The Wikipedia entry does not mention the Dominican Republic.
According to Google AI: “The MS St. Louis did not go to the Dominican Republic because, despite initial discussions, the Dominican Republic ultimately refused to accept the Jewish refugees on board, meaning they did not have the necessary permission to land there.”
I ask Grok: “Did any country offer haven to Jews in the German liner the MS St Louis?”
The answer does not mention the Dominican Republic.
Grok says:
Yes, several countries eventually offered haven to the Jewish refugees aboard the MS St. Louis, though not immediately. The MS St. Louis, a German ocean liner carrying over 900 Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi persecution, set sail from Hamburg, Germany, on May 13, 1939, bound for Havana, Cuba. However, upon arrival on May 27, 1939, Cuban authorities denied entry to most of the passengers due to a change in immigration policies and widespread antisemitism, allowing only 28 passengers to disembark (22 Jews with valid U.S. visas, 4 Spanish citizens, and 2 Cuban nationals).
After Cuba’s refusal, the ship approached the United States and Canada, but both nations also denied entry. The U.S. adhered to strict immigration quotas under the 1924 Immigration Act, and President Franklin D. Roosevelt did not intervene, while Canada’s Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King refused to accept the refugees, influenced by antisemitic sentiment within his government.
With no options in the Americas, the St. Louis was forced to return to Europe. However, thanks to negotiations led by the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC) and its representative Morris Troper, four European countries agreed to take in the passengers rather than let them return to Nazi Germany. On June 17, 1939, the ship docked in Antwerp, Belgium, and the refugees were distributed as follows:
Great Britain: Accepted 287 passengers.France: Took in 224 passengers.
Belgium: Admitted 214 passengers.
Netherlands: Accepted 181 passengers.
While these countries provided temporary refuge, the outbreak of World War II shortly thereafter, in September 1939, drastically altered the fates of those resettled in mainland Europe. The Nazis invaded France, Belgium, and the Netherlands in 1940, and many of the refugees who had settled there were once again caught in the Holocaust. Historians estimate that approximately 254 of the 937 passengers originally aboard the St. Louis died during the Holocaust, primarily those who ended up in Nazi-occupied territories. Those who found haven in Great Britain were the most likely to survive the war.
I follow up with Grok: “Did the German liner the MS St Louis stop in the Dominican Republic and were Jews allowed there?”
Grok says:
The Dominican Republic did not become a destination for the MS St. Louis, despite offering a potential refuge for Jewish refugees. At the Évian Conference in July 1938, convened to address the growing Jewish refugee crisis, the Dominican Republic was the only nation out of 32 participants to formally agree to accept a significant number of Jewish refugees—up to 100,000—without the restrictions of quotas. This offer was made by dictator Rafael Trujillo, who sought to improve his international image and “whiten” the population, though it was framed as a humanitarian gesture. The plan involved settling refugees in an agricultural colony at Sosúa, on the northern coast of the Dominican Republic. However, logistical challenges, including the outbreak of World War II in September 1939 and the difficulty of transporting refugees from Europe, meant that fewer than 1,000 Jews ultimately settled there by the time the war escalated.
While telegrams and negotiations during the MS St. Louis crisis occasionally mentioned the Dominican Republic as a possible landing option, no concrete action was taken to redirect the ship there. The reasons remain unclear but likely include the urgency of the situation, the lack of immediate infrastructure to accommodate over 900 passengers, and the focus of Captain Gustav Schröder and Jewish organizations (like the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee) on securing entry to closer or more established destinations. Thus, despite the Dominican Republic’s willingness to accept Jews, the MS St. Louis did not stop there, and its passengers were not among those who benefited from Trujillo’s offer.
I ask Grok: “Did European Jews fleeing the Nazis not want to go to the Dominican Republic?”
Grok says:
… the idea that European Jews “did not want to go” to the Dominican Republic oversimplifies the situation. It wasn’t primarily a matter of unwillingness but rather a combination of practical, logistical, and psychological factors. Many Jews were desperate to escape Europe and would have gone anywhere offering safety. The Dominican Republic, though, was an unfamiliar tropical country in the Caribbean, far from the cultural and familial ties most European Jews had. Language barriers (Spanish versus Yiddish, German, or Polish), a lack of established Jewish communities, and the prospect of starting over as agricultural settlers in a place like Sosúa—a settlement Trujillo designated for refugees—may have made it less appealing compared to destinations like the United States or Palestine, where many had relatives or stronger cultural connections.
That said, the Dominican offer wasn’t widely rejected by Jews themselves but was hampered by external constraints. Bureaucratic hurdles, limited transportation (especially as World War II disrupted shipping), and restrictive immigration policies elsewhere meant that only a tiny fraction of the promised 100,000 slots were filled. Between 1940 and 1945, fewer than 1,000 Jews ultimately settled in Sosúa, with many arriving via organizations like the Dominican Republic Settlement Association (DORSA), funded by the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee. Some who made it later left for other countries, like the U.S., when opportunities arose, suggesting that while they were grateful for refuge, the Dominican Republic wasn’t their preferred long-term home.
Evidence from the time, including survivor accounts, shows gratitude toward Trujillo’s offer despite his mixed motives—he sought to “whiten” the Dominican population and improve his international image after massacring thousands of Haitians in 1937. For example, the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum notes that those who reached Sosúa valued the safety, even if the transition to farming in a foreign land was tough. So, it’s not that European Jews universally “didn’t want” to go; rather, the option was underutilized due to circumstances beyond their control and the natural pull toward more familiar destinations.
I asked Google AI: “Why didn’t more Jews fleeing the Nazis go to the Dominican Republic?”
Google answered:
While the Dominican Republic was one of the few countries willing to accept Jewish refugees fleeing the Nazis, only a small number actually made it there due to several factors including strict immigration quotas, geographic distance, difficulty obtaining visas, and the fact that most Jews sought refuge in countries like the United States where they had family or community ties, even though those countries were often reluctant to accept large numbers of refugees.
Despite offering to accept Jewish refugees, the Dominican Republic had a small population and limited capacity to take in large numbers of people.
Accessing the Dominican Republic was difficult for many Jews due to the long journey, bureaucratic hurdles, and the need to secure necessary documentation.
According to New York’s Museum of Jewish Heritage:
Trujillo hoped that light-skinned European Jews would bring the “skills, energy, prestige, and capital” which he associated with European citizens who were white. Trujillo hoped the Jews’ intermingling with local Dominican women would result in “lightening” the skin tones of the overall population.
Luis Hess, who lived in Sosúa, contextualized these positions, saying: “The person who wanted to help us was not a humanist. But did we have a choice? Hitler, the German racist, persecuted us and wanted to murder us. Trujillo, the Dominican racist saved our lives.”
The Dominican Republic was the only sovereign country willing to accept mass Jewish immigration immediately prior and during World War II, the only alternative being the Shanghai International Settlement. The United States government had attempted to also set up a Jewish colony in Alaska in order to populate the area. However, what would become known as The Alaska Plan, was effectively buried due to a lack of support and opposition from antisemitic and nativist groups.[10] In turn, support for the Jews fell almost solely on the Dominican Republic. At the Évian Conference, convened to address the Jewish refugee crisis, the Dominican Republic, under the rule of dictator Rafael Trujillo, offered to accept 100,000 Jewish refugees.[6] However, It is estimated that 5,000 visas were actually issued, and the vast majority of the recipients did not reach the country because of how hard it was to get out of occupied Europe.[11] Trujillo then offered his personal estate in Sosúa to the Dominican Republic Settlement Association (DORSA), established by the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC) to manage the resettlement project. [6]In return for his land, Trujillo received $100,000 in DORSA stock. By February of 1940, DORSA had managed to get congressional approval for the settlement in Sosua and the plan began to move forward.[6] By Spring of that year, the colony began receiving its first settlers. About 700 European Jews of Ashkenazi Jewish descent reached the settlement where each family received 33 hectares (82 acres) of land, 10 cows (plus 2 additional cows per child), a mule and a horse, and a US$10,000 loan (about 214,000 dollars at 2025 prices) at 1% interest.[12][13] The colonists were expected to engage in communal agriculture, sharing work and profits equally. Dairying and poultry raising were also intended as complementary activities. However, crop-based agriculture proved largely unsuccessful due to poor soil, unpredictable rainfall, and limited market access.[6]Due to the challenges of communal agriculture, the colony transitioned to a capitalist model by 1945, with individual families receiving their own farms. The only exception to this individualistic approach was the dairy and meat factories, which were run as cooperatives with profits divided according to investment. [6] Those who did not travel to Sosúa usually settled in the capital, Santo Domingo. In 1943 the number of known Jews in the Dominican Republic peaked at 1000.
At the conclusion of WWII, The Jewish population in Sosúa gradually declined as residents relocated, mostly to the United States. [6] As a portion of the Jewish population left, Dominican residents began to move in Sosúa. Throughout the majority of the 20th century, Sosúa existed as a mixed community of Jewish and Dominican residents, with the Jewish population aging and shrinking. The Dominican influence, both economic and cultural, becomes increasingly prominent. This peaked in 1980 when Sosúa’s Jewish community experienced a deep decline due to emigration during the touristic boom of Sosúa when most Jews sold their land to developers.
The current population of known Jews in the Dominican Republic is close to 3,000, with the majority living in the capital, Santo Domingo, and others residing in Sosúa.
According to a 2011 academic paper “The Voyage of the St. Louis Revisited” by C. Paul Vincent, a Christian scholar of the Holocaust at Keene State College, published in the journal Holocaust and Genocide Studies:
* The story of the St. Louis, as that narrative has evolved over the decades, often includes as much myth as it does history. Focusing on American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee negotiator Lawrence Berenson, the author brings to light the often overlooked influence of key actors’ attitudes and demeanor on the episode’s outcome. He then traces the diplomatic exchange that followed the failure of negotiations to land the St. Louis passengers in Cuba. In conclusion, he calls for the St. Louis crisis
to be read in a way that takes into account the United States’ domestic and international political context at the time.* of the 620 passengers who returned to continental Europe, 365 survived the war…
* those traveling on the St. Louis were “not refugees during their voyage to Cuba, [but became] so during the return trip”—that is, once the Cubans declined to honor their landing permits.
* Of the 937 passengers aboard the St. Louis, 909 held tourist landing permits that Manuel Benitez Gonzalez, Cuba’s Director General of Immigration, had issued for a fee of roughly $160 each… Roughly 80 percent of the passengers—a total of 734 of 909—held quota numbers for eventual entry into the United States.20 Traveling officially as German tourists to Cuba, these passengers intended ultimately to immigrate to the United States. Some held quota numbers that would mature within a few months; others would be compelled to remain in Cuba for two or more years.
* Colonel Batista may have outlined Cuban refugee policy, but the man controlling its day-to-day implementation was the director general of immigration, the aforementioned Manuel Benitez. Also an army colonel, Benitez was a Batista protege who appreciated the profit to be gained by exploiting the tragedy of Jews desperate to flee the Reich. Rather than bring them in as legitimate immigrants—a procedure requiring individuals to post a $500 bond, a fee that went directly into the government’s coffers—he evolved a practice of selling tourist landing permits through Hapag offices. Thus was Jewish misfortune translated into a windfall for both Hapag and Benitez.
By May 1939 approximately 6,000 Jews were living in Cuba. Most of these lived in Havana, approximately a third having arrived as “tourists” since the beginning of the year. Like most of the Jews traveling on the St. Louis, roughly half of those residing in Cuba held American quota numbers and hoped eventually to immigrate to the United States. But by May, the Batista-Berenson accord of November 1938 was unraveling.
* A further factor inducing President Laredo Bru´ to take action was a marked rise in domestic antisemitism.
* [The American ambassador to Cuba and the American consul] urged Berenson… to act on an offer extended on June 3 by the Dominican consul, Nestor Pou, to disembark the passengers in Santo Domingo. Du Bois reported that it “was evident that Berenson himself was very reluctant to accept the Santo Domingo solution and that he believed his principals in New York would be also. Although he was repeatedly asked the reason for this reluctance, he was exceedingly vague in his replies. It was pointed out to him that
the Santo Domingo scheme was his ace in the hole, and it seemed that the time had come to play it.”* When talks with Cuba’s president were definitively terminated on June 8, the JDC’s executive committee gathered in extraordinary session.73 Hyman informed his colleagues about various proposals for landing groups of passengers in one or another Latin American country, but each had proven impractical. Sensitive to one specific offer, he focused on the Dominican Republic, pointing out that “a payment of $500 per person would be required, not as a returnable bond but as an outright landing fee.” It was especially contemptible that the fee was imposed only on Jews. He added that inquiries regarding “the suitability of settling in Santo Domingo also disclosed some unfavorable information.” The executive committee decided that the JDC “should not consent to any procedure where a special indemnity for admission was required for Jews only.”
* While the Dominican offer remained open, its terms evolved from June 3 to 5, becoming more financially onerous. In Exil Impossible (p. 97), Afoumado also expresses bewilderment at Berenson’s response to the Dominican offer.
* It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that primary responsibility for both the failure of the negotiations and the refusal to consider alternatives rests with Berenson.
* Yet, the realities policymakers faced in June 1939 did not include a second world war, Nazi conquest of Western Europe, or mass extermination at Auschwitz. Of those coming developments, only the outbreak of war may have appeared probable in June 1939. Certainly, no one could discern how a war might unfold; indeed, most military leaders would have regarded as unimaginable the collapse of France under the weight of a tactic later labeled Blitzkrieg. Ernest May writes that had Western leaders “anticipated the German offensive through the Ardennes, even as a worrisome contingency, it is almost inconceivable that France would have been defeated when and as it was. It is more than conceivable that the outcome would have been not France’s defeat but Germany’s and, possibly, a French victory parade on the Unter den Linden in Berlin.” Indeed, May stresses,
the German generals “believed to a man that Hitler had gotten the country into a war for which it was not prepared and which it might well lose.”* [The Holocaust’s] magnitude is so great that attributing the crime simply to Hitler or Himmler, or to Nazi Germany generally, or even to Europe, can seem insufficient. Despite empirical problems tied to chronology, geographic congruity, or documentary substantiation, observers generally feel that the guilt simply must be more widespread, even encompassing the United States. By embracing this insupportable judgment of the voyage of the St. Louis, they slight the significance of what was accomplished in June 1939.
* The decision of the governments of the Netherlands, Belgium, France, and Britain to grant temporary refuge was founded on an assurance that most of the passengers intended to establish themselves in America. The United States stood alone in 1939 in its commitment to accept 27,370 permanent German immigrants annually.
* How should one view Roosevelt’s apparent silence as the ship sailed aimlessly in the waters between Cuba and Florida? Why did he not pressure the Cuban government of President
Laredo Bru´? Irwin Gellman explains the U.S. government’s restraint in terms of its evolving “Good Neighbor” policy, in place since 1933, which paid “rich dividends [by 1939] in hemispheric cooperation and defense.”* the conviction of some observers that President Roosevelt should have permitted the passengers entry, even if doing so breached America’s quota law. For such critics Roosevelt symbolized universally held humanitarian principles; his failure to act undermines his moral leadership. Again, the grievance minimizes historical context, political realities, and the consequences that likely would have been triggered by such action in the summer of 1939. As an example, at the moment when the St. Louis was circling in the Straits of Florida, the immigration committees of both houses of Congress were in executive session, engaged in a contentious hearing on the Wagner-Rogers Bill—the joint resolution aimed at relaxing temporarily the country’s immigration quota to allow 20,000 “German refugee children” into the United States.113 Immigration was a polarizing issue in the late 1930s, and nothing had so provoked anger toward erosion of the country’s quota system in the spring of 1939 as the Wagner-Rogers Bill. After several years of recovery, the depression had deepened in late 1937 and Americans fearful of either losing or not finding jobs were overwhelmingly opposed to any resolution that allowed more immigrants into
the country; indeed, powerful forces sought to curtail dramatically the existing quota, which they viewed as far too generous. Advocates for the entry of refugee children believed, nonetheless, that they held the moral high ground; they were stunned when their bill failed to be reported out of committee. Clearly, the political environment precluded congressional support for landing the St. Louis passengers in the United States.* According to popular historian Marc Aronson, “Roosevelt knew that if he let the passengers of the St. Louis into America, others who had already been told they could come would be shut out. If that exchange had taken place, my mother might well have been trapped in Europe and sent to her death.”
Hypothetically, Roosevelt could have used his executive authority to land the St. Louis passengers. But the President’s isolationist and anti-New Deal Congressional foes—not necessarily the same people—might then have eagerly unified in an anti-Roosevelt campaign. The consequences of the President having been so embattled in 1939 – 40 are, hypothetically, enormous.* only 472 Jews found refuge in the Dominican Republic by the end of the Second World War.
The remarkable offer made during the Évian Conference (1938) by the Dominican government to admit 100,00 Jewish refugees is normally ignored because “Évian” stands for the failure to respond to the refugee crisis, and the Dominican offer is considered either as the exception that proves the rule, or as crude example of the political opportunism of a client (Trujillo) to gain favor in the eyes of his patron (Roosevelt). In addition, the fate of the 757 refugees who made it to the Dominican Republic seemed of little interest because their number was so small, both in relation to the refugee problem in general and in relation to the initial promise of 100,000. Furthermore the history of
the agricultural settlement in Sosúa established by these refugees was remarkably and blessedly undramatic, which might explain why there are no English-language memoirs of life in Sosúa. Finally the Dominican refuge did not fit within the Zionist perspective that has structured the Jewish interpretation of viable collective solutions to the refugee crisis of the late 1930s. There has been a tendency to belittle the fancy proposals to create Jewish colonies in, for example, Guyana or Australia…Indeed, when the labor Zionist Marie Syrkin visited Sosúa in 1941, she reported in The Jewish Frontier that she missed the begeisterung (inspiration) and the high sense of purpose she had seen in Palestine. “It would be foolish to expect a refugee from a concentration camp to burst into a hora, or its equivalent, when he spots the shore of Puarto Plata or Ciudad Trujillo, as a chalutz does when he sees Mount Carmel in the distance,” Syrkin observed. Yet the future of Sosúa as a Jewish colony depended on it. “We know that when Hitler is defeated, and the world resumes a human aspect, immigration to Palestine will proceed with even greater impetus.” No Jews would bother to settle in Sosúa when
the emergency had passed. Hence it stood condemned. And subsequent developments proved her right if the measure of success was to establish a permanent Jewish colony in Sosúa: today there are hardly any Jews left in Sosúa.Marion Kaplan’s Dominican Haven [2008]…is beautifully produced with many high-quality illustrations on glossy paper…the scholarship of Dominican Haven is nothing less than excellent, and the book is beautifully written…
Dominican Haven struggles to negotiate the tension that exists between a feel-good story that stresses the welcome offered by the Dominicans and the deliverance of a small group of Jews, and the deadly gap that exists between the promise made in Évian and the reality of Sosúa. Even the failure of the colony to prosper as a Jewish village is given a positive turn when Kaplan quotes Schneiderman, quoting in turn a Sosúa comedian’s witty observation that one “can’t build a shtetl in a country without antisemitism.”
…Both the history of the murder of six million Jews symbolically labeled as “The Holocaust,” and the history of collective Jewish response to the murder symbolically understood as “The State of Israel” have defined a single ideological arch that has offered no place for the kind of haven symbolized by the name “Uganda” and rejected by the Sixth Zionist Congress.
Kaplan, however, delves beneath the public relations and finds Trujillo’s motivation in his desire to see white people as the dominant population (as opposed to the black Haitians), his wish to expand the Dominican economy in the countryside, and his aim to establish closer business ties with the United States. Here the great irony of racial thinking is brought to the fore. In Nazi Germany, Jews had been classified as “not white,” but to Trujillo’s mind, Jews were the “right” kind of people to repopulate his nation. He even turned anti-Jewish stereotypes into positive ones by stressing the imagery of Jews as hard-working, connected to money-making enterprises, and possessing high cultural standards. Out of these mixed motives, none of them very noble, came the settlement at Sosua.
Chapter two begins the negotiations that made the new settlement possible. At the age of 65, an American-born Jew, James Rosenberg, embarked on a mission to aid Jews by transforming them into farmers and small craftsmen. His close associate, Joseph Rosen, would serve as the man-on-the-spot in Sosua, working to implement their plan. Rosen found Trujillo eager to take in the 100,000 refugees immediately, but Rosen understood that the project would have to proceed in a more dehberate fashion. After working through a series of negotiations, Rosenberg and Rosen both noted how at each meeting the theme of whiteness recurred. Rosenberg was deeply aware of the irony of working to save European Jews from racism, only to be playing into Trujillo’s propaganda blitz that the Dominican Republic was to be a white nation, unlike its neighbor, “black” Haiti. On January 30, 1940, the contract was signed in a ceremony. A U.S. State Department official, Robert T. Pell, hailed it as “the first scientific attempt to bring order out of the existing chaos of uprooted populations” (p. 47).
Chapter three explores the arrival of the refugees in the Dominican Republic, with the first “pioneers” arriving in March 1940. Here Kaplan traces the difficul ties that mostly urban central Europeans had to surmount: they were accustomed to basic amenities, but now found themselves in a situation in which they were expected to live as farmers, planting crops, milking cows, and building their own homes. In addition to the agricultural challenges, there were the language and climate adjustments. There were also the interpersonal problems that accompanied an uprooted, traumatized people forced to work and live together in an enterprise in which not one of them could claim to be an expert. Ulti mately, however, Sosua was endorsed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt as “a significant step toward the solution of the world refugee problem” (p. 78)…
Today, the Jewish presence in Sosua has all but vanished, but the Dominican Republic saved many lives “and would have saved more had the war and the U.S. government not stopped them” (p. 173)…
Haim Avni from Hebrew University writes in the May 2009 edition of the Hispanic American Historical Review:
[Tropical Zion: General Trujillo, FDR, and the Jews of Sosúa by Allen Wells] analyzes in detail the U.S. State Department’s change of attitudes regarding the immigration of refugees into the western hemisphere, and particularly to the Dominican Republic. The suspicion that German spies had infiltrated the refugees brought about the prohibition against selecting candidates for Sosúa from among those who needed it most — the persecuted Jews in the Third Reich and in the occupied countries. Selection was thus limited to refugees who had found asylum in Switzerland, in Italy (until June 1940 when it entered the war), and in Great Britain. Only a few candidates were selected in France during or soon after the debacle.
Sandra McGee Deutch fro the University of Texas at El Paso writes in the Spring 2009 edition of Latin American Politics and Society:
The U.S. government was largely responsible for impeding Jewish immigration to the Dominican Republic. While it had initially favored the project as a means of rescuing Jews while keeping them outside the United States, the Roosevelt administration quickly turned against the effort. The pretext was the belief that Nazi spies had infiltrated the refugees; instead of seeing Jews as victims of Nazism, the government regarded them as its allies. Mixed with anti-Semitism, these fears led the State Department to delay and deny transit visas and pressure the Dominicans into offering fewer visas. Despite the hysteria, no “fifth columnists” were found in Sosúa. The Jews’ relations with General Rafael Trujillo (1930-61) were rife with irony and contradiction. The dictator had many reasons to support Jewish immigration: to deflect attention from the slaughter of thousands of Haitians, to erect barriers against Haitian immigration by populating the western section of the country, and to whiten the nation, among others. Jews may not have been white enough for the United States or Aryan enough for Germany, but Trujillo judged them racially suitable. Wells explains how the Jewish presence also helped mollify the effects of the Haitian massacre in another respect. Ironically, the Dominican government indemnified Haiti using proceeds from a fee it charged incoming Jews until 1940. It preferred Jewish male immigrants to female, so that the former would intermarry with locals and whiten the country. At the same time, however, the authorities tended to isolate Sosúa.
Dominican officials may have underlined their racist motives in order to appeal to U.S. prejudices. Indeed, Wells emphasizes that the U.S. government and Jewish colonization personnel were complicit in racism. All shared eugenic and scientific racist notions; Rosenberg, Rosen, and other Jews thought that agricultural labors would revive the “Jewish race,” weakened by generations of urban life. Training by U.S. Marines had strengthened Trujillo’s racism, and U.S. government “experts” assisted his regime in drafting a new immigration code that promoted white settlement. Trujillo was not free of anti-Semitism. His identification of Jews with financial acumen lurked beneath his favoritism. Perhaps for this reason, Trujillo did not consider it necessary to give Sosúa the funding he extended to other foreign agriculturalists. Indeed, it is unlikely that he would have accepted Jewish immigration without external funding, eager as he was to avoid Jewish charges in the cities. Enlisting Rosen- berg as his lobbyist in the United States, he attributed more influence to Jews than they possessed. He also appeared reluctant to accept Jews as full-fledged Dominicans.
Allen Wells wrote the 2009 book, Tropical Zion: General Trujillo, FDR, and the Jews of Sosúa:
* “There is definitely an unfriendly attitude toward the settlement project in certain high Government quarters, based on the fear that German immigrants will be traitors. I am not giving you this as gossip, but as reliable, firsthand information. There is the same fear from Dominican army circles that German spies will be let in. The basis for all these fears is that people have been brought in directly from Germany. It seems pathetic to think that the poor oppressed Jews of Germany should now be looked upon with
suspicion.” (James Rosenberg to James Rosen)* to bring a refugee to Sosúa, Reyher had to obtain a Dominican visa and a U.S. transit visa, and that required the interventions of two Dominican ministries, their U.S. counterparts at State and Justice (and later an interdepartmental review board), and supporting documentation from the IGC (Wagg), DORSA (Reyher), and in some cases, the PACPr (George Warren). Then it was a question of waiting—and the wait could seem like an eternity for those concerned—for berths on a ship willing to risk the perilous
trip across the Atlantic.* By the end of 1941, Sosúa was equal parts agricultural colony and refugee camp, and it stayed that way until after the war—a combustible combination that had a pernicious effect on morale.
* That the overworked staff had to spend so much time and effort getting these nonsettlers out of Europe, which diverted them from the principal goal of getting the colony up and running, may have irritated DORSA officials, but it infuriated Dominican authorities. The last thing officials wanted were transients with no interest in farming who viewed their island as nothing more than a stepping stone to the United States. More than any other factor, having to accept a sizable number of nonsettlers soured Trujillo on Sosúa.
* Many factors impinged on settling the colony: the vicissitudes of Atlantic shipping during wartime, State Department fears of Nazi infiltration into the Americas, and Washington’s subsequent refusal to take any Jewish refugees from German-occupied territory, this last because of the widely shared perception that settlers with family back in Europe made tempting marks for Nazi blackmail. There was the cumbersome requirement that each applicant first had to be checked in Washington and then in Ciudad Trujillo, and the Dominican government’s outspoken frustration with the slow pace of building the settlement and the type of immigrants brought to the country. Taken together, these factors placed the colony in jeopardy from the outset.
Also slowing efforts to bring in settlers were the unanticipated high cost of extracting refugees from Europe and DORSA’s burgeoning financial problems. Rosenberg’s mantra to Rosen during the first eighteen months was twofold: “go slow” to keep within an eviscerating budget and be careful whom you accept, lest the wrong kind of immigrants enter the colony and DORSA’s skittish sponsors withdraw their support altogether. It soon became obvious that the original projection of one hundred thousand refugees would never come to
pass.…Trujillo hand over his nation’s sovereign right to admit immigrants to a New York–based colonization association and the U.S. State Department.
* Therefore only a handful of the refugees had any experience whatsoever as farmers. Desperate to leave Europe, they often told DORSA agents what they thought they wanted to hear—that they were willing to make the necessary sacrifices to adapt to a new way of life.
* DORSA’s decision to accede to the Dominican government’s request and give priority to young, unmarried males failed to bring about the desired unions. What it did foster was serious morale problems. Only nine male settlers married Dominicans in the first six years (and only seven of those stayed on), creating a large pool of eligible, potentially mobile bachelors who, in general, were less committed to the enterprise. Many young males saw little future on the farm, gravitated to the El Batey refugee camp, and became some
of the first Amerika-Fahrers (America Leavers) after 1945. Sosúa never fulfilled Trujillo’s “racial” aspirations.* Although Hitler did not close the door entirely to Jewish emigration until mid-October 1941, the successive Nazi military triumphs and Washington’s refusal to take in refugees from the occupied territories meant that DORSA remained a beggar.
* The swift capitulation of Western Europe was attributed partly to a well-planned infiltration by a cadre of Nazi agents, disguised as professors, journalists, diplomats, tourists, and refugees, in the months before the invasion. New York Times reporter Otto D. Tolischus commented on the myriad ways the fifth column stalked its prey: “They take
charge of previously organized resident armies, which, often in disguise or in the uniforms of the enemy’s own forces, seize strategic points, reinforce parachute troops, organize espionage and sabotage behind the enemy’s lines and throw confusion into the enemy army and population through false orders and reports.”15 Sensationalistic media reports that purportedly documented how German-born residents dressed in inconspicuous disguises, ambushed Dutch troops, or assisted German parachutists had a profound effect on international public opinion.* Rosen expected the settlers to perform three-quarters of the manual labor at the colony. He did not want the settlement to mirror the paternalistic landlord-peasant relations found throughout Latin America.
* Many pioneers were reluctant to learn Spanish even though the administration strongly encouraged it.
* Even a veneer of friendship and acceptance, however, could not conceal the enormous cultural divide between rural Dominicans and the Central European transplants. The settlers all too often looked at their neighbors condescendingly through the blinders of “civilization” and “barbarism.” Words like primitive and backward crop up frequently in memoirs and interviews. …the Dominicans thought highly of them. The settlers themselves, by contrast, thought of their neighbors as less educated and less worldly than they.
* A perfect case in point was the marriage of Luis Hess, who became the first settler to wed a Dominican woman. Even though one of the experiment’s stated objectives was miscegenation, an administrator was upset to learn of Hess’s engagement. He admonished Hess for setting a bad precedent and tried to dissuade him from marrying. Didn’t Hess realize that Luis and Ana Julia’s offspring would have dark skin and nappy hair? Despite the upbraiding, the couple soon wed, and she was warmly accepted by fellow settlers, according to Hess. Ana Julia quickly learned to speak German by working alongside other settler seamstresses and later converted to Judaism.
* He was not alone in insisting that manual labor was not in his enlightened self-interest. It did not take long, according to Luis Hess, for some city slickers to develop an aversion to hard work. Judith Kibel, a musician with classical training in Vienna, was appalled that she had to scrub pots and wash dishes in the community kitchen in El Batey. Hess joked that colonists quickly acquired enough rudimentary Spanish to learn the expression mucho trabajo, poco dinero (much work, little money), as the
romance surrounding this new experiment quickly gave way to the reality of toiling beneath an unrelenting tropical sun.* Some settlers apparently had no compunction about asking DORSA to lighten their load by hiring field laborers at the association’s expense. …some colonists were arrogant, and believed los muchachos, as they referred to them, inferior. A distraught Mrs. Solomon Arons wrote Rosenberg, “There is one important and very sad thing, the racial problem. . . . Our settlers do not behave very civilly to the working population. They consider themselves a higher race. They consider the natives peons.
* Brookings Institution report: “Here is a rising tide of color that must inevitably engulf but the most carefully prepared and protected white settlement. In many of the communities ‘negroidation’ of the whites is complete, and, with but few exceptions, miscegenation and absorption is gradually coloring such white groups as still remain in the Caribbean area.”
* When Dominican authorities read the published report, they were livid. One of Trujillo’s motivations had been to whiten the population, not segregate it. Even more disturbing was the report’s contention that the Dominican Republic did not have the natural endowments and human resources to serve as a site for large-scale colonization. That contradicted more than a decade of government propaganda that had sold the island as an optimal destination for European immigration.
* the Zionist press had a field day with the Brookings study. Congress Weekly wrote Sosúa’s epitaph in a piece titled “Failure of the Dominican Scheme.”50 The noted refugee expert Arieh Tartakower wrote an opinion essay dripping with sarcasm. Calling the colonization scheme “the end of another illusion,” Tartakower had the nerve to accuse the Joint and dorsa of taking advantage of Hitler’s tyranny to further their own agenda: “Hitler’s catastrophe strengthened the wave of territorialistic plans among the Jews . . . for San Domingo is not the last territorialistic plan and not the last territorialistic failure. . . . The sooner we succeed in convincing all Jews and all other people of good will that there is only one manner in which to solve the Jewish problem [a homeland in Palestine] . . . and not squander money and energy elsewhere, the better it will be for ourselves and others.”
* the State Department was digging in its heels over the visa issue. Reading between the lines, Falk believed that dorsa should, for the foreseeable future, expect to make do
with what it had: “The present feeling [in Washington] is that the picture will be frozen as it stands at this moment, that is, no more American visas; also no more Dominican visas; refugees in other Western Hemisphere countries to remain where they are for the duration of the war and no more to come over.”* What is different about this latest phase of Sosúa’s development is the extent of sex tourism. Its consumption, and the growing commodification between Afro-Dominicans and Afro-Haitians and white foreigners has brought Sosúa unwelcome notoriety and has spawned a host of related ills. To be sure, prostitution, which is legal in the Dominican Republic, was a concern to residents well before the recent spike in tourism, but the explosion of the sex trade during the 1980s and 1990s was unlike anything residents had witnessed before.
It has fueled an “anything goes,” violent environment, which has attracted criminal elements who traffic in drugs and stolen or laundered money. Safety and security have been sex tourism’s most notable casualties. Sosúa has become synonymous with AIDS and HIV transmission as the number of tourists and Dominican nationals engaging in unsafe sex has proliferated. “Sex workers” who flock to tourist bars and nightclubs in the evenings, Brennan reports, have come to “embody Sosúa’s transformation . . .
into a dangerous, decadent hybrid space.”
Emily Codik writes in the Washington Post Oct. 17, 2017 about Sousa:
The night before Kristallnacht — the infamous date in November 1938 when synagogues burned across Germany and the Nazis arrested tens of thousands of Jews — my father’s family escaped from Berlin and fled to one of the few places in the world willing to take in Jewish refugees. They settled in Sosua, a remote beach town on the northern coast of the Dominican Republic, whose dictator, Rafael Trujillo, had offered Jews safety for a promise to develop the land.
This is the story I heard countless times. “It was paradise,” my 89-year-old Aunt Hella would say, weaving my family’s heritage into a little-known part of Holocaust history.
…tourists can find any type of sex they might want: straight, gay, sex with trans people — even illegal sex with minors.
Prostitution has long been a part of Dominican culture, but nowhere does it feel more entrenched than in Sosua. Elsewhere, the industry exists in the grays of life, largely unregulated, widely known but rarely seen.The sex trade took off there in the 1980s and ’90s, after a nearby airport opened and foreign tourists flooded the town. Over the next few decades, the hotel industry boomed, and Dominican women, facing insecure and low-paying job prospects, headed for Sosua hoping to find more profitable work. As prostitution increased, it drew more tourists looking for sex, and the town got a reputation as a major sex-tourism destination. Today, a short walk from the beach, on the main drag of Calle Pedro Clisante, dozens of prostitutes line the sidewalk in front of the busy open-air restaurants and bars filled with foreign men.
Many longtime locals, like Ivonne, are upset that prostitution has consumed Sosua’s reputation. Efforts to discourage the trade have failed, and its prevalence means that the town’s businesses — hotels, restaurants, cafes — benefit from it, whether the owners condone sex work or not…
Then he made a reference to a best-selling book I had never read, about a fictional small town where sex, gossip and scandal hide behind the pretense of paradise.
“Sosua,” he said, “was a small Peyton Place.”
I didn’t understand. What did a racy novel have to do with my family’s past?
… I saw a narrow light-blue box labeled “exit interviews.” Ivonne, who helps run the museum, had never seen it before, and from the looks of what was inside, nobody had seen it for years. I pulled it onto the table. Inside were several testimonials from refugees, all men, who had abandoned Sosua and were apparently questioned by the settlement association about why they’d left.
“I could not stay [sic] the sun,” said a 29-year-old Austrian.
“I had nothing to do there,” said a 27-year-old Romanian.
“The agricultural work was too hard for me,” said a 34-year-old Pole…
Then there were two others, Tibor Meister, a 24-year-old Hungarian textile technician, and Louis Lajos Klein, a 28-year-old Czech mechanic, who cited not the town’s conditions, but tensions in Sosua that left them both feeling panicked.
Meister said he was threatened by a group of German Jews in the dormitory.
“I have been attacked by some twelve men while sleeping in my bed,” Klein said. “That is why I preferred to leave Sosua of fear they might repeat it or kill me.”
…With proper planning and management, these middle-class, white-collar Europeans could have built the new life they had been promised. Instead, the early settlers had felt “dispirited and pessimistic” from the start.
“They came to Sosua unprepared, unexperienced, unselected,” the document said. “It is not sufficient to benevolently take these people away from their past sufferings and only deposit them in an undeveloped area.”
A parade of experts, Bandler wrote, had made plans for Sosua, advising the refugees to plant bananas, raise livestock or grow tomatoes; that last effort resulted in such a failure that a large surplus of tomatoes spoiled and was thrown into the sea.
The land they had been instructed to develop turned out to be better suited for pasture than farming, and the Jews ended up finding success in a dairy and meat operation that — ironically — sold pork.
But the administration’s unkept promises and poor directions bred resentment, Bandler wrote, until antagonism toward it became the main bond among the settlers…
Documents hidden away in the archives revealed tensions I had never heard about, between Austrians and Germans, between those who lived in town and those on farms, and those who wanted to improve the community and those who wanted to abandon it and immigrate to the United States.
It wasn’t unusual for the Jews to fight among themselves. People screamed at each other at community meetings. Divisions emerged over who would be the boss and how to address the town’s problems.
On a warm night, while one refugee listened to a German radio broadcast, another became enraged by the propaganda, according to a manuscript written by a former resident, Ernest B. Hofeller. “He entered his room, ripped the radio out of its socket causing a short circuit and smashed it,” Hofeller wrote.
One main reason Sosua fell apart, several refugees said in interviews, was simple. It wasn’t only the backbreaking agricultural work, the infighting, the culture shock or the desire to find a better life in the States.
“There were very, very few girls,” refugee Ruth Kohn, 90, now living in Springfield, Va., told me. Single men had trouble finding marriageable partners in Sosua, giving them even less reason to stay. In 1942, according to the JDC, among a population of 472 were 158 single men and 38 single women.
The settlement association had looked for young men with an agricultural background who could develop the land, and women were less likely to leave Europe on their own. Trujillo also sought out men, hoping that the wave of immigrants from Europe would intermarry with Dominicans and “whiten” his nation’s people.
Settlers had to ask the administration for permission any time they wanted to leave Sosua, and the nearest major town was hours away by horseback or about an hour by car, making romance between Dominicans and Jews difficult. These conditions helped spawn cases of adultery in the small community, constantly witnessed and whispered about.
“You never knew in the morning when you woke up which young man had slept with a married woman,” Kohn said.
But it wasn’t only single men sleeping with married women. The settlers gossiped about both husbands and wives engaging in affairs, Joe Benjamin told me, and the Columbia University analysis mentioned a “sexual turpitude” that had resulted in cases of syphilis.
It made me think of a short passage in “Dominican Haven: The Jewish Refugee Settlement in Sosua,” one of the few books published about the town, that now made a lot more sense. In the 255-page book, a few paragraphs, easily overlooked, mentioned these dalliances: In 1942, doctors “warned men to stay away from bordellos and unknown women and, assuming their advice would be ignored, to use condoms.”
The bordellos in question were in Charamicos, a poor neighborhood on the south end of the beach. The refugees had populated El Batey on the north end, and those looking for sex would discreetly venture south. Today’s sex industry is completely different, employing women from across the Dominican Republic and Haiti, who take spins around town and on the beach looking for clients.
“Everything is just much more visible,” said Denise Brennan, a Georgetown University professor who wrote the book “What’s Love Got to Do With It?” about Sosua’s sex industry.
Still, it was the Jews — not the tourists blamed for Sosua’s demise — who first visited prostitutes. But that part of the story had been conveniently lost in the retelling.
…I asked [Aunt Hella] about the affairs.
“Yes, people would trade partners,” she said. “That was a mess.”
Why don’t people talk about those things? I told her that I’d gone to Sosua to find out what had happened. I left thinking that idealism has always been a part of the town, woven even into the stories we tell…
My Aunt Hella told me about one of the last times she visited, with her brother-in-law, Vittorio, more than a decade ago. She stood in the middle of the town, stunned at how things had changed, and turned to her brother-in-law.
“Let’s forget about this,” she said.
This story was supported by a grant from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.
In her 2004 book What’s Love Got to Do with It?: Transnational Desires and Sex Tourism in the Dominican Republic, Georgetown anthropologist Denise Brennan wrote:
* Dominican sex workers often dismiss foreign men’s imperfections and instead describe them in idealized terms – versions of the type of men they always wanted to marry. This romanticized construct contrasts with the women’s described perceptions and failings of Dominican men, particularly their drinking and womanizing.
* A safe haven for European Jews fleeing Nazi persecution in 1941, it is now a refuge for criminals on the run from authorities in their own countries. For foreigners seeking a more privileged lifestyle and tranquility Sosua is a place to retire. And for those valuing anonymity, it is a place to launder stolen or illicit money.
* Sexscapes link the practices of sex work to the forces of a globalized economy. Their defining characteristics are (i) international travel from the developed to the developing world, (2) consumption of paid sex, and (3) inequality. In a sexscape such as Sosua there are differences in power between the buyers (sex tourists) and the sellers (sex workers) that can be based on race, gender, class, and nationality. These differences become eroticized and commodified inequalities.
* Within sexscapes, the sex trade becomes a focal point of a place, and the social and economic relations of that place are filtered through the nightly (and daily) selling of sex to foreigners. In contrast, the sex trade in red – light districts in the developed world – such as in Frankfurt, Rome, or New York – by no means defines social and economic life outside of these districts.
* Dominican migrants imagine that once in Sosua “anything could happen,” and it has the reputation of being a town in which Dominicans can get rich quick.
* The few instances in which sex workers migrate to Europe as the girlfriends or wives of European tourists propel the fantasy for others that “anything could happen,” even though these few cases of actual migration that were known to the women I interviewed ended in eventual return and downward mobility.
* Whether these encounters between foreign tourists and Dominicans emphasize the “exotic” (First World tourists’ seeking to observe, interact with, and take photographs of the “authentic Other”) or the “erotic” (First World tourists’ seeking to have sexual relations with the dark – skinned “authentic Other”), international tourists often “seek in the margins of the Third World a figment of their imagination” (Bruner 1996: 157). But in Sosua, Dominicans too have “imaginings” about Sosua’s opportunities, the tourists, their money, and the tourists’ lifestyles back home in Europe. Consequently, the fantasies are often two way. In this economy of desire based on difference, Dominican sex workers and foreign sex tourists forge new practices and meanings of “love” that grow out of the tourist and sex – tourist trades. Sosuans (both sex and other workers) and, increasingly, foreign sex tourists and tourists, understand that many relationships that begin in Sosua are strategic performances by Dominican citizens for visas.
* Sosua’s sex trade also stands apart from many other sex – tourist destinations in the developing world because it does not involve pimps or the coercion of women into selling sex, and therefore it allows sex workers a good deal of control over their working conditions.
* Dominican women are not trafficked into Sosua’s trade but usually are drawn to it through female social networks of family and friends who work or have worked in it.
* In Sosua’s bar scene, European sex tourists might see Dominican sex workers as exotic and erotic and pick out one woman over another in the crowd, as a commodity for their pleasure and control, but Dominican sex workers often see the men, too, as readily exploitable. The men all are potential dupes, essentially walking visas, who can help the women leave the island – and poverty.
* Despite sex workers’ strategizing, a recurring story seems to unfold: most sex workers in Sosua end up just getting by, rather than improving their own or their children’s futures.
* At the same time that Sosuan sex workers try to get men to fall in love with them, they also must deliver the expected and agreed upon “sexual goods.”
* the sex tourist to Bangkok as the “quintessential postmodern man” who “avoid[s] fixation and keep[s] the options open” (Thorbek 2002a: 38) as he seeks sexual encounters without emotional involvement and desires “something different without commitment but still safe.”
* I contend that part of Sosua’s appeal to sex tourists lies in the overall experience Sosua provides as the backdrop for their sexual transactions. European consumers of paid sex have an array of choices in Europe (what Elizabeth Bernstein refers to as “the fungibility of choices”) – including Afro – Caribbean women – and the prices are often just as low there as they are in some sexscapes in the developing world (Bernstein 2002). Consequently, sex tourists’ experience in the environment in which they are buying sex is significant. Just as important as cheap prices for sex in Sosua is the experience that everything is cheaper than at home; thus foreigners, able to afford nearly anything they desire, can enjoy “feeling rich.” Even though they might find sex workers in their home towns (or other European cities) who charge cheap prices for sex, there will be other sex workers whose services they could not afford. And, of course, an array of goods and services always will be out of reach for them in Europe, reminding them that they cannot get away from the spending limits of their real social and economic selves. Sex tourists in Sosua, on the other hand, can play at being “big men.” Their relatively low social and economic status back in their home countries is inverted; their money goes farther, they have much more of it compared to most Dominicans in town, and they are sexually and romantically pursued by multiple young, beautiful Dominican women. Sex is but one more commodity they can purchase – even “in bulk,” since they can afford to have sex with several different women on each day of their vacation.
* Return tourists can enjoy the smallness and familiarity of Sosua. Over the years, these returnees get to know the owner – operators of the small hotels, lunch shacks, restaurants, bars, and nightclubs they frequent. Similarly, the male strip club regulars who Katherine Frank interviewed in the United States often referred to the television show Cheers in describing the atmosphere of their favorite clubs, where they were known by the dancers, bartenders, and waitresses.
* Since Sosuan sex workers do not see marriage to foreign men as ending other romantic and sexual relationships, they know they still can share love and engage in sex they enjoy with other partners.
* Dominican women – and Sosua – have become associated in Europe (particularly in Germany) with sexual availability and proficiency, these associations are not as well known in other countries. Nor is the Dominican Republic’s reputation as a sex hot spot as widespread as that of other sexscapes, such as Thailand.
* Sex tourists’ fantasies about particular women in a particular place often arise out of associations between nationality and race which are rooted in colonial racist discourses, and, more recently, are fueled by media depictions and Internet discussions and photos.
* Ann Stoler lists the racist dichotomies that ran through colonial discourses in Southeast Asia: “Native instinct and white self – discipline; native lust and white civility; native sensuality and white morality.”
* It is one thing to have an Afro – Dominican girlfriend on vacation but another entirely to bring her home to meet family, friends, neighbors, and coworkers.
* light – skinned migrant sex workers from Columbia and the Dominican Republic work under better conditions for higher pay than darker – skinned AfroCaribbean women.
* Few of the Afro – Dominican women I interviewed in Sosua’s sex trade identified themselves as negra (black).
* Sosua’s sex workers – who range in skin color – privilege their Spanish ancestry over their African ancestry as well as a mythic Indian past by describing themselves using a variety of terms, such as morena, india, or india clara. Commenting on how Dominicans downplay their African descent, Silvio Torres – Saillant notes that since “blacks and mulattos make up nearly 90 percent of the contemporary Dominican population,” some “would contend, in effect, that Dominicans have, for the most part, denied their blackness.”
* the Dominican elite “emphasized strong European heredity and `purity of blood”‘ (2001: 8). The “mulato” dictator Rafael Trujillo, who ruled the Dominican Republic from 1930 to 1961, went to great lengths to cover up his African ancestry – literally by using skin – lightening creams – and by commissioning biographies that claimed his parents were “pure” French and Spanish (Howard 2001: 9). Trujillo’s hatred of Haitians is well documented and was most violently clear in the massacre he ordered in 1937 of Haitians – and Haitian – Dominicans – living within Dominican borders.51
Ernesto Sagas explains Dominican elites’ “obsession” with issues of race: “Dominican elites, faced with the inescapable fact that their country shares the island of Hispaniola with Haiti, have erected barriers of prejudice and racism to distance themselves from their poor, dark – skinned neighbors. The same elites have also found race a useful political tool in thwarting challenges to their status” (Sagas 2000: I). Thus an ideology of antihaitianismo has emerged in the Dominican Republic. It scapegoats Haitians both as an ideological method of political control directed at Haiti and Haitians, but it also marginalizes `Afro – Caribbean members of Dominican society, who tend to be poor” by “intimidating them from making demands or otherwise participating in politics” and thus maintains a “narrow status quo”.* Haitian sex workers and Dominican sex workers rarely socialize or live together. This is due in large part to the racism of Sosua’s Dominican boardinghouse owners, who generally generally refuse to rent rooms to Haitians – men or women. Haitian sex workers are thus forced either to cluster together in the one or two boardinghouses that will rent to them, or they rent their own houses, usually in neighborhoods where other Haitian migrants live. Since few speak Spanish fluently – and I never met a Dominican sex worker who spoke Creole – language barriers also keep these two groups apart. Dominican racism also plays a large role. As the Dominican Republic’s poorest inhabitants, Haitians migrate to the eastern part of the island for menial and back – breaking work, most notably in the sugarcane fields. The conditions in which Haitian sugarcane workers live eerily and tragically resemble slave quarters during colonial times.
* Germans are the largest group of travelers, sex tourists, and foreign residents in Sosua, and many – but not all – of them hold workingclass or lower middle – class status back in Germany.53 Seabrook’s description of male sex tourists in Bangkok’s sexscape as “‘rednecks,’ racists, know – nothing adventurers, out simply for fun” (Seabrook 1996: 39) could describe some sex tourists in Sosua, but by no means all. Hamilton also provides an unflattering portrait of Thailand’s “sexpatriates,” to whom she refers as “the Bangkok Old Hands,” many of whom have written novels and short stories in which they recount their experiences with Thai women. Although the “Old Hand” often writes that he “truly understands” “real life” in Thailand and that his time in Thailand has been transformative and given him an opportunity to “discover the primal pleasures which only untrammeled access to feminine sexuality” could offer him, Hamilton suggests that the other side is that “many such men are in fact `losers’ who couldn’t make it in their home environments” (Hamilton 1997: 151).
In Sosua, I met many “losers” similar to those Hamilton describes and often found it uncomfortable to interview some sex tourists, especially when they were drunk. Despite my best attempts to interview foreign men when they were sober (by hanging out, for example, in the bars and restaurants on Sosua’s beach in the morning), it was often difficult to find foreign men who were not yet drunk.* I grew fond of some of the return sex tourists whom I got to know over the years. Their kindness to their girlfriends and their children, as well as their embrace of Dominican culture, makes it impossible to dismiss all of Sosua’s sex tourists (and sex tourists turned foreign residents) as unfeeling cads.
* sex workers (and other Dominican migrants hopeful of striking it rich off the tourist economy) who come to Sosua often end up disillusioned: “They hear they can make money, and meet a gringo, so they come to Sosua. Some women enter sex work because they want it all so fast. They come with their big dreams. But then they find out it is all a lie.”
* The essence of the carnivalesque is that one cannot tell male from female, rich from poor, black from white: those differences, ordinarily so crucial, do not matter for the duration of the carnival. Everything is freer there, everything is possible. But carnivals do not last.
* Although in the 1930s the United Fruit Company owned a failing banana operation in Sosua, the first significant growth in the town’s population came at the beginning of World War II. With sanctuary offered by the Dominican dictator Rafael L. Trujillo, about 600 European refugees settled in Sosua.11 While attending an international conference on refugees in Evian – Les – Bains, France, in July 1938, Trujillo’s delegate announced that the Dominican Republic would be willing to issue ioo,ooo visas to European Jews. The Dominican Republic was one of a few countries that offered sanctuary to Jews fleeing Nazi persecution. Historians have suggested that Trujillo’s gesture was an attempt to rehabilitate his image in the international community following his orchestration of a massacre in October 1937 of an estimated 20,ooo Haitians in towns along the Haitian border (Corten and Duarte 1995; Derby 1994). The offer also reflected his interest in whitening the Dominican population.
Trujillo donated 26,ooo acres of land for the settlement (CrassWeller 1966), which he had bought from the United Fruit Company Company in 1938 for US.$50,000 (Eichen 1980). In 1939 the Dominican Republic Settlement Association (DOxsA) was founded in New York, and its representatives were sent to Europe to issue visas…Felix Koch, a radio operator from Vienna who had been a refugee in Luxembourg, described what he found when he arrived with his brother in 1941: “It was a jungle here. There was no road, electricity or running water. The only thing here was wood, so the first thing we did was to make barracks. There were 20 barracks in all, some for married couples and others for single people. This was in the beginning, and we did not know how to live there yet. Not one person was living here.” Another Jewish refugee – turned – settler, Luis Hess, came to Sosua before the other settlers to work as an interpreter employed by DORSA. He also stressed the early lack of development: “Most Europeans could not adapt to the climate and a very primitive life. It was a wilderness. And we were not used to working in fields with a machete, most of us were from cities. No one had ever farmed before.”
Yet Felix Koch emphasized that despite the “primitive” conditions, “We were very happy. We would do anything we could here. We were in a safe place, safe from persecution.” The Jewish settlers eventually built a community complete with a schoolhouse, medical facility, synagogue, and movie house. In fact, the meat and dairy cooperative they started, Productos Sosua, today is one of the country’s most successful industries and sells its products throughout the country.
* International tourism began slowly, with the docking of cruise ships off Sosua’s shore and the construction of an international airport between Sosua and Puerto Plata in the early 1980s.
* One of the first words used by residents – and many Dominicans from other parts of the island – to describe Sosua is corrupt. As a catchall term, corrupcion captures Sosuans’ unease with the locale’s rapid transformation from a small agricultural town into a tourist destination. They identify several sources of corrupcion: government corruption, the failure of political institutions (including the police), and the sex trade. In fact, the name Sosua is often used as a synonym for corrupcion because it boasts both a local police force notorious as one of the most crooked in the country and a thriving sex trade.
