Two in Trouble

Christopher Columbus was delighted with his discovery, and wrote of the mountainous green Caribbean island he called La Isla Espanola: "So lovable, so tractable, so peaceable are these people. They love their neighbors as themselves, and their discourse is ever sweet and gentle, and accompanied by a smile.''

Last week, on the ancient island of Hispaniola, the Dominican Republic at one end was still trying to recover from Trujillo, and went through two seizures of power in 48 hours. At the other end, in Haiti, the U.S. is trying to moderate one of the toughest dictatorships in Latin America.

Neither end of the island has known much peace. Within 30 years after Columbus landed, the native Indians were wiped out by Iberian diseases and the abuses of slavery. The Spaniards imported African slaves and raised sugar cane--thus drawing the covetous attention of France, which in 1665 took over the western end of the island. In 1791 the slaves rose up and began the 13-year slaughter of whites and mulattoes that brought Toussaint L'Ouverture to power and established a Haitian tradition of brutal tyranny. The Dominicans got their independence from the Spanish in 1844.

During the past century, for all their racial differences, Negro Haiti and the Latinized Dominican Republic have remained poor, tyrannized and combative.

Democracy has never been one of Hispaniola's imports. Its local roots are only beginning to grow at the Dominican end of the island, not at all in Haiti.

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