Juan Bosch

Juan Bosch is the only Dominican author who deserves membership in the pantheon of great, contemporary Latin American writers. And his fame has yet to wane.

With Camino Real (1933), his maiden anthology of narratives, Juan Bosch, born June 30, 1909 in the Dominican Republic, earned the reputation of a master of the narrative as a literary genre. In the first years of the Trujillo dictatorship, he and other writers founded the literary group 'La Cueva'. In 1938 he was forced into a 24-year exile, 19 years of which he spent in Cuba, where in 1939 he founded the 'Partido Revolucionario Dominicano' (PRD).

A critical juncture in his literary career came with the publication of another narrative, Water for Two Pesos -- an astute interplay between magic and reality-- which propelled him to the rank of the pioneers of magical realism. In 1943 he received Cuba's Hernández-Catá prize for literature in recognition of Luis Pie, a narrative about the working and living conditions of Haitian sugar-cane farm laborers in the Dominican Republic.

In 1961 he decided to return to Santo Domingo. In order to concentrate on his political aspirations, he decided to give up writing altogether; indeed, a year after Trujillo's assassination, Bosch and his PRD won a landslide victory during the December 1962 elections. However, his tenure in office was short-lived. By September 1963 he had been ousted for his presumed communist tendencies.

Bosch returned into exile - this time to Puerto Rico. In April 1965, an attempted putsch in the Dominican Republic led to a rift within the military establishment: some elements of the armed services aligned themselves with the general populace by demanding the proscription of the anti-Bosch military junta, and the reinstatement of the erstwhile Bosch presidency.

During the ensuing civil war the US intervened by sending military personnel whose express purpose was to put former vice-president Dr. Joaquín Balaguer into power.

In 1970 Bosch returned home from exile. During the subsequent elections he showed a penchant for extra-legal resistance to parliament through the use of boycotts. In 1973 he broke ranks with his party, the PRD, and formed the 'Partido de Liberácion Dominicana (PLD). Neither the PLD nor the PRD participated in the elections of 1974; consequently Balaguer, by default, would earn another term in office. Increasingly, Bosch would find himself unable to fend off his political adversaries.

Incidentally, his resolve to give up writing for politics was not an absolute one. During his years in exile, he wrote the novel El Oro y la Paz in 1964, and the narrative El Culpable in 1979. Literary critics have judged his collection of short stories entitled Cuentos escritos en el exilo as a masterpiece.