removal of the Cuban sugar quota and its redistribution to other foreign
nations--the so-called Cuban windfall--provided the United States with an
enticing economic opportunity to manipulate Dominican policy.

Between 1958 and 1962, the United States played an instrumental role in the
transition from authoritarian dictatorship to democracy in the Dominican
Republic. ⁴ Since sugar was the basis of the Dominican political economy, the
principal vehicle of persuasion used by the United States to push the Dominican
Republic along the path toward democracy was the promise of a generous
preferential sugar quota. The Dominican government, however, also manipulated
the United States. Dominican policy makers used the threat of international
communism, especially after Fidel Castro's success in Cuba, to increase the US
sugar quota, ostensibly to provide the economic resources that would help forestall
communist infiltration. In reality, the funds were used by Dominican elites for
their own self-serving purposes.

Four events, all of which revolved around the Dominican sugar industry, made
1961 a pivotal year in US-Dominican foreign relations: (1) President Kennedy
canceled General Trujillo's participation in the Cuban windfall quota; (2) Trujillo
was assassinated and his twelve sugar mills became state property; (3) Dominican
President Joaquín Balaguer, in return for the promise of a generous preferential
sugar quota, began moving his nation along the road to democracy; and (4) plans
were made to lift US economic and political sanctions against the Dominican
Republic and enlarge the Dominican sugar quota. In 1961, John D. Barfield, the
US Consul in Ciudad Trujillo, stated: "The most significant period in the history
of the Dominican Republic vis-à-vis the United States may well be the period 1958
to the present and there is every reason to believe the near future will be even more
pregnant with significance for US policy objectives." ⁵

The extremely fluid Dominican political situation from Trujillo's assassination
on 30 May 1961 to the establishment of a Consejo de Estado (Council of State) in
January 1962 allowed the sugar quota to be a very effective political tool. The US
offer to expand the sugar quota became an increasingly useful incentive to
Dominican political change, and likewise the withholding of the sugar quota
became a conceivable US deterrent to political digression in the Dominican
Republic. ⁶ On the other hand, however, Dominican threats that the failure to
obtain a generous preferential sugar quota inhibited the Dominican government's
efforts to thwart possible communist menaces that might arise at home invariably
conditioned US initiatives and responses.

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