Juan Emilio Bosch Gaviño was a politician, historian, short story writer, essayist, educator, and the first democratically elected president of the Dominican Republic for a brief time in 1963. Previously, he had been the leader of the Dominican opposition in exile to the dictatorial regime of Rafael Trujillo for over 25 years.
Background
Bosch was born on June 30,1909, in the small town of La Vega, which is part of the Northern Cibao region of the Dominican Republic. His father, José Bosch, was a Catalonian immigrant who went to the Dominican Republic to work as a mas¬ter mason. His mother, Angela Gaviño, was born in Puerto Rico but emigrated to La Vega with her family at an early age.
Education
A child with an inquisitive mind, Bosch later identified his music teacher as the most important early intellectual influence (Fernández Olmos 1994). He was a precocious child who wrote at a young age. His biographers have said that he delivered a speech at the grave of a town teacher before he was 9 years old; he himself acknowledged producing his first newspaper with a friend when he was 14.
Career
He moved to the capital of Santo Domingo at the age of 15 and worked in a series of sales jobs. By 1925, the mostly self-taught intellectual was actively writing and publishing poetry under the pseudonym Rigoberto de Fresni. In 1929, his family sent him to Barcelona, Spain, where he worked as a salesperson and founded an artistic variety group that he took to Venezuela. After his group failed to attract audiences in Caracas, he took a job with a traveling circus and traveled throughout the Caribbean. In 1931, he finally returned to the Dominican Republic and launched his literary career.
Throughout the 1930s, Bosch developed an active presence in Dominican literary circles. In 1929 he joined a literary group known as La Cueva (The Cave) and in 1933 he published his short story "La Mujer" (The Woman). The story, which has been translated into many languages and is considered one of his masterpieces, tells of a woman abused by her husband and describes the dynamics of oppression and gender roles. This story was initially published as part of an anthology of his short stories entitled Camino Real (Royal Trail), the first of dozens of books that he wrote during his lifetime. He also directed the literary section of Listín Diario, the leading newspaper of the Dominican Republic. Because he was raised in agricultural town, his literary work is filled with the images of the feudal relationships he was exposed to as a child.
While in Puerto Rico, Bosch quickly found a job collecting the works of Puerto Rican patriot Eugenio María de Hostos for a commission that was compiling Hostos' complete works to commemorate the 100th anniversary of his birth. At the same time, Bosch's work also appeared in Puerto Rico Ilustrado and Alma Latina, two of the most important Puerto Rican publications of the time. Eventually, he became an expert on Hostos, on whom he gave many lectures. This expertise led to the 1939 publication of Hostos, el Sembrador, his biography of the patriot. He was also one of the early organizers of the Dominican Revolutionary Party, which challenged Trujillo's regime.
Bosch moved from Puerto Rico to Cuba during the early 1940s. While he held several jobs in Cuba, his most important activity during the period was the organizational work he did on behalf of the Dominican Revolutionary Party. He traveled throughout Latin America raising awareness about his country's political situation. Clashes with the Batista regime in Cuba, favorable to Trujillo, and his participation in an armed insurrection to bring down Trujillo eventually forced Bosch to move first to Venezuela, then Costa Rica in 1950. He spent most of the 1950s traveling through Latin America.
In 1961, after Trujillo's assassination and after 24 years of political exile Bosch returned to the Dominican Republic. In 1962 he became the first democratically elected president of the Dominican Republic on behalf of the Dominican Revolutionary Party. His government platform, opposed strongly by Jesuit segments of the Roman Catholic Church in Santo Domingo, proposed agrarian reforms, human rights, and civil liberties. For a nation that had been under the yoke of the Trujillo tyranny for so many decades, Bosch's government was perceived as too leftist and he was accused of being a communist (Gran enciclopedia Dominicana 1997). On September 25, 1963, just seven months after his inauguration, he was deposed in a military coup partially sponsored by the U.S. government.
After Iris ouster he was forced once again to seek political asylum in Puerto Rico. His removal threw the Dominican Republic into chaos because some factions wanted Bosch to be reinstated as president while other groups preferred new elections. The U.S. Army intervened to restore order and Bosch returned to the island in 1965, only to see Joaquin Balaguer elected as president in 1966. After Balaguer was elected, Bosch left the Dominican Republic for Europe, where he lived for many years.
Achievements
Politics
His early political involvement and criticisms of the Trujillo regime led to a brief arrest and imprisonment in 1934. Facing an unwanted government appointment as part of the dictatorship of Rafael Leonidas Trujillo, Bosch decided to leave the country and seek refuge in Puerto Rico. Two years later, in 1936, he published his first novel, La Mañosa (The Tricky Woman), considered a classic of Dominican literature.
Membership
In 1974 he organized the Dominican Libera¬tion Party and ran for the presidency several more times but was always defeated.
Interests
Throughout the years, Bosch remained a prolific writer of short stories, poetry, biography, and novels. He worked with the themes of liberty, freedom, economic underdevelopment, exploitation, domination, and dependence. The collapse of his political career, however, forced a shift in his literary production, and he started publishing social and political expository works that occupied the remainder of his literary life. He stated that although he had fiction in his heart, these later genres were better suited to express his political ideologies (Fernández Olmos 1992). Bosch continued publishing, traveling, and lecturing throughout the world during the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s.
Connections
Bosch married for the second time, this time a Cuban lady, Carmen Quidiello, with whom he had two more children, Patricio and Barbara. At the same time, his literary career was ascending, gaining important acknowledgments like the Hernandez Catá Prize in Havana for short stories written by a Latin American author. His works had a deep social content, among them "La Noche Buena de Encarnación Mendoza", "Luis Pié", "The Masters" and "The Indian Manuel Sicuri", all of them described by critics as masterpieces of the sort.