Caribbean at war. The battle for the Caribbean began on the night of 16 February 1942 with the torpedoing of five shallow draught tankers (see also
landing craft) bringing oil from Lake Maracaibo in Venezuela to the large Royal Dutch refinery on Aruba Island. The refinery itself was also shelled in a most visible challenge to American and British control of the Caribbean basin. By the time the
North African campaign landings relieved the pressure on the area in November 1942, 270 ships had been lost and for several months supplies of vital
raw materials such as bauxite from Dutch Guiana and oil from Venezuela were disrupted. Yet, as the submarines pulled back to North Atlantic waters, effective counter-measures were at last in place, including
convoys and co-ordinated air-sea operations. The development of US air bases in Puerto Rico, Cuba, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic in 1941, and especially of the UK's base sites in Jamaica, Antigua, St Lucia, Trinidad, and British Guiana (resulting from the September, 1940
destroyers-for-bases agreement), provided an effective shield and the Caribbean became unsafe for U-boats.
It was the building of these bases, and the large labour force of locals that was needed, that involved the USA even more intimately than before in the daily life of the basin as a whole. For example, strikes in the British West Indies were tied in to pressures to achieve home rule, although US Army officers were quick to blame German agitators as the cause. The circulation of labour among the islands and outside was also highlighted by the war. Both Cuba and the Dominican Republic resented the presence of Haitian cane cutters, while Panama refused to accept more black Jamaicans for work on the canal and new air bases, settling for Salvadorans and Colombians, instead—both would become large senders of labour in the future—and Puerto Rico's mainland links were reinforced. The Caribbean was coming into its own as a labour-exporting region.
Wartime stability and prosperity, under strong men like Cuba's Fulgencio Batista and the Dominican Republic's Raphael Trujillo Molina and Haiti's mulatto oligarchy, were bolstered by commodity purchasing agreements. With the fall of
France, the UK and USA were their only export markets. Starting in 1942, for example, Cuba's entire sugar crop was purchased by the USA. In Puerto Rico, the rise of Luis Marín and his Partido Popular Democrático, in tandem with Governor Rexford Tugwell, the New Dealer, marked a shift from colonial rule towards commonwealth status which was achieved in 1948, and an emphasis on economic development.
For their part, both powers depended heavily on oil and bauxite shipments from the region and were careful not to arouse the long-standing territorial interests of other nations. Thus British troops guarding Dutch Aruba and Curaçao, and parts of Dutch Guiana, were replaced by US forces in February 1942 though Venezuela had offered to send its forces. Brazil's offer to garrison Dutch Guiana resulted in the sending of a military mission, which the USA encouraged, though it decided to send its own troops there instead. The
Vichy regime in the French West Indies (Martinique, Guadeloupe, and French Guiana) was replaced in mid-1943 but without the aid of Latin American troops. The potential espionage threat of private German airlines, which had networks of local businessmen and landing rights close to the Panama Canal, was neutralized when the companies were, by 1940, broken up in Colombia at the request of Washington. This was well before the USA established its Caribbean Defense Command in May 1941 (see also
USA, 5(a)) and put in place a force that eventually reached 119,000 men, over half of whom were assigned to defending the Panama Canal.
John D. Wirth
Bibliography
Stetson C.,, Engleman, R. C.,, and and Fairchild, B. , Guarding the United States and Its Outposts. The U.S. Army in World War II, The Western Hemisphere, Vol. 2 (Washington, 1964).
