When an outlying hamlet of the rural belt has grown to sufficient size it is erected into a municipal district or canton and accorded a justice of the peace and a cantonal chief and governing board. It remains subject, however, to the municipal council of the commune of which it formed a part until further development warrants its segregation as an independent commune with its own council. The cantons, as well as some of the sections, are also provided with a cemetery and a small church or chapel.
From among their number the municipal councilmen select a president who is regarded as mayor of the commune, though many of the duties elsewhere pertaining to mayors are discharged by an official called the syndic. The councilmen are supposed to be elected for a term of two years, but the oft repeated revolutions have interfered as seriously with their terms of office as with everything else. The average Dominican seems to manifest little interest in his municipal elections; my question as to when the last local election was held would generally be answered with uncertainty: "Last January, no, last April, no, I believe it was in November." After all, the elections have usually been mere ratifications of slates prepared beforehand. In the time of Heureaux the lists of new councilmen were often arranged in the capital and a few days before election remitted to the various towns, even with a designation of the person whom the council was later to choose as its president.
The results of such a method of selection of councilmen has not been as unfavorable as might be expected. The position of councilman pays no salary and is not of sufficient importance to appeal to the politician, so that under the present system the principal merchants and other prominent men are frequently designated. The law does not prohibit foreigners from forming part of the municipal councils and they have frequently been chosen, especially in Puerto Plata.
CHAPTER XIX
POLITICS AND REVOLUTIONS
Political parties.—Elections.—Relation between politics and revolutions.—Conduct of revolutions.—Casualties.—Number of revolutions.—Effect of revolutions.
The characteristic features of Dominican politics are the violence of political antagonism and the absence of differences of principle between the political parties. None of the three parties existing to-day has a platform, and the distinction between them is entirely a matter of the personality of the leaders. Each party alleges that it has the best people and the purest motives and views with alarm the government of the country by any other party. In practice therefore, politics follows the rule only too common in the Spanish-American countries, of resolving itself into a personal struggle between the "ins" and the "outs."
In the early days of the Republic different policies were occasionally seriously considered. It was then held by some that independence should be preserved at any cost while others contended that in view of the constant, civil wars the country should seek peace and progress under the protection of some foreign power. Although the annexationists were at first called conservatives and their opponents liberals, these divergent views were not the exclusive property of any designated group of men, but the annexation idea was generally espoused by the party that happened to be in power, which thus hoped both to save the country and perpetuate its own rule, while independence was invariably supported by the opposition, which bristled with patriotic indignation and the fear that it might be permanently excluded from the banquet-table. Thus Santana obtained a return to Spanish rule in 1861 and Cabral a few years later agitated the question of American annexation and their action was denounced by Baez; yet shortly after Baez almost succeeded in securing annexation to the United States and was stigmatized as a traitor by Cabral.
Another issue which existed for a few years after the separation from Haiti in 1844 was the division between clericals on the one hand and liberals on the other, a party division that has created havoc in other parts of Spanish America. The very indefinite claims on each side and the practical unanimity of the country in its attitude towards the church caused this issue to disappear.
The real parties that kept see-sawing in and out of power from the early days of the Republic down to the time of Heureaux were those founded by General Pedro Santana and General Buenaventura Baez. Intimate friends in the struggles with Haiti which followed Santo Domingo's declaration of independence, their ambitious and domineering natures soon clashed, and each collected a group of friends and incessantly conspired against the other. The partisans of Baez, or Baecistas, adopted red for the color of the cockades and ribbons which distinguished them in the civil wars, and came to be known as the "Reds," while the followers of Santana, or Santanistas, adopted blue and were known as the "Blues."