In January 1966, Colonel Francisco Caamano Deno, president of the Dominican Republic during the "Constitutionalist" uprising of 1965 and the subsequent U.S. invasion, was exiled to London. Spending twenty months in the British capital as military attache at the Dominican Embassy, Caamano remained intensely involved in the affairs of his home country. He rallied opposition to the U.S. presence and prepared for his own return before secretly flying, in October 1967, to Cuba. Six years later he lost his life while attempting to launch a guerrilla war in the mountains west of Santo Domingo. Until now, little has been known about Caamano’s London sojourn, the most important by any Latin American radical leader in the British capital since the visits of Bolivar and San Martin in 1809. This book includes material from people who met Caamano in Britain and a chapter on the London period by his Dominican biographer, Hamlet Herman. It also presents, for the first time, documents from official archives on Caamano’s conversations with British and American diplomats.
The result is a complex and informative study on a missing chapter in the history of the Dominican Republic and, more broadly, a contribution to the often forgotten history of the cold war in the Caribbean.