Caamano in London: the exile of a Latin American revolutionary

In January 1966 Colonel Francisco Caamaño Deñó, President of the Dominican Republic during the ‘Constitutionalist’ uprising of April-May 1965 and the subsequent US invasion, was exiled to London. Spending twenty months in the British capital as military attaché at the Dominican Embassy, Caamaño remained intensely involved in the affairs of his home country, seeking to rally opposition to the US presence and preparing for his own return before secretly flying, in October 1967, to Cuba. Six years later, in February 1973, he was to lose his life in a failed attempt to launch a guerrilla war in the mountains west of Santo Domingo. Hitherto little has been known about Caamaño’s London sojourn, the most important by any Latin American radical leader in the British capital since the visits of Bolivar and San Martín in 1809. This book, using material from people who met Caamaño in Britain, and a chapter on the London period by his Dominican biographer, Hamlet Hermann also presents, for the first time, extensive documents from official archives on Caamaño’s conversations with British and American diplomats. The result is a complex and informative study, at once a missing chapter in the history of the Dominican Republic and, more broadly, a contribution to the oft forgotten history of the Cold War in the Caribbean.