THE UNITED STATES hovers over the Dominican Republic these days, waiting eagerly for a reward. The reasoning is simple: Everyone sees that the regime of Generalissimo Rafael Leonidas Trujillo Molina is tottering; everyone knows the State Department nudged it a bit; surely, after the crash, the new regime will embrace the nudger.

But, in the chaos and anger that will follow the fall, there will be no embrace. The sudden anti-Trujillo policy of the United States and the dramatic condemnation of the Dominican Republic by the Organization of American States (OAS) at San Jose have come too late to avert what State Department planners fear most: an anti-American, Castro-leaning successor to Trujillo. For thirty years, the United States has bolstered the brutal tyranny of El Benefactor. Now that his enemies have him on the run, the United States has jumped to their side. For the final push, this new aid may be accepted and used; but the United States will receive in return only a few cold stares, a polite nod, contempt, smoldering bitterness.

However, there are degrees of bitterness and contempt, and the exact character of the post-Trujillo regime will depend on the forces used to overthrow the Generalissimo. Some signs indicate that the new regime may not be as bitter or as loud as the Castro regime, though there is no doubt that it will be revolutionary. The sixty-nine-year-old Trujillo, who has changed the map of the country by renaming mountains, lakes, cities and streets in his honor, is too egotistical to relinquish power voluntarily. And, in the atmosphere of the Trujillo era, elections would serve only as a device to perpetuate his power. They would be meaningless without educating the people for democracy, without freeing the channels of the press and radio, without calming the fear that suffocates those who oppose him. Since no one trusts Trujillo to accept these conditions, no one believes that a new regime could succeed the tyrant by orderly process. Either an invasion or a rebellion will bring the era of Trujillo to a close, and this despite the fact that both have been tried and both have failed in the past.

IN JUNE, 1959, a band of 200 Dominican exiles and sympathizers, trained as guerrillas in Cuba and fired by the example of Fidel Castro, invaded the Dominican Republic. All were quickly wiped out. The docile capital of Ciudad Trujillo remained docile as the army and the peasants on the coast picked off the invaders one by one. Trujillo merely had to promise a bounty for each body to crush the invasion.

I discussed the futile attempt recently with an exile in San Juan, Puerto Rico. A nervously loud twenty-six-year-old, he had been trained in Cuba and assigned to join the second wave of invaders. But the second wave, informed of the destruction of the first, never left Cuba. Undaunted, the exile still saw Castro’s way as the only way to overthrow Trujillo.

He admitted two major obstacles: few guns, little unity. One source of armaments dried up last year when the Castro government reversed its policy of encouraging invasions of unfriendly neighbors. And the exiles, scattered in Caracas, Havana, San Juan, Miami and New York, have splintered into countless talkative political organizations. “I could spend all afternoon just listing the names of Dominican groups in exile,” said the young exile.

But more than guns and unity will be needed for a successful invasion. When the exiles sailed into the Dominican Republic, no one in Ciudad Trujillo rose to join them. Perhaps if a small band infiltrated and organized in the mountains, it might slowly attract support and fervor as Castro did in the Sierra Maestra. But a direct assault on the coast would have little chance of success unless the underground rose at the same time.

THE underground may be the key to the riddle of the Dominican Republic’s future. It evidently counts middle-class businessmen, industrialists, professionals and intellectuals as its core. Close relatives of government officials and army officers are included. Last January, the underground was three days away from its scheduled assassination of Trujillo when the secret police began the arrests that ended the rebellion.

The government said it arrested 220 plotters, but other sources claim thousands were jailed. Whatever the number, it is believed that two-thirds of the movement escaped detection. “And they are better organized now than they ever have been,” a close observer of Dominican political activity reported to me in Ciudad Trujillo.

Events since January have tended to solidify the ranks of the underground.

First of all, the arrests and brutal treatment of the plotters and respected middle-class men and women aroused the Catholic Church; the six bishops of the Dominican Republic quickly issued a pastoral letter deploring the regime’s refusal to respect human rights. While the Church has quieted its anger in recent months, its publicized opposition to the excesses of the regime has tended to make underground activity palatable to the middle class. Second, the economy, weighted by heavy arms purchases and tangled trade relations, has plunged into a depression that frightens many businessmen around Trujillo. They are rushing into the underground in the hope of saving their fortunes. With its ranks swelling, the movement may be ready soon to attempt another assassination. Unless Trujillo flees, it probably will succeed.

Trujillo would surely face invasion or rebellion today even if the OAS, bolstered by the change in State Department policy, had not condemned him and ordered the breaking of diplomatic relations. Nevertheless, the action at San Jose was not useless; it has quickened events. Trujillo’s immediate reaction was to screw down his clamp on criticism, a move that enrages the intellectuals. The experience of the Dominican Popular Movement (MPD) illustrates the effect of the OAS on Trujillo.

In June, as part of a program to convince the world that the Dominican Republic practiced democracy, the Trujillo regime promised a free hand to its opposition. Two exiles in Cuba, Maximo Antonio López Molina and Andrés Ramos Peguero, took the government at its word and returned to Ciudad Trujillo, brandishing an anti-Trujillo manifesto and waving a flag that cried, “Liberty or Death.” They organized the MPD. The government-controlled press welcomed the movement with so many banner headlines that some Dominicans suspected the pair were Trujillo plants. But evidence mounted to prove them genuine.

I INTERVIEWED López and Ramos a few days after the OAS condemned Trujillo. They and other followers huddled on the dusty, rotting top floor of a small building in a bustling business district. Sentinels, wearing dirty shirts, baggy pants, and shoes without socks or laces, clutched spears fashioned from an old iron gate and guarded the door, the windows, the side balconies and the roof. I had to step past an arsenal of lead pipes to find the two leaders.

Since the action at San Jose, their lot had grown hard. The newspapers had ceased mentioning the movement. The government had confiscated their only car. As a precaution, López and Ramos had decided to stop recruiting new members; now they expected an attack by the government at any time. There had been government attacks before, with paid civilians clubbing MPD members and tearing up the headquarters. In this way, Trujillo tried to show that it was the angry, loyal populace, not his police, who would not tolerate opposition to El Benefactor. Nevertheless, López and Ramos professed optimism. Ramos picked up a lead pipe. “We will win through the truth and this,” he said. López nodded.

Five days later, a mob of 300 Trujillistas, armed with sticks, stones, clubs and knives, attacked the MPD. Police looked on as they sacked the headquarters and clubbed twenty-two MPD supporters into the hospital. The government press called it, “the people’s justice,” and the MPD leaders were thrown into jail. Trujillo no longer felt it useful to show the world that he tolerated an opposition. His action, however, has tended to harden the opposition.

THE OAS has also affected Dominican stability by instilling more fear and panic into the country’s businessmen. Actually, the San Jose resolution imposes no sanction on Dominican trade. The suspension of trade in arms is meaningless since the United States, the chief source of Dominican arms in the Western Hemisphere, imposed an arms embargo on the Caribbean more than two years ago. But the resolution gives the OAS council the power to “study the feasibility and desirability of extending the suspension of trade with the Dominican Republic to other articles.”

The Dominican economy has sagged since the ascension of Castro in Cuba. A fearful Trujillo spent $88,000,000 on armaments last year — more than half the national budget — and an austerity program came in the wake of the purchases. Then the world prices dropped for sugar, coffee and cocoa, the Republic’s chief exports. And, in the last few months, Venezuela has succeeded in blocking shipments of vital oil from Curacao, Aruba and her own refineries to the Dominican Republic. Any further entrenchment of the economy, besides recruiting more businessmen into the underground, might send the unemployed masses, until now loyal to Trujillo, into the streets.

IF TRUJILLO falls soon, as almost all observers in Ciudad Trujillo assume he will, what will be the attitude of the new regime toward the United States? “It will be Dominican,” one exile told me, “not pro-American or anti-American.” Then he proceeded to offer a long list of grievances against the United States, the same list presented by almost all anti-Trujillistas. Foremost is the occupation of the country by the U.S. Marines from 1916 to 1924. Dominicans, justifiably or not, invariably describe this experience as harsh and cruel and reeking with rape and plunder. Furthermore, Dominicans do not forget that Trujillo is a product of that occupation. The Marines trained the future dictator and when they left the country he was assistant commander of the national police. Nor do they forget that the United States has actively embraced and bolstered the tyrant for almost the entire thirty years of his reign.

The present sudden change of U.S. policy is largely discounted by the Dominicans; they assume that the State Department went along with the San Jose resolution, not so much to topple Trujillo as to have a precedent for attacking Castro in the future.

With these grievances, no successor to Trujillo — even if he is “Dominican, not pro-American or anti-American”— is apt to be a warm friend of the United States. But circumstances could temper bitterness. For one thing, unlike pre-revolutionary Havana, Ciudad Trujillo does not look like Middletown, U.S.A., with every shop and enterprise bearing an American label. The Dominican Republic is a satrapy of Trujillo, not of American capitalism. The American image may also be improved by an ironic twist in Trujillo policy. The former self-styled defender of the Western Hemisphere against communism has decided to let Radio Caribe, a Dominican network, purchase news dispatches from the Russian agency, Tass, so that “the Dominican people will receive true information not influenced by the pressure of Yankee imperialism.” This new unleashing of venom against the United States may convince some anti-Trujillistas that Yankees can’t be all bad. In addition, the upper middle class, if it controls the revolution, may stifle its bitterness and look to the United States to stabilize the new regime with economic and moral support.

BUT there is no certainty that the upper middle class, even if backed by the army, will control the revolution. Some students of Dominican politics predict ten years of chaos. Out of this chaos, a government closely allied to Cuba probably would emerge. But another strong man or an OAS-supervised government also might result.

Chaos in the Dominican Republic would enflame the entire Caribbean. In Haiti, underground opponents of another American-supported tyrant, President Francois Duvalier, want to mount an invasion of Haiti from the adjoining Dominican Republic once Trujillo falls. Duvalier might call on the United States for aid, while Castro might rush help to the rebels. The State Department would find all its props under Caribbean dictators fallen and the islands, like the Belgian Congo, in dangerous turmoil.

In any case, the Dominican Republic is about to enter a new era, perhaps crackling with chaos, perhaps teeming with anti-Americanism. But the era will not be sullied by Trujillo. And that, for the Dominican Republic, will in the long run outweigh any chaos.

STANLEY MEISLER is a wire service newsman now stationed in Washington.