They Said One Word Wrong. They Died For It.

In October 1937, Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo ordered the massacre of up to 30,000 Haitian workers along the Dominican-Haitian border. The method of identification was chilling in its simplicity: hold a parsley stem to a man's face and ask him to say the Spanish word for it. The rolled R that Spanish requires — a sound Haitian Creole speakers produce differently — became the line between survival and death. This episode of History of the Caribbean examines El Corte: how Trujillo's racial ideology built toward October 1937, what happened during the eight days of killing, how the international community settled it for $525,000 total, and how the same ideological framework resurfaced in a 2013 Dominican court ruling that stripped citizenship from 200,000 people of Haitian descent. History of the Caribbean is available wherever you listen to podcasts.