Back in the Family

After 16 months of lonely quarantine, the Dominican Republic last week was welcomed back into the hemisphere's family of nations. Meeting in its marbled Washington headquarters, the Organization of American States voted 20 to 0 (Cuba abstaining) to lift the diplomatic boycott and partial trade embargo applied to late Dictator Rafael Trujillo's Caribbean fief.

Originally imposed as punishment for Trujillo's attempt to assassinate Venezuela's President Romulo Betancourt. the sanctions were retained after the dictator's own assassination--as a warning to his successors against a new dictatorship. But after months of cliff-hanging crisis, the troubled country seems on the way to its first democratic government in 32 years. Last week a Swiss-style council of state, composed largely of anti-Trujillo business and professional men, was installed to govern the nation until free elections promised for next December. Trujillo's holdover President, Joaquin Balaguer. will turn over chief-executive duties to the council's designated president, Rafael Filiberto Bonnelly, 57, a lawyer who. like almost everyone else of prominence in the Dominican Republic, served Trujillo at one time, but broke with him and helped organize the powerful opposition National Civic Union. One of the council's first actions: to fire Trujillo's diplomat-playboy and onetime son-in-law, 52-year-old Porfirio Rubirosa ("I have loved, and been loved by, some of the world's most beautiful women") from his $36,000-a-year post as the "inspector of embassies."

The U.S., which has worked hard for the peaceful transition of power, resumed diplomatic relations and prepared to uncork an outpouring of economic aid. To pump new life into the Dominican economy, which was bled white by the treasury-looting Trujillo clan, the U.S.

will resume its purchases of Dominican sugar at the premium price of 5 1/2-c- per pound, v. 2 1/2-c- on the world market, and will assign the Dominican Republic a part of Cuba's former sugar quota. Sugar alone should add $55 million to the Dominican economy this year. Equally important, the misery-ridden land is now eligible to share in the Alliance for Progress. The day the OAS lifted its sanctions, the White House announced that an Alliance "task force" headed by Teodoro Moscoso, Latin American director of A.I.D., will speed to Santo Domingo (once Ciudad Trujillo) to reckon up the national dollar needs for recovery.

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