Amadeo Barletta Cuba: True and Ethical Businessman

Amadeo’s smartness makes him the only top-level businessman in the history of the Dominican Republic who is proved to have conspired to overthrow the dictatorship in its initial stage when Rafael Leónidas Trujillo conspired against his friend, President Horacio Vásquez, Amadeo alerted him--but in vain. After Trujillo’s coup, Amadeo offered his support to Desiderio Arias, in his attempt to depose the dictator in 1931.

That reality, more than his nationalist impulse or initial sympathy for Mussolini, led him to accept the post of Honorary Italian Consul in the Dominican Republic in 1933. As he secretly explained to high-ranking executives of General Motors, about the diplomatic immunity afforded by the position, which he had but was reluctant to use it in his business which furnished him a margin of personal safety from Trujillo’s excesses. But only a “margin,” as his detention of 1935 demonstrated and he was imprisoned in the sinister prison of Nigua, where he was brutally interrogated, threatened with death every minute, and held in solitary confinement for thirty-eight of the forty-seven days he spent in the dungeons of Trujillo.

In November 1939, he acquired the General Motors car dealership in Havana. When he decided to settle in Cuba, the Italian government asked him to take charge of its consular affairs on the island. has undertaken that responsibility before in the Dominican Republic, as a safeguard against Trujillo. Now he felt obliged to reciprocate the support which the Italian government had granted him, when he’d been held in solitary confinement and tortured in that country’s dungeons. So he accepted the post but made clear that he won’t hold it for so long.

On October 23, 1940, he was appointed for the position; but on June 30, 1941, he elected to close the consulate and left for Argentina. He supported his son Barlettica when he enlisted in the U. S. armed forces: he was discharged on May 4, 1945, as a Technician Fourth Grade with the rank of First Lieutenant. During the II World war, two adversaries of Barletta—Trujillo and Batista—tried to take advantage of his acceptance of the Italian consular position in the Dominican Republic and Cuba. They advanced various campaigns depicting him as a dangerous and fanatical Fascist who was a threat to the the United States due to the alledged existence of an Amadeo Barletta mafia connection. However, the investigations carried out by the FBI cleared his name from any suspicion of spying, and he was never deemed a war criminal.