The settlers participated in organized, communal holiday events such as Hanukkah, Purim and the annual Passover Seder. There were bar and bat mitzvahs that celebrated the coming of age of Jewish boys and girls, as well as funerals that honored those who passed. Indeed, settlers had “established a religious burial society and created a small Jewish cemetery” that served the colony.The 1950 figures, again culled from the Rosenzweig Report in Bruman’s Field Book III, divulge that DORSA allocated monies totaling $7,900.00 to subsidize various functions and administrative arms at the colony. This included $400.00 for ‘Religious Purposes,’ but also $3, 500.00 for the school and $1,000.00 for the Hospital. The Sosúa Council had responsibility for administrative oversight at the colony, and the settlers made monthly contributions to the Council that were from 1% to 3% of their income. Bruman noted that the Loan Cooperative filled the basic banking needs of the Sosúa settlers. The cooperative functioned as a bank and clearing house for all financial transactions at the settlement. Indeed, all “money transactions of the Sosúa Cooperative were made through the Loan Cooperative.”Sosúa also had its entrepreneurs who began private enterprises at the colony. One of Rosenberg’s key goals for Sosúa was the establishment of small crafts and niche businesses to create revenue streams aside from a farm-based income. They included a turtle-shell business that made arts and crafts goods, which were then sold throughout the country, a haberdashery which made shirts and pants, a cobbler who also made slippers, several restaurants, and a cinema which had its own ‘Cine bar’ selling refreshments. Also included among the fledgling businesses were a plumber and a dentist whose services were not paid for by DORSA. The colony’s reliance on agriculture as its primary source of income did not pan out, and showed that a shift to dairy products was necessary if the colony was to become self-sustaining and profitable. That change came with the addition of cattle, dairy cows,ebb flow and pigs. In about four years since its first refugees arrived in May 1940, Sosúa’s dairy industry had grown into a thriving business with national importance.
The new emphasis on dairy and meat products, made it clear that Sosúa’s initial focus on agriculture had been a failure. Sondheimer wrote that “It was soon seen that the best source of cash income was from milk production. The original plan was revised,” and the economic focus shifted to dairy products and meat processing. Each settler who joined the Cooperativa Industrial Lechera, C. por A. or CILCA by its initials, founded in late 1941, and the Ganadera meat cooperative founded in 1945, became shareholders with one share in each of the enterprises. The Ganadera “slaughtered meat, tenderized beef and ham, and produced bologna, frankfurters, and sausages.”Both CILCA and Ganadera became award-winning anchor businesses that drove the economy of Sosúa. Indeed, their products were sold throughout the island with CILCA butter “in constant demand [because] it is considered the best butter produced in the Republic.” Rosenzweig noted that “out of the 27,000 total acres of the settlement, 18,000 were judged suitable for grazing. Sondheimer’s report of 1944 noted that the improvement in the breeds of animals was done through “the judicious introduction of [imported and superior] breeding stock.” The inferior, native breed of cattle was cross-bred with imported Holstein, Zebu and Senegal bulls, which translated into heartier and heavier calves, and increased yields of milk and meat.The CILCA C. por A. is, at the time of this writing in 2016, still in business, although no longer wholly owned by Jewish settlers/stockholders. It remains a visible reminder of Sosúa’s success as an agricultural colony founded by Jewish refugees fleeing the violence of war torn Europe more than half a century earlier. The Ganadera, Compania Industrial Ganadera C. por A. also enjoyed phenomenal success, with their meat products sold throughout the island and elsewhere. Indeed, from its inception as a small, local Jewish co-op, it experienced increased sales and profits throughout its life. By 1950 it had an annual turnover of an impressive $200,000, whereas in the preceding year, 1949, its receipts were $164,000.The turnover at CILCA C. por A. was equally impressive. In 1949 the receipts totaled $198,000, and by 1950 they jumped to over $245,000. The hapless Jewish refugees who arrived in Sosúa in 1940, built a business empire that is today valued at over millions of dollars, this in spite of the tremendous odds that were stacked against them.
People without a country and land to call their own, a people who had their personal possessions and wealth confiscated, and who were involuntarily pushed out of their homeland, were the success of an experiment happening leagues away from the madness then infecting most of the world.The end of the colony paralleled that of World War II. Many refugees had arrived at Sosúa with no intention of staying on as farmers or ranchers. Some did not want to remain in the Dominican Republic at all, and were among the first to flee the colony when they had the chance. Some who had connections and/or family in the United States, moved there directly after the war. A few chose to return to their European homeland, still reeling from the effects of more than six years of conflict. Then again, some migrated into other Latin American countries such as Brazil, Argentina and Chile. Some remained at Sosúa, yet moved from the homestead farm to the administrative hub at El Batey to be closer to ‘downtown’ and its attractions. Today only a small museum resides at the site of the original colony, reminding those who now come in search of tropical dreams, that this was once a Promised Land for some ‘hapless’ Jewish refugees who had escaped the Nazi terror.Rosen had developed a successful agricultural settlement model in Crimea based on the three-point plan discussed earlier. However, what worked so well in the Crimea failed miserably at Sosúa. It must be noted that the Bolivian haven for Jewish refugees at Buena Tierra in the Yungas region was, according to the historian Leo Spitzer, also an abject failure. Such failures, on the other hand, can be considered as successes given that they had achieved their original objective: saving lives. Buena Tierra was cobbled together from three formerly profitable but now derelict haciendas: Charobamba, Santa Rosa, and Polo Polo in the semitropical Yungas region to the northeast of the capital city of La Paz. As with Sosúa, Buena Tierra included a professional agronomist who did detailed surveys of available tracts of land on which to settle the Jewish refugees. Bolivia also had, as in the Dominican Republic, a president, Germán Busch Becerra , who came from the ranks of the military. After a military coup, Busch seized the presidency in July of 1937. Busch was born in the Beni Province to a physician father who had emigrated from Germany at the beginning of the twentieth century and a Bolivian mother of Italian heritage.98 Busch also wanted to establish agricultural settlements in Bolivia, some years before the conference at Évian took place. Busch’s chief reason for supporting agricultural settlements was that Bolivia was held hostage by fluctuations within the international commodities markets where it had to purchase essentials.
Bolivia, under Germán Busch, struggled to become self-reliant and feed itself. Busch’s strategy was to avoid any of the pitfalls inherent in the international commodities markets.99 The Bolivian president’s ally, Mauricio Hochschild was a billionaire mining magnate and naturalized Bolivian. Both men saw the wisdom of having “European immigrants as agriculturalist colonists to cultivate and exploit the vast, potentially rich, but largely undeveloped semitropical and tropical areas of the country.” The recruitment took place through Bolivian Consular officials stationed in Europe, who “were instructed to attract prospective agricultural immigrants with an offer of free land, free transportation within the country, and a one-year maintenance allowance.” This experiment resulted in the founding of the Colonia Busch. The colony failed from the start,greenhouse benches yet it also provided a model for future colonization of the Yungas by Jews who had fled war-torn Europe in droves.100 In early 1940 Hochschild and officials from the Joint founded the Sociedad Colonizadora de Bolivia, or SOCOBO, which oversaw the development of Jewish agricultural settlements, including the training of the would-be settlers. SOCOBO functioned much like its Dominican twin DORSA. It was a legal corporation that entered into agreements and contract negotiations with government officials. It also handled, along with officials from the Joint, the logistics involved in getting Jewish refugees into Bolivia, and then supplying them with the necessary funds, housing, seeds and farming equipment to begin life anew as Bolivian farmers. Much faith was put in the word of Felipe Bonoli, the Italian agronomist and naturalized Argentine who had past success in Argentina establishing a settlement of Italians on the land. Bonoli had gone to the Yungas region to report on the state of the land and the feasibility of purchasing the properties. The plan was to combine the three derelict haciendas into one large settlement and rename it Buena Tierra. The Yungas region is in the lush semitropical Andean lowlands, an area with plenty of rivers for irrigation. The three haciendas were once thriving farming concerns “on which coffee, cocoa, mangoes, oranges, tangerines, bananas and coca had once been cultivated,” yet had been abandoned by their former owners.Bonoli had deemed the properties suitable for settlement as their fertile soil could be recycled and put into cultivation and pasturage. Bonoli was also taken by the physical beauty of the semitropical, lush Yungas, as were investigators for the REC. Echoing the sentiments of Rosenberg and Rosen about the natural beauty of Sosúa, REC investigator Walter Weiss gushed with praise for the Yungas site; “Not only is the soil long-rested and fertile with mountain streams running in sufficient quantities [but] nowhere in our far West have I seen more wonderful panoramas.”
Members of the REC and the Joint believed that Buena Tierra would be attractive to the refugees as a sight for settlement. The pioneers would have land, low-cost housing and opportunities not available elsewhere on the continent. Recall that most Latin American countries closed their doors to Jewish refugees who came in search of a safe haven, so the list of places in which to immigrate was very short indeed. In addition to the difficulties one encountered fleeing Europe, were the difficulties of getting to the extremely isolated colony. The trip from the capital of La Paz was a ‘terrifying one.’ One left La Paz, altitude 11,000 plus feet, ascended an additional 3,000 feet to La Cumbre, and then began the hair-raising descent into the Yungas and its ‘green, lushly vegetated valleys.’In a masterful bit of understatement, Spitzer noted that “travel on this road is not an easy journey to undertake.” This was aptly illustrated by the numerous crosses that dotted the narrow road, put there to mark the spot of the frequent, fatal crashes that happened to careless travelers. The lack of a network of passable roads accessible by automobile or truck further enhanced the colony’s isolation. It was essential to build a network of roads that would connect the colony with the outside world, one which would facilitate access to domestic markets and ports. Bolivia was in the main dependent on imported goods and foodstuffs for clothing and food. Bolivians consumed rice from India, drank coffee grown and processed in neighboring Colombia and Brazil, and used wheat grown in Canada and Argentina to bake their bread and pastries.It was hoped that agricultural colonies such as Buena Tierra could put Bolivia on the path to feeding itself and, in the process, become self-sustaining. The money saved by reducing costly imports would be invested in settlement schemes such as Buena Tierra. Money would also come from the Jewish philanthropies such as the Joint, and the recently founded protection society known as the Sociedad de Protección a los Imigrantes Israelitas, or by its acronym SOPRO. The SOPRO had offices in several large Bolivian cities, including one in the famous silver mining center of Potosí, that provided aid to Jewish refugees, many of whom had arrived with just the clothes on their backs. It may be recalled that the Nazis had imposed the onerous Flight Tax on Jews emigrating from Third Reich lands beginning in the 1930s, causing the financial ruin of many. So, as in the Dominican Republic, the majority of the Jewish refugees who made it to the safety of Bolivia were penniless.