Buenaventura Baez (14 July 1812-14 March 1884) was President of the Dominican Republic from 29 May 1849 to 15 February 1853 (succeeding Manuel Jimenes and preceding Pedro Santana), from 8 October 1856 to 13 June 1858 (succeeding Manuel de Regla Mota and preceding Jose Desiderio Valverde), from 8 December 1865 to 29 May 1866 (succeeding Pedro Guillermo and preceding Pedro Antonio Pimentel), from 2 May 1868 to 2 January 1874 (succeeding Manuel Altagracia Caceres and preceding Ignacio Maria Gonzalez), and from 26 December 1876 to 2 March 1878 (succeeding Marcos Antonio Cabral and preceding Ignacio Maria Gonzalez). He was a member of the conservative Los Coludos party, and he infamously bankrupted his country for his own benefit, leading to his overthrow by Santana and the start of the Dominican Restoration War.
Biography[]
Buenaventura Baez was born in Cabral, Captaincy General of Santo Domingo in 1812, the son of a wealthy merchant father and a mixed-race former slave mother. He studied in France and other parts of Europe, and he inherited his father's vast fortunes in 1841, becoming a deputy to the Haitian Constituent Assembly in 1843. He took part in the revolution against Haitian president Jean-Pierre Boyer and unsuccessfully attempted to remove an anti-white bias from the Haitian Constitution. In 1844, he emerged as one of the leaders of the Dominican War of Independence, and he failed (in 1846) to convince France to establish a protectorate in the Dominican Republic. Baez went on to serve as President from 1849 to 1853 and from 1856 to 1858, and he supported Spain's occupation of the Dominican Republic and went to Spain with his riches. However, after the end of the Dominican Restoration War, Baez returned to the presidency from 1865 to 1866 (when he was overthrown in a military coup), from 1868 to 1874, and from 1876 to 1878. He almost succeeded in persuading the United States to annex the Dominican Republic, but the bill to annex Santo Domingo failed on the US Senate floor, embarrassing President Ulysses S. Grant. Baez returned to the presidency from 1876 to 1878, when he was deposed in a final coup and sent into exile in Puerto Rico, where he died in 1884 at the age of 71.