| BOOK REVIEW The terrible winter of Trujillo
By Thomas Filbin, 11/25/2001 Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 404 pp., $25 Rafael Leonidas Trujillo Molina (1891-1961) ruled the Dominican
Republic for 31 years either as president in his own right, or as the power
behind puppet heads of state Joaquin Balaguer and his own brother Hector.
Assassinated by disgruntled former associates with the assent and assistance
of the US government in 1961, he continued to cast a long shadow on the politics
and culture of his country even after death. Four years of instability led
to an invasion and occupation by the American military in 1965. (The Marine
Corps was the de facto government in an occupation that lasted from 1916
to 1924, and trained Trujillo for a new national police force that became
the army.) Trujillo was the quintessential Latin American dictator, often
photographed in full military dress with braid and medals. He controlled
not only politics, but companies, social institutions, and the way people
thought. He bestowed titles on himself such as ''Benefactor and Father of
the New Nation,'' as well as renaming Santo Domingo, the capital, ''Ciudad
Trujillo.'' Part Cuban, Dominican, and Haitian, he powdered his face to dismiss
any notion that he might have black ancestors, and in 1937 ordered the attack
and murder of more than 10,000 Haitians in the Dominican Republic. Trujillo received generous US military and economic aid, and
Washington overlooked his human-rights abuses because of his anti-Communist
stance, although it is doubtful he had any ideology beyond self-enrichment.
In a secret loathing way he admired Castro for his total control of Cuba,
and, like that nation's Fulgencio Batista and Nicaragua's Anastasio Somoza,
he relied on repression and an ever-present police force to stifle opposition.
A remark sometimes attributed to Cordell Hull, Franklin Roosevelt's secretary
of state, explained Trujillo as ''a son of a bitch, but he's our son of a
bitch.'' Eventually he became even too much of a liability for the American
government to stomach after such acts as kidnapping, murder, and the attempted
assassination of President Romulo Betancourt of Venezuela, and so it encouraged
his elimination. Mario Vargas Llosa has written a gripping novel that details
not only the facts about Trujillo, sometimes known as ''the Goat,'' but the
personal and national psychology of the Dominicans who supported him. Told
principally through the life of Urania Cabral, a middle-aged woman who has
lived most of her life in New York as a lawyer, the story is poignant, moving,
and immensely readable. Urania is the daughter of Senator Augustin Cabral,
once president of the senate and Cabinet minister to Trujillo; she has stayed
away from the Dominican Republic for decades after leaving as a schoolgirl.
Although she never answered her father's letters, finally when he is old
and feeble she returns on a whim and visits him at her childhood home. A
torrent of recollection becomes the plot to this engaging and insightful
book. ''Her nose registers a range of odors as great as the endless
variety of noises hammering at her ears: the oil burned by the motors of
buses ... tongues of smoke that dissipate or remain floating over the pedestrians;
smells of grease ... and that dense, indefinable, tropical aroma of decomposing
resins and underbrush, of perspiring bodies, an air saturated with animal,
vegetable, and human essences. ... A hot odor that touches some intimate
fibre of memory and returns her to her childhood, to multicolored heartsease
hanging from roofs and balconies.'' The Cabral family is typical of the educated upper classes
who fell in with Trujillo and prospered as a result, but the price they eventually
pay in loss of their own humanity is staggering. Urania is beautiful and
sophisticated but remote, and icily calls her father to account for his life.
She is appalled that any thinking person could have followed a leader as
vicious and crude as Trujillo, who, ''at night, after a few glasses of Carlos
I Spanish brandy, ... so careful, refined, elegant in his speech - a snake
charmer when he set his mind to it - would suddenly come out with the filthiest
words. Talk the way they do on a sugar plantation ... in the stadiums and
brothels, talk the way men talk when they need to feel more macho than they
really are.'' If Trujillo's personality were the sole reason for Urania's
cold anger, we would have limited sympathy for her, but as the story reaches
its final moments, when we see Senator Cabral's craven betrayal of his daughter's
innocence to please ''the Chief,'' we feel if anything that she has let her
father off too lightly. The book brings readers to the precipice of terror
and lets us look into the abyss of cruelty as it poses and answers the question:
Why do people not oppose dictators? For some it is apathy, for some fear,
for many others greed and personal gain. Vargas Llosa, however, brilliantly
reveals a more depraved truth about human nature: Many people support these
tyrants because they admire them. Despots rise up in times of instability
and promise security, persecute minorities, expel foreigners, imprison journalists
who report the truth, and create objects of blame for a nation's troubles.
None of this suffering displeases those who do not suffer. Enough people
constituting ''us'' can eliminate ''them.'' Vargas Llosa is mentioned every year as a possible Nobel Prize
recipient, and he fits all the requirements for a great literary figure:
unique vision, a distinctive style, and seriousness of subject. Not a secluded
thinker, he is engaged and political (he ran for president of his native
Peru in 1990). He is long overdue for recognition by the Swedish Academy,
but if he never receives it, he has by his body of work already secured a
place as one of the monumental writers of our time. Thomas Filbin is a freelance writer who lives in Westwood.
Last fall he was a visiting scholar at Oxford University. This story ran on page D4 of the Boston Globe
on 11/25/2001.
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