He may have had a point. Like sex, it is a physical excitement that presents an alternative to rational thought. In the years since Espaillat, the instrumentation has gotten both more elaborate and louder with the inclusion of a brass section. The beat remains frenetic and engaging, an exhilarating and somewhat numbing expression of energy for energy’s sake. With large speakers and powerful boom boxes, merengue has ensured that Dominican towns are not quiet at night; and now, with the advent of iPods and tiny earphones, it can be blasted into the ear canal and directly patched into the brain. Things you cannot do while listening to merengue: reflect, stand still, be sad.
Since the 1960s a newer music, bachata, has emerged from poor rural areas. This is the Dominican equivalent of country music: sad ballads of unrequited love. While it is also claimed as a distinctly Dominican form, it clearly has its roots in the Cuban bolero.
The ambiguous and confused Dominican identity, like all national identities, is rooted in history. The Dominican Republic, in a region known for harsh histories, has a particularly difficult, somewhat strange story of a land and a people struggling for centuries to find a path to nationhood. In five hundred years it was invaded twice by the Spanish, three times by the Haitians, twice by the French, and twice by the Americans—if you don’t count sugar companies or Major League Baseball. Dominicans have also on their own initiative at different times asked to be annexed to Spain, Britain, Colombia, France, and the United States.
The one Dominican moment with an undisputed claim to world history was in 1492 when Columbus landed there, named the island Española to leave no doubt about ownership, and established the first European colony in the Americas. It became a base for the Spanish conquest of America, and most of the butchers who conquered for Spain—including Cortés, Pizarro, Ponce de León, and Balboa—passed through there.
Gold was the Spanish obsession of the time, and when they found some they enslaved the locals to mine it. Only twenty-five years later, most of the gold and most of the locals were gone. The Spanish had worked to death or infected with fatal diseases all but 11,000 of the estimated population of 400,000, earning Santo Domingo an important place in the history of genocide.
Understandably, Dominicans do not feel comfortable with their founding history. There is no Columbus Day holiday in the Dominican Republic, because they knew him too well. Yet there is a certain pride, especially in the capital city, in the firstness that Columbus gave them—that Santo Domingo is the oldest European city in the Americas and its university the oldest in the Americas.
But with both the gold and the population gone, Santo Domingo became a backwater, never again to play a major role on the world stage. Sugar, which for a thousand years had been a Mediterranean product, could be produced more cheaply in the Caribbean tropics. The Dominicans were one of the first sugar producers in the Americas. The original colonists tried it, harvesting the first Dominican sugar crop in 1506. But despite high sugar prices in Europe, Dominicans failed to become major sugar producers. Sugar requires a great deal of labor, and the Spanish, having killed most of the locals, were left with an underpopulated island. Like other islands, they began importing African slaves, but starting in 1522 the slaves began rebelling. Soon there were more runaway slaves than Spaniards in the colony.
Away from the capital, in the far western regions of the second-largest Caribbean island, local sugar was being sold illegally to enemies of Spain, such as France and Holland. The Spanish solution was to burn and destroy all the coastal agriculture on the western side of the island, where the smuggling had taken place, and forcibly vacate the area. As a result, it was taken over by the French, who turned it into the most profitable colony in the world, while the eastern Spanish half remained impoverished and neglected.
In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries—when the French side exploded in what would be the Americas’ first successful African slave rebellion and in what became the world’s first postcolonial black nation—the Santo Domingo side continued to drift.
In 1795, during the Haitian revolution, the French took the Spanish side away from Spain. The Dominicans rebelled and threw the French and the Haitians out but, instead of declaring independence, asked the Spanish back. From 1809 to 1821 the Spanish ruled again, but they ruled harshly and were indifferent to developing the colony. Tired of Spanish rule, the Dominicans rebelled again—as did most of the Spanish colonies at the time—and in a rare moment of triumph the Dominicans drove the Spanish out and declared their independence. This should have been the moment of national glory, the founding moment in the nation. But immediately a sense of panic seemed to grip Dominicans about being alone in the world. They entered into negotiations with Simón Bolívar, the great South American liberator from Venezuela who dreamed of one large independent Latin American nation called Gran Colombia.
Instead the Haitian army invaded in 1822 and, with little resistance, took over and immediately abolished slavery. The Dominicans never even had their own abolitionist movement. Haitian rule was not only antislavery, it was antiwhite—even antimulatto—and the Haitians, wishing to make the eastern side of the island blacker, encouraged black immigration from the United States and got five thousand blacks, mostly from New York and Philadelphia—many of them freed slaves—to move to underpopulated areas. After twenty years of occupation, the Dominicans were left a little bit Spanish, a little bit French, not quite black or white—the only mulatto country, obsessed with race and deeply insecure.
Dominican history teaches of the Dominican military victory that drove the Haitians out in 1844. But one of the Dominican leaders, Buenaventura Báez, was educated in France and seems to have suffered from that age-old affliction Francophilia. When he returned from France, he collaborated with the Haitian occupiers while opening a dialogue with the French government on having France take over the Dominican Republic, known at the time as Haiti Español. There is some evidence that the French had a hand in negotiating the Haitian retreat. Even as Haiti Español was being christened the independent nation named the Dominican Republic, negotiations were under way for the French takeover.
Dominican historian Frank Moya Pons wrote about a “defeatist attitude” that set in, with a conservative upper class preoccupied with the fear that the Haitians would return and take their property. In the first years as an independent nation, Dominicans discussed possible takeovers by not only the French but the Spanish, the Americans, and the British. This was threatening to the Haitians—particularly their leader from 1847 to 1859, Faustin-Élie Soulouque—who feared above all else an attempt by outsiders to reestablish slavery in Haiti. Soulouque, a black brought to power as a puppet of the upper-class mulattos, had a surprising cunning and quickly consolidated power and crowned himself Emperor Faustin I. A militant black nationalist, his fear of foreigners—especially Americans, who by then ran the leading slaving nation—led to three attempts to retake the Dominican Republic. This in turn led the Dominicans to a desperate desire to be taken over and rescued by a foreign power.
None of the four powers under consideration was particularly interested in acquiring the Dominican Republic. Columbus, it seems, was the first and last to have considered it a prize. The French were interested only in Haiti and had gotten the Haitians to agree to a huge indemnity in exchange for recognition of the nation. The only French interest in the Dominican side was to stop the Haitians from spending all their money trying to take over the Dominican Republic instead of paying them. The British and the Spanish were concerned only about American designs on the real prize, Cuba, and feared that the U.S. saw the Dominican Republic as a stepping-stone. Far from worrying about preserving their nation while all these militarized world powers were looking them over, many Dominicans, not all of them white, were claiming Spanish citizenship. Spanish law promised citizenship to any descendant of a Spanish colonist. As Spanish citizens, they were exempt from Dominican military service.
But at the end of the international debate, in 1860 th
e Spanish came back. Dominicans did not like Spanish rule this time any more than they had the other times, and they fought a war of independence against the Spanish, which they won in 1865. They were independent at last, and from 1865 to 1879 had twenty different governments.
In despair and defeatism, Dominicans tried to become part of the United States. U.S. president Ulysses S. Grant was interested but the American people had no interest in the Dominican Republic, and so most politicians were not particularly receptive; the project was rejected by the Senate in 1871. In fact, Massachusetts senator Charles Sumner, an old-time abolitionist, was remembered in the U.S. as a hero for opposing the measure and sparing the U.S. the annexation. Once Dominicans came to know the U.S. better, Sumner came to be remembered with equal admiration by Dominicans.
An independent Dominican Republic, without economic resources, went deeper into debt and was increasingly controlled by foreign financial institutions. In everything the Dominicans tried to do, they were divided between two bitterly opposed groups: the reds and the blues, the Partido Rojo and the Partido Azul.
It was the fate of the Dominican Republic to fill odd footnotes in history and never center stage. World War I was the pretext for a U.S. invasion of the Dominican Republic. As World War II approached, when the world turned its back on German Jewish refugees, the Dominican dictator Trujillo took them in—welcoming them not out of a sense of humanity but to blanquear, whiten, the racial makeup of Dominicans, just as the Haitians had welcomed American blacks to darken it.
When World War I was breaking out, the Americans discovered that Dominican waters were in danger of a German takeover, so they took over instead. In truth, the invasion was part of a policy that went back to 1898 of securing the Caribbean for building the Panama Canal. The U.S. during this period found excuses to invade six Caribbean nations, including both Haiti and the Dominican Republic. The Americans suspected that the Dominicans, given their history and their deep debt to European banks, would one day throw in with the Europeans, right in their own backyard, at the gateway to Panama.
In remarkable similarity to the invasion of Iraq not quite ninety years later, the U.S. invaded in 1916 with few clear goals or explanations and was surprised to find that locals resented the American presence. Dominicans formed into small bands that sporadically attacked U.S. troops, who called them bandits. The U.S. created a Dominican national police force to control the rebels but struggled to get Dominicans to effectively take charge of this force.
The U.S. military established an officer training school in Haina. Among the graduates in the first class was a drifter and petty criminal named Rafael Leónidas Trujillo Molina. Although there had been some problems with this young enlisted man trying to extort money from the locals, the charges had been dropped and he was approved for officer training. Graduating a second lieutenant, Trujillo befriended high-ranking American officers and rose so rapidly that in 1924, when the Americans left, claiming they had stabilized the country and built an effective police force, Trujillo was a major. Soon after, he became a lieutenant colonel. The Americans had said they wanted to achieve stability, and indeed they had. Within six years of the American withdrawal, his opposition exhausted by its eight-year war with the U.S. Marines, Trujillo had gained complete control of the country. He kept it for thirty-one years, one of the longest-running dictatorships in history, until he was assassinated in 1961 with the complicity of the CIA.
Trujillo ruled by personal whim—“megalomania” was the word used by Jesús de Galíndez, a Basque refugee of the Spanish Civil War, in his doctoral dissertation on Trujillo at Columbia University, for which the general had Galíndez kidnapped from New York and brought to Santo Domingo. His body was never found, and the variety of gruesome stories that circulated about his end were testimony to the dark Dominican imagination. Of course, Trujillo himself had a Dominican imagination—none darker—and one of these grim stories was probably true. Galíndez, like many in the decades of Trujillo government, came to a very bad end. In his dissertation, which chronicles meticulously both the eccentricity and brutality of the regime, Galíndez reported that in 1935 Trujillo’s henchmen had assassinated a political opponent in exile in New York; that they had murdered another Dominican in 1952 on Madison Avenue; and that in 1950, in Havana, they had murdered Mauricio Báez, a union organizer from San Pedro de Macorís. None of this turned the U.S. government against General Trujillo.
The Jewish refugee incident is only one of many examples of Trujillo’s obsession with “whitening the race.” He whitened merengue by insisting on the version from the white Cibao region. Another attempt to whiten the race was made in 1937. While everyone was consumed with the epic baseball showdown between Ciudad Trujillo and San Pedro, Trujillo launched Operación Perejil, more ominously nicknamed the corte, the cutting down.
Most Haitian-born people cannot say perejil, the Spanish word for parsley. Haitians speaking their mother tongue, Creole, tend to pronounce r as w, which is an African influence. And, like many English-speaking people, they struggle with the Spanish j, the jota, which, coming from Arabic, has a raspy h sound. Trujillo sent soldiers to the border region armed with sprigs of parsley. When encountering anyone who seemed suspiciously dark or had African features, a soldier would take out the sprig and ask the person to identify it. If he said something sounding like “pewidgil,” he was either sent across the border or killed. It is not known exactly how many were executed. The New York Times initially estimated between 2,700 and 3,000, but the killing continued. Galíndez guessed that there were more than 20,000 dead, and some estimates have been as high as 30,000 murdered. Those on sugar bateys were not touched, and it is supposed but not certain that Trujillo’s message was that Haitians could come to the Dominican Republic but had to keep to their bateys. Afterward the merengue composer Julio Eladio Pérez came out with the song “Trujillo en la Frontera,” “Trujillo at the Border,” in which the Dominicans of the border thank the caudillo for bringing peace and progress to the region.
Trujillo also tried to whiten himself. He was rumored to have some Haitian blood and was a little dark—nothing that couldn’t be fixed with the right amount of Pan-Cake makeup. According to journalist Bernard Diederich, who covered Trujillo in the 1950s, the general’s foundation would start to streak in the tropical heat and he would shoo away press photographers.
Trujillo’s story says much about the relationship of the United States and the Dominican Republic. Trujillo rose to prominence because of the U.S. military occupation. His murderous rule was tolerated by Presidents Hoover, Roosevelt, Truman, and Eisenhower—even in 1956, when his agents kidnapped Galíndez in New York. Although Trujillo was torturing and murdering Dominicans by the hundreds, what was important to Roosevelt was that Trujillo sided with the Allies; to Eisenhower, it was that Trujillo was a staunch anticommunist. But in June 1960, before Kennedy was elected, Trujillo tried to assassinate Rómulo Betancourt, the president of Venezuela. Then, shortly after Kennedy was elected in November, Trujillo killed the three Mirabal sisters. Once in office, Kennedy decided that the U.S. did not want him anymore, and soon Trujillo was dead.
In British novelist Graham Greene’s Our Man in Havana, police captain Segura, an infamous torturer, explains the idea of a torturable class: that a dictator could murder and torture as many people as he liked as long as he did not touch the kind of ruling-class people to whom other world leaders could relate. Trujillo had crossed that line. No longer just a killer of nameless brown people, he had become a rogue menace in the world. To deal with him, the CIA linked up with a Dominican underground that the U.S. had not helped for thirty years, and that was the end of the general.
Trujillo ran the most successful kleptocracy in Caribbean history—not an insignificant achievement, considering the contenders. For a kleptocracy, success is marked by the amount stolen and the number of years in a position to keep stealing. Trujillo, although he ran only a small, poor country, became one of the richest men in the world and
lasted longer than even the Duvaliers in neighboring Haiti—father and son combined. Of course, in reality the longest kleptocracy in Caribbean history was the centuries in which Europe sucked every ounce of wealth it could find out of its Caribbean colonies. Corporate America tried its best—after all, sugar could be grown in Florida and Louisiana, yet it was this history of kleptocracy that made the Caribbean seem appealing for business—but never lived up to the kleptocratic success of Europe. Then the Europeans and the Americans wondered at the tendency toward kleptocracy in these islands as though this were a peculiarly Caribbean affliction, perhaps caused by climate.
The key to Trujillo’s success was ruthless brutality and relentless egotism that sought to control and redefine everything in Dominican life. He owned most of the industry—including the sugar mills but also rice, beef, salt, and shoes—and controlled the baseball teams, and even dominated merengue with hits such as “Glory to the Benefactor,” “Trujillo Is Great and Immortal,” and the 1946 smash “We Want Reelection.” He danced the merengue to gain popularity with the peasant class, but he also whitened the music to appeal to the upper classes by imposing forms that came from Spanish poetry.
Dominican children placed bottle caps on their chests to resemble the leader with his self-awarded medals and custom-designed uniforms. It has long been believed that Dominican feelings of insecurity and ambivalence demanded a certain type of paternalistic strongman for leader: what is called in Spanish a caudillo—the type of leader that expected to be thanked for the sugar harvest. It is also widely recognized that this tendency, caudilloism, is one of the great problems of the Dominican Republic. When Trujillo came to power, one of the first officially sanctioned merengues said:We have hope in our caudillo;
Everything will change with great speed,
Because now Trujillo is president.
The Eastern Stars Page 3