by Shawn Levy
The following year, Ramfis made one more awful splash. In June 1959, two groups of invaders landed on Dominican soil—expatriots and freedom fighters from around the Caribbean determined to remove the dictator Trujillo from his perch. The attack was easily repelled by a military that had been trained for decades to expect just such an incursion. As it was the Dominican air force that had been chiefly engaged in the battle, the dozen or so survivors of the invasion were brought to the San Isidro Air Force base for interrogation. Ramfis, as commander of the air force, had them tortured and executed; he was himself a party to the cruelties and murders. And then he ordered the roundup and execution of anyone in the country who might have had a hand in abetting the invasion.
Trujillo took note of this savagery bubbling up in his son—dirtying his hands with deeds best left to henchmen—and prudently sent him off to Brussels for yet more psychiatric care (there were rumors of electoshock), the dynastic dream indefinitely deferred.
Rubi, of course, had no claim to the line of succession that Trujillo imagined would be his glory. And he was, in some part, to blame for the dissolution of Ramfis—not only by setting an example that the younger man couldn’t emulate but by introducing him to the women who were, through no fault of their own, his downfall. But—and particularly in the face of the evidence of Ramfis’s uselessness—Rubi was still arguably the most valuable asset the Dominican strongman had on the world stage. No Dominican had more or better contacts in Europe or the United States. Rubi, even as he settled into something like the role of aging lion, was still invaluable.
He had associates, for instance, in the world of public relations and the media, and he profited from the introductions he facilitated even when the relationships that ensued from them failed to bear fruit. In 1958, for instance, when Trujillo felt he had a need to polish his nation’s reputation in the United States, Rubi introduced him to the fellows at the Mutual Broadcasting System, one of the largest news and entertainment networks in North America. Rubi’s contact at Mutual was Alexander Guterma, a financial rapscallion of the highest order who had spent the latter months of 1958 and the dawn of 1959 unsuccessfully ducking a series of bankruptcies and indictments connected to his myriad investments. Through his controlling interest in Hal Roach Studios—the same folks who brought the world the filmic adventures of Laurel and Hardy and the Little Rascals as well as TV’s Blondie and Amos and Andy series—Guterma had purchased Mutual in 1958, and now that he was hemorrhaging money on fines and legal fees he was in dire need of cash flow.
Need, assets, and opportunity all combined when Guterma met Rubi, who suggested that Mutual would find a useful client for its services in Trujillo. In January 1959, the Benefactor proposed that Mutual broadcast uncensored, unedited “news” about the Dominican Republic on its air in exchange for a cash infusion: 425 minutes of propaganda per month for eighteen months for a grand sum of $750,000. It was a lot of money and a lot of promise; some in the Dominican government counseled Trujillo that it wasn’t worth the risk. But Rubi, according to one palace official, argued avidly in favor of the deal: “He lobbied and buttonholed. He fluttered and hovered around the power-that-was.… He projected that high-voltage Rubirosa personality.”
His campaign succeeded; The money was delivered—Rubi took a $50,000 taste off the top for his services as matchmaker—and at least some of Trujillo’s material was actually aired. But Guterma and his companies were under a withering assault by U.S. authorities throughout the year; by summer Mutual itself was declaring bankruptcy; by fall, the trail from the company to Trujillo was discovered by auditors—who also noted that Guterma and his fellow executives Garland L. Culpepper Jr. and Hal Roach Jr. had failed to register, as the law required of them, as agents of a foreign government. They were indicted on that charge in September. Guterma, hammered from all sides, pled no contest to the indictment and received an eight- to twenty-four-month jail sentence.*
Maybe Trujillo was losing his touch. Maybe he was so busy with the dozens of intrigues he had in motion that he couldn’t worry about past trespasses. Maybe he was, after all this time, genuinely fond of Rubi. Or maybe he just didn’t have anyone else that he could trust for certain types of work. For whatever reason, as the Guterma deal ground slowly forward, Rubi was already serving in a new diplomatic post for Trujillo, the most sensitive, in fact, that he had occupied since he’d left Buenos Aires more than a decade earlier. In September 1958, Rubi had arrived in Havana and presented his credentials as ambassador to the government of Fulgencio Batista. He had been charged with representing his government at ground zero of what was emerging as the most explosive episode in the modern history of the Caribbean.
He had been in Havana the previous winter for the Grand Prix of Cuba, the last car race that Odile would allow him to enter, the one that achieved legendary status when a group of bandits kidnapped the great Juan Manuel Fangio just beforehand and released him just after. The kidnappers turned out to be a group of rebels living in the hills—the Twenty-sixth of July Movement, led by a charismatic guerrilla named Fidel Castro; so unknown was the group and its leader that headlines about the kidnapping in American newspapers wondered aloud if they might possibly have communist leanings. Interrupting the auto race turned out to be Castro’s debut on the world stage. And now that he and his comrades were engaged in outright revolution, they would have Rubi as an eyewitness to their progress.
Trujillo had come to rely, curiously, on Rubi’s contacts, renown, and blend of palaver and charm as tools of diplomacy. Few people inside the Dominican Republic reckoned much of Rubi’s abilities, but few of them shared his singular gifts: the international name, the ease among the wealthy and powerful, the personal charm, the familiarity with the peccadilloes and secrets of the sort of people on whom Trujillo needed to keep tabs. Indeed, the very triviality of Rubi’s fame—the high living, the skirt-chasing, the glamour—was an advantage: Who could believe that such a superficial fellow was actually an important cog of Trujillo’s machinery of power? It was a guise that made Rubi invaluable to his former father-in-law.
In Havana, Trujillo counted on Rubi to use his cunning and his cool demeanor to make peace with both sides in the simmering conflict. He was, for instance, intructed to offer to sell arms both to Batista, who had been cut off by the Americans, and to the rebels (cannily, Trujillo would only sell to the government for cash but was willing to extend credit to Castro). At the same time, he was to gather any intelligence that he could from all parties, including the U.S. ambassador, Earl E. T. Smith, who, along with his wife Florence, would become a boon friend to Rubi and Odile in the coming years. Among Rubi’s contacts were Dominican exiles who were unfriendly to Trujillo; he was to sound them out as gingerly as he could to determine what, if any, activities were under way that might threaten the Benefactor’s regime.
And Rubi had personal interests of his own. In June 1958, he had started another business, this time with Emilio Tagle, a Chilean of independent means who raced cars and played polo and ran in chic circles in Palm Beach, where he met Rubi during the fiasco of the Hutton honeymoon. Along with two members of the Batista government, these two poured money into a mining venture in the Cuban city of Mantanzas, and Rubi hope to milk the maximum from the venture by being on the scene.
As soon as Rubi hit Havana in September 1958, he sussed out some important changes that needed to be made to secure Dominican interests there. “I intend for our embassy to have a key place in the social life of Havana,” he wrote to Trujillo.
To that end it is vital to refurnish and make over the residence of the embassy, which I have found in a disastrous state. It’s a magnificent building, and it’s incredible that it has been furnished in the way it has and that it has been allowed to fall into this state of decay and filth. I consider it shameful to receive important guests in these rooms. I have given immediate orders to paint the walls, rearrange the furniture and clean the rugs—steps that have already cost more than 2000 pesos. I believe we must g
et rid of all the furniture and lighting in the reception and dining areas and decorate them in an appropriate manner.
It wouldn’t be a long stay, but it was vivid. “Havana at this time was the wildest place in the world,” remembered Odile, who met Senator and Mrs. John F. Kennedy at a party at the American embassy there soon after arriving and liked to brag decades later that she was the youngest ambassadress in the world when she arrived in Havana. She and Rubi partied at the city’s nightclubs and casinos; they posed for pictures at the Dominican embassy—one even showed Rubi sitting at a desk strewn with papers, a strangely thought-free expression on his face. Rubi took up yoga—yet other photos would show him attempting a variety of poses under the tutelage of an unnamed guru—and he kept up his polo, his boxing practice, his parrandas. He was still a famous figure: When he visited a doctor for some intestinal pains, word got out that the famous Rubirosa would be visiting the clinic, and he had to pass through a crowd of gawking admirers to keep his appointment. It was almost like Paris, specifically—given the revolution brewing in the mountains and the air of panic that infused Havana—the Paris of the prewar 1930s that had so excited him.
Following orders, Rubi met with Batista, however briefly. The president, Rubi reported to Trujillo, had “very kind words for the Dominican Republic and Your Excellency. He told me he would like to get to know the Dominican Republic and he would visit. When I asked him if I could relay these intentions to Your Excellency, he responded, ‘Yes, yes … tell Generalissimo Trujillo that I will come to the Dominican Republic.’”
That visit would have required a thaw in Cuban-Dominican relations—the two dictators always kept uneasy eyes on one another—or something even more unexpected. On December 31, the unexpected came to pass. Rubi and Odile were dining at the U.S. embassy and, as Odile remembered, “Ambassador Earl Smith told Rubi that something was going to happen: ‘You are going to maybe have a problem. Whatever happens I’ll call you later on in the evening and let you know. But be ready, something is going to happen.’” The Rubirosas left the Smiths’ very late in the evening and found themselves in a Havana under siege: Rebel troops led by Che Guevara had entered the city. When Rubi and Odile got to the Dominican embassy, the phone was already ringing. “Earl Smith called Rubi,” Odile recalled, “and said, ‘Listen, come over now to my embassy. Batista left the country and he just landed in the Dominican Republic.’”
This was a real crisis. Nobody in Ciudad Trujillo knew much yet about the rebels or their intentions, even though Rubi had made efforts to sound them out. Nor had Rubi alerted Trujillo that Batista and a number of high-ranking officials of his government would be imposing their presence on him. (Not that he could have known; Batista fled at the last minute, originally headed for Florida; when the Yankees rebuffed him, he only naturally thought of his esteemed neighbor Trujillo.) But if Trujillo was angered by all this, he would have to hold it in: Rubi and Odile remained trapped for days at the American embassy, where Smith had arranged temporary asylum for them as they determined what to do next.
“We packed at five in the morning,” Odile said of that anxious episode. “We took my jewelry and the dog.… We were stopped by Fidel Castro’s guerrillas a couple of times on the street. Thank God they didn’t recognize it was Rubirosa!” As it happened, Earl Smith, still able to liaise with both the rebels and the outgoing government, had arranged for Rubi and Odile to have safe conduct between the Dominican and American embassies. As nobody knew the rebels’ politics entirely, much less how they felt about potentially hostile Caribbean neighbors, it was a prudent precaution.
Given the flurry of activity in those first hours and days after the fall of Havana, it’s not surprising that a number of contradictory stories about Rubi’s activities survived. In one account, he helped a squad of Trujillo’s SIM goons steal their way into the city and put them up at the Dominican embassy; in another, he waltzed freely about the city, stopping for a drink at the Havana Hilton on New Year’s Day and spending an afternoon a few days later in a café, drinking and chatting amiably with Fidel Castro’s brother, Raul; another story had him hunkered down at the Swiss embassy and sending Odile off to safety in Miami; yet another suggested that he was more preoccupied with getting his polo ponies out of the country than himself or his wife.
Odile painted a picture of the weeks following the rebels’ victory that was at once pedestrian and sensational, a combination of domestic routine and martial excitement.
We stayed at the American embassy for a week but then went back to the Dominican Republic’s embassy. We went through hell. They were yelling outside that Rubi was a murderer. I couldn’t understand a thing that was going on. I couldn’t speak Spanish or English. One night we were watching television and all of a sudden there was this boom. I thought the embassy was falling apart. There were a couple of cars outside and they threw hand grenades—and they weren’t small hand grenades. They made a hole in the patio and they were shooting through all the windows of the embassy. The guards were playing cards in the garage. They didn’t hear anything. We couldn’t go out any place. For four months, until we broke relations with Cuba, it was very hard for us.
During these weeks, relations between the new Cuban government and the regime in Ciudad Trujillo were volatile. Castro wanted Trujillo to cough up Batista and his cronies, but the Benefactor, who had given Juan Perón sanctuary in 1955 when he was booted from his despotic seat, wouldn’t comply. Rubi remained a curiosity for Castro, who once sat quizzing the Dominican ambassador about Trujillo and his means of holding on to power. But the bombing of the embassy—in April 1959—was pretty much the final straw. By May, Rubi and Odile had left Cuba for good.
The revolution, of course, spelled the end of the mining business Rubi had entered with Emilio Tagle. Soon after the new year, the Castro government got word to Rubi that all agreements made with the Batista crew concerning the deal were null and void. Tagle tried to get some American money to keep the venture afloat, but when he arranged to meet some backers at the Hotel Nacionale, he was greeted instead by Castro’s cops, who whisked him off for three hours of questioning—mostly about Rubi, his attitude toward the new Cuban government, when and how he had left Havana, and whether he was helping Trujillo plan an invasion. Tagle knew nothing, and was given leave to go, only slightly mussed, after three hours.
But Rubi would, perhaps, leave one last remembrance for the Castro regime. In March 1960, an explosion roiled Havana harbor, killing scores of sailors, longshoremen, and passersby. The Coubre, a freighter loaded with arms intended for Castro’s militias, was sunk in a series of explosions that were caused, investigators surmised, by devices loaded onto the ship when it sailed out of France with a load of weapons purchased from Belgian concerns. Castro and his government immediately accused the United States, specifically the CIA, of this act of sabotage; many historians would come to see the Coubre incident as a decisive turning point in the Cuban decision to ally with the Soviet Union. But the American government denied stridently any involvement with the explosion.
There was another explanation, though, having to do not with the United States but with Trujillo. The ship, remember, had sailed with its Belgian cargo from France. And, according to insurance investigators associated with Lloyds of London and CIA informants including Cesar Rubirosa, there were two people there who might have been able to arrange for the ship to be booby-trapped before it crossed the Atlantic, abetting Trujillo by seeing that his dangerous new neighbor didn’t get any stronger but doing it from a discreet remove.
One was General Arturo Espaillat, once the Dominican Republic’s ambassador to the United Nations and, by the time of the Cuban revolution, Trujillo’s secretary of state security.
The other was Rubi, who had been named ambassador to Belgium just one month after leaving Havana.
As in the Bencosme murder, his fingerprints were nowhere on the operation. But, then, the new Cuban regime couldn’t get its hands on him to fingerprint him.
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* Angelita gave birth to the couple’s first child less than six months after her wedding, prompting one of Trujillo’s most impressive acts of reshaping the perceptions of the world around him. Presented with his grandchild, the Benefactor declared, “How rare a thing this is! It’s extraordinary that a five-month baby would live!” No one ever dared challenge his suggestion that his daughter was pure when she wed.
* Those sums didn’t include the cost of the round-the-clock protection that Ramfis required. Trujillo was afraid that reprisals would be visited on Ramfis by the fiancée of slain American pilot Gerald Lester Murphy, who happened to hail from nearby Wichita. As a result, Ramfis never walked to his classes like the other students but came and went in a motorcade of armored Cadillacs. Security ran the Dominican government some $3,000 a day for two scores of armed guards, surveillance equipment, alarms, fortified cars, cameras, guns, and the like.
* There was nothing they could do about the brief craze among the young women of Los Angeles for bumper stickers reading “This car is not a gift from Trujillo.”
* Trujillo got his revenge for this slight on his son: All thirty Dominican military cadets studying in the United States were withdrawn, future American financial aid was rejected by a unanimous vote of both houses of the Dominican congress, Trujillo threatened not to allow American forces to use the missile base and listening stations they manned on the island, and the Dominican ambassador to the United Nations deliberately failed to attend a speech by President Eisenhower later in the year. The fact that Ramfis didn’t deserve to graduate didn’t seem to factor into his father’s thinking.