Santo
Domingo de Guzmán as Ciudad Trujillo and Its
Legacy Thereas
To state the
least, Rafael Leonidas Trujillo Molina inevitably and indelibly changed Santo
Domingo de Guzmán and the rest of the
Dominican Republic. From the
Trujillista coup in 1931 to Trujillo’s justifiable murder on May 30, 1961; the
Dominican Republic and Santo Domingo—then known as Ciudad Trujillo—received
wounds from which will they will never heal, and the scars of those wounds
which will never fade—at least not in this lifetime. At least according to
Mario Vargas Llosa (among others
),
“Generalissimo” Rafael Leonidas Trujillo Molina was a brutal, narcissistic,
pedophiliac, and Self-Hating-Black
man who was perhaps-severely OCD or vain in regards to appearance, not good at
being a dad, unfortunately skilled in abusing his training that was acquired
with the U.S. Marines, and fiercely patriarchal.
Beginning by
examining
Trujillo’s
ethnic self hatred and racism, one may well quote Vargas Llosa’s
obviously-well-researched
La Fiesta del Chivo (The Feast of the Goat).
According to Vargas Llosa’s historical fiction novel,
Trujillo unequivocally had exchanges such as
this:
Hieratic
and theatrical, the Generalissimo raised his hands and showed them to his
guests:
“For
the sake of this country, I have stained these with blood… [t]o keep the blacks
from colonizing us again. There were tens of thousands of them, and they were
everywhere. If I hadn’t, the
Dominican
Republic would not exist today. The entire
island would be
Haiti,
as it was in 1840. The handful of white survivors would be serving the blacks.
That was my most difficult decision in thirty years of government, Simon.”
His
Black mother, Julia Molina de Trujillo, did not know that her son despised his
maternal heritage to that extent, if she knew at all. She also probably had no
idea that her son became just like his dad, and his sons became like their dad
in turn:
Did
she recognize him? Doña Altagracia Julia Molina was ninety-six years old and
her mind must be like soapy water in which dissolved…She had always been a very
good woman, this illegitimate daughter of Haitian immigrants to San Cristóbal,
whose features he and his siblings had inherited, something that never failed
to mortify him despite his great love for her. Sometimes, however,…he would
think, mockingly: [Dominicans are] licking the ground for a descendant of
slaves.” How was the Sublime Matriarch to blame for the black blood that ran in
her veins? Doña Julia had lived only for her husband, Don José Trujillo Valdez,
an easygoing drinker and womanizer…Congenitally frugal, Doña Julia would have
continued to live in the modest little house…where the Generalissimo had been
born and spent his childhood, or in one of the huts where her Haitian ancestors
had died of hunger.
As
stated, Rafael Trujillo became like Don José instead of Doña Julia, and his
sons in turn became like him. As Don José was not a good dad, he was not a good
dad; and his sons reflected that:
[“]The
great mistake of my life has been…my children. Have you ever seen disasters
like them? Their only horizon is booze, pesos, and fucking. Is there one of
them capable of continuing my work? Isn’t it a shame that…Ramfis and Radhamés
are playing in
Paris
instead of standing at my side?”
Trujillo imposed suffering on himself and his family
within Ciudad Trujillo and San
Cristóbal due to his racist self hatred and addictions
to alcohol and sex. Trujillo imposed suffering
on the rest of the Dominican
Republic by starting with his heinous rapes
of girls, including Urania Cabral. Urania Cabral partially describes her forced
encounter with Trujillo
as follows:
“Let’s
go up, beautiful,” he said, his voice somewhat more thickened. “We’ll be more
comfortable…I don’t enjoy being brutal to girls. I like them to enjoy it, too…”
“He
was seventy and I was fourteen,” Urania specifies for the fifth or tenth time.
“We were a mismatched couple…The grandfather and the granddaughter on their way
to the bridal chamber.”
But
since the time of Urania’s recounting was in1999-2000—2000 being when Vargas
published
La Fiesta del Chivo—; Urania must have been younger than
14—since she claims to be 49
—and
was perhaps, at most, 11 years old. Urania was not the only victim of
Trujillo’s pedophilia.
Among other victims was 17-year-old Yolanda Esterel.
Yolanda must have been treated the same way as Urania was treated by the vain,
appearance-obsessed, and perhaps-severely-OCD
Trujillo:
He
looked at her with surprise and hatred, as if she were a malevolent apparition.
Red, fiery, fixed, his eyes froze her. She couldn’t move. Trujillo’s eyes ran over her,…darted to the
bloodstained spread, and glared at her again. Choking with revulsion, he
ordered:
“Go
on, get washed, see what you’ve done to the bed? Get out of here!”
…
“Get
out, get out,” he said in a strangled voice. “Tell Benita to bring fresh sheets
and a spread and clean up this mess.”
Trujillo had a
U.S. Marine as an accomplice in all his brutal, narcissistic, pedophiliac,
self-hating, vain, and fiercely-patriarchal work and bad parenting—and one
would think that the 2012 Cartagena, Colombia scandal with the U.S. Secret
Service was just as bad until he or she met this accomplice of Trujillo.
That accomplice was Simon Gittleman.
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