The Eastern Stars - Mark Kurlansky [117]
1924 U.S. Marines leave.
1930 Rafael Leonidas Trujillo comes to power.
1936 Santo Domingo is renamed Ciudad Trujillo.
1936 San Pedro’s Estrellas win the championship from Ciudad Trujillo.
1937 Ciudad Trujillo beats Estrellas and bankrupts Dominican baseball in the process.
1937 Trujillo massacres between 20,000 and 30,000 Haitians in the Dominican Republic.
1945 Brooklyn Dodgers sign Jackie Robinson, first black major-league player since 1898. Eleven weeks later, second black player, Larry Doby, is signed by the Cleveland Indians.
1948 Cuban Minnie Miñoso breaks color line for Latinos by playing for Cleveland Indians.
1951 Dominican League is reorganized as professional baseball again.
1954 Estrellas win championship.
1956 Ozzie Virgil becomes first Dominican major leaguer.
1956 Jesús de Galíndez is kidnapped by Trujillo agents in New York, tortured, and murdered.
1959 Mirabal sisters are murdered.
1959 Stadium is built in San Pedro for the Estrellas; later named Tetelo Vargas Stadium.
1961 Trujillo is assassinated.
1962 United States embargoes Cuba.
1962 Amado Samuel, shortstop, is first Macorisano to play in major leagues.
1963 Juan Bosch is elected president but after nine months is overthrown by military.
1965 A pro-Bosch rebellion leads to civil war. U.S. invades.
1966 U.S. military leaves after engineering an election that brings former Trujillo puppet president Joaquín Balaguer to power.
1968 The Estrellas win championship.
1978 After twelve years of Balaguer, opposition leader Silvestre Antonio Guzmán is elected president.
1982 Jorge Blanco from Guzmán’s party is elected.
1986 Balaguer returns to power.
1994 Although this is Balaguer’s third corrupt election victory in a row, international outcry is so great, he agrees to hold another election in two years.
1996 Leonel Fernández, from Juan Bosch’s party, is elected. Unlike Bosch, he emphasizes infrastructure for international business rather than social programs and claims to be building “Singapore of the Caribbean.”
2000 Fernández is barred by law from running a second term. Opposition candidate Hipólito Mejía comes to power on popular platform of social programs.
2004 Mejía uses legislative majority to end term limit. His opponent Fernández is elected.
2008 Fernández is reelected.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Me gustaría agradecer a Manuel Corporán, mi hermano Manolo, por toda la ayuda, la buena conversación, la perspicacia y las risas y para dejarme conocer su familia valiente y afectuosa. I thank Major League Baseball for their cooperation, and particularly Ronaldo Peralta for answering all of my questions for years with the utmost courtesy, speed, and professionalism. Thanks to José Canó for his openness and help, even though we still haven’t gone fishing, and to Arturo D’Oleo.
My deep-felt thanks to my friend of many years now, Bernard Diederich, whom I first met on Hispañola—no longer remember which side first—and who writes of this world with rare insight and grace. And to Elizabeth Macklin for her help in translating Deligne: I could translate the lean twentieth-century lines of Mir but could never have done Deligne without her poet’s touch.
I owe a debt to Tim Wiles and Freddy Berowski, who pleasantly and efficiently helped me in the library of the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York.
Thanks to Geoffrey Kloske for doing it all and so well, to Rebecca Saletan for her great advice, and to the whole Riverhead family for being such great partners. A special thanks, as always, to my dear friend Charlotte Sheedy for representing me. And thanks to Susan Birnbaum for all her help.
Thank you, Marian Mass, my beautiful Marian, for a hundred things, but especially for having stopped rooting for the Yankees.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
DOMINICAN HISTORY
Atkins, G. Pope, and Larman C. Wilson. The Dominican Republic and the United States: From Imperialism to Transnationalism. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1998.
Balaguer, Joaquín. Historia de la Literatura Dominicana. Rafael Calzada, Argentina: Gr