The Eastern Stars - Mark Kurlansky [13]
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.
After Trujillo was killed, for the next thirty years Dominican politics replaced the reds and the blues with Joaquín Balaguer and Juan Bosch. These two eternal brotherly enemies—Balaguer, the right-wing caudillo who had served as Trujillo’s president, and Bosch, the leftist idealist, friend of Fidel Castro—had so much in common that they appeared to be mirror images of the same person. Balaguer was born in 1906 in the northern Cibao region, a member of an elite group in the country’s wealthy region with the whitest population. Bosch was born in the same region and social class three years later. Bosch had a Puerto Rican mother, and Balaguer a Puerto Rican father. They were both white in a country where only about fifteen percent of the population is white. They both had literary aspirations, although Bosch’s tough and realistic short stories garnered more respect than Balaguer’s flowery, nineteenth-century-style poetry. More highly regarded was Balaguer’s writing on literature, which always reserved ample space for praising the work of his frère-ennemi, Juan Bosch.
One worked for Trujillo, the other opposed him and went into exile. They both lived and played central roles in the nation’s political life into their nineties, both seemingly refusing to either retire or die. The two old enemies could even join together to keep a third party out.
Balaguer was an aesthete who never married and lived in the servant quarters of the house of his six sisters. He wore dark suits and a fedora, and his only extravagances were a specially made limousine known as the Balaguermobile and a huge, dark, elaborately carved desk that he inherited from Trujillo, his extravagant predecessor. It was rumored that Balaguer had fathered illegitimate children throughout the country, but this speculation may have come from the difficulty Dominicans had in accepting men of power who were not oversexed. The sexual exploits of most of them, especially Trujillo and his son Ramfis, were legendary. When Trujillo’s assassins caught up with him on the road, it was said the dictator was on his way