The Eastern Stars - Mark Kurlansky [14]
But just their haberdashery showed the difference between the caudillos: Trujillo looked like a feathery cross between Napoleon and Lord Nelson as seen in a Gilbert and Sullivan operetta, while Balaguer resembled actor Karl Malden doing a credit card commercial.
Balaguer, with or without sex, lived to be the oldest head of state in the world—was he preserved by celibacy, another worrying rumor mill asked—hanging on after he was legally blind and his hearing had faded. Interviewed at his huge desk, which made the small man look even smaller, this writer asked him why the electrical system was constantly failing. While he was denying this obvious truth, the electricity went off in the palace, but Balaguer continued with his denial, too blind to know what had happened.
Bosch was also a colorful octogenarian. He liked to take journalists to the slums and show his outrage at the wretched housing by pulling shacks apart while the poor family helplessly watched what little they had being torn up. Successive U.S. governments liked Balaguer, who had formed his right-wing party while in exile in New York. The Kennedy administration initially supported Bosch despite the claim of opponents that he was a communist. But once in power, as a result of one of the rare untainted democratic elections in Dominican history, Bosch made the mistake of seeking economic independence from the U.S. by awarding public contracts to Europeans. Washington began to fear Bosch, and after he was removed in a military coup in 1963, the U.S. invaded to prevent him from coming back to power. They put in his place Balaguer. In most Balaguer elections, fraud was suspected and violence was employed: in 1966, Balaguer had 350 Bosch supporters killed in order to ease his return to power. The U.S. accepted this as long as it was keeping Bosch from office. Once Bosch was no longer the opponent, the U.S. started criticizing the nearly nonagenarian president’s proclivity for fraud.
In 1992, for the four-hundredth anniversary of Christopher Columbus’s arrival, Balaguer ignored how badly the explorer is regarded in the Dominican Republic and spent $200 million to build a monument to him that could project light in the shape of a cross into the sky that would be visible for ten miles—that is, if they can ever get enough electrical power to light it up.
Having seen the U.S. completely manipulate the destiny of their country for generations, Dominicans understandably make the mistake of thinking that their country is a major priority of U.S. policy. But, in fact, the mistake of the nineteenth-century annexationists—who, once their proposal came to a Senate vote, discovered that no one in Washington was really interested in their country—is continually repeated. After President Lyndon Johnson sent troops to occupy the Dominican Republic, he sent down his top national security adviser, McGeorge Bundy, to report on the situation. But it turned out that the main reason for the assignment was not Johnson’s concern about the Caribbean nation he had just invaded but to force Bundy to cancel a planned debate with leading scholars on Vietnam policy. It was Vietnam, not the Dominican Republic, that was preoccupying Washington. It is always something else.
CHAPTER TWO
The First Question
The first question most people ask when they learn how many Major League Baseball players have been produced by this one small town of San Pedro de Macorís is “What’s in the water?” There seem to be numerous things in the water, some from the Mexican cement factory along the Higuamo River. But there is probably nothing in the water that would help with baseball. San Pedro baseball was not born from the water but from the history of the town.
Dominicans tend to be more attached to their regions than to their country, a fact that has proved important in the organization of baseball. One of the reasons it is so difficult to define Dominican culture is that although it is a small country—it is large only by Caribbean standards—the Dominican Republic has distinct regions with