The Feast of the Goat - Mario Vargas Llosa [76]
With Luis and Iván, who turned out to be even better than he had hoped, Tony filled the poles with sticks of dynamite, and placed the caps after testing them with a remote control. To be certain of their timing, they practiced in the empty lot of the factory after the workers and clerical staff had left, to see how long they needed to take down a piece of existing fence and put up a new one, replacing the old posts with ones full of dynamite. Less than five hours. Everything was ready on June 12. They planned to act on June 15, when Trujillo returned from a trip to Cibao. They had at their disposal a dump truck that would knock down the piece of fence at dawn, so they would have a pretext—wearing the blue overalls of Municipal Services—to replace it with the armed one. They marked two points, each less than fifty paces from the explosion, where, with Imbert to the right and Luis and Iván to the left, they would activate the remote controls in quick succession, the first blast to kill Trujillo at the moment he passed in front of the poles, and the second to make sure he was dead.
And then, on June 14, 1959, the eve of the day they had decided on, in the mountains of Constanza, it happened—the unexpected landing of an airplane from Cuba, painted with the colors and insignia of the Dominican Air Force and carrying anti-Trujillista guerrillas, followed a week later by landings on the beaches of Maimón and Estero Hondo. The arrival of that small detachment, which included the bearded Cuban comandante Delio Gómez Ochoa, sent a chill down the spine of the regime. It was a rash, uncoordinated attempt. The clandestine groups had absolutely no information regarding what was being prepared in Cuba. The support of Fidel Castro for the uprising against Trujillo had been, since the fall of Batista six months earlier, an obsessive topic at their meetings. They counted on that help in every plan they put together and then took apart, and for which they were amassing hunting rifles, revolvers, old shotguns. But no one Imbert knew was in touch with Cuba or had any idea that June 14 would see the arrival of dozens of revolutionaries; after putting the handful of guards at the Constanza airport out of commission, they fled to the nearby mountains, only to be hunted down like rabbits in the days that followed, and killed on the spot or taken to Ciudad Trujillo, where, on Ramfis’s orders, almost all of them were murdered (but not the Cuban Gómez Ochoa and his adopted son, Pedrito Mirabal, whom the regime, in another of its theatrical gestures, returned some time later to Fidel Castro).
And no one could have suspected the magnitude of the repression the government would unleash after the landing. In the ensuing weeks and months, it intensified rather than subsided. The caliés seized all suspects and took them to the SIM, where they were subjected to torture—castration, bursting their eardrums, gouging out their eyes, sitting them on the Throne—to force them to name names. La Victoria, La Cuarenta, and El Nueve were overflowing with young people of both sexes—students, professionals, and office workers—many of them the children or relatives of men in the government. Trujillo was dumbfounded: was it possible that the children, grandchildren, nieces and nephews of the people who had benefited most from the regime were plotting against him? They were shown no consideration despite their family names, white faces, and middle-class trappings.
Luis Gómez Pérez and Iván Tavares Castellanos fell into the hands of the caliés of the SIM on the morning of the day scheduled for the attack. With his customary realism, Antonio Imbert knew he had no possibility of seeking asylum: all the embassies were surrounded by lines of uniformed police, soldiers, and caliés. He calculated that, under torture, Luis, Iván, or anyone else from the clandestine groups would mention his