Chronicle of the Present

Between January and May of 1961, John F. Kennedy’s administration made three attempts to convince Rafael Trujillo Molina to leave the Dominican Republic. The last of these attempts, in early May, was successful. In his memoirs, Virgilio Álvarez Pina, alias Cucho, narrates how he accompanied Trujillo to a meeting in the Ambassador Hotel with a person sent by Kennedy, whose face Álvarez Pina did not see. It seems that from then on, CIA agents tried to convince the conspirators to delay the assassination. We reiterate that these policy errors of the Yankees always result, their power and resources notwithstanding, in a subjective judgment of their actions.

In early April of that year, the author of this column went to the birthday of our late friend, Tage Holsteinson Malagón, who at that time was married to Paddy Henríquez Valenzuela and lived in la Núñez de Cáceres. There we found Chana Díaz and her husband, retired general Juan Tomás Díaz, accompanied by Tage’s mother, Consuelo Malagón, and his aunt Annerys Malagón, widow of Cobián, who introduced us to Chana. Chana introduced us to Juan Tomás, saying that he was the son of Clemencia and Euclides. The general affectionately asked about my parents and continued chatting with Annerys, Doña Consuelo and Paddy in the dining room, and we listened while he responded to a question of Annerys by saying, “Don’t tell me any more about this problem, because sooner than you think, within a few days, it will be resolved.”

The “problem,” as we understood after May 30, was Trjuillo’s assassination, because the team of men who had been around Juan Tomás and Antonio weren’t from the lower class nor from the small urban bourgeois. Juan Tomás Díaz and Antonio from Maza knew that they couldn’t toy with Trujillo, because they knew him very well and that this “shark,” as Juan Bosch respectfully called him in a letter from February 27 of that year, had to be faced resolutely and serenely, as they were profoundly convinced that he was a brave, fearless man.

To claim that Trujillo was a villain is nonsense and a lie, and this description diminishes the traditional courage of the Dominican people, perhaps the most courageous, aggressive and dignified of the American peoples. If an evil man, a coward, a rapist, and a thief was such a prominent figure for more than 50 years, then the ones who aren’t truly serving us are those who flaunt our own nationality, a synthetic version of the identity of the Dominican people, whom Fidel Castro called “Legendary people, veterans of History and the David of the Caribbean.” *

* Efforts to verify this quotation have not been successful.