The Eastern Stars Read Online Free PDF

controlled by foreign financial institutions. In everything the Dominicans tried to do, they were divided between two bitterly opposed groups: the reds and the blues, the Partido Rojo and the Partido Azul.
    It was the fate of the Dominican Republic to fill odd footnotes in history and never center stage. World War I was the pretext for a U.S. invasion of the Dominican Republic. As World War II approached, when the world turned its back on German Jewish refugees, the Dominican dictator Trujillo took them in—welcoming them not out of a sense of humanity but to blanquear , whiten, the racial makeup of Dominicans, just as the Haitians had welcomed American blacks to darken it.
    When World War I was breaking out, the Americans discovered that Dominican waters were in danger of a German takeover, so they took over instead. In truth, the invasion was part of a policy that went back to 1898 of securing the Caribbean for building the Panama Canal. The U.S. during this period found excuses to invade six Caribbean nations, including both Haiti and the Dominican Republic. The Americans suspected that the Dominicans, given their history and their deep debt to European banks, would one day throw in with the Europeans, right in their own backyard, at the gateway to Panama.
    In remarkable similarity to the invasion of Iraq not quite ninety years later, the U.S. invaded in 1916 with few clear goals or explanations and was surprised to find that locals resented the American presence. Dominicans formed into small bands that sporadically attacked U.S. troops, who called them bandits. The U.S. created a Dominican national police force to control the rebels but struggled to get Dominicans to effectively take charge of this force.
    The U.S. military established an officer training school in Haina. Among the graduates in the first class was a drifter and petty criminal named Rafael Leónidas Trujillo Molina. Although there had been some problems with this young enlisted man trying to extort money from the locals, the charges had been dropped and he was approved for officer training. Graduating a second lieutenant, Trujillo befriended high-ranking American officers and rose so rapidly that in 1924, when the Americans left, claiming they had stabilized the country and built an effective police force, Trujillo was a major. Soon after, he became a lieutenant colonel. The Americans had said they wanted to achieve stability, and indeed they had. Within six years of the American withdrawal, his opposition exhausted by its eight-year war with the U.S. Marines, Trujillo had gained complete control of the country. He kept it for thirty-one years, one of the longest-running dictatorships in history, until he was assassinated in 1961 with the complicity of the CIA.
    Trujillo ruled by personal whim—“megalomania” was the word used by Jesús de Galíndez, a Basque refugee of the Spanish Civil War, in his doctoral dissertation on Trujillo at Columbia University, for which the general had Galíndez kidnapped from New York and brought to Santo Domingo. His body was never found, and the variety of gruesome stories that circulated about his end were testimony to the dark Dominican imagination. Of course, Trujillo himself had a Dominican imagination—none darker—and one of these grim stories was probably true. Galíndez, like many in the decades of Trujillo government, came to a very bad end. In his dissertation, which chronicles meticulously both the eccentricity and brutality of the regime, Galíndez reported that in 1935 Trujillo’s henchmen had assassinated a political opponent in exile in New York; that they had murdered another Dominican in 1952 on Madison Avenue; and that in 1950, in Havana, they had murdered Mauricio Báez, a union organizer from San Pedro de Macorís. None of this turned the U.S. government against General Trujillo.
    The Jewish refugee incident is only one of many examples of Trujillo’s obsession with “whitening the race.” He