The Eastern Stars Read Online Free PDF Page B

whitened merengue by insisting on the version from the white Cibao region. Another attempt to whiten the race was made in 1937. While everyone was consumed with the epic baseball showdown between Ciudad Trujillo and San Pedro, Trujillo launched Operación Perejil , more ominously nicknamed the corte , the cutting down.
    Most Haitian-born people cannot say perejil , the Spanish word for parsley. Haitians speaking their mother tongue, Creole, tend to pronounce r as w , which is an African influence. And, like many English-speaking people, they struggle with the Spanish j , the jota , which, coming from Arabic, has a raspy h sound. Trujillo sent soldiers to the border region armed with sprigs of parsley. When encountering anyone who seemed suspiciously dark or had African features, a soldier would take out the sprig and ask the person to identify it. If he said something sounding like “pewidgil,” he was either sent across the border or killed. It is not known exactly how many were executed. The New York Times initially estimated between 2,700 and 3,000, but the killing continued. Galíndez guessed that there were more than 20,000 dead, and some estimates have been as high as 30,000 murdered. Those on sugar bateys were not touched, and it is supposed but not certain that Trujillo’s message was that Haitians could come to the Dominican Republic but had to keep to their bateys . Afterward the merengue composer Julio Eladio Pérez came out with the song “Trujillo en la Frontera,” “Trujillo at the Border,” in which the Dominicans of the border thank the caudillo for bringing peace and progress to the region.
    Trujillo also tried to whiten himself. He was rumored to have some Haitian blood and was a little dark—nothing that couldn’t be fixed with the right amount of Pan-Cake makeup. According to journalist Bernard Diederich, who covered Trujillo in the 1950s, the general’s foundation would start to streak in the tropical heat and he would shoo away press photographers.
    Trujillo’s story says much about the relationship of the United States and the Dominican Republic. Trujillo rose to prominence because of the U.S. military occupation. His murderous rule was tolerated by Presidents Hoover, Roosevelt, Truman, and Eisenhower—even in 1956, when his agents kidnapped Galíndez in New York. Although Trujillo was torturing and murdering Dominicans by the hundreds, what was important to Roosevelt was that Trujillo sided with the Allies; to Eisenhower, it was that Trujillo was a staunch anticommunist. But in June 1960, before Kennedy was elected, Trujillo tried to assassinate Rómulo Betancourt, the president of Venezuela. Then, shortly after Kennedy was elected in November, Trujillo killed the three Mirabal sisters. Once in office, Kennedy decided that the U.S. did not want him anymore, and soon Trujillo was dead.
    In British novelist Graham Greene’s Our Man in Havana , police captain Segura, an infamous torturer, explains the idea of a torturable class: that a dictator could murder and torture as many people as he liked as long as he did not touch the kind of ruling-class people to whom other world leaders could relate. Trujillo had crossed that line. No longer just a killer of nameless brown people, he had become a rogue menace in the world. To deal with him, the CIA linked up with a Dominican underground that the U.S. had not helped for thirty years, and that was the end of the general.
    Trujillo ran the most successful kleptocracy in Caribbean history—not an insignificant achievement, considering the contenders. For a kleptocracy, success is marked by the amount stolen and the number of years in a position to keep stealing. Trujillo, although he ran only a small, poor country, became one of the richest men in the world and lasted longer than even the Duvaliers in neighboring Haiti—father and son combined. Of course, in reality the longest kleptocracy in Caribbean history was the centuries in which Europe sucked