On May 1961, after more than thirty years in power, the dictator Rafael Trujillo was shot and killed when his blue 1957 Chevrolet Bel Air was ambushed on a road outside Santo Domingo, the Dominican capital, by a group of Dominican dissidents. In December, 1962 new elections were held, which were won by Juan Bosch, a scholar and poet. His leftist policies, including land redistribution, nationalization of certain foreign holdings, and attempts to bring the military under civilian control, antagonized the military officer corps, the Catholic hierarchy, and the upper-class, who feared another Cuba. In September 1963 Bosch was overthrown by a right-wing military coup led by Colonel Elías Wessin and was replaced by a three-man military junta. Bosch went into exile to Puerto Rico. Afterwards a supposedly civilian triumvirate established a de facto dictatorship.
On April, 1965 the civil war broke out. Growing dissatisfaction generated another military rebellion that demanded Bosch's restoration. The insurgents, reformist officers and civilian combatants loyal to Bosch commanded by Colonel Francisco Caamaño, and who called themselves the Constitutionalists, staged a coup, seizing the national palace. Immediately, conservative military forces, led by Wessin and calling themselves Loyalists, struck back with tank assaults and aerial bombings against Santo Domingo.
I didn’t experience first hand the death and destruction caused by the war, because most of the armed conflict took place in Santo Domingo, the Capital City. We lived in Santiago, in the interior of the island. But I clearly remember one day, when I heard a deafening sound coming from the sky, like machine guns, and we all went out to the street to find out what it was, and the sky was full of helicopters, the kind you see in movies about the Vietnam war. Being only nine years old, I was impressed by those flying machines, but also scared, aware that something bad was occurring. “What’s going on?” I asked my aunt. “The Yankees are invading us,” she replied.
The anti-Bosch army elements had requested U.S. military intervention and U.S. forces landed, ostensibly to protect and evacuate American citizens and other foreign nationals. U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson, convinced of the defeat of the Loyalist forces and fearing the creation of a second Cuba on America's doorstep, ordered U.S. forces to restore order. In what was initially known as Operation Power Pack, 23,000 U.S. troops were ultimately ordered to the Dominican Republic.
After six months of fighting between the people and one faction of the Dominican armed forces on one side, and the American army and another faction of the Dominican armed forces on the other side, the war ended. We went back to a precarious peace, to some sort of normality under the rule of a pseudo-democracy or a semi-dictatorship.
I think it was around that time that my passion for reading was awakened. I started reading comic books, and then the Reader’s Digest magazines that Mauricio, a neighbourhood friend, used to lend me. I couldn’t afford to buy them. My father gave me an allowance of 15 cents every Sunday; that was ten cents for the afternoon movie, and five cents for a snack. Later, when my allowance was increased to 25 cents, I was able to save 35 cents a month, to buy the monthly Readers’ Digest, which I would read cover to cover. After that, I went on to reading novels. “Treasure Island” by Robert Louis Stevenson was my first. I borrowed them from the library, as I couldn’t afford to buy them.
© William Almonte Jiménez, 2015
