On May 30, 1961, the dictator Rafael Trujillo was shot and killed when his car was ambushed on a road outside Santo Domingo, the Dominican capital. The conspirators, however, failed to take control of the government. The Trujillo family put the SIM (Military Intelligence Service) to work to hunt down the members of the plot and brought back the dictator’s son, Ramfis Trujillo, from Paris, who assumed control of the country. Hundreds of suspects were detained, many tortured, and executed. But the attempt by the Trujillo family to keep control of the nation failed. In November 1961, they were forced into exile, fleeing to France, and the puppet president, Joaquín Balaguer, assumed power.
At the insistence of the United States government, Balaguer was forced to share power with a seven-member Council of State, established on January 1, 1962, which included moderate members of the opposition. Following an attempted coup, Balaguer resigned and went into exile on January 16. The reorganized Council of State, under President Rafael Bonnelly, headed the Dominican government until the elections in December 1962.
Juan Bosch, a scholar and poet who had founded the opposition Partido Revolucionario Dominicano (Dominican Revolutionary Party, or PRD) in exile during the Trujillo years, won the elections. His socialist policies alarmed the military officer corps, the Catholic clergy, and the upper classes, who feared the country would become 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 in Puerto Rico. Afterwards, what seemed to be a civilian triunvirato soon became a de facto tyranny.
Those were years of political unrest, but, since I was only seven years old I don’t remember much of it. What I mostly retain from that time are joyful memories of summers spent at my grandma’s farm. Sometimes I was accompanied by my brothers or cousins. The stay at grandma’s farm was always a cornucopia of extraordinary activities: tobogganing on a yagua (the thick woody sheathing of the palm tree branches) over the carpet of slippery leaves under the cocoa trees; collecting the mangoes and avocados that the wind had knocked down the night before; digging out sweet potatoes.
Grandma was a widow. Only two of her unmarried daughters lived with her, and they all had to work on the fields. I particularly enjoyed accompanying her when she went to the fields to plant seeds. With her machete, she would inflict a wound on the ground, and I would put a seed in it.
During the day, the countryside was beautiful, shining, and magical. Birds and cicadas chirped and buzzed in the branches of the chestnut trees. The hills loomed high across the stream. The wind whistled, sometimes furiously, sometimes playfully, on the tops of the mango trees, making them look like living giants. The fields of corn, plantains, cassava, coffee, and cocoa were a testimony to the generosity of Mother Earth. But at nightfall, without electric lighting, the hollow where Grandma lived was pitch-black. Looking through the windows of the ranch to the spooky shadows that ruled outside, the countryside became a fearsome place, haunted by monsters, ghosts, and demons.
That’s when I would seek grandma’s company, who, sitting at the dining table, was doing something, like sewing a quilt, under the light of the kerosene lamp. She knew me very well and knew what was going through my mind. I would sit on a chair next to her, fold my arms on the table, and bury my face in them, as though ignoring the shadows covering the ranch were to protect me against the evil creatures lurking in the night, hiding behind the trees. After that, I would wait for her hands, which invariably would start petting my hair until I fell asleep.
© William Almonte Jiménez, 2015
