The Last Playboy: The High Life of Porfirio Rubirosa

“I am the son of General Rubirosa.”

The bully stopped walking. “In that case,” he declared, “I cannot fight you. I served under your father.”

The episode became a local legend, spun in some versions with elaborate detail. But there was a bitter private irony to it: Don Pedro’s name might still have been big enough to ward off an angry man with a knife, but his body was failing. In 1930, just before the national elections, he moved to San Francisco de Macorís, ostensibly to run as a congressional deputy for the district but quite obviously to die in the tranquility of his birthplace.

He moved into the house of his father-in-law, a strange old bird who’d been an important local lawyer until he was accused, in 1895, of having embezzled public funds; he was proven innocent, but he was so offended that his fellow townspeople should doubt him that he became a hermit, isolating himself in his house. “He never left his study or library and he refused to see anyone besides his family and clients,” remembered Porfirio. “He never again put a foot in the street, and the only journey he made out of the house was in the hearse that carried him to the cemetery.” Don Pedro wasn’t quite so eccentric, but he was just as surely retreating from the world.

The gravity of his father’s condition impressed Porfirio, who left Santo Domingo for Don Pedro’s side and applied himself sufficiently to his studies to pass his baccalaureate and find work teaching French in a local school. He kept up his soccer, he took up competitive swimming, he traded lessons on the ukulele for guitar lessons from his cousin Evita.

And he sat patiently as Don Pedro, his voice weakened, told stories of his warrior days and shared his worries over the seemingly permanent chaos of Dominican governance. Indeed, even as Santo Domingo prepared for what was being billed as a free election, a rebellion against the government was brewing in—where else?—the Cibao.

Don Pedro knew the minds of both the government and the rebels. He had been offered positions of responsibility by both, refusing in each case because he saw the country’s salvation in neither. In particular, he had strong fears about the leader of the National Police, a cunning and unlikely arriviste who had diabolically made Don Pedro the offer of ruling the country after a coup. As he sat with his son reading a newspaper account of the brewing rebellion, Don Pedro pointed a feeble finger at a name in a headline and said, as his son recalled, “Here is the heart of the plot. The one in charge, in the shadows, pulling the strings, who has all the trump cards, is Trujillo.”

* In England and America, they came to be known as lounge lizards.

THREE

THE BENEFACTOR AND THE CHILD BRIDE

His uniforms were always immaculate, as were, when he could finally afford them, his hundreds of suits.

His manner careered unpredictably from obsequious to civil to icy.

His appetites for drink, dance, pomp, and sex were colossal.

His capacity for focused work seemed infinite.

He was a finicky eater.

With his thin little mustache, he looked a cross of Charlie Chaplin’s Monsieur Verdoux and a bullfrog, always with his hair slicked back, always standing erect to the fullness of his five feet seven inches, always tending slightly toward plumpness (as a boy, he was mocked as Chapito: “little fatty”).

He had a massive ego that sat perilously on a foundation of dubious self-confidence.

He remembered everything and forgave nothing, though he might wait years to avenge a grudge.

He wasn’t above physically torturing his enemies and throwing their corpses to the sharks, but he had at his disposal more insidious schemes that involved anonymous gossip, public shunning, and other shames that cut deeper, perhaps, than any punishment his goons might mete out.

His scheming and brutality and cunning and shamelessness and greed and nepotism and cruelty and gall and paranoia and righteousness and delusions of grandeur verged on the superhuman.

He was one of the most ruthless and reprehensible caudillos, or strongmen, ever to hold sway in the Western Hemisphere—and one of the most enduring.

He was Rafael Leonidas Trujillo Molina, and he formed an unholy bond with Porfirio Rubirosa that would crucially shape the latter’s life.

Trujillo was born in October 1891, the third of eleven children of a poor family from San Cristóbal, a provincial capital in the dusty south of the island. The town began as a gold rush camp, then settled into a long, hard haul as one of the island’s many centers for processing sugarcane. It was never an illustrious spot, but for several decades of the twentieth century, it was known by federal decree as the Meritorious City, simply because it was the birthplace of this one man.

By his sixteenth birthday, with only a grammar school education, Trujillo was working full-time as a telegraph operator—and perhaps doing a little cattle rustling on the side, though records of his activities in that sphere would one day disappear. (Likewise, he was convicted of forgery and at another time suspected of embezzlement, but in neither case could it be shown on paper after he’d established his domain over the nation and its historical records.)

By his twenty-second birthday Trujillo was married to a country girl named Aminta Ledesma who was pregnant with a baby daughter who would die at age one and, like her father’s criminal record, be erased from later accounts of his life. A second daughter, with a grander future, came the following year. They named her Flor de Oro—“golden flower” in English, “Anacaona” (the name of a warrior chieftainess of the Jaragua tribe) in the native Taino.

Trujillo first engaged with the hair-raising brand of Dominican politics in the mid-1910s, when he joined an unsuccessful rebellion against one of the nation’s fleeting governments and had to live on the run in the jungle until finally, ragged and starving and underfed and missing a few teeth, he threw himself on the mercy of the authorities. Granted amnesty, he came back home and turned to crime, as a member of a gang called the Forty-four. And then he found honest work in a sugar refinery, first as a clerk and then, providentially, as a security guard.

It was no rent-a-cop position. In the lawless Dominican Republic of the era, the policía of a thriving private business constituted, in many cases, the only local authority of any standing. These forces were charged with keeping the peace and guarding their bosses’ property from theft, but they also fought fires in the cane fields, protected payrolls, made sure workers didn’t defect to rival operations, and mounted and supervised such profitable side businesses as bars, brothels, and weekly cockfights.

It was a position that called for a calculating mind composed of equal parts soldier, accountant, psychologist, and mafioso. Trujillo was perfect for it.

He liked the work so well, in fact, that he decided to become a career soldier, applying at the end of 1918 to join the National Police, the only military force open to a Dominican during the American occupation. His letter requesting induction was a combination of bootlicking, braggadocio, and bald-faced lies: “I wish to state that I do not possess the vices of drinking or smoking, and that I have not been convicted in any court or been involved in minor misdemeanors.”

He was accepted, enrolling as a second lieutenant in January 1919. Within three years, he had attended an officers training school and been promoted to captain. The Yankees liked him: “I consider this officer one of the best in the service,” wrote one evaluating officer. And he continued to advance, sometimes in shadowy fashion. In 1924, the major under whom he served was killed by a jealous husband; most onlookers assumed that the offended party was put onto the scent of his wife’s affair by Trujillo, who eventually replaced the dead man in rank and duties. By the end of that year, with the North American marines having returned home, Major Trujillo was third in the chain of command of a military force that was virtually unopposed in ruling the land.

All that remained now was to take over.

But before he could ascend to full power, there was a domestic matter to resolve: namely, the peasant girl he had married, hardly a fitting wife for a man of his status. Sexually, Aminta had long since been replaced by a string of women, one of whom, Bienvenida Ricart, Trujillo had singled out as a likely next wife. Divorce by mutual consent was, curiously, legal in the almost homogeneously Catholic Dominican Republic at the time, and in September 1925 the Trujillos’ marriage was dissolved by civil decree. Trujillo was ordered to pay alimony, to provide Aminta with a house, and, to his frustration, to leave Flor de Oro to live with her mother—a detail he would revisit.

A full two years later, serving at the rank of brigadier general, he married Bienvenida. But by then yet another concubine had taken a special place in his heart: María Martínez, who in 1929 would trump her rivals by producing a male heir, Rafael Leonidas Trujillo Martínez, a boy stamped for life with the nickname Ramfis, derived from his father’s love of Verdi’s dynastic opera Aida. Through the coming years, just as he navigated with Machiavellian deliberation the political waters of the nation, so would Trujillo manipulate these women, regularly discarding a lower-class mate for a higher as a means of fashioning his image and his fate: a proper tíguere.

He proved as decisive and ruthless in public life as in private. In the next two years, he moved gradually, in the shadows, to solidify a power base from which he might seize control of the country. In 1928, the National Police was transformed by law into a proper National Army, and Trujillo was named its chief. But he had additional resources at his disposal—thuggish gangs that enforced his wishes and maintained a cordon sanitaire of plausible deniability between his official position and the more brutal imposition of his will.

He patiently bided the ineffective presidency of Horacio Vásquez, the military man whose ascent back in 1924 had convinced the North American occupiers that the country could see to itself. As Vásquez’s health failed and his government weakened toward collapse, various groups jockeyed to replace him. Each knew that it would need Trujillo on its side. None, however, fathomed the deep logic of the situation as well as he or recognized that he had fancied himself the best man to rule the country.

Presidential elections were announced for 1930, and it wasn’t clear that Vásquez was out of the running; many notables—including, at times, Trujillo, at least publicly—declared an interest in his reelection. But at the same time, Trujillo hatched an audacious, sinister plan to usurp the presidency. In broad outline, he would confide in an ally in each opposition party his intention to support its cause by staging a rebellion of disloyal troops in—where else?—the Cibao; when Vásquez sent him to quell the rebellion, for he could turn to no one else, Trujillo would instead take command of it, leading it into the capital and overseeing a rigged election that would put his candidate—whoever that might be—in power.

What Trujillo told almost no one was that he was his own preferred candidate, that he was going to pull his support from whichever side came closest to power when it would be too late to stop him, seizing the top spot for himself. He shared his plans with the American diplomats who monitored Dominican politics from a judicious remove while wielding the threat of a second occupation as a means of influencing the nation’s affairs (the Yanks were still impressed with him, if less than enthusiastic about his plan). He also shared his plans with Don Pedro Rubirosa, who declined to take part.

The scheme was so risky that Trujillo hedged against failure by keeping a small fortune in cash at the ready should it fail and he be forced to flee. As it turned out, it went almost exactly as he’d planned. He found credulous dupes in each political camp and played them sublimely: Each man, in his own ambition to usurp the presidency, was certain he had the army’s support. He fomented just the right amount of faux unrest in the Cibao; when Vásquez felt himself nervously in need of a stronger military of his own, Trujillo was promoted to minister of national defense. A little more than a week later, as the phony revolt approached the capital, Vásquez, masterfully gulled, demanded assurances of loyalty from Trujillo and, mollified, directed him to stave off the impending coup. Trujillo sent a token platoon to oppose the insurrection—with orders, of course, to join rather than stop it—and then holed himself up with a more sizable and better-armed force in the chief redoubt of Santo Domingo, the Ozama Fortress. And there he sat implacably, insisting on his loyalty to Vásquez while the besieged president was forced to resign without a shot being fired in his defense.

Trujillo allowed his coconspirators in the opposition briefly to enjoy a show of control over the nation. And he equanimously allowed the presidential election to be held, with Vásquez’s party still permitted to run a candidate. But the whole thing was a dark farce. Everyone who might have taken power had been suborned by Trujillo into treason; no one could risk exposing his own deceit by stepping forward to claim the reins. Trujillo used frank acts of intimidation and violence to curb any dissent to his own puppet candidate, Rafael Estrella Ureña, and then simply strong-armed the man out of the race. The sham election was protested even before it occurred: An oversight board resigned en masse a week before the balloting. In May 1930, Trujillo was elected president by a near unanimous (and patently fabricated) majority that would have made the most megalomaniacal despot envious; in August, amid the high pomp he had felt was due him even in his days as a telegraph operator, he was inaugurated.

With epic tenacity and iron severity, Trujillo would so impose his personality on the Dominican Republic and its people that there would be no appreciable distinction between the man and the nation. Stalin, Mao, Castro, Amin, Ceausescu, Hussein, Kim Il Sung: none would have the same degree or depth of impact on the psyche of his people. In the course of time, every home in the country would boast a sign reading “God and Trujillo”—often right out on the roof in huge letters. Santo Domingo would be renamed Ciudad Trujillo; calendars would all be dated according to the Era of Trujillo, with 1930 as Year One; Pico Duarte, at ten thousand feet the highest peak in the Caribbean, would be renamed Little Trujillo—as opposed, of course, to the big one who sat, literally, on the throne in the National Palace; the first toast at any formal dinner, especially those at which he was not in attendance, would be to the health and honor of Trujillo; and he would be spoken of not as the President or the Generalísimo or the leader but, unironically, as the Benefactor.

These ritualistic incarnations of the cult of personality didn’t emerge immediately after Trujillo took power. No, before the tíguere Trujillo could metamorphose from soldier to god, certain parties reluctant to being held in his domain would have to be made to knuckle under. In particular, there was the refined circle of bourgeois families who dominated the social and cultural life of the capital. Educated, traveled, wealthy, born to relative privilege, they looked frankly down their noses at Trujillo with his mean roots, antiquated manners, and precise mien. In 1928, still merely an ambitious officer, Trujillo had stood for election to the Club Unión, one of Santo Domingo’s most elite social institutions, and was admitted because, as everybody who observed the process knew, somebody acting under his orders had tampered with the vote. That he nevertheless went ahead and joined and attended the club was the most desperate sort of social climbing; Trujillo felt the sting of having been forced to embarrass himself and filed it away for future vindication. His revenge was swift: In 1932, after filling the club with military officers, he was elected as its president, transferred the entire membership wholesale to a newly formed premises, and had the genteel old home of the Club Unión razed.

But Trujillo characteristically had another, more cunning scheme for gaining influence over the Dominican elite. If he couldn’t enlist the parents, he would enlist the children. And he found a perfect candidate with whom to begin his campaign: the feckless, French-educated, popular son of the estimable and recently deceased Don Pedro Maria Rubirosa.

In the autumn of 1931, Porfirio was out at a drinking party with friends at the Country Club, another of Santo Domingo’s swank gathering places, when he noticed Trujillo, in full, glistening uniform, presiding over a party of military officers across the room. It was an inauspicious time for the young man: Upon his death a year earlier, Don Pedro had left his son little more than the thin veil of a good reputation—for which, truly, Porfirio had no practical use—and a deathbed wish that he continue his legal education. With the household now dominated by his brother-in-law Gilberto Sánchez Lustrino, a dreary future seemed probable. Obviously the opportunity to return to Paris was negligible, and the seemingly unavoidable legal studies would clearly tear him from the sporting, leisurely life of the streets of Santo Domingo.

Sánchez Lustrino was a true Dominican bourgeois, more dedicated to shows of courtliness and refinement than Don Pedro had ever been, a born-and-bred member of that class of gentlefolk who sneered, sometimes openly, at the pretenses of the rustic new president. And, as Porfirio didn’t care much for his brother-in-law, he was particularly pleased when an aide of Trujillo’s came to the table that night at the Country Club and told Porfirio that the president wanted to see him.

As he approached the group of soldiers who, in contrast to his boisterous friends, sipped their drinks in tightly wound decorum, Porfirio observed that “one man dominated with his energetic mien, his dark and severe gaze, a certain hidden brutality and his impeccable uniform: Trujillo.” But when he was introduced to this forbidding man, a chameleonic transformation occurred before his eyes. “I was stupefied at the change that came over him,” he later recalled. “His severe expression disappeared, and he seemed very pleased to meet the son of an old friend.”*

Porfirio knew that Trujillo had attempted to lure Don Pedro into the byzantine scheme by which he gained control of the country and that his father, partly because of his ill health, partly because he genuinely desired that his nation’s future be decided democratically, demurred. So he wasn’t entirely surprised that Trujillo made mention of his grief at Don Pedro’s passing: “You know, I was very pained by your father’s death. Men like him are what we lack today.”

Likewise, Porfirio wasn’t surprised that Trujillo failed to be impressed by his choice of profession. “Students, always with their noses in books!” he snorted. “If we don’t advance more quickly, it’s because young men like you don’t participate in this great effort.”

But there was a surprise coming: Hard on that admonition, Trujillo gently suggested that Porfirio meet him at the National Palace the next morning to discuss his future, say 10 A.M. The matter agreed, the older man stood and, begging pardon, left the club, but not without a final invitation: “Sit here with your friends. Tonight you are the guests of the President!” Porfirio waved his chums over and they joined the soldiers, who slackened their rigid posture when Trujillo left and drank brandy and champagne with the young men until the early morning hours.

He returned home and prepared for his meeting, his head heavy from the night’s indulgences. At the palace, he found Trujillo characteristically alert, erect, immaculate, and direct.

“Did you enjoy yourself last night?”

“Thanks to you, Mr. President.”

“Very good. Now let’s get to more serious matters. I am going to make you a lieutenant in my Presidential Guard.”

There was no time—or, indeed, reason—for retort. Trujillo immediately sent a lackey to fetch an administrative official, to whom he announced, “I have just named Señor Rubirosa a lieutenant. I want to see him in uniform immediately. Take him to my personal tailor, my shoemaker and my gunsmith. Tonight he’ll enter the military training academy.”

As he was outfitted in the splendor that Trujillo demanded for himself and those closest to him, Porfirio tried to wrap his mind around the situation. “At 22,” he admitted, “this was a windfall … I was sufficiently vain to believe that my personality and the name of my family had occasioned this treatment by the General.” But he managed as well to plumb Trujillo’s deeper motives. Addicted to gossip—especially as a means of dominating its subjects—Trujillo had heard about Don Pedro’s popular boy-about-town and determined to use the young man’s social standing for his own purposes. Porfirio understood it instinctively: “He had resolved to get the golden youth of the island involved in the reform of his army. I seemed a young man well suited for this plan because of the prestige of my father and the esteem that my Parisian education had among young men of my generation.”

At heart, he understood Trujillo because the two were cut of the same material: “The General was a tíguere,” he recollected, “crueler than any of the other tígueres Santo Domingo had known before. This tíguere was smarter than a fox.” In time, their relationship would evolve into a complete symbiosis. Trujillo, capable of the most ruthless acts, would pass virtually all his life in the Dominican Republic to keep his iron fist on its affairs, would commit the most ruthless acts of violence and immorality to suit his pleasure and his power, but would always take especial care to maintain at least a show of public decency. Porfirio, who would eventually emerge as his country’s most visible emissary to the outside world, habitually engaged in a more extroverted and sensational form of tíguerismo, based not on the ruthless wielding of fear but on suavity, dash, ambition, charm, and magnetism. He would provide the sophisticated public face of a brutal regime while Trujillo would, in turn, provide a steely foundation for his stupendous adventures—a mutuality that Trujillo seemed almost to have planned from the start.

It began when, hung over and greedy, Porfirio swallowed the bait dangled before him, allowing yet another of the older man’s schemes to unfold exactly as it had been planned. “Just as Trujillo imagined,” he confessed, “many young men of the Dominican upper classes followed me.”

He didn’t care if he was being used. Military life, contrary to expectations, appealed to him. As he would recall, “Physical efforts filled our days: calisthenics, various sports, arms training, target practice, horseback riding. For a young man like me, it was paradise.” It was made for him: the smart, elaborate uniforms, the camaraderie of fellow junior officers, the freedom from the responsibility to feed or house himself or define his days.

He loved his uniforms, and he looked brilliant in them: pinch-waisted, sharp-jawed, muscular, whippy, with a tight crown of wavy hair, a broad forehead, dark almond-shaped eyes, wide cheekbones, and that café au lait complexion. He wore his hair longer than other soldiers and his boots were more suited to gentlemanly pursuits than to combat or training. If the elite society of Santo Domingo wasn’t yet prepared to accept Trujillo and his military, there were certainly young ladies whose eyes, and more, would readily be caught by the spectacle of this handsome, cultured young officer. He was in his glory.

His golden impression of his new life wasn’t shared at home. His brother-in-law asserted his domain over the household by refusing to allow a soldier to live under his roof. Porfirio simply moved into the barracks.