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Editorial 3-8
Ética y nacionalismo
Contenido
Ana Féliz Lafontaine 9-24
Les états nationaux vs. la société cosmopolite. Une lecture critique du ius
cosmopoliticum dans le républicanisme de Habermas
Rosaura Sánchez
Beatrice Pita 61-86
Pablo Mella sj
Documentos
Franklin Franco 109-141
Estudios Sociales
Año 51, Vol. XLII-Número 158
Enero- abril 2019
EDITORIAL
Ética y nacionalismo
Estudios Sociales
Año 51, Vol. XLII-Número 158
Enero- abril 2019
Resumen
* Una primera versión de este artículo apareció también como fascículo por ISD/
Fundación F. Ebert. Santo Domingo. 2018.
** Historiadora y activista social dominicana. Docente de historia dominicana y lati-
noamericana en la Universidad Autónoma de Santo Domingo (UASD) y en el Instituto
Superior Bonó. Correo electrónico: anylafontaine4@gmail.com
10 Ana Féliz Lafontaine
Abstract
With regard to the results of the national survey “Imagining the future:
political culture, citizenship and democracy in the Dominican Republic”,
which was drawn up at the end of 2016 by the Social Research Institute
of Santiago de los Caballeros, the author of this text poses the problem of
the limitations presented by conceptions or discourses of an essentialist
nature on the nationality and identity of Dominicans. For in seeking
to seek a “essence” or true and immutable origin of what is Dominican,
those discourses not only deny or reject part of the Dominican reality
that overflows, but forget that self-identification by which people perceive
themselves a certain mode constitutes rather a continuous and changing
process, in constant movement, in which local and global social, political
and economic phenomena affect or impact. That is why the author echoes
the assertion that cultural identity should be thought of as something never
finished and in constant negotiation, in terms of, to a very high degree,
the deterritorialized symbolic goods that circulate through the networks of
global connection.
Résumé
SERVICIOS
PERMISOS DE DERECHO
REGIONES PÚBLICOS A
TRABAJO NACIONALIDAD
INMIGRANTES
REGION OZAMA 43.35% 40.59% 57.43%
CIBAO NORTE 54.67% 45.33% 55.61%
CIBAO SUR 34.60% 47.68% 29.16%
CIBAO NORDESTE 13.71% 44.21% 49.17%
CIBAO NOROESTE 58.75% 50.75% 63.50%
VALDESIA 44.49% 38.05% 43.38%
ENRIQUILLO 22.75% 36.25% 13.25%
EL VALLE 14.50% 15.50% 3.50%
YUMA 26.56% 24.69% 24.06%
HIGUAMO 22.91% 28.79% 45.82%
Fuente: Encuesta ISD, 2016
Gráfico VII.1 Si tuviera que elegir un color de piel que más represente a los
dominicanos, ¿cuál sería?
50.00%
46.38%
45.00%
40.00%
35.00%
30.00%
25.00%
20.00% 17.22%
15.63%
15.00%
9.54%
10.00% 7.42%
5.00% 2.19%
1.12% 0.50%
0.00%
Blanco Negro Indio Amarillo Mestizo Todos por Ninguno NS/NR
igual
50.00%
40.00%
30.00%
22.44%
20.00%
13.46%
10.00% 8.21%
2.00%
0.00%
Africana Española Indígena Una NS/NR
mezcla/mestizaje
NR
NS
No
Si
Referencias bibliográficas
Estudios Sociales
Año 51, Vol. XLII-Número 158
Enero- abril 2019
Resumen
En este artículo analizamos qué significa, según Jürgen Habermas,
una sociedad civil de carácter cosmopolita. Para ello recurriremos a su
criticada noción de “patriotismo constitucional” ponderando las fuentes
de las cuales el autor alemán bebe, pero que también supera, es decir,
el Kant de “Ideas para una historia universal en clave cosmopolita” y de
Sobre la paz perpetua. El republicanismo deliberativo de Habermas tiene
que vérselas con la restricción de la soberanía de los Estados nacionales
y con la pacificación que se urge entre ellos, cuyo propósito es superar
los vínculos ferinos (status naturae) y llevar hasta la interestatalidad el
rango de status civilis que se ha logrado intraestatalmente. El fin último
es el ius cosmopoliticum, o lo que es lo mismo, la ampliación de la esfera
de los derechos a una escala mundial, de manera que el orden jurídico
y la solidaridad internacional amparen a los individuos más allá de su
adscripción a un Estado-nación particular.
Abstract
In this article we analyze what a “cosmopolitan civil society” means
according to Jürgen Habermas. For this we will examine his criticized notion
of “constitutional patriotism”, pondering the theoretical sources of which
the German author drinks, but also exceeds, that is, the Kant of “Idea of a
Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View” and Perpetual Peace.
The deliberative republicanism of Habermas has to do with the restriction
of the sovereignty of the national States and with the pacification that is
urgent among them, in order to overcome the wild ties (status naturae) and
to give to the bond between States the rank of status civilis that has been
achieved within the States. The ultimate goal is the constitution of the ius
cosmopoliticum, or what is the same, the expansion of the sphere of rights
on a global scale, so that the legal order and international solidarity protect
individuals beyond their ascription to a particular national State.
Résumé
Dans cet article, nous tenterons d’analyser la conception de Jürgen
Habermas Nous attirerons votre attention sur sa notion critique de
“patriotisme constitutionnel” en essayant de ramener à la surface les
sources auxquelles l’auteur puise ses idées mais qu’il dépasse à son tour,
il s’agit plus précisément de ces ouvrages de Kant : “Idée d’une histoire
universelle d’un point de vue cosmopolite” et “Vers la paix perpétuelle”.
Le républicanisme délibératif de Haberms doit être compris en fonction de
limitation de la souveraineté des États-nations et la pacification urgente
d’entre eux, dont le but est de surmonter les liens (état sauvage naturae)
en passant par les liens interétatiques jusqu’à atteindre le rang de status
civilis qui est le propre de l’état. Le but ultime est le ius cosmopoliticum
qui représente, l’élargissement de la sphère des droits à l’échelle mondiale,
de sorte que l’ordre juridique et la solidarité internationale protègent les
individus au-delà de leur allégeance à un Etat-Nation en particulier.
1. Patriotismo constitucional
7 Ibid., p. 118.
8 J. Habermas, “¿Por qué la Unión Europea necesita un marco constitucional? En:
Boletín Mexicano de Derecho Comparado, No. 105. Disponible en: DOI: http://dx.doi.
org/10.22201/iij.24484873e.2002.105.3737
16 Cfr. J. Habermas, La inclusión…, pp. 110 y 133; También en J. Habermas, “¿Por qué
la Unión…”. Desde el punto de mira de Böckenförde, el patriotismo constitucional,
por muy ajeno a los sentimientos de las pertenencias nacionales, no es sino un pálido
producto de un seminario de universidad, una ficción intelectual a la que no puede
encargársele la tarea de sustituir a la sana conciencia nacional. Es un concepto que
flota en el aire, ajeno al genuino “nosotros” y a su capacidad de vincular emocional-
mente.
17 J. Habermas, La constelación posnacional, Barcelona, Paidós, 2000, p. 141.
28 J. Habermas, El Occidente escindido, Madrid, Trotta, 2006, p. 113. Como curiosi-
dad intelectual, oigamos a Borges: “Yo intento ser cosmopolita. Es evidente que poco
tengo que ver con los esquimales o con el Congo; pero, en realidad, hago lo posible
por ser digno de la universalidad del mundo. Creo que todo el mundo es, natural y
espontáneamente, cosmopolita. Son los gobiernos, los Estados, los que insisten en
las diferencias”. Jorge Luis Borges, “Literatura y latinidad (entrevista con Jean Pierre
Bernès)”. En: G. Duby (Comp.), Civilización latina, Barcelona, Laia, 1989, p. 60.
29 Cfr. J. Habermas, Entre naturalismo y…, pp. 323.
30 J. Habermas, La constelación…, p. 139.
una esfera pública a nivel mundial, cuya función consiste en aportar los
fondos legitimadores de las decisiones tomadas a escala cosmopolítica.
La cosmópolis requiere que se gire sobre los fondos de las voluntades
racionales, a fin de procurar estabilidad a sus propias decisiones admi-
nistrativas. Lo que está ya a la vista, aunque no se mencione, es que efec-
tivamente, y llevada a acto por los imperativos sistémicos, existe una
aglutinación supranacional en la cual se instruyen decisiones que afec-
tan a los actores tomados localmente, dentro de los Estados nacionales.
De allí se sigue, en opinión de Habermas, que para evadir las consecuen-
cias de una orientación tecnocrática de la vida colectiva, decidida ahora
por una burocracia engrandecida, se requiere de una legitimación de de-
cisiones que sobrepasan los límites de los Estados territoriales, teniendo
por base una universalidad moral que la solidaridad mínima arraigada
en los derechos humanos expresaría31.
Habermas no desconoce a estas alturas que el discurso kantiano acerca
de un Estado de Estados es inviable por el despotismo sin alma que esa
figura podría traer consigo; además, porque una tal figura podría poner
en entredicho las distintas identidades y solidaridades colectivas que se
expresan en los términos sustantivos de las convivencias aún atadas a
las tradiciones. Para evadir una nueva violencia, Kant diferenciará cui-
dadosamente “entre “asociación de naciones” (Völkerbund) y “Estado de
naciones” (Volkerstaat)”32. La idea es desvincularse de un poder superior
que impondría una tiranía terrible, fundando entonces una asociación
que “deja intacta la soberanía de sus miembros”33, despidiendo la posibi-
lidad de quedar absorbidas sus competencias nacionales por una repú-
blica mundial que asuma para sí las competencias estatales de la mane-
ra en que las establecían los órdenes nacionales tutelados estatalmente.
El problema kantiano de la represión de una competencia supraestatal
se resuelve, empero, trayendo a colación otro problema: la obligatorie-
dad o coerción que va inscrita en las vinculaciones, ahora llevada a cabo
entre los Estados miembros de la asociación de naciones. Por respetar
las soberanías parciales, la obligación que acarrean las normas jurídi-
cas se pierden de vista o se diluyen en una esperanzada obligatoriedad
moral, más perdida de vista que la obligación jurídica antes referida. La
Völkerbund kantiana “no está pensada como una organización que con
órganos comunes adquiere cualidad estatal y, en cuanto tal, una auto-
ridad coercitiva. Debe confiar por eso tan sólo en una autovinculación
moral de los gobiernos”34. Respetar en demasía la soberanía de los Es-
esa discusión al ámbito de las esferas públicas informal y formal, con la pretensión de
fijarlos (a esos atributos) institucionalmente por medio de ese gran traductor social
llamado “derecho”. Con la protección de tales derechos, pueden los sujetos defender
sus libertades tanto fuera de sus sitios de origen, como dentro de ellos, incluso ha-
ciéndolos valer en contra de gobiernos que están a la zaga en materia de respeto a
las libertades públicas. Habermas va a caballo sobre ambos fueros jurídicos, pero a
ambos deslastrándolos de todo soporte metafísico, otorgándole a la invariable esfera
de la naturaleza un orden de convención en atención a una requerida acción de los
sujetos que hacen, y se hacen, en la historia. Pero para lo relativo a una defensa de
las personas hacia dentro y hacia fuera, por supuesto, son urgidas instancias inter-
nacionales desestatalizadas que hagan idóneo tal sistema de derechos y una auto-
comprensión de la sociedad global en derredor de ellos que los interiorice como ele-
mentos fundamentales de una convivencia ampliada, esto es, que permita el paso del
Estado nacional a la sociedad cosmopolita. Cfr. J. Habermas, Verdad y justificación,
Madrid, Trotta, 2007, pp. 318-320. Sin embargo, ciertas críticas tienen como mira la
absolutización de tales derechos, pues estos trazan las directrices de intervenciones
unilaterales por lo general impulsadas por los países más poderosos representados
en la ONU: mediante una especie de descalificación moral hecha aposta en contra de
un determinado país, la intervención pacificadora o bélica encontraría su respaldo en
la ortodoxia de estos derechos. No obstante, la otra parte alega que la negación de la
intervención, bajo el amparo de la soberanía nacional, no es más que el pretexto de
los gobiernos autocráticos con el fin de perpetuarse en el poder.
litares y busquen ser tratados como iguales por las potencias de viejo linaje. La mo-
dificación de dicha autocomprensión no sigue una vía descendente (todos los países
inmiscuidos en un diálogo mundial entre iguales), sino, antes, una vía ascendente, la
vía según la cual algunos países, cual recién estrenadas potencias, ya no se ven a sí
mismos como pares de los países que no son potencias, sino que ahora reclaman los
privilegios antes restringidos sólo a un grupo de países hegemónicos.
50 Cfr. J. Habermas, El Occidente…, p. 127.
51 Ibid., p. 126; Cfr. J. Habermas, Entre naturalismo y…, p. 318.
52 Cfr. J. Habermas, El Occidente…, p. 49.
tados constitucionales, si debe ser algo más que la fachada del derecho
hegemónico”64. La fuerza productiva de la comunicación y su blando po-
der constituyente no pueden desenchufarse de una arena supranacional
llevada a realidad de manera republicana, pues incluso allí el sistema
de los derechos cobra un carácter más bien dinámico que estático. Si
el orden jurídico desestatalizado (aunque conformado por organismos
supranacionales) presenta déficits de legitimación, los saldos en rojo de
ese déficit pueden ser compensados por medio del reconocimiento de
las auténticas fuentes de legitimidad democrática y mediante la reco-
nexión con ellas de la producción jurídica en las arenas supranacionales.
En ello se fundamenta Habermas para alegar que la “sustancia norma-
tiva de las constituciones supranacionales se nutre de las constitucio-
nes de tipo republicano”65 y que, otro tanto, “la constitucionalización del
derecho internacional mantiene un estatus derivado, dependiente de
los rendimientos de legitimación que, por así decirlo, le anticipan los
Estados constitucionales democráticos”66. No obstante, para que la idea
transite a lo real, se requiere ante todo de un proceso que coagula en lo
macro los flujos argumentativos que brotan en lo micro, de modo que las
opiniones mundiales lleven en sí el sello de una legitimidad proveniente
de abajo: “la formación de la opinión y la voluntad dentro de la organi-
zación mundial debería reacoplarse con los flujos de comunicación de
los parlamentos nacionales, abrirse a la participación de la Organiza-
ciones No Gubernamentales con derecho de intervención y exponerse
a la observación de una esfera pública mundial movilizada”67. Es decir,
la política transnacional no puede descuidar la legitimidad discursiva
formal e informal proveniente de la irrenunciable dimensión nacional.
El nuevo nivel de integración mundial no permite considerar como ca-
put mortuum el nivel de integración cristalizado en las formas estatales
nacionales.
A la debilidad de una esfera pública que a escala nacional va mediando
los sucesos periféricos con los centros de decisión política, no queda
sino añadir la esperanza de una esfera pública mundial que se constitu-
ya en el espacio de legitimidad argumentativa de los acontecimientos
que tienen lugar en un ámbito que desborda las fronteras nacionales,
siendo empero resultado de estas. Como estas fronteras van perdiendo
algunas de sus competencias, y estas son transferidas a órganos de cala-
do supranacional, una serie de procesos que afectan las formas de vida
68 “¿Ante quién –se pregunta Habermas- son responsables los funcionarios dele-
gados, si éstos negocian regulaciones multilaterales vinculantes que sus votantes
nacionales no aceptan?”: Entre naturalismo y…, p. 352.
69 J. Habermas, El Occidente…, p. 139.
70 Ibid. La frase citada pertenece a Brunkhorst: Globalizando la democracia.
71 J. Habermas, La inclusión…, p. 158.
72 Ibid.
73 Ibid.
Referencias bibliográficas
Estudios Sociales
Año 51, Vol. XLII-Número 158
Enero- abril 2019
Abstract
This article analyzes, in various texts, the particular aspects of the
dictatorship under Rafael Leónidas Trujillo Molina in the Dominican
Republic. It also identifies the social antagonisms and contradictions
and establishes what narrative strategies are used to convey particu-
lar readings (and renderings) of the dictatorship in the novels of Ma-
nuel Vázquez Montalbán (Galíndez, 2002), Mario Vargas Llosa (La
fiesta del chivo, 2000), Julia Álvarez (In the Time of the Butterflies,
1994), Angie Cruz (Let It Rain Coffee, 2005), and the more recent one
by Junot Díaz (The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, 2007). The
study concludes that the Trujillato and its repercussions continue to
be taken up in the fiction of Dominicans and Dominican-Americans
alike and discusses the importance and impact this national trauma
has had on the nation.
Resumen
Résumé
Cet article analyse, dans divers textes, les aspects particuliers de la dic-
tature de Rafael Leónidas Trujillo Molina en République Dominicaine. Il
identifie également les antagonismes sociaux et les contradictions en
indiquant les stratégies narratives utilisées pour véhiculer des lectures
(et des interprétations) particulières de la dictature dans les romans de
Manuel Vázquez Montalbán (Galíndez, 2002), Mario Vargas Llosa (La
fiesta del chivo, 2000), Álvarez (À l’époque des papillons, 1994), Angie
Cruz (Let It Rain Coffee, 2005), et le roman le plus récent de Junot Díaz
(La courte vie merveilleuse d’Oscar Wao, 2007). L’étude conclut que le
Trujillato ou encore les œuvres justifiant la dictature de sont encore
abordées dans les œuvres littéraires des Dominicains et des Dominica-
no-américains afin de mieux montrer comment le trujillisme a traumati-
sé la nation toute entière.
Pons, “It was commonly said that during the Trujillo regime the situa-
tion reached such extremes that the Dominicans could not obtain food,
shoes, clothing or shelter without creating a profit in one way or another
for Trujillo or his family” (Moya Pons, 1995). Moya Pons (1995) also ex-
plains that the torture and killing of political prisoners and opponents
was “a daily practice” and discusses the massacre of Haitian workers
as well as the failure of the U.S. government to intervene or condemn
Trujillo for the genocide. By the time of Trujillo’s 1961 assassination
the economy was in disarray, but the U.S. would return to ensure that
its policies would continue and its interests predominate on the island.
The degree to which each of the novels discussed in this work—each in
its own fashion—deals with the key historical issues noted by Moya Pons
and Halperin Donghi is indeed striking and points to the mutually de-
termined and dependent nature of historiography and historical fictions,
a genre to which in greater or lesser degree, the novels of Vargas Llosa,
Díaz, Cruz, Álvarez, and Vázquez Montalbán all belong.
For her part, in The Dictator’s Seduction, Derby (2009), by contrast,
provides a micro-level account of Trujillo’s cultural and political tech-
nologies to maintain power. Derby (2009) finds a masculinist cultural
logic of power at the level of the state that allowed for domination and
focuses on the impact that the dictatorship had on individuals and on
the DR culture in general. While scholars may focus on state appara-
tuses of control, she chooses to study those neglected everyday for-
ms of coercion that produced a “practical consent” of the oppressed
population. It is in this way that the U.S. invasion is seen as having
precipitated a crisis of masculinity for Dominican manhood, cutting
into the core of Dominican male agency, an issue taken up at length by
Díaz (2007) in his novel, but alsoobliquely perhaps—by Álvarez (1994)
in her foregrounding of female protagonists in a field ostensibly left
empty—or evacuated of male agency. Her micro-structural analysis
allows Derby (2009) to concede that there was indeed dispossession,
and torture, but what interests Derby is the result: a feminized nation,
the establishment of a culture of fear generated through insecurity and
suspicion, symbolic violence through denunciations that resulted in
dismissal and social death, and symbolic beneficiaries that participa-
ted in public functions. Trujillo’s style of masculinity, his hombría, the
image of the hypermasculine tíguere loved by women that would beco-
me an image in novels of the period, his assumed sorcerer powers, his
gifts to the public, all contribute to what Derby (2009) calls Trujillo’s
economy of domination by stating that, “The crux of Trujillo’s hege-
mony thus lay in the political economy of symbolic exchange that pro-
vided the infrastructure of domination” (Derby, 2009). In the end, and
Among the several novels in question remapping the Trujillato, one can
distinguish those that, in the process of refiguring it, view it as a parado-
xically “necessary anomaly” in Latin America, that in this specific case
enabled capitalist development of the DR. Such is the refiguring of the
Trujillo found in Vargas Llosa’s La fiesta del chivo (2000). Unlike the
über-dictator in Gabriel García Márquez’s El otoño del patriarca, Truji-
llo, in the Vargas Llosa novel, does not suffer solitude or desperation for
the atrocities he has ordered or committed. La fiesta del chivo’s fragmen-
ted narrative structure is divided into three intercalated and ongoing
temporalities: the time of the dictator, the time of the rebels, and the
time of the victims and accomplices of the dictatorship. The tempora-
lity of one victim, figured though her experience of rape, is offered in
conjunction with an account of her father’s close association with and
support of the dictator. The opening narrative presents Urania Cabral,
who returns to the DR after thirty-five years abroad in the U.S. Now for-
ty-nine, she fled her country with the help of her colegio nuns, after being
raped at the age of 14 by the dictator, who received her as a gift from her
father, Agustín Cabral, in an attempt to win back his Jefe’s favoritism.
Part of Trujillo’s inner circle and head of the Dominican senate, Cabral
had unexpectedly been summarily dismissed after thirty-one years of
loyal service to Trujillo. Traumatized by her experience vis-à-vis the pre-
datory Jefe, Urania swears never to return. Unwilling to forgive her fa-
ther, now—tellingly—in a comatose, vegetative state, she does, however,
return to the DR for a few days and during her stay reveals her story to
her aunt and cousins, who have been mystified by her lack of communi-
cation all these years. Urania’s narrative, like the other two, is marked by
multiple flashbacks, in her case to her early childhood and experience at
a U.S. high school and later at Harvard. In Urania’s mind, her father’s lo-
yalty to Trujillo and his betrayal in offering her up to the dictator known
for his desire for pubescent girls, speaks to the acquiescence of the entire
republic. Even now after all these years, what Urania has a hard time
coming to terms with is the realization that many Dominicans yearn for
the Trujillo days despite awareness of the atrocities he committed. Her
father’s semi-comatose state speaks volumes to Urania’s perception of
Dominican consent to and collusion with domination.
The second and more developed narrative in La fiesta del chivo is that
of the dictator himself. In 1961, on the day (May 30th) that he is to be
assassinated, Trujillo thinks back repeatedly throughout the day on his
political and economic “achievements;” he recalls his total dedication
to his fatherland (la patria), acknowledging the “sacrifices” his rule
part of a small group of plotters and are not linked to a larger collecti-
ve movement like that of the June 14th Movement crushed by Trujillo
the year before. These plotters have an at best half-baked plan with
no specific plans for social re-construction post-Trujillo, although
they do anticipate an uprising headed by the Armed Forces. The CIA
is said to encourage the plot, but it offers little assistance, with the ex-
ception of two rifles, at least in the novel. While trusting that there are
many in support of the assassination, especially at the higher levels
of government, the plotters have no solid evidence of this support.
Only one plotter has apparently had any contact with other groups
involved in resistance against Trujillo, but these are not, however, in-
volved in this plot. The plotters’ reasons for wanting Trujillo dead are
of a more personal and ethical nature than political; they seek to right
individual wrongs. One, for example, has had a family member killed
for his participation in the Galíndez cover-up (Trujillo made it a habit
to erase his henchmen, precluding any later testimony against him).
Another is a devout Catholic, worried about Trujillo’s threats against
the church; he sees the dictator as the beast that, following Thomas
Aquinus and the current papal nuncio, must be eliminated. The plo-
tters naively expect the head of the Armed Forces to take charge and
bring change to the republic after Trujillo’s death. But the general in
question, Román (like most Dominicans, as Urania declares [18]), is a
coward and fails to act. After the successful, even if ad hoc, assassi-
nation, most of those involved are captured, imprisoned, tortured and
killed by Trujillo’s son Ramfis and Abbes, including the head of the
Armed Forces. Only two plotters manage to hide out several months
till Balaguer declares amnesty for the opposition. By then, Trujillo’s
immediate family has left the country, their pockets well lined with
millions by Balaguer. The novel does not anticipate nor touch upon
the subsequent U.S. Marine invasion of 1965 to crush the military and
popular insurrection after President Bosch is elected and removed
by a military coup, nor does it suggest in any way that Balaguer will
become the new U.S. puppet in the DR. In the novel, Balaguer is con-
figured as an astute maneuverer, even if a monkish man, who pulls all
the right strings and ends up on top.
What stands out in La fiesta del chivo is, in the final analysis, the indi-
vidual Trujillo, his ego, his manias, his power, and the society of syco-
phants that surround him. Far from being depressed about his past, he
is shown to be proud of what he has accomplished and justifies his re-
gime, including the atrocities committed. In focusing on the dictator’s
body and mind from an everyday-routine perspective, the novel has the
effect of humanizing this monstrous head of state, who created a brutal
and formidable state apparatus that guaranteed his power. Even the
rape of Urania is presented as an unfortunate event, a failed act, given
his impotence on that night. What is however made clear is the total
submission and collusion of his close associates who hold the highest
positions and support Trujillo’s domination.
Manuel Vázquez Montalbán, The Affaire Galíndez
Focused on the persona of Trujillo, Vargas Llosa’s (2000) novel is
nowhere interested in voicing a critique of imperialism or of capital
and in this regard stands in stark contrast to the novel Galíndez by
Vázquez Montalbán (2002), in which the role of the CIA in Galíndez’s
disappearance and murder at the hands of the Trujillo machine is revea-
led. The truth is made clear when Muriel Colbert, a graduate student at
Yale, decides to investigate the 1956 disappearance of Galíndez, then
a Columbia doctoral student writing his dissertation on Trujillo’s co-
rrupt and murderous regime. Gálindez, a refugee from Franco’s Spain,
went into exile in the DR and spent several years there before going to
New York: he is said to have worked for the Basque nationalist cause,
the FBI, and possibly the CIA. In view of the collusion of particular
congressmen and other important figures like the son of F.D. Roose-
velt, as well as the FBI and CIA, in Galíndez’s disappearance, it beco-
mes crucial to the CIA that Colbert not continue with her research and
not unearth what occurred some thirty years earlier and should remain
buried. The CIA agent that makes a visit to her dissertation director
makes none-too-veiled threats against the professor unless he puts a
stop to Muriel’s research. Vázquez Montalbán’s novel takes note of the
U.S. government’s participation in Galíndez’s disappearance, torture
and assassination, an aspect of the murder of Trujillo’s enemies to-
tally skirted in Vargas Llosa’s novel. The student researcher, Colbert,
much like Galíndez, will be kidnapped and turn up drowned in the DR
putting an end to her unwanted digging into the past, especially into
the collusion of the CIA and prominent U.S. politicians in Galindez’s
murder. Her Spanish lover, Ricardo, however, is unwilling, like Muriel,
to accept the cover-up of a murder, in this particular case the assassi-
nation of Colbert, and plans a trip to the island to unearth clues of com-
munications that led to her trip to Miami, her kidnapping, and murder.
Vázquez Montalbán’s novel deals with the hidden violence of the U.S.
State Department and its agencies, violence—past and present—that
the CIA tries to hide at any cost. The novel’s particular historicity is
linked to an investigation of the dictator’s state of exception that beca-
me the rule and Trujillo’s necropolitics, that, in collusion with the U.S.
State Department, determined who lived or died.
From a wholly different and more gendered angle, the Trujillo dictators-
hip and the Mirabal sisters’ involvement in the resistance is central to In
the Time of the Butterflies (1994), a novel that deals more with intrafami-
lial and interpersonal relations than it does with the dictatorship itself or
the resistance to it, except at the level of the Jefe’s well-known predatory
lust for young women and his power to incarcerate, torture, and kill at
will.
Alvarez’s (1994) novel would seemingly be in direct conversation with
Derby’s take on Dominican history that asserts that “systematic tor-
ture, espionage, and random arrests made dissent an impossibility on
Dominican soil” (Derby, 2009). In the Time of the Butterflies centers on
the daughters of a well-to-do landowner and store-keeper who partici-
pate in dissent and organize the June 14th Movement, encouraged by
liberation theology minded priests. Although Alvarez’s novel provides
a narrative that focuses primarily on the transmission of female streng-
th, highlighting gender vulnerability, and familial ties, it does include
several pages on three of the Mirabal sisters’ participation in politi-
cal and armed resistance to the Trujillato. The three women—Patria,
Minerva, and María Teresa—will go down in history as heroines who
opposed the Trujillo dictatorship and were assassinated for it in 1960,
a few months before the assassination of Trujillo himself. The Mirabal
family’s troubles with Trujillo, especially after Minerva’s unwillingness
to become one of Trujillo’s sexual conquests and the dictator’s impri-
sonment of her father, lead to a family vendetta against the dictator
and vice versa. The national dispossession, political oppression and
incarceration of all opponents to the regime take a back seat to the
personal and familial desire for vengeance. The argument could be
made that the Mirabal family stands for the nation, especially in light
of Derby’s notion of a feminized Dominican nation as a result of the
Trujillato, although the Mirabals’ particular whiteness, privilege, and
class situation—landowners and store owners—are not representative
of most Dominicans. There is too in the novel a troubling racial resent-
ment against Trujillo for being mulatto and part Haitian. If the Mirabal
sisters are the nation, then it is a strong, not weak, feminized nation,
that takes risks, dares to speak out, and participates in collective poli-
tical action, despite gender subordination within a wholly patriarchal
and masculinist culture. The trauma visited on the Mirabal sisters’ bo-
dies is presented as parallel to the violence enacted on the Dominican
national body.
Of these three, the best novel on the brutality of the Trujillo regime and
the U.S. government’s role in maintaining the regime is undoubtedly
that of Vázquez Montalbán on the Galíndez kidnapping and murder.
More recently, however, a younger generation of U.S. novelists of Domi-
nican heritage, Angie Cruz (2005) and Junot Díaz (2007), have written
on events that take place during the Trujillato. Though it is Díaz who
won the Pulitzer Prize (2011), when it comes to constructing a deeper
critical memory of that period and the ensuing diaspora of Dominicans,
Cruz’s novel is by far the more perceptive, as she brings out the partici-
pation of those that resisted as well as of those, the many, that accommo-
dated to the Trujillo dictatorship. Why, then, has Díaz’s novel attracted
more critical and media attention than Cruz’s? Is it a matter of style or
obsession with masculinity and sexuality that garners one work more at-
tention than the other, making it more trendy? Or is it the latter novel’s
focus on fragmented subjectivities that makes it more appealing in a
postmodern moment?
Fukú Dominicanus?
There is clearly much to be said about the irreverent and iconoclast style
evident in Díaz’s novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, (2007).
We can begin by noting its approximation to García Márquez’s burles-
que style, with its combination of the fantastic, exaggeration, humor, and
realist writing. A number of Latin American writers have attempted to
adopt the GGM approach to narrative, as has Díaz in his novel. Clearly
a “bad imitation” is part of Diaz’s self-referential pastiche of style that is
also accompanied by a more worrisome pastiche of history, evidenced
in the novel’s abundant and often hilarious footnotes on Dominican his-
tory.
Díaz’s pastiche of style builds on intertextuality, parody, humor, juxta-
position of incongruous events, exaggeration, marvelous elements, and
a decidedly anti-heroic character, Oscar, a genuine nerd obsessed not
only with adolescent sci-fi but especially with his failure in the sexual
prowess department. His dysfunctionality serves to counter and undo
the image not only of a super-sexualized dictator but of hyper-sexuali-
zed Dominican men, like the narrator, Yunior, who needs to bed several
young women a week to fulfill his own and others’ macho expectations.
But what does Oscar’s truncated sexuality and handicapped agency say
about Dominicans who put up with Trujillo for 31 years? As Lola, Os-
car’s sister, insightfully notes, “Ten million Trujillos is all we are” (Díaz,
2007). Is Oscar’s dysfunction and demise at novel’s end an allegory for
Dominican history? Not really, because in Díaz’s hands, Oscar’s failu-
re is not a rejection of Dominican accommodation to state power, nor
a commentary on the trauma of diaspora; the nerd who suffers from
truncated sexuality does not consciously counter Dominican masculine
practices either; on the contrary, he simply wants to be like all the other
Dominican men, but comes up short, miserably, until perhaps the pathos
of his one final attempt.
As we will see, the nerd Oscar de León Cabral is the last Cabral victim,
not of colonialism, diaspora or dictatorship, but of the fukú. Victimhood
in the Cabral family here is cyclical, although, as the novel argues, the
fukú can strike anywhere and anyone. The fukú americanus, the cur-
se that the Admiral (Columbus) or alternatively, African slaves brought
over, it seems, continues to dominate affairs in the DR, and is at the root
of the country’s dysfunction, visited onto succeeding generations. If the
fukú is colonialism or slavery or U.S. imperialism or everything that is
evil on the island, it has followed Dominicans in their diaspora with its
eternal “fuck you.” The curse is not analyzed, however, just assumed to
exist, naturalized, as it were, even in the diaspora that is said to have
brought Oscar’s mother, Belicia, nothing but “the cold, the backbreaking
drudgery of the factorías, the loneliness of Diaspora” (Díaz, 2007). But,
the novel certainly does not address or deal in any significant way with
her backbreaking work, nor with the racism endured by black Domini-
cans in New Jersey and New York. The fukú curse on Oscar in New York
or New Jersey is clearly not motivated by historical circumstances or by
Dominican political issues, but far more by sexual drives and desires.
In fact, throughout the novel the curse falls on various members of the
Cabral family who dare to obstruct someone’s sexual drive, especially
the sexual drive of Trujillo, or his sister, or a policeman, even many years
after Trujillo’s assassination.
In the first case, the fukú strikes Dr. Abelard Cabral, a wealthy doctor
with a beautiful daughter (Jacquelyn), who dares to protect her from
Trujillo’s lascivious grasp. Unlike the Cabral senator in Vargas Llosa’s
novel that offers his daughter’s body as a way to propitiate Trujillo, here,
the doctor seeks to protect his daughter and keep her from the goat.
After offering this explanation in some detail, Díaz’s novel goes on to
question and dismiss this version of events, suggesting that Abelard’s
sentencing to prison and torture, is in fact not yet another instance of
the oft repeated Trujillo tale of the Benefactor’s taking of daughters for
his sexual pleasure:
The Rap about The Girl Trujillo Wanted is a pretty common one on
the Island. As common as krill. (Not that krill is too common on the
Island but you get the drift.) So common that Mario Vargas Llosa
didn’t have to do much except open his mouth to sift it out of the air.
There’s one of these bellaco tales in almost everybody’s hometown.
It is one of those easy stories because in essence it explains it all.
Trujillo took your houses, your properties, put your pops and your
moms in jail? Well, it was because he wanted to fuck the beautiful
daughter of the house! And your family wouldn’t let him! (244)
The narrator not only invokes and ridicules Vargas Llosa’s appropria-
tion of the ubiquitous story but also trivializes the “rap” of the predations
of Trujillo as over-played and too “easy.” The narrator then suggests that
Abelard was really sentenced to prison (and his daughters killed) be-
cause he dared to joke about Trujillo’s murderous ways (putting bodies
in his Packard). Then again, the narrator second guesses himself and
gives another option: perhaps it was because of Cabral’s writings about
Trujillo. Cabral’s hidden book on Trujillo is not an exposé, like that of
Galíndez, who was tortured and murdered for writing about corruption
and death under Trujillo, but a sci-fi treatise, the kind Oscar might write,
that suggests that Trujillo is not human, not of this world, but rather a
supernatural being, a monster, a creature from another realm with dark
powers. The alternate reading minimizes and diminishes the historical
assassination of the absent referent, Galíndez. Humor here is definite-
ly used to flatten things out so that nothing is nor can be really histo-
rically or politically meaningful; it’s all hilarious for the narrator, one
continuous joke on fukú-ed Dominicans and those who fancy that they
understand what the Trujillato was about, or perhaps Díaz seeks to su-
ggest that, in the end, the only explanation for anything and everything
is the fukú.
The fukú curse, strikes Belicia next, the only survivor of the once well-
to-do Cabral family who suffers at the hands of those who take her in
as a child, hoping to make money off her relatives; once no one comes
in search of the child, they pass her on to a family in need of a maid
that exploits her, keeps her from school, and burns her back horrendous-
ly. Belicia is saved by La Inca, her paternal aunt (cousin to Abelard) who
becomes her surrogate mother. She grows up to be a beautiful young
woman, expelled from school for her sexual activity. The pattern is set:
sexuality continues to be the driving force and explanation for all that
is to follow. A year or two later she meets and falls for one of Trujillo’s
goons, Dionisio, aptly called the Gangster, a man who handles the es-
tablishment of brothels in Cuba for Trujillo and who is also married to
Trujillo’s sister. His affiliation with the dictator is of no concern to Beli,
who is ready to follow her man to Miami. In stark contrast to Urania in
the Vargas Llosa novel, who is traumatized by her rape and can never
be with a man again, Belicia enjoys the Gangster’s attention. Complica-
tions arise when the Gangster’s wife learns that Belicia is pregnant and
her goons, Trujillo’s secret police, pick up Beli for an abortion. When
Beli resists, she is taken to a cane field, beaten, and left for dead.
Enter the marvelous elements obligatory for all who would be imitators
of Gabriel García Marquez. Beli is saved by the appearance of the Mon-
goose, a marvelous creature that symbolizes life and survival and that
urges her to get up and walk out of the cane field. Beli’s near-death expe-
rience is the product of a jealous wife and though the wife in question is
a Trujillo, the reasons for the assault on Beli are not political, but rather
strictly sexual. The fact that she has power to command state goons is
merely circumstantial. Even after the beating Beli hopes that the Gangs-
ter will come back for her, but La Inca knows better and ships her off to
New York. On the plane to the U.S., Beli next sets sights on the man she
will marry. The father of her two children, Lola and Oscar, will leave her
after two years.
The fukú befalls Oscar next, who already at the tender age of seven
(when his future as a male still looked promising in light of his little girl-
friends), is signaled to be a failure and an a-typical specimen of Domi-
nican manhood, defined in the novel as hyper-sexual and able to seduce
women at will. Sexuality is in fact the dominant motif of this novel, as is
made clear by the narrator, Yunior, a “normal” Dominican male, who re-
lishes and requires sex several times a week. Oscar, on the other hand, is
presented as a desexed fat nerd, who though thoroughly obsessed with
getting laid, is unable to get women of any age interested in him as a
man. Those women that engage him at all see him as another girlfriend.
This feminization and Oscar’s truncated masculinity are the main topics
of this novel as is his adolescent obsession with sci-fi books, videos and
games. Constant intertextuality, with continual references to superhe-
roes and supervillains, dominates the first part of the novel and then
practically drops out from the text, but not because Oscar leaves behind
childish things. Clearly his obsession with superheroes only serves to
underscore him as anti-heroic. In college, Oscar, rejected by one of his
serial crushes, attempts suicide by jumping from a bridge onto the trac-
ks of an oncoming train, but the Mongoose once again makes an appea-
rance to snatch him from certain death as Oscar falls not onto the tracks
but into a garden divider. The mongoose vs. fukú binary is thrown out
“in fun,” as just one more theory to play with and poke fun at in the novel.
Saved, but all broken up, Oscar finally begins to lose weight and travels
with his mother and sister to the DR where he falls in love with—who
else could it be?—a prostitute, now the lover of—drumroll—el Capitán,
an officer in the Dominican military police. It is all great fun ostensi-
bly. He and the prostitute/nightclub dancer, Ibón, become friends and
spend time together; for this reason Oscar, driving Ibon’s car one night
after heavy drinking with her at the nightclub, is stopped by el Capitán
and taken to the cane fields where he is severely beaten by el Capitan’s
goons and left for dead. A fitting remake of the case of his mother Beli,
the Mongoose intervenes anew, and this time leads the friendly taxi dri-
ver, who saw what happened in his rearview mirror, to the crushed Os-
car. How bad was the beating? We are to believe it was a real nightma-
re: “It was like one of those nightmare eight-a.m. MLA panels: endless”
(Díaz, 2007). The snide remark signals to the reader that the beating is
merely discursive, one more instance, just one more boring account of
the endless tales of torture in the DR, just another case of fukú. Of cour-
se, as in all Cabral family beatings, “the faceless man” also appears. He’s
the other Dominican, the everyman Dominican, the ghost of all Domi-
nicans colluding with the regime and its violence, and apparently not to
be taken too seriously; after all, familiarity obviously breeds contempt.
Thanks to the Mongoose-delivered taxi driver, Oscar survives and is put
in the care of La Inca, once again charged with the role of mending a
broken Cabral. Once recovered, Oscar is taken back to New Jersey by his
mother, where he recuperates until one Saturday, unbeknownst to anyo-
ne, he returns on his own to the island, where he again courts Ibón, this
time supposedly spending time with her at a motel, vindicating himself
and Dominican manhood. Shortly thereafter, he is killed by el Capitán’s
goons. Another Cabral thus succumbs—inexorably—to the curse of fukú.
The constant in the novel is that jealous lovers, with ties to state power in
the form of goons, have an easy time doing away with or beating up their
rivals. The senseless, yet necessarily expected death of Oscar (note the
title: The Brief Wondrous Life) is ultimately uninteresting. Some readers
can be expected to be underwhelmed by the character’s sexual trials and
tribulations. Oscar is, if anything, obsessive compulsive and stubborn,
despite (or because of ) his intelligence. His adolescent fixation with su-
perheroes and supervillains is funny, but not much more. His writing is
often remarked upon, but never discussed, although at the end we are
told his sci-fi manuscripts have been archived by Yunior, who, after ha-
ving been mostly bored by the “fat nerd,” now keeps them stuffed in
three refrigerators in his basement for Oscar’s niece, who one day may
(but not likely) come by and wish to read her Uncle’s esoteric writings.
Unlike Melquíades’ works in Cien años de soledad (1993), Oscar’s stories
do not elicit much curiosity (even from Yunior).
The novel’s narrator, Yunior, years later, thinks back with regret on his
own dissolute behavior, only because his promiscuity led to the end of
his relationship with Oscar’s sister, Lola. Like her aunt Jacquelyn and
her mother Beli, Lola is presented as a strong, beautiful and intelligent
woman, whose difficult relationship with her mother is only laterally ad-
dressed in a —for the most part—wholly male-centered novel. In the end,
we know all too little about the life of Dominicans in the diaspora, except
that, when it comes to the second generation, some go to Rutgers and
are excellent students, and even less still about the life of Dominicans on
the island, except that they are often beaten and killed by sexually driven
men and women. So much for Dominican history despite the novel’s
interplay of footnotes, that playfully “ground” the work in “history.”
In the end Díaz’s parody of novels that focus on “the-Domini-
can-girl-that-Trujillo-wanted- and-got” by retelling the story from the
perspective of “the-girl-that-wanted-and-got-Trujillo’s –gangster-only-
to-find-herself-beaten-up-by-the-gangster’s-wife’s-goons,” makes fun of
the sexual tale, but adds precious little to a deeper understanding of Do-
minican society or the dictatorship, despite the fact that the jealous and
murdering wife is a Trujillo. But perhaps being funny, coming off as
clever, is the primary purpose of the episode, or the novel.
Cruz’s (2005) novel also engages with the period of the Trujillato, as well
as the ensuing diaspora. Unlike the diaspora configured in Díaz’s no-
vel that focuses almost exclusively on the younger generations’ sexual
activities or lack thereof, and on Oscar’s fantasy world as a sci-fi junkie,
Cruz’s novel deals with the day-to-day and, for many, life-long hardship
of Dominican migration to the U.S., a hardship that Díaz readily redu-
ces to one sentence. In Cruz’s narrative, issues of acculturation, consu-
merism, racism, class status, immigration, the myth of the “American
Dream” and the role of popular culture also figure prominently. Memory
of the homeland, of collective political and economic struggles, along
with accommodation to the Trujillo and Balaguer regimes, intersect the
diaspora narratives to create dissonances that spell out revealing contra-
dictions shaping the novel’s characters.
By far, of the four novels, Let It Rain Coffee has the broadest historical
scope. Like the other novels, Cruz’s novel also has a fragmented structu-
re, with shifts between chapters focusing on the past and on the present,
on the Dominican homeland and New York City, on those who accommo-
dated to Trujillo and those who resisted, offering in the process a broad
perspective on the Dominican population. The novel begins with events
in late twentieth century New York City, where Don Chan Colón arrives
in 1991, after the death of his wife, to live with his son Santo, his wife Es-
peranza and their two children, named, significantly, Bobby and Dallas.
Dysfunction plays a role here too. As Don Chan ages and begins to con-
fuse the present and the past, he takes us back to another time in the DR,
to 1916 and up to the 1990s. His cognitive confusion due to his incipient
Alzheimer’s thus serves to make the necessary narrative connections be-
tween past and present, between the first and third world, and between
and daring than even his own son, Santo. Aware of the villagers’ poverty
and their life of fear under Trujillo’s surveillance system, Don Chan sees
the need to organize the villagers of Los Llanos. If they live in fear, he
says, they will never be free. To encourage them, Don Chan decides to
show the villagers that they need not be afraid, proposing that he will visit
Trujillo’s palace without being caught, as he will make himself invisible.
He returns after a trip to the capital bringing what turns out to be a letter
opener, as evidence of his palace visit, and in Los Llanos all are impressed.
This will be the beginning of a collective to be known as Los Invisibles, the
Invisibles Ones. No fool as to the eyes of Trujillo everywhere, Don Chan
disguises the meetings as parties, with music and drink. With his own
unique style of humor he brings the villagers to see that it is their labor
that produces the wealth for the rich. It is important, he reminds them, to
be alert, take note of things, to be prepared, resisting through small sub-
versive acts against local Trujillistas. Overall, he teaches the importance
of doing things collectively and of supporting each other. The news of the
Invisible Ones begins to spread and soon other villagers begin to organi-
ze under the purported mantle of “invisibility.”
After Trujillo’s assassination, elections are called and, like in the villa-
ge of Los Llanos, a majority of Dominicans support the candidacy of
Juan Bosch, despite the fact that he is a white intellectual and, as Mira-
luz points out, unlike them, has never done a hard day’s work in his life.
But Don Chan, who sees Bosch as a candidate calling for change, agra-
rian reform, improved education, and health facilities, and opposing the
rich and “the gringos who wanted D.R. as their new stomping ground”
(Cruz, 2005), convinces them to support Bosch. Elected in 1963, Bosch
would, however, be overthrown a few months later by a military coup. A
popular pro-Bosch insurrection, organized by troops supporting Bosch
allied with the broader population, took place in 1965. In Cruz’s novel
the villagers of Los Llanos resolve to support the revolt and travel to
Santo Domingo to join the rebels. It would be that same year, 1965, that
U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson, fearing a repeat of the Cuban revolu-
tion, would crush the uprising by—again— sending in the Marines. New
elections return Trujillo’s surrogate, Balaguer to office and matters dete-
riorate again for Los Llanos and the DR.
In Los Llanos he grows up in, Don Chan learns that the villagers had
lost title to the land, taken over by Trujillo, and currently worked the
land as squatters. The novel further recounts that in 1963 when Bosch is
elected, a hurricane hits the island, unearthing both trash and treasures
from the past. Fortuitously, Don Chan finds a sealed aluminum soup pot
with enough money to buy the land for the community and legalize the
titles of all the families in Los Llanos. Using the money for this collec-
tive effort, Don Chan and the villagers establish a commons, with all
participating in the planting and harvesting of the communal gardens.
As Don Chan tells them, if they work the land, they should own the land.
The project is a success and many hear about it, making Don Chan a
celebrity of sorts in the region.
Shortly after the military coup against Bosch, however, Los Llanos’ villa-
gers wake up one night to find their garden ablaze and do their best to
save the trees and some of the crops from the flames. History notes that
the military triumvirate under Reid Cabral that toppled Bosch made it a
point to send out forces to sabotage the livelihood of Bosch supporters.
Los Llanos’ villagers become aware of the coming dispossession when
weeks later three men drive to Los Llanos—a priest, a military general,
and a businessman—, to look over the land in Los Llanos for foreign in-
vestors. Seeing the writing on the wall, the villagers join the revolt in
1965.
When the villagers of Los Llanos travel to Santo Domingo to join the
insurrection, they set up their headquarters in an old clinic, across from
the home of Esperanza de los Santos. From her window, Esperanza spots
Santo Colón, Don Chan’s son, and falls in love. Her father, a Trujillista
and later a campaign worker for Balaguer, is a right-winger who does
not approve of Santo Colón, a rebel fighting to bring Bosch back. After
the Marines put down the insurrection, Don Chan is targeted by the Ba-
laguerista/ex-Trujillistas. In order to save his father’s life, Santo has to
capitulate and accommodate to the right-wingers. Years later, Don Chan
denies that any of that bargaining-with-the-devil happened, but Espe-
ranza reminds him of a certain confrontation in a certain bar and of the
deep machete mark left on his hand, testament to those events.
After Santo and Esperanza marry, he brings her back to Los Llanos to a
life of poverty and hard work. Compelled by necessity, the villagers of
Los Llanos, for the most part, begin to sell their land to foreign investors,
while Don Chan and Miraluz’s grandmother hold off as long as possible.
A city girl growing up on a steady diet of the TV soap, Dallas, Esperan-
za’s life dream is to go to the U.S., and more specifically to Dallas, where
she hopes to become rich like the Ewings of Southfork Ranch. To pursue
that desired outcome, she forces Santo to emigrate to the U.S.
Back in Santo Domingo, Don Chan continues to work the land, but Mi-
raluz also leaves the village of Los Llanos. When we next see her she is
working in San Pedro de Macorís, with no husband and two children.
Her trips to Los Llanos become more infrequent, as the village is distant
from the city, she travels to Los Llanos to discover that Don Chan’s wife,
Caridad, has died. In the city, Miraluz loses her job at the hospital for
supporting a strike and finds work at an assembly plant in the Free Tra-
de Zone (la Zona Franca). When she begins organizing factory workers,
anti-unionists visit her home and threaten her sons. Full of anger, but
fearful for her family, Miraluz considers returning to Los Llanos until she
gets an idea to form a collective, a commons—like the communal garden
created by Don Chan in Los Llanos—and, with several fellow workers,
establishes a collectively owned shop that produces women’s undergar-
ments. If they work at the factory, they should own the factory, she notes,
recalling Don Chan’s words about the land (Cruz, 2005). The novel’s
representation of the establishment of what Miraluz calls “socially res-
ponsible capitalism” (Cruz, 2005) is in all likelihood based on the Alta
Gracia collective in the DR, a worker-owned, living-wage, union-made
apparel factory. The novel details how Miraluz, following Don Chan’s
teachings and practices, organizes the women of the garment shop,
drawing on the same kind of collective spirit that he fomented in Los
Llanos, to form their cooperative. Inverting the “Victoria’s Secret” brand,
the women name their shop “El Secreto de la Victoria.” The novel thus
situates the DR within contemporary global capital and finds that even
here, in low-wage sweatshops owned by U.S. industries, there remains a
spirit of resistance, now centered on women, unwilling to submit.
The Colón family arrives to the U.S. around 1981 under Esperanza’s delu-
sion of prosperity and the “American Dream” induced by the Dallas TV
series. Diaspora does not, however, bring Esperanza Colón the dream
life that she expected. In NYC, she works as a health aide, caring for the
elderly, and her husband Santo Colón drives a taxi doing the night shift;
he will be killed one night in a robbery. Consumerism will be Esperan-
za’s downfall, for once she is offered credit cards, she obsessively shops
for herself and her family, and in short order gets deep into debt. After
the death of Santo, she finds herself with interest rates that promise to
keep her indebted for some twenty years. Her looming debt is not, howe-
ver, the worst of it. Her children, Bobby and Dallas, face the difficulties of
life under the double onus of racism and poverty. A Dominican mulatto
teenager in the Harlem barrio, Bobby will be sent to juvenile delinquent
detention at Spofford for three years for firing a borrowed gun against
a mugger attacking his sister. The novel also details the sexual issues
faced by the adolescent Dallas and broaches issues of domestic abuse
and rape in connection to Dallas’s friend, Hush.
In what is one of the few novelistic representations of the ravages of Al-
zheimer’s, Let It Rain Coffee’s narration of Don Chan’s struggle against
forgetting and losing himself is particularly striking. Echoing Gabriel
García Marquez’s Cien años de soledad’s plague of forgetfulness, Cruz’s
novel presents an aging Don Chan who struggles daily to maintain a
routine and tries desperately to remember dates, tasks and people. The
death of Santo and the incarceration of Bobby devastate him and he be-
gins to age and decline even more quickly. After eight years, he begins
to fear that he will never return to Los Llanos. One night, Don Chan
greets Esperanza in tears telling her he wants to go home. By then, with
her family unraveling, Esperanza has come to see the misrepresenta-
tions of life in the U.S. offered in the soap Dallas and agrees to revisit
the homeland.
Upon their return to the DR, the family looks out on the poverty, the ho-
melessness, and the lack of sanitation, as well as on the all-too-familiar
signs: the McDonald’s arches and Baskin-Robbins neon signs, the KFCs,
Haagen-Dazs, Burger King, Pizza Hut, Benetton, all signs of neo-libe-
ralism’s penetration. Only the sea looks beautiful to them, but as Don
Chan soon discovers, even the beaches have now been privatized. Along
the road, they run into buses with “los deportados,” the repatriated immi-
grants from the U.S., the jettisoned flotsam of Dominican diaspora. The
return to the homeland is, not surprisingly, a further disillusionment for
Esperanza, who reacts negatively against her own, calling Dominicans
all “criminals.”
Esperanza has come to bring Don Chan home, to scatter Santo’s ashes
in Los Llanos, and to give away the hand-me-down gifts that she has
saved for her relatives for years. The return to the island will enable Don
Chan to reconnect with Miraluz. Esperanza, for her part, can think about
paying off her debt with the sale of Don Chan’s land and returning to
New York with Dallas and Bobby, who, however, considers staying on
for a few days with Miraluz, to help her set up a website for “El Secreto
de la Victoria.” At the end, with Don Chan fading fast, Miraluz is again
the clearheaded one, understanding that she must allow Don Chan to
walk into the cane field by himself. His death is a return to the earth and
to the past, the Dominican past, with all its violence and massacres and
struggles.
Cruz’s novel’s emplotment of Dominican history from the perspective
of three generations of the Colón family makes visible complexity and
contradiction at the level of the individual, family, and nation-state. Its
fragmented structure with shifts between characters and time dimen-
sions allows for highlighting the nature of the relations between the DR
and the U.S. and for reconstructing two phases of imperialism: a period
of U.S. territorial expansion with U.S. military forces in control of Domi-
nican territory (in 1916 and in 1965) and a period of economic imperia-
lism, with U.S. interests controlling Dominican sugar cane and, later, the
Free Trade Zones. The novel’s configuration of multiple struggles within
various temporalities, whether over land or over the right, or lack thereof,
TheTrujillato Revisited.
While all five novels are explicitly or implicitly conscious of the Domi-
nican diaspora, these authors believe it is Cruz’s novel that provides
a deeper reading of the relationship of one geographical area to the
other by the intersection of different time spaces. Let It Rain Coffee
takes us to working class spaces in NYC where Dominicans reside,
and where the difficulties of being poor and black in the U.S., amidst
the lure of consumerism, credit and the resulting debt indentureship,
are evident. Here, it becomes clear that Dominican immigrants, pa-
radoxically if understandably, both reject the homeland and yearn to
return. While not dealing directly with the torture and imprisonment
under the Trujillato, like Vázquez Montalbán, Álvarez, or Díaz, Cruz’s
novel does convey the life of fear lived by the population under a dic-
tatorship. It offers no “quintessential” and ubiquitous Dominican Tru-
jillo rape story, for gender violence like rape, as the novel notes, are as
much a reality in the U.S. as in the DR. And finally, Cruz’s novel stands
out in that it is not male-centered, despite the fact that Don Chan is
clearly a central figure. Strong women like Esperanza and Miraluz, Da-
llas, and Hush are highlighted in the narrative and, although highly
contradictory figures, they are the primary agents of change, whether
within their families or in the public sphere. In dealing poignantly—
and seriously— with the effects of diaspora and dictatorship on its cha-
racters, and without relying on clever witticisms or the marvelous, as
in the case of Díaz’s novel, Let It Rain Coffee deftly and engagingly
constructs a broad critical memory of 20th century Dominican society
both in the U.S. and in the DR.
Dominican history and the brutal legacy of the Trujillato, which like a bi-
blical curse seems to visit succeeding generations, are present in all five
novels; their differential diagnoses need to be seen as engaging (with
varying degrees of commitment and success) in the hard work of histo-
ricizing and coming to terms with the Trujillato and the dysfunctional
aftermath of this trauma nacional.
References
Estudios Sociales
Año 51, Vol. XLII-Número 158
Enero- abril 2019
1 Por ejemplo, el Plan Decenal de Educación 2008-2018, terminará con muy pocos logros
que exhibir. El gobierno no asignó los recursos financieros necesarios para su normal imple-
mentación. En este Plan se estableció que en el año 2009 el presupuesto del MINERD sería 2.67%
del PIB del gasto público, con incrementos anuales que elevarían dichos porcentaje a 4.09% en
2012, 5.16% en 2015 y 6.82% en el presente año (2018). http://www.ministeriodeeducacion.gob.do/
docs/plan-estrategico/plan-decenal.pdf. Consulta 07/04/2018.
2 Foro Socioeducativo. Una campaña que devino en movimiento social y que impactó en la
política educativa. Disponible en:
http://vigilantes.do/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/CED_Final_digital.pdf
Como resultado del referido compromiso, a partir del año 2013 el Minis-
terio de Educación recibe anualmente un presupuesto equivalente al 4%
del PIB, pero no se ha cumplido con el incremento progresivo indicado
en el compromiso y consignado en la END 2030. Desafortunadamente,
continúa la preocupación por la esperada mejoría de la calidad educati-
va, cuyo logro depende tanto del nivel de gasto por estudiante en edad
escolar, como de la calidad de la asignación y manejo de los recursos. En
el año 2014, fue firmado un nuevo acuerdo, denominado Pacto Nacional
para la Reforma Educativa (2014-2030)4, cuyo Comité de Veeduría Social
tiene la responsabilidad de dar seguimiento a la agenda educativa acor-
dada. Los segmentos de la sociedad civil dominicana que luchan por
una escuela pública de calidad y la ciudadanía en general tienen el reto
de fortalecer su labor de incidencia y presión política para proteger el
derecho a la educación.
En el país ha quedado claro que no basta formular leyes, planes y suscri-
bir acuerdos.
4 En la ley END 2030, artículo 34, se consignó la necesidad de que las fuerzas políticas,
económicas y sociales arriben a un pacto que impulse las reformas necesarias para elevar la
calidad, cobertura y eficacia del sistema educativo en todos sus niveles.
5 Campaña Latinoamericana por el Derecho a la Educación (CLADE). http://monitoreo.
campanaderechoeducacion.org/
$3,500 4.50%
4.00%
$3,000
3.50%
$2,500
3.00%
$2,000 2.50%
$3,136
2.00%
$2,914
$1,500
$2,715
$2,582
$2,478
1.50%
$1,000
$1,652
1.00%
$500
0.50%
$0 0.00%
2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017
Fuente: Elaborado con datos de ejecución presupuestaria reportados por la DIGEPRES .(http://www.dige-
pres.gob.do/transparencia/?page_id=6503 ) y .valores del PIB nominal publicados por el Banco Central (ht-
tps://www.bancentral.gov.do/estadisticas_economicas/real/ . Consulta 19/03/2018
0 5 10 15 20 25
2,500
2,125
1,964
2,000 1,814
1,680
1,541
1,500
1,000 844
500
-
2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017
Fuente: Elaborado con datos de la DIGEPRES. Los valores en RD$ fueron convertidos a US$ PPP utilizando
el factor de conversión del PIB de República Dominicana a valores PPP aplicado por el Banco Mundial.
7 MEPYD. http://economia.gob.do/wp-content/uploads/drive/UAAES/SISDOM/2016/
Datos%20estadisticos/SISDOM%202016.%20Volumen%20II%20Serie%20de%20Datos.pdf
Desafíos
8 http://www.digepres.gob.do/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/Panorama-Macroeconomi-
co-2016-2020.pdf Consulta 08/04/2018
9 MINERD. Plan Estratégico 2017-2020. Conversión en dólares y cálculo del % del PIB con
base a la proyecciones de la tasa de cambio y del PIB publicadas por la DIGEPRES http://www.
digepres.gob.do/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/Panorama-Macroeconomico-2016-2020.pdf Con-
sulta 08/04/2018.
10 http://www.ministeriodeeducacion.gob.do/docs/plan-estrategico/plan-decenal.pdf. Pág.
124. Consulta 08/04/2018.
Referencias bibliográficas
Estudios Sociales
Año 51, Vol. XLII-Número 158
Enero- abril 2019
* Texto revisado de las palabras pronunciadas por Pablo Mella sj con motivo de la
puesta en circulación de esta obra, en la Sala Juan Bosch de la Biblioteca Nacional, el
día 18 de octubre de 2017.
100
Presentación de conjunto
san Pablo en Hechos de los Apóstoles, capítulo 22, vv. 22-29, cuando lo
querían asesinar los ultranacionalistas judíos por ser practicante de una
religión de dudosa catadura). Todos lo sabemos bien por experiencias
cotidianas: una ciudadanía se puede adquirir; también se puede perder.
Es una figura legal para garantizar la igualdad social, no para excluir a
determinados segmentos de la población por raza o creencia. Sin em-
bargo, la ciudadanía étnica que se fortificó al calor de la dictadura se
reproduce excluyendo con instrumentos netamente legales.
Las élites políticas dominicanas, neotrujillistas en este aspecto, se encar-
garon de perpetuar la confusión entre nación y ciudadanía; pero dados
los cambios históricos, debieron valerse de otros medios. Había que con-
tener, a como diera lugar, la imprescindible población obrera haitiana
en auténticos apartheids; segregarlas espacialmente del resto del orde-
namiento social nacional: para eso sirven los bateyes, que son espacios
de segregación. Para crear este apartheid social-espacial, se echó mano
de la fuerza militar; pero también, se comenzó a producir un sistema de
irregularidad legal que le hacía imposible a esa población integrarse en
la vida cotidiana. Hintzen lo expresa gráficamente así: «Los residentes
de los bateyes siempre habían resistido los intentos de aislarlos, y con-
tinuaron resistiendo después del asesinato de Trujillo. Sin embargo, los
expartidarios de Trujillo vieron el movimiento más allá de los confines
de los cañaverales como una amenaza cada vez mayor, no solo para la
productividad de la industria azucarera, sino para la estabilidad y el futu-
ro de la nación dominicana» (p. 100). Con la nacionalización de los inge-
nios, una vez caída la dictadura, la desnacionalización entera de pobla-
ciones ya establecidas aparecía como una auténtica cruzada nacional,
como un asunto de seguridad de Estado… o mejor aún, como un asunto
de seguridad de la «identidad nacional». En buena medida, se discierne
aquí la lógica social profunda de la sentencia 168-13. La Fundación Juan
Bosch evidencia esta lógica al titular este conjunto de ensayos como lo
ha hecho. Aunque la autora no desarrolla explícitamente esta conexión
en estas páginas, se nos invita a tenerla en mientes cuando recorramos
sus páginas, que son de carácter histórico.
Dentro de los límites metodológicos de su estudio historiográfico, la in-
vestigadora norteamericana sostiene la siguiente tesis congruente con
el título de la obra: «Como ciudadanos, los hijos de inmigrantes haitia-
nos no podían ser puestos en cuarentena en los cañaverales tan fácil-
mente como sus padres. En la década de 1970, el gobierno comenzó a
buscar maneras de revocar retroactivamente estos derechos y alterar las
leyes de ciudadanía por nacimiento de larga data en el país» (p. 101).
Nosotros debemos añadir: las élites políticas dominicanas solo logra-
Estudios Sociales
Año 51, Vol. XLII-Número 158
Enero- abril 2019
DOCUMENTOS
I. Introducción
tizada por Colón como La Española) que registró en el siglo XIX el pri-
vilegio de ser dividida en dos estados nacionales: La República de Haití,
situada en la parte más montañosa, en el oeste, y la Dominicana, en la
zona este, la más fértil, más amplia y mejor favorecida por la naturaleza.
En su suelo se inició la esclavitud del negro en el continente america-
no, y su derivación, la discriminación racial. Está integrada actualmente
por una población mayoritariamente mulata y negra, con otra pequeña
proporción mestiza y una reducida minoría blanca que no alcanza el 10
por ciento. Los dos primeros grupos, sin embargo, no se definen como
negros, sino como indios, errática denominación que mentalmente asu-
me allí con orgullo el hombre de color para identificarse como aborigen.
En consecuencia, los negros y mulatos dominicanos que conforman
la gran mayoría de la población están entre los escasos habitantes del
mundo que se identifican como originarios de una etnia diferente a la
que en verdad pertenecen.
Algunos académicos dominicanos, emigrantes o nacidos en Estados
Unidos, hijos de emigrantes negros y mulatos, se han expresado sobre
este extraño comportamiento afirmando que nuestros compatriotas des-
cubren su verdadero color cuando se establecen en Estados Unidos o Eu-
ropa. Ese inverosímil y raro fenómeno, que delata una casi total ausencia
de identidad (y sus consecuencias), es lo que me propongo examinar en
esta oportunidad.
II
Como muy bien recogen varios cronistas de Indias, en esta isla, la pri-
mera en ser conquistada y colonizada por los españoles en nombre de
la evangelización de sus aborígenes, considerados sacrílegos y paganos,
se llevó a efecto el más brutal de los genocidios ocurrido en el Nuevo
Mundo, tragedia apocalíptica que describe muy bien Las Casas (entre
otros), jornada trágica en la que se exterminó completamente a sus pri-
mitivos habitantes, que alcanzaban aproximadamente el número de cien
mil, según los especialistas en tales cuestiones.
La desaparición de la población aborigen de La Española fue fatal para
los planes y órdenes —recibidas de la monarquía— de dar inicio al tra-
bajo en las minas y a la explotación agrícola y ganadera en gran escala.
Por esa razón, después de que se agotaron las minas de oro y que se
descubrió que la caña de azúcar (producto altamente cotizado en los
mercados europeos) florecía espléndidamente en este territorio insular,
fue necesaria la importación de indios lucayos (de las Bahamas), los cua-
les acusaron idéntico comportamiento al adoptado por los nativos. Fue a
partir de ahí cuando se verificó la concertación de los primeros grandes
embarques de negros esclavos que llegaron a este territorio.
El cultivo de la caña y su industrialización, que comenzó en grande en
1512, pronto alcanzó en La Española notable desarrollo. Según el cronis-
ta Oviedo, en 1520 ya existían allí 24 ingenios y 4 trapiches movidos por
fuerza animal, humana e hidráulica. Y por esos años ya se exportaban
hacia España 100 mil arrobas anuales.
En uno de estos ingenios situados en la cercanía de la ciudad de Santo
Domingo se inició, en 1522, la primera gran rebelión antiesclavista en
América. Una buena parte de los participantes fueron apresados y las
crónicas refieren que los caminos quedaron “sembrados a trechos con
muchas horcas”.
Consecuencia de ese auge azucarero señalado, bien pronto la población
negra de la isla superó en alta proporción a la población europea. Pero, al
parecer, estos negros no eran de “buena calidad”, pues tempranamente
se iniciaron las fugas y las rebeldías. Para tratar de evitarlas, las autori-
dades autorizaron la importación de esclavas negras para casarlas con
los varones y pretendieron detener la entrada de hombres, premisa, esta
última, que no se cumplió, pues en 1530 la población masculina negra de
la isla superaba la cifra de los 20 mil, cuando la desequilibrada población
blanca apenas alcanzaba los tres mil.
La permanente actitud de rebeldía de los esclavos negros y sus fugas
—fenómeno que alcanzó niveles alarmantes (los negros fugitivos llega-
ron a fundar en las montañas varios poblados o manieles, donde esta-
blecieron organizaciones de convivencia comunitarias)— y el inicio de
la explotación de las ricas minas de oro y plata en México y Perú —que
sustrajo una parte importante de la ya mermada población europea de la
isla— afectaron el desenvolvimiento económico de La Española, conver-
tida también en poco tiempo en puerto de escala para el abastecimiento
de casabe, agua y otros alimentos para las flotas españolas que se diri-
gían al territorio continental.
Con miras a mejorar la seguridad en la isla, fueron creadas disposi-
ciones y leyes especiales para disciplinar y controlar las conductas de
los negros, medidas que envolvían severas sanciones que incluían la
pena de muerte. Además se organizaron cuadrillas especiales integra-
das por milicianos españoles con muy buenos salarios para perseguir
a los negros fugitivos y a los que vivían en los montes en los diferentes
ciedad colonial entre los blancos, los negros y los mulatos libres. Pero ni
los negros, ni los mulatos, ni los criollos mestizos escalaron a posiciones
de importancia en el ordenamiento social establecido, pues tenían pro-
hibido por ley ingresar a la administración colonial y a la milicia. Según
se legisló mediante cédula real: “ningún mulato, ni mestizo pudiese tener
oficio real ni público”.
III
IV
Más aún, los documentos históricos señalan que cuando Toussaint Lou-
verture entró a Santo Domingo, para hacer efectivo el traspaso de esta
colonia a Francia, fue recibido por la población dominicana con alegría
y aclamaciones.
Esa reacción era natural. En primer lugar, fue abolida la esclavitud y por
primera vez se dio comienzo a un verdadero proceso de integración racial,
pues, en nombre de los principios de la Revolución, se inició la igualdad
social y política y la discriminación racial fue herida de gravedad (pero no
muerta) al permitir que negros y mulatos dominicanos pudieran ser eleva-
dos a cargos municipales y del gobierno central. Por estos días, sin embar-
go, abandonaron la colonia decenas de familias esclavistas que entendían
como una ofensa a su “dignidad” la igualdad social y política establecida
y, peor aún, la presencia de un gobernador negro.
Todas esas transformaciones fueron truncadas, sin embargo, con la lle-
gada al poder en Francia de Napoleón Bonaparte, quién ordenó restable-
cer la esclavitud en la colonia (salvo en Haití) y envió a Santo Domingo
una poderosa flota de más de 20 mil soldados con el propósito de some-
ter a Louverture y, de paso, derogar su constitución.
Tal decisión reabrió de nuevo las compuertas de la guerra del pueblo
haitiano contra la Francia esclavista, ahora no sólo por el establecimien-
to de la igualdad en su territorio, sino también por la independencia de
la patria.
Como se conoce, el ejército napoleónico logró apresar a Louverture me-
diante el engaño y lo remitió a Francia, donde murió encarcelado. Pero
el pueblo haitiano, ahora bajo el mando del general Dessalines, terminó
aplastando de modo humillante a los soldados de Napoleón y procla-
mando la independencia nacional el 1ero. de enero de 1804.
Sin embargo, la guerra por la independencia de Haití fue librada sólo en
el territorio del oeste. La antigua parte española, hoy República Domini-
cana, no fue liberada; fue abandonada, quedando bajo el dominio de los
soldados franceses que habían huido de la derrota recibida en occidente.
En esta parte oriental de la isla fue establecido un gobierno bajo el man-
do del general Ferrand, quien restableció aquí la esclavitud y logró un
eficiente reordenamiento administrativo con el apoyo y el auxilio de la
antigua burocracia civil y militar colonial española.
Pero ese gobierno de Ferrand pronto se convirtió en una punta de lanza
amenazante contra la novel República de Haití. Abrigando la esperan-
za permanente del retorno de la dominación francesa de Haití, Ferrand
adoptó contra este naciente país una conducta provocadora.
3 Un artículo del nuevo proyecto constitucional, que prohibía a los blancos el ser
propietarios de tierras en Haití, fue protestado por los representantes dominicanos,
pero fue finalmente aprobado.
VI
VII
VIII
IX
En enero 26 del año 2010, es decir, hace apenas un año, fue promulgada
en la República Dominicana una nueva Constitución, la número treinta
y ocho, entre las tantas que hemos padecido en los cientos sesenta y
siete años de vida independiente.
Esa reforma fue alcanzada por la vía del Congreso de la República, con-
vertido en Asamblea Revisora, y no mediante una Asamblea Constitu-
yente, como fue reclamado por amplísimos sectores organizados de la
nación que no fueron escuchados.
Uno de los puntos más controvertidos en la opinión pública, en los días
en que se efectuaba esa reforma, fue precisamente el referente a la cues-
tión de la nacionalidad. Pero sobre ese particular en la Asamblea Revi-
sora se impuso finalmente el criterio de aquellos grupos de presión de
claro corte racista que han pretendido, y ahora han logrado, mantener en
nuestro país a decenas de miles de hijos de haitianos nacidos en nuestro
territorio sin el disfrute del derecho a la nacionalidad.
En consecuencia, para complacer a esos grupos racistas antihaitianos,
en la nueva Constitución dominicana, en lo referente al disfrute del dere-
Estudios Sociales
Año 51, Vol. XLII-Número 158
Enero- abril 2019
PRESENTACIÓN Y NORMAS
Estudios Sociales es una revista de investigación social, publicada
cuatrimestralmente por el Centro de Reflexión y Acción Social Padre Juan
Montalvo, SJ, y por el Instituto de Estudios Superiores de Humanidades,
Ciencias Sociales y Filosofía Pedro Francisco Bonó. Ambas entidades forman
parte de la obra apostólica de la Compañía de Jesús en República Dominicana.
La revista publica artículos sobre temas sociopolíticos de República Dominicana
y de la región del Caribe. Publica además temas de actualidad en humanidades
y filosofía. Está abierta a colaboraciones nacionales e internacionales que
cumplan con sus objetivos y estándares editoriales.
Edita:
Centro de Reflexión y Acción Social Padre Juan Montalvo, SJ e Instituto de
Estudios Superiores de Humanidades, Ciencias Sociales y Filosofía Pedro
Francisco Bonó
Equipo editorial:
Fabio Abreu
Lissette Acosta Corniel
Sandra Alvarado
Roque Féliz
Raymundo González
Orlando Inoa
Elissa Líster
Antonio Masferrer
Riamny Méndez
Irmary Santos-Reyes
Indhira Suero
25/11/2018