The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

rematch against Batista. Of the eighty-two revolutionaries who splashed ashore, only twenty-two survived to celebrate the New Year, including one book-loving argentino. A bloodbath, with Batista’s forces executing even those who surrendered. But these twenty-two, it would prove, were enough.
    12 . Reminds me of the sad case of Rafael Yépez: Yépez was a man who in the thirties ran a small prep school in the capital, not far from where I grew up, that catered to the Trujillato’s lower-level ladroncitos. One ill-starred day Yépez asked his students to write an essay on the topic of their choice—a broad-minded Betances sort of man was this Yépez—and unsurprisingly, one boy chose to compose a praise song to Trujillo and his wife, Doña María. Yépez made the mistake of suggesting in class that other Dominican women deserved as much praise as Doña María and that in the future, young men like his students would also become great leaders like Trujillo. I think Yépez confused the Santo Domingo he was living in with another Santo Domingo. That night the poor schoolteacher, along with his wife, his daughter, and the entire student body were rousted from their beds by military police, brought in closed trucks to the Fortress Ozama, and interrogated. The pupils were eventually released, but no one ever heard of poor Yépez or his wife or his daughter again.
     
    13 . By Ramfis Trujillo I mean of course Rafael Leónidas Trujillo Martínez, El Jefe’s first son, born while his mother was still married to another man, un cubano. It was only after the cubano refused to accept the boy as blood that Trujillo recognized Ramfis as his own. (Thanks, Dad!) He was the “famous” son that El Jefe made a colonel at the age of four and a brigadier general at the age of nine. (Lil’ Fuckface, as he is affectionately known.) As an adult Ramfis was famed for being a polo player, a fucker of North American actresses (Kim Novak, how could you?), a squabbler with his father, and a frozen-hearted demon with a Humanity Rating of 0 who personally directed the indiscriminate torture-murders of 1959 (the year of the Cuban Invasion) and 1961 (after his father was assassinated, Ramfis personally saw to the horror-torture of the conspirators). (In a secret report filed by the US consul, currently available at the JFK Presidential Library, Ramfis is described as “imbalanced,” a young man who during his childhood amused himself by blowing the heads off chickens with a .44 revolver.) Ramfis fled the country after Trujillo’s death, lived dissolutely off his father’s swag, and ended up dying in a car crash of his own devising in 1969; the other car he hit contained the Duchess of Albuquerque, Teresa Beltrán de Lis, who died instantly; Lil’ Fuckface went on murdering right to the end.
     
    14 . Johnny Abbes García was one of Trujillo’s beloved Morgul Lords. Chief of the dreaded and all-powerful secret police (SIM), Abbes was considered the greatest torturer of the Dominican People ever to have lived. An enthusiast of Chinese torture techniques, Abbes was rumored to have in his employ a dwarf who would crush prisoners’ testicles between his teeth. Plotted endlessly against Trujillo’s enemies, the killer of many young revolutionaries and students (including the Maribal Sisters). At Trujillo’s behest Abbes organized the plot to assassinate the democratically elected president of Venezuela: Rómulo Betancourt! (Betancourt and T-zillo were old enemies, beefing since the forties, when Trujillo’s SIMians tried to inject Betancourt with poison on the streets of Havana.) The second attempt worked no better than the first. The bomb, packed into a green Olds, blew the presidential Cadillac clean out of Caracas, slew the driver and a bystander but failed to kill Betancourt! Now that’s really gangster! (Venezolanos: Don’t ever say we don’t have history together. It’s not just the novelas that we share or the fact that so many of us flooded your shores to work in the fifties, sixties, seventies, and eighties. Our dictator tried to slay your president!) After Trujillo’s death Abbes was named consul to Japan (just to get him out of the country) and ended up working for that other Caribbean nightmare, the Haitian dictator François “Papa Doc” Duvalier. Wasn’t nearly as loyal to Papa Doc as he was to Trujillo—after an attempted double-cross Papa Doc shot Abbes and his family and then blew their fucking house up. (I think