“I’ve just been informed of a possible attempt on His Excellency’s life, on the San Cristóbal highway. I’m going there now. I’ll keep you apprised.”
He finished dressing and went downstairs, carrying a loaded M-1 carbine. Instead of firing and finishing off Razor, he spared his life again, and nodded when Espaillat, his little rat’s eyes devoured by worry, advised him to alert the General Staff and order a nationwide curfew. General Román called the December 18 Fortress and directed all the garrisons to impose a rigorous quartering of troops and to close all exits from the capital, and he told the commanders in the interior that he would shortly be in telephone or radio contact with them regarding a matter of utmost urgency. He was wasting precious time, but he had to act in this way, which, he thought, would clear away any doubts about him in Razor’s mind.
“Let’s go,” he said to Espaillat.
“I’m going to take Ligia home,” he replied. “I’ll meet you on the highway. At about kilometer seven.”
When General Román drove away, at the wheel of his own car, he knew he ought to go immediately to the house of General Juan Tomás Díaz, just a few meters from his own, to confirm if the assassination had been successful—he was sure it had—and start the process of the coup. There was no escape; he was an accomplice regardless of whether Trujillo was dead or wounded. But instead of going to see Juan Tomás or Amiama, he drove his car to Avenida George Washington. Near the Fairground he saw someone signaling to him from a car: it was Colonel Marcos Antonio Jorge Moreno, head of Trujillo’s personal bodyguards, accompanied by General Pou.
“We’re worried,” Moreno shouted, leaning his head out the window. “His Excellency hasn’t arrived in San Cristóbal.”
“There was an attempt on his life,” Román informed them. “Follow me!”
At kilometer seven, when, in the beams from Moreno’s and Pou’s flashlights, he recognized the bullet-riddled Chevrolet, saw the smashed glass and bloodstains and debris on the asphalt, he knew the attempt had been successful. He had to be dead after that kind of gunfire. And therefore he ought to subdue, recruit, or kill Moreno and Pou, two self-proclaimed Trujillistas, and, before Espaillat and other military men arrived, race to the December 18 Fortress, where he would be safe. But he didn’t do that either; instead, displaying the same consternation as Moreno and Pou, he searched the area with them and was glad when the colonel found a revolver in the underbrush. Moments later Razor was there, patrols and guards arrived, and he ordered them to continue the search. He would be at the headquarters of the General Staff.
While he sat in his official car and was taken by his driver, First Sergeant Morones, to the December 18 Fortress, he smoked several Lucky Strikes. Luis Amiama and Juan Tomás must be desperately looking for him, dragging the Chief’s body around with them. It was his duty to send them some kind of signal. But instead of doing that, when he reached the headquarters of the General Staff he instructed the guards not to allow in any civilians, no matter who they were.
He found the Fortress in a state of bustling activity inconceivable at this hour under normal circumstances. As he hurried up the stairs to his command post and responded in kind to the officers who saluted him, he heard questions—“An attempted landing across from the Fairground, General?”—which he did not stop to answer.
He went into his office in a state of agitation, feeling his heart pound, and a simple glance at the twenty or so high-ranking officers gathered there was enough to let him know that despite the lost opportunities, he still had a chance to put the Plan into effect. The officers who, when they saw him, clicked their heels and saluted were a group representing the high command, friends, for the most part, and they were waiting for his orders. They knew or intuited that a terrifying vacuum had just been created, and, educated in the tradition of discipline and total dependence on the Chief, they expected him to assume command, with clarity of purpose. Fear and hope were on the faces of Generals Fernando A. Sánchez, Radhamés Hungría, Fausto Caamaño, and Félix Hermida, Colonels Rivera Cuesta and Cruzado Piña, Majors Wessin y Wessin, Pagán Montás, Saldaña, Sánchez Pérez, Fernández Domínguez, and Hernando Ramírez. They wanted him to rescue them from an uncertainty against which they had no defense. A speech delivered in the voice of a leader who has his balls in the right place and knows what he is doing, explaining that in this dire circumstance the disappearance or death of Trujillo, for reasons yet to be determined, provided the Republic with a providential opportunity for change. Above all, they must avoid chaos, anarchy, a Communist revolution and its corollary, occupation by the Americans. They, who were patriots by vocation and profession, had the duty to act. The country had touched bottom, placed under quarantine because of the excesses of a regime which, although in the past it had performed services that could never be repaid, had degenerated into a tyranny that provoked universal revulsion. It was necessary to move events forward, with an eye to the future. If they followed him, together they would close the abyss that had begun to open before them. As head of the Armed Forces he would preside over a civilian-military junta, composed of prominent figures and responsible for guaranteeing a transition to democracy, which would allow the lifting of sanctions imposed by the United States and elections under the supervision of the OAS. The junta had the approval of Washington, and from them, the leaders of the most prestigious institution in the country, he expected cooperation. He knew his words would have been greeted with applause, and whoever had doubts would have been won over by the conviction of the others. It would be easy then to order executive officers like Fausto Caamaño and Félix Hermida to arrest the Trujillo brothers and round up Abbes García, Colonel Figueroa Carrión, Captain Candito Torres, Clodoveo Ortiz, Américo Dante Minervino, César Rodríguez Villeta, and Alicinio Peña Rivera, thereby immobilizing the machinery of the SIM.
But, though he knew with certainty what he ought to do and say at that moment, he didn’t do that either. After a few seconds of hesitant silence, he limited himself to informing the officers, in vague, broken, stammering terms, that in view of the attempt on the person of the Generalissimo, the Armed Forces must be like a fist, ready to strike. He could feel, touch the disappointment of his subordinates, whom he was infecting with his own uncertainty instead of infusing them with confidence. This was not what they were hoping for. To hide his confusion, he communicated with the garrisons in the interior. He repeated to General César A. Oliva, in Santiago, General García Urbáez, in Dajabón, and General Guarionex Estrella, in La Vega, in the same hesitant way—his tongue barely obeyed him, as if he were drunk—that due to the presumed assassination, they should confine their troops to barracks and take no action without his authorization.
After the round of phone calls, he broke out of the secret straitjacket that bound him and took a step in the right direction:
“Don’t leave,” he announced, getting to his feet. “I’m calling an immediate high-level meeting.”
He ordered calls placed to the President of the Republic, the head of the SIM, and the former President, General Héctor Bienvenido Trujillo. He would have the three of them come here, and arrest them. If Balaguer was part of the conspiracy, he could help in the steps that followed. He saw bewilderment in the officers, glances exchanged, whispering. They passed him the telephone. They had gotten Dr. Joaquín Balaguer out of bed:
“I’m sorry to wake you, Mr. President. There has been an attempt on His Excellency, while he was driving to San Cristóbal. As Minister of the Armed Forces, I am calling an urgent meeting at the December 18 Fortress. I ask you to come here without delay.”
President Balaguer did not respond for a long time, so long that Román thought they had been cut off. Was it surprise that caused his silence? Satisfaction at knowing the Plan was being put into effect? Or mistrust of this phone call in the middle of the night? At last he heard his answer, spoken without a trace of emotion:
“If something so serious has occurred, as President of the Republic my place is not in a barracks but at the National Palace. I am going there now. I suggest that the meeting be held in my office. Goodbye.”
Without giving him time to reply, he hung up.
Johnny Abbes García listened to him attentively. All right, he would go to the meeting, but only after he heard the statement of Captain Zacarías de la Cruz, who was badly wounded and had just been admitted to Hospital Marión. Only Blacky Trujillo appeared to agree to his call for a meeting. “I’ll be right there.” He seemed unhinged by what was happening. But when he didn’t show up after half an hour, General José René Román knew that his last-minute plan had no chance of being realized. Not one of the three men would fall into the trap. And he, because of his actions, had begun to sink into quicksands that it would soon be too late to escape. Unless he commandeered a military plane and had it fly to Haiti, Trinidad, Puerto Rico, the French Antilles, or Venezuela, where he would be welcomed with open arms.
From that moment on, he was in a somnambulistic state. Time was eclipsed, or, rather, instead of moving forward it spun around in a monomaniacal repetition that depressed and infuriated him. He would not leave that state again in the four and a half months of life he had remaining, if what he had deserved to be called life and not hell, nightmare. Until October 12, 1961, he did not have a clear notion of chronology but did have an idea of mysterious eternity, which had never interested him. In the sudden attacks of lucidity that reminded him he was alive, that it hadn’t ended, he tortured himself with the same question: why, knowing that
this
was waiting for you, why didn’t you act as you should have? The question hurt him more than the tortures he faced with great courage, perhaps to prove to himself that cowardice was not the reason he had acted so indecisively on that endless night of May 31, 1961.
Incapable of making sense of his actions, he fell into contradictions and erratic initiatives. He ordered his brother-in-law, General Virgilio García Trujillo, to dispatch four tanks and three infantry companies from San Isidro, where the armored divisions were stationed, to reinforce the December 18 Fortress. But immediately after that he decided to leave the Fortress and go to the Palace. He instructed the head of the Army General Staff, the young General Tuntin Sánchez, to keep him informed regarding the search. Before he left he called Américo Dante Minervino, at La Victoria. He categorically ordered him to immediately liquidate, with absolute secrecy, the prisoners Major Segundo Imbert Barreras and Rafael Augusto Sánchez Saulley, and to make the bodies disappear, for he feared that Antonio Imbert, a member of the action group, might have told his brother about his involvement in the conspiracy. Américo Dante Minervino, accustomed to these kinds of missions, asked no questions: “Understood, General.” He bewildered General Tuntin Sánchez by telling him to inform the SIM, Army, and Air Force patrols participating in the search that persons on the lists of “enemies” and “the disaffected,” which had been distributed to them, ought to be terminated at the first sign of resisting arrest. (“We don’t want prisoners who’ll be used to unleash international campaigns against our country.”) His subordinate made no comment. He would transmit your instructions exactly, General.
As he left the Fortress to go to the Palace, the lieutenant of the guard informed him that two civilians in a car, one of whom claimed to be his brother Ramón (Bibín), had come to the entrance demanding to see him. Following his orders, he had obliged them to leave. He nodded, not saying a word. That meant his brother was in on the plot, that Bibín too would have to pay for his doubts and evasions. Sunk in a kind of hypnosis, he thought his inaction could be due to the fact that although the body of the Chief might be dead, his soul, spirit, whatever you called it, still enslaved him.
At the National Palace he found confusion and desolation. Almost the entire Trujillo family had gathered there. Petán, in riding boots and with a submachine gun slung over his shoulder, had just arrived from his fiefdom in Bonao and was pacing back and forth like a cartoon cowboy. Héctor (Blacky), sitting on a sofa, rubbed his arms as if he were cold. Mireya, and his mother-in-law Marina, were consoling Doña María, the Chief’s wife, who was as pale as a corpse and whose eyes flashed fire. The beautiful Angelita cried and wrung her hands, but her husband, Colonel José (Pechito) León Estévez, in uniform and looking glum, failed to calm her. He felt all their eyes fixed on him: any news? He embraced them, one by one: they were combing the city, house by house, street by street, and soon…Then he discovered that they knew more than the head of the Armed Forces. One of the conspirators, the former soldier Pedro Livio Cedeño, had been wounded and was being interrogated by Abbes García at the International Clinic. And Colonel José León Estévez had already informed Ramfis and Radhamés, who were trying to charter an Air France plane to fly them in from Paris. This was when he also learned that the power attached to his position, which he had squandered over the past few hours, was beginning to slip away; decisions no longer came from his office but from the heads of the SIM, Johnny Abbes García and Colonel Figueroa Carrión, or from Trujillo’s family and relatives, like Pechito or his brother-in-law Virgilio. An invisible force was distancing him from power. It did not surprise him that Blacky Trujillo gave him no explanation for not coming to the meeting he had asked him to attend.
He left the group, hurried to a phone booth, and called the Fortress. He ordered the head of the General Staff to send troops to surround the International Clinic, place the former officer Pedro Livio Cedeño under guard, and stop the SIM from taking him out of there, using force if necessary. The prisoner had to be transferred to the December 18 Fortress. He would come and interrogate him personally. Tuntin Sánchez, after an ominous pause, said only: “Good night, General.” He told himself, in torment, that this was perhaps his worst mistake of the entire evening.