The Last Playboy: The High Life of Porfirio Rubirosa. Shawn Levy
worldliness, because they were relatives of the Dominican president, and because the Third Reich was courting Caribbean governments as part of its scheme of global expansion, Porfirio and Flor were granted a number of remarkable privileges. When the Olympics began, they were permitted to sit in Hitler’s box at the main stadium, where they observed the Führer’s caroms between childish glee at each German victory and rock stolidity when another nation’s anthem was played at a medal ceremony. They were feted by Hermann Göring, who took Porfirio aside during the evening and expressed interest in obtaining a particularly handsome Dominican medal. They were invited to the annual party rally in Nuremberg, where they gazed in stupefaction at an orgy of adulation on a scale of which Trujillo, with his own budding cult of personality, could only dream.
Despite such impressive shows, both young Dominicans were shocked by the outright anti-Semitism of the regime. Flor found herself secretly aiding a Jewish girl who had been her schoolmate in France, obtaining visas for her and her husband and seeing to their getting settled in the Dominican Republic and started in the tobacco business. Porfirio was staggered one day as he rode through a park and saw a young man wearing a yellow star and being humiliated by Germans. “Racism never occurred to me,” he reflected. Indeed, he had enjoyed a certain éclat for his Creole heritage, which was evident even though he was fair-skinned enough to pass for Latin as opposed to Negro. “In the Dominican Republic, blacks and whites were equals. At times they mixed. There were social differences, but in the most exclusive places one met people of color. In Paris as well, racial problems didn’t exist.”
But at the same time, neither of them had any inkling of how truly invidious the Reich was or would be. Dazzled, perhaps, by his good fortune to be living with money in a posh European capital, Porfirio reckoned that Hitler’s great shows of force “were no more than a bluff.” In retrospect he would feel some shame at his miscalculation. “I’m not a politician,” he would explain. But he noted, too, that the diplomatic corps of larger and more sophisticated nations were equally gulled by the Führer. If he had been fooled, he wasn’t alone.
Before he could fathom the truth of the Reich, however, he found himself transferred. Flor was so miserable living in Berlin with her rakish husband that she wrote to her father to express her displeasure:
I have learned a little German and seen a lot of the country, and I have admired the great work of Hitler. But nevertheless I’m not happy.… In diplomatic circles, most of the officials are on the left. They don’t invite us to their dances and I don’t have the chance to meet anybody. If it isn’t too much to ask, I’d like you to transfer us to Paris.… There, I’d have occasion to attend many conferences and get to know better the French literature that I like so well. Please let me know if you can comply with this request.
Indeed, he could, but first a royal interlude in London: On May 12, 1937, they represented the Dominican Republic at the coronation of George VI; Porfirio met the monarch in a private audience. Two days later, at the Dominican legation at 21 Avenue de Messine in Paris, the following note arrived from the undersecretary of foreign relations in Ciudad Trujillo:
It pleases me to inform you that the most excellent Señor Presidente of the Republic has seen fit to name Mr. Porfirio Rubirosa as Secretary First Class of this legation in substitute for Gustavo J. Henriquez, who has been designated Secretary First Class in Berlin in substitution for Mr. Porfirio Rubirosa.
This was far more like it.
Paris had changed in the decade since he’d last lived there: The tangos and Dixieland in the nightclubs had been swept away by a wave of Russian music and Gypsy-flavored hot jazz; the chic hot spots were now on the Left Bank of the Seine instead of the Right. But it was intoxicating to be there, to saunter into his old haunts in search of old friends, to pass by the erstwhile family house on Avenue Mac-Mahon, to delight in the new fashions favored by women in both couture and amour. When he stowed away on the Carimare and left France he was a child, as Don Pedro had despairingly declared; now he was a twenty-eight-year-old man with means and liberty.
“As soon as I arrived in Paris,” he remembered without shame, “invitations began pouring in. I was out every night, often alone. My wife objected … she could not keep up with me.”
In large part, his duties at the embassy would be, as in Berlin, ceremonial. He and Flor were presented to the general commissioner of the upcoming Exposition Internationale des Arts et Techniques dans la Vie Moderne, and he found himself appointed to a panel of judges who would award prizes to various exhibits. It was a prestigious post. The exposition, a gigantic world’s fair celebrating global modernity, took over the area around the Eiffel Tower and Palais de Trocadero throughout the summer. It was a marvel of aesthetic novelties paraded by nations on the verge of global war: Albert Speer’s soaring German pavilion; Pablo Picasso’s searing Guernica in the Spanish pavilion; a Finnish hall designed by Alvar Aalto; illuminated fountains; exhibitions dedicated to the latest advances in refrigeration and neon light. The Dominican Republic couldn’t compete with those sorts of things, but they did share some exhibit space with other Caribbean nations, showing off native crafts and the work of the latest Dominican artists. Trujillo instigated dozens of letters between Paris and Ciudad Trujillo about the exposition; he was delighted to learn that the French artist and critic Alfred Lebrun “had formed an elevated new idea of the progress achieved by our country,” and he sent the eminent man a box of cigars in gratitude.
The Benefactor lived for this sort of thing, and he kept Porfirio busy with the most bizarre little requests to satisfy better his comprehension of the modern world and his nation’s place in it. He sent to Paris for atlases and diplomatic dictionaries; he hired a Paris-based Caribbean journalist to analyze the possibility of his being awarded a Nobel Peace Prize; he had framed photos of the legation sent to him, and signatures of foreign officials, with whom he also exchanged pens; relishing the opportunity to acquire foreign honors in exchange for those of the Dominican Republic, he ordered miniatures and reproductions of each new award he received. Porfirio served so well as the conduit for all this ephemera that he was promoted to consul in July 1937.
But at the same time that he put forward the shiny front of his daughter and son-in-law for Europe’s leaders, Trujillo was revealing his most atrociously dark side back home. He had spent the first years of his rule quelling—through political machination, bribery, and, especially, brute force—all internal opposition. Now he turned his attention to Haiti. It was a natural target for him: The border between the two countries was something of a fiction, having been drawn along no clear geographical or political lines and passing through remote districts whose residents truly might not be able to say which country they lived in or who its ruler was. Moreover, Trujillo, like every Dominican, had been bred with a fear and hatred of Haiti born of centuries of conflict, and he had, like every leader of both nations, harbored dreams of uniting Hispaniola under his hand. At the very least, he wanted clear autonomy over his own portion of the island, and Haiti and its citizens always seemed to be interfering with that prospect. Throughout the early years of Trujillo’s reign, Haitian encroachment on Dominican territory became burdensome in a number of ways: public health, cattle rustling, an increase in churches practicing a mixture of Catholicism and voodoo, Haitian infiltration into the Dominican sugar industry, and so forth. There had been some efforts toward a détente between Trujillo and his Haitian counterpart, Stenio Vincent. But as the grievances were felt chiefly by Dominicans, it was inevitably Trujillo who was the more vexed.
His frustration reached the tipping point in October 1937, when he gave a provocative speech about Dominican sovereignty and national purity. That very night, up and down the border and in the areas farther inland that were easily accessible to Haitian migrants, small cadres of armed men—some from the official military, others no better organized than the makeshift platoons that Don Pedro Rubirosa had once commanded—rounded up all the Haitians they could find and slaughtered them.
It was the most brutal sort of genocide. In a land where virtually everyone was of mixed blood, it was nevertheless assumed that Haitians were generally darker-skinned, meaning that many black Dominicans were swept up in the raids; a crude test of certain Spanish words that French speakers notoriously had trouble pronouncing was instituted. Have a dark enough complexion and say perejil (“parsley”) improperly and you were dead.