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Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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La fiesta del chivo, the novel by Mario Vargas Llosa that tells us a story that is sadly very common for Latinos, that of a totalitarian dictator. In this case, that of Rafael Trujillo in his last weeks of life during his regime in the Dominican Republic in 1961. Arrancamos con otro episodio de Bibliotequeando. Como siempre, les habla Sonfitron, Ricardo Lugo, arroba Bibliotequeando en las redes.
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El link lo encuentran en la descripción de este podcast o en el link de las cuentas de las redes sociales. La Fiesta del Chivo is a historical fiction novel. Mario Vargas Llosa takes, of course, real elements of history, as was the regime of Rafael Trujillo, and adds characters and different fictional elements.
This novel is very interesting because it has three paths, let's say it has three stories, all happen in parallel, and in each of the characters they return to the past and think about the different decisions they made to get where they are.
These three stories are the story of Urania Cabral, who is a Dominican woman who left the Dominican Republic during the Trujillo regime, shortly before they killed him, but she was the daughter of a senator of the Rafael Trujillo regime. The second character, the second story, is that of Rafael Trujillo himself, and it is basically from the morning to the afternoon on the day of his murder.
And the third story is that of his murderers, those who, so to speak, attempted a coup and those who ambushed him on the day of his death. So while I do this summary, I will be interspersing, exchanging between each story to make them feel that they are living the book in the same way that Vargas Llosa wrote it. So we start with the story of Uraña Cabral.
A girl, just when she left the Dominican Republic at the age of 14. But already in this novel, she is already a 49-year-old woman. She lives in the United States. She graduated from Harvard University. She works as a lawyer in New York. She has traveled the world. She has a very good job. She has been very successful professionally.
But it shows that she has certain personal problems that she has never solved. Since she left at the age of 14, she has never returned to the Dominican Republic. Her family sends her letters. She reads them, but she has not answered them. But after reading them, she finds out that her father, who is still alive after being a senator of the Trujillo regime, is in very poor health.
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Chapter 2: What is 'La Fiesta Del Chivo' about?
When she arrives at her father's house, she realizes that her health is much worse than she thought. Basically, her father can't talk anymore, he can't communicate, he understands what they say, but he no longer has a way of communicating, given the certain damage he had in his brain.
So she decides, or rather, takes advantage of this opportunity to face him, to ask him how he could have been so faithful to a tyrant like Rafael Trujillo. In fact, he even asked him, because Uraña begins to remember that Trujillo used to go to the houses of his various government officials only to have sexual relations with the wives of his officials. For the only reason of demonstrating power.
So Uraña asks him if Trujillo had sex with his mother, what other evils did he do within his family that she never knew. His father, of course, cannot answer and there is even doubt as to whether he is understanding or not. But this is how the novel begins, with Urania returning to the Dominican Republic for the first time and challenging her father.
And from here the novel now takes us to the story of Rafael Trujillo, the dictator. This is the morning of what will be his last day on earth, of course he does not know it. Y la novela nos los muestra como un hombre muy firme, muy intimidante, por supuesto con un carácter muy difícil. Y al mismo tiempo con una obsesión por la limpieza, apariencia personal.
Se despertaba muy temprano, se aseguraba que la ropa estuviera organizada de cierta manera. Y mientras él se despierta, se pone a pensar en diferentes problemas personales que él tiene. Está pensando en el hecho de que él siente que no hay un heredero del trono actual. that honor him. None of his sons think he would be a good governor.
In fact, he feels a lot of frustration towards them because they are in Paris, playing polo, dating women, enjoying life, while he is in the Dominican Republic, fighting for the good of the country. That's how he sees it, at least. But of course, this is a very totalitarian dictatorship. It lasted 31 years. His family members have all positions in the government.
He changed the name of the capital of Santo Domingo to Ciudad Trujillo and whoever was in disagreement or had any intention of doubting the leadership of Trujillo was persecuted, murdered, tortured or the popular disappearance of the people who happen a lot in Latin America. During this morning he is waking up, dressing up and thinking about many problems that he currently has.
One with the church. The church tried to get up against him a couple of years before. Economic sanctions by the OAS. And with all this in mind, his meeting with Johnny Abbas begins. Who is the leader of the military intelligence service, better known as the SIM. who were, let's say, the dogs, the dirty hands of the dictator Trujillo in the Dominican Republic.
This Johnny Aves Garcia is one of the bloodiest people within the Dominican Republic, probably throughout Latin America at the time, he was not a soldier. Despite being the head of the military intelligence service, he was not a soldier. What he was in charge of is to persecute and torture and kill people. He was a sicar in the exterior of Rafael Trujillo.
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Chapter 3: Who are the main characters in 'La Fiesta Del Chivo'?
Not that he doesn't consider it, but in fact he has it in his head for a long time. But he doesn't want to do it at this moment. And very curiously, in this novel, Johnny Aves recommends to Trujillo to reinforce the security path that he had towards San Cristobal. San Cristobal was the original people.
of Trujillo, and there he was going to have sexual relations with women, many times consensual, as non-consensual. And Aves wanted to put more security on that route, which Trujillo says no, because he felt claustrophobic, he didn't like to have people around him when he was going to do these things in his own town.
And from here, the story now leads us to the conspirators, to the murderers of Rafael Trujillo. As I told you, this is all the same day. It is the last day in the life of Rafael Trujillo. While he wakes up and has his meeting with Johnny Aves Garcia, Los Golpistas are in the car, on the road, waiting for Rafael Trujillo's car.
This is a May 30, 1961, and there are four men who are in the same car. Salvador Estrella Sadala, better known as El Turco, Antonio Invert, Antonio de la Maza and Amadito. These four characters are from real life and of course the details of the conversations and all this is a bit fictitious, but the story of them is true. Each of them was a Trujillo.
Everyone supported the regime at one point, but different circumstances, different events happened that made them change their minds. In the case of the Turk, Salvador Estrella, he was a very practicing Catholic, a very believer, and he was convinced that what Trujillo was doing with the Catholic Church was not the right thing to do.
So he felt that he had, let's say, God's permission to go and kill Rafael Trujillo. In the case of Amadito, he was a soldier, part of the Trujillo army. During his stay in the army, he met a girl named Lucia Gil, of whom he fell in love. He fell in love so much that he wanted to ask for marriage, but within the Trujillismo, he had to ask for permission.
to be able to get married because Trujillo was very paranoid and he wanted to avoid that military, specifically political leaders, would mix with families that were not in Trujillo's interest. Trujillo's regime did not seem to him that this girl, Lucia Gil, was the best for Amadito.
She did not as such, but she had certain connections with her brother who was a little bit of an idealist, a little bit of a leftist, socialist, and he was forbidden to marry her. Amadito with all that he remained in the army and despite the fact that it hurt him, he continued to trust Trujillo's regime.
But he went up little by little in the military rank, partly because he decided not to marry her, that impressed him. Trujillo liked to do that, he liked to test those who were closest to him. So what they saw was that this Amadito sacrificed his love life for the good of Trujillo.
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Chapter 4: How does Urania Cabral's story unfold in the novel?
Radamés, who was the second son, disappeared in the streets of Panama. He was supposedly murdered by the Colombian mafia. He had a lot of problems with drugs. And the only surviving daughter of Trujillo, called Angelita, is a reborn Christian who now lives and preaches in Miami.
She tells this only trying to vent because she is 35 years old without seeing her father, without seeing her family, without stepping on Dominican soil and she is like collecting what this point was in her life. And that's when she realizes that now she is in another reality,
She is now a very successful professional woman, but who never takes vacation, who never has free time, who, when she does have free time, starts reading history books about the Dominican Republic, and when she does that, she feels that it weighs even more on her for what she went through.
But she reminds her father that despite having been in the United States for years, she has not become a gringa, as she says, she has simply preserved Dominican. And in this visit, in this conversation, if you can call it that, between Urania and her father Agustín Cabral, suddenly a cousin of Urania called Lucinda arrives.
They have time without talking since Urania left and they begin to remember, they begin to talk about things that happened when she was still in Dominicana and among those things are the last weeks of the Trujillo regime. And here Vargas Llosa shows us how Agustín Cabral was really persecuted by the Trujillo regime in the last two or three weeks of his regime. Uraña knows that.
She was there when that happened. So here the novel gives us an introduction to that problem. It shows us that Trujillo... He takes away the political position that Agustin Cabral has, he takes away access to the country club, he takes away access to bank accounts and loses all kinds of social and economic status that the family had.
In fact, if it is not for the money that Urania sent her father back, the family would probably have been broken. And here Lucinda invites Urania to her house, to visit the aunts, the cousins, the nephews, all these people who are 35 years old without talking. Urania is not sure she wants to go. There are many things with which she does not want to deal yet.
We still do not know exactly what it is. We still do not have a clear image of why Urania leaves Dominicana. and he doesn't keep in touch with his father and with the rest of his family. With his father, the book at this point gives us an idea that well, Urania is in disagreement with the fact that he supported the regime.
But now that we see that the regime was chasing the father in the last few weeks, now we have a question mark. What's going on? Why Urania, who seems like a decent, intelligent woman, is not in touch with his family after so long? So Urania
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Chapter 5: What is Rafael Trujillo's perspective in the story?
The daughter is barely 14 years old. What's wrong with the fact that the daughter traveled to the United States? It was more or less common within the regime. In fact, Balaguer clarifies that she went to a convent, a Catholic school in Michigan, in the United States, and that the nuns who helped her get that scholarship don't even like Agustín Cabral. They don't have a good opinion about him.
What he does like is that he likes Urania, who is a girl. At the end of the meeting, Trujillo calls Johnny Aves Garcia and asks him to find out what happened with Urania Cabral, how she could escape the country, how that letter didn't reach him. So we still see the paranoia or the the importance of this issue for Trujillo.
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Then he decided to go back to his hometown, San Cristobal, since he had an appointment with a 17-year-old girl. Let's remember that he really liked to go to his house in San Cristobal and receive women, many times voluntarily, most of the time involuntarily, who were going to have sex with him. And unfortunately, many of these girls were minors.
But on the way, he decides to go through Pupo Román. If you remember, Pupo Román is the leader of the armed forces who is conspiring against Trujillo. Trujillo doesn't know this at the moment. What he's going to do is punish him because he feels that the armed forces are dirty, out of cleanliness, they don't have as much order. He simply went to reproach him for how bad the armed forces are.
He took him to one of the barracks, he took him down the road, humiliated him and left him there, Pupo Román. And further ahead on this road, the conspirators are waiting for him. They are nervous, they are anxious, afraid that the plan has been exposed because Trujillo, in theory, should have already passed through the road.
He hasn't done it, they don't know, because Trujillo is scolding Pupo Román, which is ironic because Pupo Román is working with them. But they keep reviewing the plan. The plan is that they are the main car, where these four conspirators are, is the main car. But later, about a kilometer later, there is another car.
And a kilometer further, there is another car that is waiting for them to kill Trujillo. The reason why these cars are not a central part of history is because they do not know the main plan. To prevent the plan from being exposed within Trujillo's intelligence, They never gave all the details to everyone. For example, Pupu Roman does not know exactly how they are going to kill Trujillo.
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Chapter 6: Who are the conspirators planning to assassinate Trujillo?
And he went to the bathroom to clean himself. Trujillo was screaming, upset with life, cursing the gods because he can no longer get an erection. And in all this, he decides to call the conductor and ask him to take him back, but not to his house, but to a nun's academy in Santo Domingo. In this academy, she tells him the story of what happened to the nun Mary.
This nun had an agreement, it was a sister academy, of an organization, a school in the United States. And this is the school that Uraña is going to study, which leaves at the age of 14. This is the nun who helped her get that scholarship. She always kept the incident a secret. And she convinced her to leave. Uraña told her, you can't stay in this country.
Your dad doesn't know if he's going to offer you again. He doesn't know if Trujillo is going to keep asking you. You have to leave now. Of course, this shows us why Trujillo never forgave Agustín Cabral.
It is not yet known why he put him in disgrace, but of course he would never accept him as part of the government, because when he left Uraña to the United States, his father was left as a traitor to the homeland. This shows us not only that Rafael Trujillo was a horrible person politically, as a dictator, guilty of thousands of deaths, but also horrible at a personal level.
Many young women had to pay to have been born in the time of Rafael Trujillo. His family, when they hear the story, is amazed, surprised. But at the same time they forgive her and tell her that they are going to send her letters later on. And they humbly ask her if Uraña is going to stay in touch this time. And Uraña says yes. This was a moment, let's say, when Uraña mentally healed.
She never told anyone about this. She didn't have a husband. In fact, she later admits that she doesn't have sexual relations with men in the United States, which is very cold towards men, because in part she was traumatized by what happened with Rafael Trujillo and she understands. So her family forgives her, forgives her. She forgives, of course, the fact of not having sent the letters.
It didn't happen with Trujillo, but him having been out of contact with Dominicana for 35 years. And Urania returns to New York to her lawyer job, but now with a feeling that she could finally close that page. And that's how this story ends, this story of real life, but at the same time fictitious.
As I told you, Urania Cabral is a fictional character, but she went through something that many, many women suffered with Rafael Trujillo, who was a pedophile and a horrible dictator. As I told you, El resto de los personajes son de la vida real. Todos los conspiradores, el pupo Román, Balaguer, por supuesto, Johnny Aves García. En internet pueden averiguar mucha más información sobre ellos.
Es una historia muy interesante. Y bueno, espero que les haya gustado este resumen. Como siempre, nos pueden seguir en Instagram y TikTok, arroba Bibliotequeando. Ahí pueden conseguir el link que les da acceso a todos estos libros en PDF y el link para este podcast. Nos vemos la próxima semana.
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