It has been a pet peeve of mine the rise of a new breed of historians who continue to dominate and revise Dominican history apr?s Trujillo. This week the overrated French Castroist bufoon Piero Gleijeses, who was received with red carpet by our local "leftist" Castro lambones, came up with some outrageous bull from the past. He brings up again the "hero worship" of post-Trujillo politics, by enhancing Manolo Tavares Justo's image, while pitting another pseudo-hero Fidelio Despradel against him.
I have always asserted, because I lived the "era" and knew him somewhat, that Tavares Justo was nothing more than a Ramfis Trujillo-looks imitator, playboy, adventurer and bultero excellent. His claim to fame was to have married one of the most overrated heroines of our times, the Mirabal sisters, made famous by the errand pen of Julia Alvarez, Mario Vargas Llosa, whose only mistake was to lower himself writing La Fiesta del Chivo, and the new kid on the block Junot Diaz, who bluffed his way to a Pulitzer with "The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, which I read fully in English. None of their books impressed me, although Vargas Llosa and I are in the same wavelenght philisophically, though his Nobel is well deserved.
But Tavares Justo was a foolish idiot who took to the mountains thinking he could emulate the other overrated hero Che Guevara and his idol Fidel Castro. He mistakingly underestimated Balaguer's temple and misread his own popularity with our peasant class. For it wasn't the Dominican army that did him in, but our loyalist peasants in the campos.
Such was the fate of all Cuban-led invasions, including the miserably failed Colonel Caama?o incursion. Caama?o, himself another police thug of the worst kind, like other fake heroes Imbert Barreras and Antonio dela Maza, is another example of revisionist heroism.
Gleijeses has impressed Dominican leftists with his John Hopkins resume, but nowhere is he listed in a faculty who's who in that famed school and his own claim to fame is a book about the US and Cuban interventions abroad and La Esperanza Desgarrada, his new book about the April '65 revolution.
This new book is another revisionist old hashed theme with pure self-made fiction.
It's not even in a league with Vargas Llosa's much invented historical account of events leading to Trujillo's death.
It's almost like my pet peeve with "historian" Juan Daniel Balcacer, member of the Dominican Historical Society, President of The Dominican Efemerides government agency. Here's a guy I grew up with in NYC. I don't recall ever seeing him go to college, much less high school. From that gang of friends in Washington Heights ,only my cousin and namesake and I went to and graduated from college in NYC. Juan Daniel was a street dude. Yet years later he shows up as a Dominican historian. i have yet to find a biography of him, including his own briefs describing his higher education. Yet he lectures at UASD. Such is the world of faux historians in DR.
I have always asserted, because I lived the "era" and knew him somewhat, that Tavares Justo was nothing more than a Ramfis Trujillo-looks imitator, playboy, adventurer and bultero excellent. His claim to fame was to have married one of the most overrated heroines of our times, the Mirabal sisters, made famous by the errand pen of Julia Alvarez, Mario Vargas Llosa, whose only mistake was to lower himself writing La Fiesta del Chivo, and the new kid on the block Junot Diaz, who bluffed his way to a Pulitzer with "The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, which I read fully in English. None of their books impressed me, although Vargas Llosa and I are in the same wavelenght philisophically, though his Nobel is well deserved.
But Tavares Justo was a foolish idiot who took to the mountains thinking he could emulate the other overrated hero Che Guevara and his idol Fidel Castro. He mistakingly underestimated Balaguer's temple and misread his own popularity with our peasant class. For it wasn't the Dominican army that did him in, but our loyalist peasants in the campos.
Such was the fate of all Cuban-led invasions, including the miserably failed Colonel Caama?o incursion. Caama?o, himself another police thug of the worst kind, like other fake heroes Imbert Barreras and Antonio dela Maza, is another example of revisionist heroism.
Gleijeses has impressed Dominican leftists with his John Hopkins resume, but nowhere is he listed in a faculty who's who in that famed school and his own claim to fame is a book about the US and Cuban interventions abroad and La Esperanza Desgarrada, his new book about the April '65 revolution.
This new book is another revisionist old hashed theme with pure self-made fiction.
It's not even in a league with Vargas Llosa's much invented historical account of events leading to Trujillo's death.
It's almost like my pet peeve with "historian" Juan Daniel Balcacer, member of the Dominican Historical Society, President of The Dominican Efemerides government agency. Here's a guy I grew up with in NYC. I don't recall ever seeing him go to college, much less high school. From that gang of friends in Washington Heights ,only my cousin and namesake and I went to and graduated from college in NYC. Juan Daniel was a street dude. Yet years later he shows up as a Dominican historian. i have yet to find a biography of him, including his own briefs describing his higher education. Yet he lectures at UASD. Such is the world of faux historians in DR.
