Mirabal Sisters

Dominican Republic political activists who in the generation after their deaths were transformed into national martyrs, feminist icons and revolutionary heroes. Name variations: Las Mariposas (The Butterflies).

Mirabal de González, Patria (1924–1960). Born Patria Mercedes Mirabal on February 27, 1924; assassinated by command of the dictator of the Dominican Republic, Generalissimo Rafael Leonidas Trujillo Molina, on November 25, 1960; daughter of Enrique Mirabal and Mercedes Mirabal; had sisters Minerva, María Teresa, and Dedé; married; children: son, Nelson González Mirabal (became chief aide to the nation's vice president, Jaime David Fernandez Mirabal).

Mirabal de Tavárez, Minerva (1927–1960). Born Minerva Mirabal on March 12, 1927; assassinated by command of the dictator of the Dominican Republic, Generalissimo Rafael Leonidas Trujillo Molina, on November 25, 1960; daughter of Enrique Mirabal and Mercedes Mirabal; had sisters Patria, María Teresa, and Dedé; married; children: Minou Tavárez Mirabal (became the deputy foreign minister of the Dominican Republic).

Mirabal de Guzmán, María Teresa (1936–1960). Name variations: Maria Teresa Mirabal; (nickname) Maté. Born María Teresa Mirabal on October 15, 1936; assassinated by command of the dictator of the Dominican Republic, Generalissimo Rafael Leonidas Trujillo Molina, on November 25, 1960; daughter of Enrique Mirabal and Mercedes Mirabal; had sisters Minerva, Patria, and Dedé; married.

Born into a family of landowners, the four Mirabal sisters—Patria, Minerva, María Teresa, and Dedé —grew up in a highly conservative and sheltered environment in the rural town of Ojo de Agua in Salcedo Province, Dominican Republic. Their father Enrique kept them on a tight rein. Although their mother Mercedes was barely literate, she recognized the importance of education. Mercedes convinced her husband that if their daughter Patria, who hoped to become a nun, sought to be educated, then the path to learning should not be denied her sisters. As they matured, all four sisters developed social consciences, realizing that daily life in their country had been distorted for an entire generation as a result of Rafael Trujillo's dictatorship.

For more than three decades, the Caribbean nation of the Dominican Republic was ruled by Generalissimo Rafael Leonidas Trujillo Molina (1891–1961), a megalomaniac who held on to power through terror, intimidation and corruption. He established his regime in 1930 with the approval of the United States, which had recently ended its occupation of the Dominican Republic and above all else desired stability in the region for economic and strategic reasons. A military officer trained by the U.S. Marine Corps, Trujillo "won" the Dominican presidency in May 1930, in a contested election. By the time he officially took office as president on August 16, 1930, he had used terrorism to end the lives of enough real and potential opponents to look forward to a regime with little, if any, organized opposition to his rule.

The nature of his lust for power and wealth was crystal clear by the end of the first decade of the Era of Trujillo. He was feared, powerful, and rich by the time he became commander-in-chief of his nation's armed forces. His investments in urban properties only whetted his appetite for more wealth and, once established in the presidential office, he took personal control of the nation's salt production. Now the owner of the Barahona salt mines, Trujillo promulgated a law prohibiting the traditional production of sea salt, which was virtually free, so that the people would have to purchase salt produced at his mine. With the monopoly in place, he raised the price of salt from 60 cents to $3 for a hundred pounds. He soon established a meat monopoly by taking over the slaughterhouses in the capital, Santo Domingo de Guzmán, and eventually his network of monopolies included rice and milk. Trujillo also created a bank for cashing government checks that was managed by his wife María Martínez Trujillo . By the time his first presidential term ended in August 1934, he was by far the richest man in the Dominican Republic.

Trujillo also received an honorary doctorate from the national university and an appointment as a professor of political economy. Among the countless honorific titles bestowed on him over the years were Benefactor of the Fatherland, Restorer of Financial Independence, and Father of the New Fatherland. In 1936, the name of the national capital was changed from Santo Domingo de Guzmán to Ciudad Trujillo. October 24, the day of his birth, became a national holiday, and in 1955 he celebrated 25 years of his rule, proclaiming that entire year to be the "Year of the Benefactor." In the final years of his dictatorship, Trujillo was demanding that the Roman Catholic Church bestow on him the title of "Benefactor of the Church," but—possibly sensing that his days were numbered—it refused to do so.

One of the Mirabal sisters, Minerva, had firsthand knowledge of the dictator's nature. At age 22, having turned down sexual overtures from Trujillo, she was jailed and banned from continuing her law studies. During three years under house arrest at her parents' home in Ojo de Agua, she passed the time painting watercolors and writing poetry about the suffering endured

by the exploited poor in her country. Eventually, Minerva returned to her law studies and graduated with the highest honors from the National Autonomous University of the Dominican Republic.

The successful Cuban revolution, which led to the coming to power of Fidel Castro in January 1959, played a major role in radicalizing many Dominicans, including the Mirabal sisters. In the first phase of the Cuban revolution, before it became enmeshed in the bipolar struggles of the Cold War, many Latin Americans could detect a major step forward in the struggle for social justice in a part of the world where millions had long been denied the basic elements of a decent life. As the desire for social justice began to stir in the Dominican Republic in 1959, the response of the Trujillo dictatorship was swift and brutal. Hundreds were imprisoned, many were tortured, and some simply disappeared, never to be seen again.

For almost his entire dictatorship, Trujillo appeared to be impervious to attack by his enemies. Invasions by Dominican exiles—the first in June 1949 and the second exactly one decade later in June 1959—proved miserable failures. The latter invasion was a catastrophe, even though it had received considerable backing from Castro and included a number of veterans of the anti-Batista guerillas who had fought in Cuba's Sierra Maestra mountains. Despite these demoralizing defeats, the anti-Trujillo underground forces within the Dominican Republic continued to plan and plot for the overthrow of the hated dictatorship. By 1959, these revolutionaries included the Mirabal sisters, each of whom had different reasons for their participation in such a dangerous undertaking. The eldest sister Patria joined the underground because of an essentially religious thirst for justice and peace. Minerva was intent on becoming a tough-minded, fearless revolutionary free of any illusions about the dangers she was facing. The other two sisters were a study in contrasts: María Teresa, the youngest and most naïve, believed that something must be done to rid her nation of the evil Trujillo, whereas Dedé, the only sister who would survive, never completely accepted the rationale of resistance.

By 1960, Patria, Minerva, María Teresa, and their husbands had become thoroughly enmeshed in the growing anti-Trujillo resistance movement that began to sweep the Dominican Republic. Their husbands, having been involved with the failed revolt of June 1959, were arrested and imprisoned. The United States—which had long supported Trujillo's dictatorship as a pillar of pro-business, anti-Communist stability in the region—now began to distance itself from a regime whose very existence provided Fidel Castro and other Latin American revolutionaries with more than sufficient justification for a revolutionary upheaval. Known within the underground Movimiento Revolucionario 14 de Junio (MR14J) by the code name of Mariposa (butterfly), the sisters soon became known for their activities to agents of Trujillo's secret police, the dreaded SIM. They were arrested but released after a short time (for Minerva, this was the third imprisonment in her revolutionary career).

By the closing months of 1960, Trujillo had lost patience with the revolutionary movement and particularly with the Mirabal sisters. He had toyed with the idea of assassination for some time but had been talked out of it by advisors, who impressed on him the negative image this would create for his regime and possibly for him personally. Now, however, incensed by their fearless refusal to cease their oppositional activities, Trujillo gave orders to kill the sisters. Enticed by a ruse, the Mirabal sisters thought that their request to see their imprisoned husbands had finally been approved. On the way to the prison on November 25, 1960, they were arrested, subjected to horrific torture, and killed.

To hide the nature of the crime, their bodies (and that of their driver, Rufino de la Cruz) were placed in their own jeep which was pushed over a high cliff a short distance beyond Santiago, off the winding mountain road that crosses the Cordillera Septentrional to Puerto Plata. When the deaths were reported in the press, including Trujillo's puppet newspaper El Caribe, few readers at home or abroad were fooled by the story of an "automobile accident" that took the lives of Patria, Minerva, and María Teresa Mirabal. Soon, reports of torture inflicted on the sisters before their vehicle plunged off the cliff appeared in a story in The New York Times.

A number of months before his own assassination, Trujillo chose the same stretch of mountain road where the Mirabal sisters' jeep had fallen as the site for an evening stroll. With him was an intimate associate who knew the details of the assassinations. Pausing, Trujillo gazed silently over the precipice and down the steep slope. Then to the surprise of his companion, he said, "This is where the Mirabal women died—a horrible crime that foolish people blame the government for. Such good women, and so defenseless!" On the evening of May 30, 1961, Trujillo was shot dead in a machine-gun attack on his limousine led by a former general who had fallen from grace because his sister had become a member of the resistance.

With the end of the Trujillo dictatorship, Dominicans expected their country to move easily toward democracy, having been denied its blessings for so long. However, unrest, instability, poverty, and social inequality continued to plague the nation into the next decades, and the ghosts of the past were not easily put to rest. Trujillo's last puppet president, Joaquin Balaguer, remained a major player in the Dominican political game, not retiring (under pressure) until 1996. The Mirabal family had to accept the catastrophe that had befallen them. The surviving sister Dedé helped the widowers to raise the children who had been deprived of their mothers.

By the 1980s, Dominicans had begun to appreciate the supreme sacrifice made on their behalf by the Mirabal sisters. Books, articles, museum exhibitions and a commemorative postage stamp issued on December 18, 1985, all testified to a national urge to honor these women. Throughout Latin America, the Mirabal sisters became feminist icons, with the anniversary of their deaths being commemorated every November 25 as the International Day of Violence Against Women. A powerful novel by Dominican-born poet and writer Julia Alvarez , whose parents had gone into exile with her in 1960 to escape Trujillo's wrath, appeared in 1994 as In the Time of the Butterflies.

In the Dominican Republic, the next generation of Mirabals has stepped on the public stage of that hopeful nation. Patria's son, Nelson González Mirabal, became chief aide to the nation's vice president, Jaime David Fernandez Mirabal. Minou Tavárez Mirabal , who was only four years old when her mother Minerva was killed, became the deputy foreign minister of the Dominican Republic. The Foreign Ministry is located in a mansion that once belonged to the Trujillo clan. Working in an office that was the bedroom of the dictator's daughter Angelita led Minou Mirabal to conclude that her own presence there was proof that "we are stronger" than the forces represented by the Trujillo Era.

In February 1997, Santo Domingo unveiled a refurbished 137-foot obelisk which had been placed there many decades before by Trujillo to grace the Malecon, the capital's busy seaside promenade. Now covered with a mural depicting images of the Mirabal sisters—the three martyred ones and the survivor Dedé—it no longer honors the long-dead and disgraced dictator. The work was sponsored by the national telephone company Codetel, whose president said that honoring the sisters this way offered a eulogy to "the struggle of many men and women for Dominican liberty," while also atoning for "the ignominious motive that gave birth to this monument." Dominicans, particularly the nation's women, had long regarded the phallic obelisk as an embodiment of both the Trujillo dictatorship and the machismo values that permeated his life and regime, and which continue to flourish in Latin America. Its replacement by a mural honoring women was interpreted by Minou Tavárez Mirabal as "a victory that is not only political but one of gender."

sources:

Alvarez, Julia. In the Time of the Butterflies. Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 1994.

Aquino Garcia, Miguel. Tres Heroinas y un Tirano: La Historia Veridica de las Hermanas Mirabal y su asesinato por Rafael Leonidas Trujillo. Santo Domingo: [s.n.], 1996.

Behar, Ruth. "Revolutions of the Heart," in Women's Review of Books. Vol. 12, no. 8. May 1995, pp. 6–7.

Crassweller, Robert D. Trujillo: The Life and Times of a Caribbean Dictator. NY: Macmillan, 1966.

Diederich, Bernard. Trujillo: The Death of the Dictator. Princeton, NJ: Markus Wiener, 1998.

Ferreras, Ramon Alberto. Las Mirabal. Santo Domingo: Editorial del Nordeste, 1982.

——. Trujillo y sus mujeres. 3rd ed. Santo Domingo: Editorial del Nordeste, 1989.

Galíndez, Jesús de. The Era of Trujillo, Dominican Dictator. Edited by Russell H. Fitzgibbon. Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press, 1973.

Galvan, William. Minerva Mirabal: Historia de una Heroina. 2nd ed. Santo Domingo: Editora Universitaria UASD, 1985.

Julia, Julio Jaime. Haz de Luces. Santo Domingo: CIPAF, 1990.

Mena, Jennifer. "Women on the Verge … Four Brash Latina Writers Transform the Literary Landscape," in Hispanic Magazine. Vol. 8, no. 2. March 1995, pp. 22–24, 26.

"The Mirabel [sic] Sisters," in The Topical Woman. Vol. 16, no. 2. Spring 1994, pp. 460–461.

Mujica, Barbara. "The Sisters Mirabal," in The World & I. Vol. 10, no. 4. April 1995, pp. 328–333.

Pons, Frank Moya. The Dominican Republic: A National History. Princeton, NJ: Markus Wiener, 1998.

Puleo, Gus. "Remembering and Reconstructing the Mirabal Sisters in Julia Alvarez's In the Time of the Butterflies," in Bilingual Review. Vol. 23, no. 1. January–April 1998, pp. 11–20.

Rohter, Larry. "Santo Domingo Journal: The Three Sisters, Avenged—A Dominican Drama," in The New York Times. February 15, 1997, section I, p. 4.

John Haag , Associate Professor of History, University of Georgia, Athens, Georgia