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As the treasury began to fill, Trujillo built schools and boasted that he had raised the literacy rate from 30% to 96% during his regime. Efficient hospitals were built; good roads (with military check points every few miles) crisscrossed the island to carry a rich sugar and coffee harvest to market. Trujillo spent millions on self-glorifying publicity (hiring such U.S. agents as F.D.R.'s Attorney General Homer Cummings and F.D.R. Jr. himself), and won such influential champions as U.S. Democratic Senators James O. Eastland and Allen Ellender, who once said, "I wish there were a Trujillo in every country of South and Central America." Other apologists, ignoring Trujillo's terror, pointed to the Dominican Republic's sharply improved per-capita yearly income ($225, about average for Latin America). But the average did not reflect the disproportionate share of the wealth acquired by the ubiquitous Trujillo family through The Benefactor's standard 10% cut on all public-works contracts, his heavy interests in sugar, textiles, cattle, insurance, and his monopolies of salt, cigarettes, lumber, matches, milk and peanut oil. When the coffin lid shut on Trujillo's business career last week, he was worth an estimated $800 million. Feeding the Chaos. The man who will reap the whirlwind, rushing home from Paris in an Air France jet chartered for $28,000, was Rafael Leonidas ("Ramfis")
Trujillo Jr., 32, one of Trujillo's four acknowledged offspring. A polo-loving playboy, his main claim to fame until now was flunking out of the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth while AWOL in pursuit (despite a wife and six children) of Kim Novak and Zsa Zsa Gabor (to whom he gave a $5,500 Mercedes-Benz, a $17,000 chinchilla coat). Commissioned by Daddy as an army colonel at the age of three and promoted to brigadier general at nine, Ramfis has little in his record to suggest the tenacity and talent needed to cope with the chaos he has inherited.
Beneath the façade of order, the Dominican Republic left by Trujillo is a political vacuum, and its economy is near collapse. As he grew older, Trujillo embarked on grandiose projects of no merit, lost $35 million on an international fair that flopped in 1956, drained away another $50 million for arms in the space of two years. Trujillo compounded his growing troubles by a foolish and abortive plot to assassinate Venezuelan President Rómulo Betancourt in Caracas last June. As a result, Trujillo was ostracized by all the other nations of the hemisphere.
Increasingly, his raw nerves lay close to the surface. In fits of blind rage, he slapped his puppet President Joaquin Balaguer, kicked palace functionaries in the groin, spat on his assistants. But he still had an instinct for survival. Aware that the main threat of internal revolution lay within the literate middle class, he kept up the pressure of arrest and harassment to prevent organized opposition. He even took on the Roman Catholic Church, which at last went into open opposition.
As the pressure of the U.S. and Latin American nations hardened against him, Trujillo last year mischievously began a defiant courtship with Moscow. He let leftists take over a radio station and a newspaper, sent emissaries behind the