Three Men in a Funk

At one time or another all three of them were in the same line of work; outsiders might easily picture ex-Dictator Juan Peron, 63, and ex-Dictator Fulgencio Batista, 58, gathered around Dictator Rafael Leonidas Trujillo's warm swimming pool in the Dominican Republic, reminiscing about the good old days. Instead, there was trouble in Trujillo's paradise. Peron was too scornful to speak to Batista; Batista was too scared to talk to Peron; aging (67) Dictator Trujillo obviously wished that both of them would go away. Reason: Cuba's bearded rebel leader, Fidel Castro, who toppled Batista, has now turned his attention to the Caribbean's last dictatorship--Trujillo's Dominican Republic.

On his triumphal tour to Caracas a fortnight ago, Castro sent Venezuelans into wild spasms of cheers when he told them: "Everywhere I hear the chant 'Trujillo next! Trujillo next!'" At Caracas' Central University, Castro himself tossed the first coin into a hat to launch a drive for $300,000 to start an invasion. Only 155 miles away from Trujilloland, bearded members of Castro's 26th of July Movement are already gazing longingly at maps showing the Dominican Republic's Cordillera Central, a forest region much like Cuba's Sierra Maestra. As Dominican exiles plot and plan, Castro's soldiers talk knowingly of landing strips and beaches, of living off the land Trujillo has cut up into agricultural colonies.

"Get Out." Of the three dictators, Peron seems to be accepting his plight most resignedly. Trujillo thought that Peron seemed too much of a showpiece living in his Ciudad Trujillo hotel; the weary Argentine obligingly donned his red baseball cap, gathered his blonde secretary, poodles, a motorcycle and a motor scooter and headed for a country villa. For his exurban retreat, he chose a soft-blue-and-white stucco house seven miles east of the capital, facing out over the Caribbean. As explanation of the move, he said that he was "bothered" by the noisy Cuban exiles who invaded his hotel when Batista arrived.

Living with a son and a cluster of bodyguards in the Jaragua Hotel, Batista and his crew present a picture of wariness. One day last week the trigger-cock sound of a purse snapping shut in the hotel lobby made a group of his fellow Cuban exiles swivel around. Batista himself refuses to stand before an open window, spends almost all his time in his suite, scuttles out of the center of a ring of bodyguards only to eat. Trujillo's mouthpiece newspaper, El Caribe, outrightly told Batista to "get out," but he has nowhere to go. France last week turned down his bid for asylum, and he got no answer to a feeler he put out to the U.S.

"Hit by a Truck." Old Dictator Trujillo himself rarely stirs out of his rock-walled white palace; he is too busy planning his defense. Last week he called up 6,000 army reservists to build his active-duty force to 21,000 men (only half of them well trained). He put laborers to work building forts in the interior, sent reinforcements to the string of strongholds along the 193-mile Haitian frontier.

To keep potentially troublesome university students in line, Trujillo organized the "President Trujillo University Police." Bodies of the few remaining opposition lawyers, students and journalists began cluttering up the usually super-sanitary streets. El Caribe laconically reported that one lawyer was found with every bone in his body broken. "Rumor has it," said the paper, "that he was hit by a truck." Afraid of similar "accidents," 14 refugees scuttled to sanctuary in the Venezuelan embassy.

Trujillo has 38 Vampire jet fighters; the Canadian government last week refused to allow a U.S. dealer to ship twelve more to him. But in Cuba, Castro proved that tactical air superiority is pointless over heavy forests in a Caribbean filibuster. Far more valuable to Trujillo are 1) his efficient small-arms plant in his native city of San Cristobal, and 2) the Rio agreement of 1947, which obliges the U.S. and its hemispheric neighbors to halt any invasion fleet bent on disturbing the peace.

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