Warning Beneath the Cliff

Tragic coincidences are not uncommon in Dictator Rafael Leonidas Trujillo's Dominican Republic. Last week Trujillo's mouthpiece, El Caribe, reported another: the curious case of three wellborn sisters noted for their opposition to the Dictator. They were found dead near the wreckage of a Jeep at the bottom of a 150-ft. cliff on the north coast of the tight little island. Said El Caribe: "The accident in which Driver Rufino Cruz and the sisters Patria Mirabal de Gonzales, Minerva Mirabal de Tavarez and Maria Teresa Mirabal de Guzman died is presumed to have happened when Cruz lost control of the vehicle."

There was much to the story of the three Mirabal sisters that El Caribe did not tell. The story began with Minerva, 32, who reportedly caught the Dictator's eye some years ago when she was a pretty university student. When Trujillo tried to exercise his Dominican version of droit du seigneur, Minerva's response was a stinging slap on the face. Shortly thereafter, both Minerva and her middle-aged father were jailed, Minerva briefly, her father for two years before he was released --to die 15 days later of a combination of malnutrition, beatings and general misuse. The sisters all married anti-Trujillo husbands--a lawyer, an engineer, a farmer. In 1957 the three couples began organizing an underground opposition to the Dictator among the Dominican Republic's middle and professional classes; after the failure of a Cuba-based airborne invasion in 1959, the underground movement took as its name the date of the failure--the 14th of June. Last January, as the 14th of June gathered strength to strike at Trujillo, the Dictator got word of the plot and cracked down.

In the trials that followed, two of the husbands got 20 years, the other 30. To forestall plotting, the men were sent to widely separated prisons. Two of the sisters themselves were imprisoned briefly, then allowed to return to their family home near Salcedo, 70 miles northwest of Ciudad Trujillo. Two months ago, without explanation, all three husbands were moved to a prison near Salcedo. There, after a tantalizing delay, the wives were granted permission to make a joint visit a fortnight ago. The sisters' cars had been confiscated; gratefully they accepted a stranger's offer to ride to the prison in his Jeep. On the way back, for reasons unexplained, the Jeep driver left the main highway for an unnecessary--and fatal--jounce along a desolate, cliff-edged road.

There was, of course, no hint of foul play in the reports from Trujilloland. But the terrible deaths of the three sisters and their driver--who presumably was considered expendable--would be something for the 14th of June underground to think about.

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