The Comeback

One year ago last week Dictator Rafael Leonidas Trujillo was waylaid and slain. It took another six months for his son Ramfis to be sent packing. In the void left by 31 years of Trujillo family tyranny, few cheers greeted the seven-man Council of State that took power in the Dominican Republic last January. Its President, Rafael Bonnelly, a 57-year-old lawyer, had once been an errand boy for Trujillo. The other members include a truckline operator, two heart doctors, a businessman, a Roman Catholic priest--and one of the triggermen who killed Trujillo. The news out of the Dominican Republic last week is that this makeshift regime is now ruling with a surprisingly sure hand.

Between Right & Left. Thousands of Dominicans have family scores to settle with the Trujillos, but the Council knew that mass vengeance would only lead to civil conflict with the still influential and Trujillo-trained military. The worst of Trujillo's thugs will in time be brought to trial, the Council promises. Some 1,300 Trujillo-linked officers and noncoms have been retired, but without the kind of rancorous purge that would give them an excuse for armed revolt.

The Council is drawing the nation's middle-road parties into a common, anti-Communist front. Window-smashing mobs can still raise a ruckus in Santo Domingo (formerly Ciudad Trujillo), but now, says one political leader, "each time we have trouble, we have less trouble." The biggest pro-Castro party has lost two-thirds of its original 150,000 members. An anti-Communist national labor federation has won away most of the country's organized workers; anti-Communist student groups have won out in the Dominican Students' Federation.

Turning to Neighbors. To help revive the looted economy, the U.S. rushed $35.2 million in aid. For economic advisers the Council sensibly turned to the neighboring U.S. island Commonwealth of Puerto Rico, which speaks the same language and has plenty of economic experience. Governor Luis Munoz Marin sent his experts to draw plans for a Dominican Industrial Development Corp., capitalized with $41 million in seized Trujillo assets. Puerto Rican specialists drafted a Dominican income tax law hiking levies on the rich, designed an agrarian reform law under which the Council is already distributing land, planned the country's first housing authority, which hopes to help finance 20,000 low-cost homes in the next twelve months. As new capital and new machines--tractors, trucks, sugar-cane grinders--pour into Santo Domingo, unemployment is down 50% to 200,000, wages are up 20%-40%, and workers are eating better.

Glory to the Heroes. Dominicans celebrated the anniversary of Trujillo's assassination last week with horn-tooting street parades. Beside a highway outside the capital, a plaque was undraped on the spot where Trujillo died: ''Glory to the heroic liberating act of the 30th of May." Only one of the four "liberators"' was present for the ceremony: the other three triggermen all died in the aftermath at the hands of Trujillo's troops. The survivor, Council Member Antonio Imbert, 41, hid for six months in a friend's shuttered room, is still a presumed target for Trujillo revenge. Tommy gun-toting guards protect his home round-the-clock; he wears a .45 Colt at all times and keeps an M-1 rifle within easy reach.

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