Shawn Levy - The Last Playboy - The High Life of Porfirio Rubirosa

Don Pedro, his son related, “was always in a campaign. It was the time of basements stocked with rifles and houses filled with soldiers. In effect, my father negotiated a ceaseless labyrinth of skirmishes, assaults, forays, and guerilla attacks.” And through a combination of personal qualities and historical accidents, he became, in the military algebra of the era, a general. In this context, mind, a general wasn’t a professional soldier promoted after of a long career of battle and governance. He was, rather, the smartest, luckiest, boldest in his troop, responsible for arming, feeding, and housing his men, and for strategizing and liaising with the other bands of soldiers with which they were allied. It was a position earned as much with guts as brains. “A general who didn’t march in front of his men didn’t exercise great dominion over them,” Don Pedro’s son said. “This explains why Dominican officers rarely died in bed of old age, like their European colleagues, and why rapid promotions permitted a youngster of 20 to become a general.”

But there was another quality to Don Pedro, even more important than his daring or his brains or the poor luck of his senior colleagues. As his son put it, “One had to be a tiger to command a group of tigers.”

Tiger: tigre in Spanish, tíguere in the local argot, in which the word came to represent the essential defining characteristic of the Dominican alpha male. The Dominican tíguere was, like the ideal male in all Latin cultures, profoundly masculine— macho , in the Castilian—but had dimensions unique, perhaps, to the Creole culture of Hispaniola. He was handsome, graceful, strong, and well-presented, possessed of a deep-seated vanity that allowed him the luxury of niceties of character and appearance that might otherwise hint at femininity. He could move with sensuality or violence; he was fast, fearless, fortunate. A tíguere emerged well from nearly any situation that confronted him, twisted any misfortune to an asset, spun a happy ending of some sort out of the most outrageously poor circumstance; he was able, being feline, to climb to unlikely heights and, should he fall, always landed, being feline, on his feet. The tíguere bore the savor of low origins and high aspirations, as well as a certain ruthless ambition that barred no means of achieving his ends: violence, treachery, lies, shamelessness, daring, and, especially, the use of women as tools of social mobility. A tíguere always married to advantage.

If there was an element of the outlaw or the delinquent in the tíguere , if only in his early days, he could hope to transcend it and reach the highest rungs of society—indeed, it was widely understood in Dominican life that an element of tíguerismo was essential to most success. To some degree, the Dominican male, if he was true to his blood and his culture, could be permitted virtually any impudence or trespass whatever. Adultery, theft, tyranny, violence, bellicose savagery, social cruelty, excesses of libido and appetite and greed: All could be ascribed to—and forgiven as— tíguerismo .

Pedro Maria Rubirosa clearly fulfilled the role of tíguere as a warrior and man of action. But he did so as well as a lover of women. “My father was a handsome man,” the son remembered. “His form was lithe, his eyes brilliant; he shone with every aspect of a gentleman. Women admired him.”

Among those admirers was a girl from his hometown, Ana Ariza Almanzar, granddaughter of a Spanish general who had fought in Cuba. At the dawn of the new century, Don Pedro took this well-bred young woman as his wife.

They began their family with tragedy, losing at least one child before 1902; then a daughter, Ana, managed to survive the perils of tropical infancy. Three years later came a son, Cesar. The tíguere now had a male heir to boast of and to train.

It was a flush time for Don Pedro. The tyrant Ulises Heureaux, who had ruled the Dominican Republic with a ruthless hand for two decades, had been assassinated in the summer of 1899, and a period of relative calm had descended. Don Pedro’s daring, loyalty, and intelligence had recommended him to the new government, and he was appointed as governor of a string of small cities—first San Francisco de Macorís, then the coastal city of Samaná, then El Seibo, each posting finding him assigned farther from home as the warrior-politicians of the Cibao peacefully extended their influence.

In El Seibo, where he arrived in 1906, Don Pedro allowed himself the pleasure of other women. (Ana, her son would offer by way of explanation, “got fat after her first children arrived.”) With a local woman and her cousin he fathered four children en la calle , as the saying went: “in the street”: bastards.

He acknowledged them, though only one took his name. And then his duties called him back to San Francisco de Macorís, where the last of his legitimate children was born, on January 22, 1909. They named him Porfirio.

It was such a sparkling name: Porfirio Rubirosa Ariza (the Ariza a technicality, following the Spanish convention of retaining the matronym for legal purposes).

The surname was, of course, a given, and it meant “red rose.”

The Christian name, however, was something of a fancy, not a family name like that of the baby’s sister or an obviously historical name like that of his brother. There were some obscure antecedents: an ascetic Saint Porphyry of Gaza; Porphyry of Tyre, a mathematician and philosopher of Phoenicia, noted to this day for his treatises on vegetarianism and named after the purple dye for which his home city was famous (at root, the word “porphyry” refers to a shade of purple that naturally occurs in feldspar crystals). But Don Pedro and Ana probably had in mind Porfirio Díaz, the autocratic president of Mexico under whose hand that nation modernized itself into the envy of the Caribbean—a strongman whose career, like Caesar’s, would be worth emulating.

Ironically, soon after the baby was baptized, the great Díaz found himself falling into a struggle to maintain his rule—just as Don Pedro once again found himself commanding men in the field when yet another civil war broke out in the Dominican Republic in 1911. This was the campaign that formed the young Porfirio’s first memories: the rifle shots at dawn, the soldiers sleeping throughout the house, the cat that crept away in the night.

The boy would grow to remember, too, a fearful, devout Doña Ana: “My mother, who was very pious, lived at prayer … I remember her often curled up in the darkest corner of the house, praying.” Doña Ana Ariza Rubirosa may have seemed a pushover: born to a family of soldiers, married to a soldier, countenancing her husband’s infidelities, burying herself in counsel with the Virgin of Altagracia, draped demurely in black, growing plump. But there was steel in her as well. Take the way she saw to the woman who was making time with Don Pedro and then ran, unopposed, for the presidency of the ladies’ club of San Francisco de Macorís. On the day of the vote, with all the notable women of the city assembled and prepared to anoint their new leader, the outgoing president announced that she was so sure that they all approved of her successor that the election would be conducted by acclamation. “No,” came a voice. All heads turned to face the speaker, Doña Ana. “This woman is my husband’s lover,” she declared. “Under these conditions, I don’t think it’s possible to make her our president.” Shock; murmurs; a hasty conference of officials; and a new presidential candidate was impressed and elected. Ana got in her carriage, according to her son, “and returned home without saying a single word to my father about the scandalous scene she’d made. And he, after being told about the incident a few minutes later, also remained silent.”