In the Time of the Butterflies: • Political commitment to overthrow the goat made by the 4 sisters
• MIS shown dishing out severe punishment
• Minerva went to school
• Sinitta the first Minerva encounters of someone speaking badly about the goat
• One of Minervas friends taken by Trujillo for sexual acts and then exiled
• Minerva is being courted by Trujillo
• Minerva slaps Trujillo across the face!
• The sisters used the false name to identify themselves as "butterfly"
• Trujillo had Minerva's sisters executed publicly
• Trujillo disposes of all evidence making the deaths seen like an accident
• So much death and violence
• Complete destruction of a country by one man
Quotes from the feast of the goat:
• “The Chief’s limousine pulled away leaving him in the stinking mud
hole, General Jose Rene Roman was trembling from head to toe, like the
soldiers he had seen dying of malaria... He waited for the trembling to
pass before walking to San Isidro Air Base. The guard on duty was
shocked to see the head of the Armed Force appear on foot covered in
mud.”
• “Abduct him? That’s bullshit! As long as he’s alive nothing will change. You have to kill him”
• "Nothing that a man has been, is, or will be, is something he
has been, or will be forever, rather, it is something he became one day
and will stop being the next"
• "I am writing out of civic duty to protest the affront to
Dominican citizens and to the unrestricted freedom of expression which
the government of General Trujillo guarantees this republic."
• ''He had more or less all the common traits of a Latin American
dictator, but pushed to the extreme. In cruelty, I think he went far
far away from the rest -- and in corruption, too.''
• “But all of them had to confront two closely linked problems:
how to conjure up an evil that had once grown in intensity and
pervasiveness until it became almost unutterable; and more generally,
how to incorporate into a fictional structure such a well-known and
infamous man without simply rehashing the archives of history.”
Quotes from my own work:
• "He turned an accomplished boxer and award winning courageous
military leader into a sniveling child left in the mud to walk back to
base after being beat."
• "I think this book speaks volumes about the power of one man, the power of death, and the power of liberty."
• "Urania speaks of a man thankful for the rule of the goat, for
putting the Haitians in their place and bringing them into a modern
era."
• "This concept was interesting, the people had been oppressed for so long that they were happy with this dictator"
• "Urania reveres the men who fought against his dictatorship and say they were few and far between."
• "Trujillo has kept up his image even through these times of
political crimes, and why the people have yet to revolt. I'm hoping the
more modern perspectives bring answers to this."
Link to info graphic
Sources:
The Feast of the Goat
In the Time of the Butterflies
Ethan Reese
The Dominican Republic Public Archives
