Alou

by Felipe Alou

  Could he play baseball?

  Juan Alou had the potential to be the fourth Alou in the big leagues. When I would be home during the offseasons, people were always telling me Juan had solid skills; he could hit like Matty, for a high average, but with power. And he was a switch hitter. Like Matty, Jesús, and myself, Juan possessed a strong arm. But unlike his older brothers, who all broke into the big leagues as outfielders, Juan was an infielder. His body was a solid six feet, barrel-chested, strong, and muscular.

  When people hear that about my youngest brother, the next obvious question is, what happened? It’s not an easy answer.

  To understand what happened you have to understand what happened to my country after Rafael Trujillo was assassinated in 1961. Trujillo’s assassination threw the Dominican Republic into years of turmoil and strife, with two factions fighting for power and control. On one side were the remnants of Trujillo’s dictatorship, led by his sons and the military who wanted to maintain power, primarily through one of his former right-hand men—Joaquín Balaguer. On the other side were those who resisted and wanted free and fair elections. By the mid-1960s an all-out civil war raged, and it looked like the left-leaning resisters might regain control. That got the United States’ attention. Fearing that another Caribbean country would turn to communism—becoming a second Cuba—President Lyndon Johnson declared, “We don’t propose to sit here in a rocking chair with our hands folded and let the Communists set up any government in the western hemisphere.”

  I didn’t see it that way, and neither did most of my countrymen. The majority of us—me included—wanted Juan Bosch to rule us. It was only two years earlier, in 1963, when Bosch, a writer, poet, and intellect who headed the Dominican Revolutionary Party, was sworn in after winning our first free presidential election in thirty-plus years. Bosch was a socialist, considered by some a step away from a communist, and that was unacceptable to the United States. Seven months after he took power in 1963, a military junta—remnants of the Trujillo regime—sent him into exile for the second time, plunging our country into two years of abject corruption.

  After an uprising early in 1965 pushed back against the corruption, Bosch returned from exile to again run for president. His burgeoning support worried the United States. So on April 28, 1965, an estimated forty-two thousand U.S. troops arrived in the Dominican Republic, occupying our country against our will. It was that quick, that immediate. We woke up one day, and there were tens of thousands of marines, air force personnel, and paratroopers on our island and a navy warship and an aircraft carrier hovering off our coast with thousands more soldiers—all of it to support anti-Bosch forces. The same government that decades earlier helped Trujillo rise to power was now enforcing its will on us again. And it’s not like the United States was oblivious to Trujillo’s ways and the horrors and atrocities we endured. But Trujillo served the United States’ business and political interests, which was all that mattered. It’s why President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s secretary of state Cordell Hull once infamously said of Trujillo, “He may be a son of a bitch, but he is our son of a bitch.”

  We didn’t want another son of a bitch. While many of us wanted Juan Bosch, we mostly just wanted the opportunity to peacefully elect a new leader. But now, after intervening and occupying our island country from 1916 to 1924, the American military was back again, and it wasn’t pretty. There were skirmishes, gunfire, Molotov cocktails, bloodshed, deaths, most of it swept under the rug of U.S. history . . . but not our history.

  History, after all, is like a prism. It bends the light of truth into the colors it wants to show. It might be difficult for people in the United States to realize that those colors aren’t always red, white, and blue. For instance, ask any school-age child in the United States who discovered their country, and the answer will be Christopher Columbus. Yet the reality is that none of Christopher Columbus’s voyages ever set foot on what is now known as the United States. His four voyages to the Americas were all to the Caribbean, and historians document that all four touched Dominican Republic soil, likely more than once right in the area where I grew up. In fact, today there are two sites that claim to have the remains of Christopher Columbus—the Seville Cathedral in Spain and the Columbus Lighthouse at Santo Domingo in the Dominican Republic. Santo Domingo is also the oldest permanent city established by Europeans in the Western Hemisphere.

  Obviously, I am proud of my country, as I’m sure most people are proud of theirs. I’m not trying to disparage the United States, but at the same time I don’t believe people in the United States fully appreciate what we went through under Trujillo’s reign of terror followed by the turmoil that was most of the 1960s. I especially don’t believe people in the United States can fully comprehend what it’s like to have another country occupying your country, meddling in your affairs without any provocation, dictating what you can and cannot do. But that’s what happened to us, to my family and to me. It was demeaning, humiliating, and I’ll go to my grave believing it was wrong.

  Here is an example of how humiliating it was. One afternoon during that 1965 offseason, I was parked on Avenue Abraham Lincoln, which runs north and south in Santo Domingo, not far from the neighborhood where I grew up. I was waiting for a friend. A U.S. military jeep wheeled in behind me, and out stepped a soldier who looked as if he was a teenager. He was carrying a rifle, while another soldier stayed in the jeep, holding a machine gun.

  “You have to get off this road,” he ordered.

  “Get off this road? Why?”

  “This is now a military road,” he replied. “No civilians are allowed to stop or park here.”

  “What do you mean a military road? This is my country. This is my neighborhood. I’m waiting for a friend. I’m not doing anything wrong. You cannot tell me to get off a road in my country.”

  “If you don’t get off the street now, I’m taking you to San Souci.”

  I learned later that San Souci, which was next to the naval base, was where they sent dissidents—or desafectos.

  I stared at him, my eyes radiating anger. He was a kid, a punk, a puny little man with a big gun and an even bigger country to back him, telling me what to do in my country. Unless you’ve experienced that, it’s hard to describe how demeaning that is.

  “Move! Now!” he barked, punctuating his words with jabs of his rifle.

  As I listened to the syllables in his syntax, something struck me. I didn’t pick up on it at first. But the more he talked, the more I deciphered his accent. It was that same lilt, that same syrupy drawl I heard when I was in Louisiana in 1956—and was told I couldn’t play baseball there because of my skin color. Now that same accent was in my country, telling me I couldn’t stand on a street in my neighborhood. I left, seething.

  There are wounds—not flesh wounds, but something worse—where even a lifetime does not provide enough years to heal.

  Historians say the infighting combined with the invasion took an estimated three thousand Dominican lives and the lives of thirty-one U.S. soldiers. And for what? We had done nothing to the United States.

  When you have a civil war and another country intervenes, siding with one of the factions, it aggravates and amplifies everything that is so abominable about war. The horrors and heartache increase. Divisions widen. Instead of reducing the magnitude of our civil war, the United States’ intervention intensified it. Not only were tens of thousands of U.S. troops occupying our country, but they were also siding with the remnants of Trujillo’s regime, and they were killing Dominicans. Our country is a small country. Everybody knows everybody. People don’t forget, and neither do future generations of people. Those types of wounds—the wounds of a civil war and an occupation—last a long time. And to think that all we wanted to do was have an opportunity to select and live under the government of our choosing. Instead, gallons of our blood spilled onto our soil.

  Thankfully, none of that blood was Alou blood, but there was further humiliation that my family suffered. The United S
tates chose the roof of my parents’ home to set up a military post. They didn’t ask; they just took. The U.S. military wasn’t accustomed to urban warfare, and because of that it was important to establish posts high enough to see what was going on below. It especially gave snipers an edge. Because of the danger inherent in that, my parents were exiled, forced to flee to a relative’s home. My brother Juan stayed behind, primarily to keep the home secured and protected from looters.

  Imagine my father’s anger. Me? I don’t have to imagine. One day, when a U.S. helicopter was flying overhead, my father grabbed his shotgun and fired a futile blast as the chopper whirred past, well out of range. It was more of an angry statement of defiance than any real threat.

  My brother Juan, a young man who was now attending the university, witnessed much of this. It affected him, as it did most of the young men in the Dominican Republic. Sure, he could play baseball, and who knows what might’ve happened had he pursued that as his career. But that wasn’t what was most important. The future of our country was a consuming concern.

  Because of the turmoil there were years when the Winter League seasons were either truncated or eliminated entirely. Scouts were not scouting in the Dominican Republic because the country was too unsafe to visit. Big-league players were going to Puerto Rico and Venezuela to play winter ball. And because Juan was the youngest of the four boys, my parents were trying to hold on to him for as long as they could. My mother especially didn’t want to lose him to baseball. And they both wanted at least one of their boys to get a college degree. So even though Juan possessed solid baseball skills, he flew under the radar, as much as someone who carried the name Alou could be under the radar.

  Not even the soldiers on the roof of the family house knew who he was. We know that because one of those soldiers came to Juan one day and asked for water. Juan allowed him into the house, and when he did the soldier saw photos on the wall of Matty, Jesús, and me in our big-league uniforms.

  “Why do you have pictures of baseball players on the wall?” he asked. “Who are they?”

  “Those are my brothers,” Juan replied. “The Alou brothers.”

  Until then the soldier had no clue that he was occupying the roof of a house of the parents of three Major League Baseball players. Incredible. But even more incredible was his next question.

  “What country is this?”

  Imagine being part of an occupation army, occupying another country, and not even knowing what country that is.

  At least after that the soldiers treated Juan in a friendlier manner.

  Juan was nineteen at the time, and perhaps under different circumstances he might have signed a professional contract by then and been with a Minor League team somewhere. Based on my success, Matty signed with the Giants when he was seventeen and Jesús when he was fifteen. So it wasn’t out of the question. In fact, Horacio “Rabbit” Martínez, who signed my brothers and me, kept asking when Juan was going to sign. But our country’s turmoil and my parents’ desire for Juan to get an education kept him unsigned, and at home.

  Unfortunately, part of the education Juan was getting was in political unrest and civil war. Like the rest of my family and me, Juan sympathized with Juan Bosch’s return to power, and he fell in with a group of fellow students who shared the same sentiment. The danger was palpable. People were being detained and often executed.

  Juan was detained twice. The first time it was by U.S. soldiers. The second time he was detained Juan was at a bodega with some of his friends when a bomb exploded nearby. He and others were picked up by Dominican soldiers and taken to the depot for military transportation for questioning. Hundreds of other men were being held there, and for three days Juan slept on the floor. He wasn’t even fed the first day, and then after that he was given only boiled cornmeal to eat.

  One of his friends refused the cornmeal. “I’m not going to eat that,” he said.

  It elicited a smirking response from one of the soldiers. “I’m sure you’ll eat it tomorrow,” he said.

  The next day when a different soldier again fed him the boiled cornmeal, he ate it.

  Fortunately, Juan was released. When my parents learned what happened, they weren’t about to take any more chances. Being detained twice was like strike one and strike two, and they were not about to wait to see if strike three would happen. They also didn’t like it that the university shut down because of the civil unrest. So they sent Juan to Puerto Rico and ordered him to go to school and blend in. Juan essentially vanished, enrolling at the College of Agriculture and Mechanic Arts in Mayagüez—now the University of Puerto Rico at Mayagüez—which was known as one of the toughest colleges in the Americas. He played a little baseball there, but his real passion was his academics. Juan poured himself into his studies, graduating summa cum laude with a civil engineering degree. He then entered the workforce in Puerto Rico, ironically taking a job with the U.S. government.

  And that’s what happened to Juan Alou. When I played in the big leagues, people would joke that there was a fourth Alou brother and that, like Baltimore Orioles first baseman Boog Powell, his name was Boog. Boog Alou. Get it? It was supposed to be funny, but I never laughed. I knew the real story of the fourth Alou brother. Instead of baseball, Juan became a highly respected civil engineer in Puerto Rico, where he lives in retirement.

  Through the decades I’ve occasionally come across someone who knows Juan. When I do baseball is never mentioned. Instead, people rave about his brilliant engineering mind. That’s nice to hear, and I am proud of Juan, but sometimes I wish he would have become a big-league baseball player. Of course, there is no guarantee that would have happened, even if Juan continued to develop his baseball skills. But the thought of having four brothers in the big leagues, something not done since the 1800s, still intrigues me. Had Juan wanted to pursue baseball, I believe my dad would have been for it. He could see the life baseball was providing for Matty, Jesús, and me. But Juan was the baby, and my mother wanted him to get a university education, and she wanted to hold on to him as long as she could. She didn’t quite get to hold on to him the way she wanted, at least not in the Dominican Republic, where his life was in danger. I’ve always admired Juan’s courage, how unafraid he was to step up under all the circumstances he faced.

  Instead of possibly becoming the fourth Alou brother in Major League Baseball, Juan became the first and only Alou brother to get a college degree. My sister Virginia also got a college degree and became a veterinarian. That’s the way life happens. I’ve learned that you cannot predict your life. Sometimes you cannot even plan it. History has a way of happening, and sometimes it happens to you.

  For me, history brought me to Juan Bosch later in 1965, around the same time that U.S. soldier ordered me off Avenue Abraham Lincoln. Bosch was a man I greatly admired and respected because of his anti-Trujillo stance, which forced him into years of exile. But now, even though he was back in the Dominican Republic, campaigning for president, the U.S. military had him under house arrest because of his left-leaning ideology.

  Through a well-known sportswriter named Johnny Naranjo, I learned that Bosch wanted to meet me and the other Major League players from the Dominican Republic. Only three of us summoned enough courage to go. Together with Naranjo and another respected journalist, Tomás Troncoso, we went to meet Bosch.

  It was tense. Walking up to Bosch’s home was frightening. On one side were the U.S. Green Berets, all of them black soldiers brandishing weapons. On the other side were armed soldiers, fierce-looking Dominican men, bravely ensuring that nothing happened to the man we again wanted to freely elect to be our president.

  We were ushered into the house and to Bosch’s office, where he was reading a book about the great Major League pitcher Bob Feller. Bosch didn’t know much about baseball, and he was reading that book to try to educate himself. Our presence startled him. Then he chuckled as he looked and saw that it was 2 p.m., the scheduled time for our meeting.

  “You guys are punctu
al,” he said. Dominicans—then and now—are known to operate on island time.

  “That’s from baseball,” I explained. “When they tell you that you have to be somewhere at 5 p.m., you have to be there at 5 p.m. You have to be punctual if you’re going to play professional baseball.”

  “I’m a Dominican who doesn’t know baseball,” Bosch said, smiling.

  The conversation turned serious as Bosch began appealing to us. I felt for him. Here he was, this tremendous scholar and educator, but history had thrust him into a difficult situation, and now that difficult situation was about to tap me on the shoulder.

  “In my own country, I’m a prisoner,” Bosch said. “You guys have access to the United States media. When you get back to the U.S., denounce the intervention.”

  His request rocked me, and it took me several seconds to respond. “Professor,” I finally said, “we are really nothing but baseball players. This is not something we should be involved with. If we get involved, we don’t know what might happen.”

  One of the journalists, Tomás Troncoso, spoke up, mentioning the obvious. “You know,” he said, “the Yankees don’t lose elections in Latin America.”

  Troncoso wasn’t talking about the New York Yankees. He was talking about the United States. After suffering that setback in Cuba, the United States was especially determined to not leave the Dominican Republic until it accomplished what it wanted, in spite of signs that said YANKEE GO HOME! that littered our capital city, Santo Domingo. And what the United States wanted was Joaquín Balaguer in power. The election was a foregone conclusion. Everyone knew it.

  I studied Bosch and could see the kindness, the sincerity, in his eyes. This was an intellectual and a philosopher, a poet and a writer. In another time and place his life might’ve been very different. But not in the time and place we lived in. History had thrust him, and by extension me, into a difficult position.

  I knew that what Bosch was asking me to do was too dangerous. I had a wife and three children—my boys, Felipe and José, and my daughter, Maria. My wife was also pregnant with our fourth child—a boy whom we would name Moisés. My parents also relied on me for support.