Rafael Trujillo was Generalissimo of the Dominican Republic from 1930 until his assassination in 1961. The violence deployed by his regime was extraordinary, with Trujillo’s men murdering an estimated 30,000 Haitians in a matter of weeks in 1937, not to mention thousands of Dominicans across three decades, in what my guest today describes as the violence of the Trujillo plantation.

Trujillo’s story, and indeed the story of the Dominican Republic, can be read as a story of domination, perhaps suffocation, by the United States. The image of the United States as the Great Satan in the World, which can only do wrong, is a simplistic and misleading one, but it isn’t difficult to see where it comes from if you read about the Caribbean and Latin America.

My guest today is Junot Diaz. Junot is a Dominican-American author, who has written multiple novels including The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2008. He is also a Professor of Creative Writing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and his insights on the experience of growing up Dominican in the United States are fascinating.