Ramfis Trujillo - Influential Years

Influential Years

On 30 May 1961, his father was assassinated in a plot to end the 31-year-long dictatorial regime. He quickly returned to the country and with the help of Johnny Abbes García, the ruthless intelligence chief, brutally repressed any elements believed to be connected with his father's death, murdering many of the suspects himself. However, soon afterward, he and puppet president Joaquin Balaguer took some steps to open up the regime. Ramfis eased his father's harsh censorship of the press, and also granted some civil liberties. While these were rejected as insufficient by a people who had no memory of the instability and poverty that had preceded the Trujillo era, even these meager reforms were opposed by the hardliners gathered around Ramfis' uncles.

Both internal and external pressures forced him into exile late in 1961, when he fled back to France, along with all of the surviving Trujillos, aboard the famed yacht Angelita (still sailing today as the Sea Cloud), with his father's casket, which was allegedly lined with $4 million in cash, jewels and important papers.

In 1962, he settled down in Spain where he was protected by Generalisimo Francisco Franco. There he continued with his jet-set lifestyle, which included flying planes as a hobby (also one of the passions of Rubirosa).

There is a story by a Gerry Hemming (leader of a group of anti-communist soldiers of fortune, who trained anti-Castro Cubans in the early 1960s), who says that in 1963, Ramfis and Johnny Abbes attended a meeting in Haiti, with other unknown men for the purpose of pledging money to partly finance a plot which would result in the John F. Kennedy assassination, allegedly as revenge for the supposed Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) involvement in the assassination of Rafael Trujillo, Sr.

He died on 27 December 1969, in Spain, from pneumonia, in a hospital after being severely injured in a car accident, a fate similar to Rubirosa's, 11 days earlier in the outskirts of Madrid. The person in the car he hit, Teresa Beltran de Lis, the Duchess of Albuquerque, died instantly. Trujillo was initially buried in Madrid's Almudena cemetery, but his remains were subsequently moved to the El Pardo cemetery to accompany his father's remains.

Ramfis Trujillo's children and grandchildren are still alive, some of them living in Spain.