One day, as a child on my way to the sea in Puerto Plata with my father, we traversed windy, remote mountain roads that seemed to have no end. Halfway through the trip, he pointed to my right where he told me was near where the Mirabal sisters, political revolutionaries who fought against the dictatorship of Rafael Trujillo, were murdered by the regime in 1960. It was an ominous feeling to be so close to where such a violent event had occurred. I knew about the Mirabal sisters through Dominican author Julia Alvarez’s 1994 book In The Time of the Butterflies, a fictionalized story about the sisters’ activism, but I hadn’t read any of the sisters’ personal accounts. I was eager to understand who these sisters were and how they navigated their lives and resistance under the bloody regime of Trujillo, who ruled the country for more than three decades (1930-1961). Such was the reason I picked up Minou Tavárez Mirabal’s The Letters of Minerva Mirabal and Manolo Tavárez a few years later, which focuses on the lives of Minerva Mirabal and her husband Manolo Tavárez.
Minou Tavárez Mirabal is the daughter of Minerva and Manolo and the founder of Opción Democrática (Democratic Choice, OD), a center-left political party. In her book, Tavárez Mirabal weaves together her parent’s letters and her own memories to shed light on the true lives of these revolutionaries. Complemented by personal commentary and excerpts from Pablo Neruda poems, Tavárez Mirabal brings together telegrams, family photographs, and 117 letters her parents wrote to each other between 1954 and 1963, from their time in law school together, to their marriage, to their imprisonment. These highly personal exchanges allow us to see Minerva and Manolo as complex ordinary people fighting for nationwide justice, not merely the myths they have become.
Minerva Mirabal (1926-1960) and her husband Manolo Tavárez (1931-1963) were Dominican lawyers and political activists who founded and led Movimiento Revolucionario 14 de Junio (June 14th Movement, 14J), the largest opposition movement to the brutal Trujillo dictatorship, one of the Americas’ most violent and absolute regimes in the twentieth century. The couple met in law school at the University of Santo Domingo, the school at which Mirabal soon after became the first woman in the Dominican Republic to graduate with a law degree, though she was barred from practicing due to her political activities. Mirabal, Manolo, and the 14J Movement to which they belonged worked tirelessly to overthrow the regime, organizing secret meetings and disseminating pamphlets to expose its crime, no matter the risks.
Minerva Mirabal and her husband Manolo Tavárez were Dominican lawyers and political activists who founded and led Movimiento Revolucionario 14 de Junio, the largest opposition movement to the brutal Trujillo dictatorship.
In 1960, Minou was just three years old when her parents, uncles, and aunt were imprisoned for their resistance. Her mother Minerva was killed that year along with her two sisters Patria and María Teresa by Trujillo’s secret police. Three years later, her father was assassinated for leading an armed uprising against the Triumvirate, the three-man civilian junta that took power after the overthrow of Juan Bosch, the country’s first democratically elected president in three decades. In 1999, the UN General Assembly marked the sisters’ date of death, November 25, as the annual International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women; the surviving Mirabal sister Dede dedicated her life to celebrating her sisters’ legacy.
The book delves into this wider history after an introduction that contextualizes the lives and legacies of these revolutionaries, written by the translator Heather Hennes. Then, it transitions to its main sections, which begins with the couple’s courtship, delves into their correspondences while in prison, and ends with a final message from Manolo to his daughter.
In their correspondence, we see Minerva and Manolo as ordinary young people stressing about studying for law school exams, hanging out with friends, flirting with one another, and getting into arguments, as couples do. It is the unfiltered nature of the letters that allow us to understand who Minerva and Manolo were outside of the popular imagination, even though the majority are written by Minerva.
“The extraordinary thing about this collection of letters is that it brings them closer to us; it makes them all too human, all too close, all too alive. Minerva Mirabal doubted. Manolo Tavárez sailed…Heroes breathe too,” Tavárez Mirabal writes.
If one consults this monograph to learn concrete details about the June 14th Movement or the Trujillo dictatorship, this is not the book for them—though the introduction does provide both an eloquent summary of the country before, during, and after the Trujillo regime. In fact, Tavárez Mirabal notes that the purpose of this book of letters is not to reiterate these events but rather to understand her parents as ordinary humans—not just heroes—culminating in a story that is “even more beautiful” than the mythologized stories of Minerva and Manolo. Additionally, in their correspondences, the reader sees glimpses of Minerva’s clever wit and humor and Manolo’s sentimentality and deep love for his children—aspects of their personalities previously missing from the historiography.
Like many biographers, Tavárez Mirabal highlights the difficulty of reading between the lines of her parents’ letters to fully understand their motives and feelings.
Like many biographers, Tavárez Mirabal highlights the difficulty of reading between the lines of her parents’ letters to fully understand their motives and feelings. This is particularly relevant in the letters they wrote while in prison. Since Manolo was sent to a few days in solitary confinement after getting caught with Minerva’s letters, Tavárez Mirabal surmises that her father destroyed her mother’s letters in prison for safety purposes. Thus, only one letter written by Minerva to Manolo in prison remains.
“Full of clues that help us understand her, it is a treasure for the brevity with which her wounded words—harmed but not destroyed—are woven together,” Mirabal writes. “Reading between the lines, we gain a more complete vision of those days, of that horrific space.”
In the book’s last chapter, titled “The Final Letter, 1960-1963,” Tavárez Mirabal discusses her parents’ unfortunate fates, assassinated for their activism. The “final letter” Tavárez Mirabal includes in this chapter is not the last exchange between her parents; she notes that she does not want to reiterate a painful history that is already well-known. Thus, the last “letter” she includes is the last message her father wrote to her: “To my little Minou, as a memento of a grand experience,” Tavárez wrote on a snail shell on December 21, 1963, two hours before he was murdered. Tavárez Mirabal interprets this letter as written from both her parents, dedicated to the nation.
“It wasn’t just from him, but from both of them, from both my parents. And that little note wasn’t written just for me, but for both his children, for my brother Manolo and me, and for the history of the Dominican people,” she writes. “They’re with all of us, here where they still speak generously and embrace us warmly with their lives, our lives.”
Rina Rossi is a PhD student in Latin American History at the CUNY Graduate Center. She is also NACLA’s former web editor and a writer who has been published in The Nation, Ojalá, and the Harvard Kennedy School Review, among others.