Juan Isidro Jiménez Grullón
The posthumous forgetfulness of a political and intellectual legacy.
By Daniel Mancebo Zorrilla
Juan Isidro Jiménez Grullón was born in the dawn of century XX, more indeed, the 17 of June of 1903, in the city of Santo Domingo, capital of the Dominican Republic. Her family was of very good economic position and social root for the time; himself describes to his parents in an interview who did in Cultural Supplement of the newspaper La Noticia, in 1981, like “two good bourgeois” (1). If they were two good bourgeois or no, it is not the objective of this article. But it is known of that they know the Dominican History that the development of the bourgeoisie in the Dominican republic, begins with the coming of the dictatorship of Trujillo and the nationalization of the industries that establish the North Americans in the country.Anyway, the good position, prestige and social root of his family, influence in the formation of the temperamental revolutionary and intellectual solid that was.
It leaves his studies of the of a lawyer carrer due to his passion towards the philosophical one, to go out to Paris, to study Medicine, in the Sorbona, pressed by his parents (2). He garduated of doctor in the 1929.
It has spent just three or four years, he is returning from France to Santo Domingo, when in 1934, the government of the dictator Trujillo caught him in a plot. He is arrested and goes into an exile that will last 26 years. (2).
During his exile, in Cuba, he mainly took care to organize the resistance against the tyranny of Trujillo. Founde, in 1941, with other illustrious Dominican fighters, between which they are Juan Bosch Gaviño, Angel Miolán, the Dominican Revolutionary Party (2).
But Juan Isidro, is not only a fighter, but he takes active part in the armed expedition, in the year 1959, in Constanza, Maimón and Estero Hondo, to overthrow the regime of Dominican tyrant dictator (2).
But all the ostracism was not surrounded in the fight by the freedom of the mother country, but there was also time to know the love. He initiates an enthusiastic idyll, in Puerto Rico, towards the 1938, with which she has been the greatest poetess that was born in Puerto Rico, during the Century XX, Julia Burgos (1). She was inspired by the figure of Juan Isidro to compose her better poems including “Song of the simple truth” (1).
Juan Isidro, breaks during his exile in New York his first marriage with the French Ivonne Julia. Later, he married again, in 1944, with Amada Maria Sabater Rosales (3), with whom had his first son the poet Leon David.
Julia Burgos and Juan Isidro Jiménez Grullón
This admirable and anxious intellectual and fighter, possibly committed a serious error of political apreciaciación and historical when with his acute critics he favors the coup d'etat to Juan Bosch, to the rupture of the Dominican democracy with the overthrow of the first freely elect president of the Dominican Republic, although Juan Isidro Jiménez did not support it (4). He was always an adversary of Bosch by political reasons.
But I have here, that as a result of the events, not only in the Dominican Republic, but in the whole Ibero-America, I like much more this term than that the one of Latin America, for diverse historical reasons, the political thought of Juan Isidro Jiménez Grullón, gives a radical and systematic, gradual but maintained turn, to embrace the Marxism-Leninism and to separate from the theoretical conceptions of the bourgeoisie (4) (5) (6). Already in 1968, he declared himself frankly Marxist. He made his ideological conversion towards the dialectic materialism, many years before than did it Bosch.
It is, in this period, when the acute and shining thought of Jiménez Grullón creates his better intellectual contributions for the study of the Dominican social reality, with his masterpiece work Dominican Political Sociology, in three volumes, the Myth of the Parents of the Country, and Our False Left, between tens of written essays and other books.
Of his prolific bibliography, we will mention those that follow:
We fight by our America, 1936.
Contemporary ideas and political doctrines. Puerto Rico: Graphical factories Marry Baldrich, 1939.
The Dominican Republic. Analysis and their passed present and. Havana: Printer Arellano and company, 1940.
One gestapo in America, 1946.
Six Cuban poets. Havana: Editorial Chromiums, 1954.
Besides Ortega and Gasset. Merida, Venezuela: Publisher of the University of Los Andes, 1959.
The philosophy of Jose Martí, 1960. Medicine and Culture, 1961.
The Dominican Republic: a fiction. Merida, Venezuela: University Graphical factories, 1965.
Dialectic Biology, 1968.
Anti Sábato. Maracaibo: University of Zulia, 1968.
Pedro Henríquez Ureña: reality and myth. Santo Domingo: Dominican bookstore, 1969.
The problematic of Latin American college student, 1970.
The Myth of the Parents of the Mother country, 1971.
Latin America and the Socialist Revolution. Santo Domingo: Dominican Cultural publisher 1971.
Dominican political sociology. Santo Domingo: Publishing Alpha and Omega, [v. 1, 1974, v. 2, 1975, v. 3, 1980].
John Bartlow Martin, a proconsul of the Yankee Empire, 1977.
Our False Left, 1978 (1).
The academic Alberto L. Merani, of the Institute of Psychology of Venezuela, writes about of his style with “the fecundity of the dialectic approach… he reprents the satisfaction to feel propped up us by its great knowledge… the breath of a conviction that is not common” (Prolog of Dialectic Biology of loa Andes, University of the $andes, Merida, Venezuela, 1968).
The historian Julio Genaro Campillo Perez, writes about him, in the prolog to the work of Jiménez Grullón, the Myth of the Parents of the Mother country, describing him as being “one of the fecund pens whereupon he today tells vigorous to the Dominican culture… and prolific combative intellectual… by temperament and revolutionary by conviction… ready to found theories, to sustain innovations and to destroy myths… in policy, economy, sociology and history”. In addition Campillo Perez writes: “…he with an amazing facility to write, a vast formidable erudicción and a dialectic one” (4).
With all these intellectual contributions to the Dominican reality, nowadays, it seems to be forgetting or condemning to the ostracism of the new generations and the society of the Dominican ones.
Several hypothetical factors could be emitted that have contributed to this lamentable forgetfulness. First, his contibutory role to the historical error of the 1963, which led to the coup d’etat, and later his political enemies handling made of it. Secondly, that the vast culture shown in the sharpness of his anális and literary contributions, would not make it reasonable and intelligible for the heap of the mean level of many intellectuals of the Dominican Republic as well as for the people. Third party, the deterioration of the noble values and the rise, in Santo Domingo, of certain tendency towards the entropy of the culture, the disorganization of the state. Quarter, that doubtlessly, the social class bourgeois, to which many intellectuals aspire to enter, and even the same oligarchy, to whom he belonged, has not pardoned him their vindication of the Marxism-Leninism and his iconoclastic position about badly founded values of the Nation by tradition and that, he until described to the Dominican left, as puerile. He always postulated the infantilism of the left like main cause of which this did not have a greater cohesion, development and root in the mass of the Dominican workers.
According to his son, poet Leon David, he was not an practical politician, he was essentially a theoretician. “Everything what he thought and believed he spoked, people realized of that, for that reason he could not be a good politician, that he must put a face and think another thing, everything he felt, everything he transmitted ” (3).
References:
1 http://www.literatura.us/julia/index.html
2 http://wikidominicana.edu.do/wiki/Juan_Isidro_Jim%C3%A9nez_Grull%C3%B3n
3 http://www.hoy.com.do/el-pais/2004/5/2/157714/Juan-Isidro-Jimenez-Grullon-la-prolifica-vida-de-un-humanista-y-politico
4 http://www.cielonaranja.com/castrojuanisidro.htm
5 http://www.dominicanaonline.org/portal/galerias/galeria_escritores2/pages/Juan%20Isidro%20Jim%C3%A9nez.html
6 http://www.historiadominicana.com.do/biografias/personajes/250-juan-isidro-jimenes-grullon.html
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