Ramfis Trujillo

He died on 27 December 1969 in a Spanish hospital due to complications from pneumonia after being severely injured in a car accident eleven days earlier in the outskirts of Madrid. The person in the car he hit, Teresa Bertrán de Lis, the Duchess-consort of Alburquerque, died instantly. Trujillo was initially buried in Madrid's Almudena cemetery, but his remains were subsequently moved to Mingorrubio Cemetery in El Pardo to accompany his father's remains. Trujillo was driving a Ferrari 330GT sports car (s/n 9151), a blue 2-door purchased in 1966. The car sat unrestored in Spain from 1969 and finally was offered for sale in early 2013 for £50,000.

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).

On 30 May 1961, Rafael Trujillo was assassinated in a plot to end his 31-year rule. Ramfis Trujillo 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 Joaquín Balaguer took some steps to open up the regime. Trujillo 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 memories only of the Trujillo era rather than the decades of poverty and instability which had preceded it (for example: 1902–1905 bankruptcy, 1911–1912 Civil War, 1914 Civil War combined with political deadlock and threat of U.S. invasion, 1916–1924 U.S. occupation), 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 cruise ship Sea Cloud), with his father's casket, which was allegedly lined with $4 million (equivalent to $28 million in 2021) in cash, jewels and important papers.

When he returned home, his wife Octavia filed for divorce. His unruly behavior, including gang rapes of young women and frivolously ordering murders, forced his father to send him to a sanatorium in Belgium. Trujillo apparently suffered from psychological problems, possibly the result of the pressure that his father constantly placed on him, as he intended to remake his son into an image of himself. Dominican historian Bernardo Vega has documented Trujillo's history of mental hospital stays, and Robert Crassweller also wrote about it in his Trujillo's biography. Trujillo received electroshock treatments in Belgium as early as 1958; there were also stays in mental hospitals after that.

In the early 1950s, he married his first wife, Octavia Ricart, they had six children.

In the mid-1950s, he was sent to study at the United States Army Command and General Staff College in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. While there, and with Rubirosa as his liaison, Trujillo skipped class and took off for Hollywood, eventually embarking on an affair with actress Kim Novak. Trujillo became notorious for buying luxury cars, mink coats, and jewelry for beautiful girls during his stay. Trujillo's flashy gift-giving made the national news and members of the United States Congress were openly questioned by the press about what real use was being made of foreign aid given to the Dominican Republic. At one point a bumper sticker began appearing on the cars of girls in Los Angeles that read: "THIS CAR WAS NOT A GIFT FROM RAMFIS TRUJILLO".

Rafael Leónidas Trujillo Martínez (5 June 1929 – 27 December 1969), better known as Ramfis Trujillo Martínez, was the son of Rafael Leónidas Trujillo, dictator of the Dominican Republic, after whose 1961 assassination he briefly held power. Nominally an army general, he lived the life of a reckless and spoiled playboy like his friend and sometime brother-in-law Porfirio Rubirosa. Remembered for his ruthlessness and cruelty, he went into exile in Spain, where he died after crashing a sports car.

Ramfis was born in 1929, his mother was María de los Angeles Martínez Alba, nicknamed La Españolita "the little Spaniard" as her parents were from Spain. By the age 14, his father Rafael Trujillo had made him a colonel, with equivalent pay and privileges. Some say he received this appointment aged just four and that he had become a brigadier general by the age of nine. He was nicknamed Ramfis after the high priest in Aida.