Hello and thank you for downloading witness from the BBC World Service.

And it was on the 30th of May, 1961, that Raphael Trujillo, the dictator in the Dominican

Republic in the Caribbean was assassinated.

In 2011, Tim Mansle spoke to three people who had reason to remember that May day very clearly.

The first was Linden Teheeder, who was spending a quiet morning at home

when a visitor arrived to talk to her husband.

The day, three days of the morning of May the 30th, Antonio de la Maisana,

on the morning of May the 30th, Antonio de la Masa came to the house.

He saw that I was pregnant and asked me when the baby was due.

I told him, end of August, beginning of September.

Oh he said, then he'll be born in the era of freedom. So then I knew something was up.

What was up was a plot to kill Raphael Trujillo, who had been in power in the Dominican Republic for more than 30 years. He ruled by fear.

Political opponents were tortured and killed.

Often it was said they were fed to the sharks.

Like everybody else, I was a Trujista because at that moment in time this was the most similar thing to Russia's Stalin in the sense that no newspapers from abroad came here.

Any foreign station that Chris Estuhi was jammed.

It was very difficult to travel abroad.

Bernardo Vega is a Dominican historian and a former ambassador to Washington.

He says he didn't understand the true nature of the Trujillo regime until his first week

as an undergraduate in the United States.

That week's material to read included 1984 by Orwell and darkness at noon by Kessler, and then the scales fell off my eyes and I

realized I had been living under a Stalinist type of regime and of course I

...