Weeks before his death in 1970, Gregorio Urbano Gilbert, whose remains will be transferred to the National Pantheon, confessed his disappointment with the young people he worked with, as they harassed them like a slow old man, hardly useful.
It was his only complaint in his life. The man who, as a young man, saw the atrocities committed by the North American invaders in San Pedro de Macorís in 1916, grabbed a revolver and confronted the battalion commanded by Captain CH Burton.
Gilbert was not the son of the bourgeoisie or the elite of the eastern city, but the courage that the presence of the invaders from the United States gave him only made him rise against what he considered a disgrace to the small country . that he hadn’t expected that accident.
In the interview I did for the Ultima Hora newspaper, Gilbert already mentioned that epic that had already happened, although in a few paragraphs in Dominican history, because most of his life the voices against the invaders had been muffled.
Gilbert was born in Puerto Plata on May 25, 1898 and died in Santo Domingo on November 29, 1970. At the time of the interview, he was living with his wife in a house on Palo Hincado Street, in Ciudad Nueva, apparently already retired due to his age. .
At the time, he looked strong. The build of a lifelong worker who made muscle and would not disappear until his death. He spoke slowly, politely, and said he was Dr. Emilio Cordero Michel, a leading historian and patriot, thanked. “The younger colleagues in the bakery despise me because I am old. I don’t have the strength they have. I had it and that’s why others remember me. I tell them that one day they will be old like me, ”Gilbert confirmed, not without a hint of melancholy and pain.
During the interview, Gilbert and his wife occasionally mentioned Dr. Cordero Michel, from a well-known family in La Vega, some of whom collided with Trujillo. Apparently his achievement went unnoticed by the intelligentsia.
In that interview, he didn’t focus so much on his performance itself, nor on his tour of various countries in the Caribbean neighborhood. He had the memories of his battle alongside Commander César Sandino, who fought against the US intervention in Nicaragua.
At only 17 years old
At just 17 years old, Gregorio Urbano Gilbert killed Captain Burton with a revolver, something that was not forgiven by the invaders who chased him through San Pedro de Macorís. At the time, those who took up arms in the eastern region were called “gavilleros”.
The Dominican not only became a bandit after killing the Marine, but also avoided the persecutions unleashed against him and in search of other villagers who also revolted. Gilbert, the story goes, escaped under a hail of bullets, but was captured.
Once Gilbert was free when he learned that Augusto César Sandino, called the “ general of the free people, ” had rebelled against the North American intervention in Nicaragua, where they tried to seize mining and agricultural wealth, he traveled to that country and placed himself under the command of the commander.
Sandino started his fight in the field against the invaders and when the bombardment by the invading aviation took place, it formed a patriotic fight that united the men of the field against the government of President Sacasa and then Anastasio Somoza García.
Gilbert’s books on the American intervention of 1916-1924 and his struggle with Sandino were written on his return to Santo Domingo after the dissolution of the Nicaraguan guerrillas and the assassination of General Sandino.
Gilbert recalled that in the fight against the North American intervention in Nicaragua from 1927 to 1934, aviation was first used in Central America to attack the cities that had risen in the guerrillas that had some firearms and machetes.
Gilbert ignorant
Before Decree 08-21 of the current president, Luis Abinader, ordering the transfer of Gilbert’s remains to the National Pantheon, the patriot lived in a forgotten memory. His name was relieved by Cordero Michel and Dr. Roberto Cassá. When Encarta Africana appeared in its first edition 40 years ago, I looked who was in the Dominican diaspora. I only found Olivorio Mateo, a mystic and occultist from San Juan de la Maguana, who fought the North American invaders from 1916 to 1924.
Like Gilbert, Olivorio Mateo, Papá Liborio, another who took up arms when the 1915 invading soldiers reached the hills of San Juan de la Maguana, is recognized in Encarta as an ‘occultist, messianic leader and revolutionary’. In the Dominican Republic, the latter profile has never been emphasized; it has not been studied much except by Dr. Lucitania Martínez and co-workers to get a good perspective from that farmer who took on regional leadership.
The researcher focuses more on the Palma Sola twins, who established a sect in San Juan that grew out of Olivorio Mateo’s legacy and were exterminated when they confronted the National Army after an extensive media campaign against it, in 1962.
It is believed that up to 600 people lost their lives in the massacre, including General Rodríguez Reyes, one of the best-trained officers left in the military after Trujillo’s death. It was always speculated that it had been sent to some sort of “mousetrap”.
As the Dominican Republic prepares to honor Gilbert, without the majority of the country, especially the youth, knowing who he was and what he did, it is recalled that years ago Haiti honored Charlemagne Peralte, the ‘thief’ who rose in northern Haiti against the first intervention from 1915 to 1935.
Born in Hinche, on the border with the Dominican Republic, Peralte rallied hundreds of men with weapons and machetes, pleaded for a government in Cap Haitien, and at one point unsuccessfully marched to Port-au-Prince with a column of guerrillas.
How Olivorio Mateo was betrayed by one of them who gave the information of his password to the Americans who occupied all of Haiti. He was shot and his body, like Mateo, was placed on a stretcher and photographed.
The photo, which illustrates the Encarta Africana article, was called Charlemagne Peralte Crucified, a canvas originally created by leading Haitian native painter Philomé Obim. When I visited Obim in his studio in the Cape in 1984 and told him about that photo, now an old man in his eighties, he said to me “and you know my other painting”. Then he showed me that of Peralte with his mother who was looking for him everywhere after she got the news that he had been murdered and that a Capois painter had painted him. It was Peralte with the painful grief.