But in those elder days, fukú had it good; it even had a hypeman of sorts, a high priest, you could say. Our then dictator-for-life Rafael Leónidas Trujillo Molina. No one knows whether Trujillo was the Curse's servant or its master, its agent or its principal, but it was clear he and it had an understanding, that them two was tight. It was believed, even in educated circles, that anyone who plotted against Trujillo would incur a fukú most powerful, down to the seventh generation and beyond. If you even thought a bad thing about Trujillo, fuá, a hurricane would sweep our family out to se, fuá, a boulder would fall out of a clear sky and squash you, fuá, the shrimp you ate today was the cramp that killed you tomorrow. Which explains why everyone who tried to assassinate him always got done, why those dudes who finally did buck him down all died so horrifically. And what about f***ing Kennedy? He was the one who green-lighted the assassination of Trujillo in 1961, who ordered the CIA to deliver arms to the Island. Bad move, cap'n. For what Kennedy's intelligence experts failed to tell him was what every single Dominican […] knew: that whoever killed Trujillo, their family would suffer a fukú so dreadful it would make the one that attached itself to the Admiral jojote in comparison

Basic set-up:

In this excerpt, the narrator of the novel, Yunior, tells us about the ancient curse that was used by the Dominican dictator Molina to keep people in check.

Yunior's telling us about a curse called fukú here. It's a terrible curse, and according to Yunior, it was used by the Dominican dictator Trujillo, who ruled at various points between 1930 and 1952, to destroy his enemies.

Now, Yunior really believes in this curse, and he invites us to believe that this curse exists, too—even if our rational minds tell us that curses and voodoo and all that magical stuff is just made up nonsense.

But another big theme of this passage is politics. Trujillo was a really bad guy: he attacked his enemies, he oppressed loads of Dominicans, and he was corrupt. By talking about how Trujillo used fukú to destroy his enemies, Yunior isn't just mixing the magical with the real; he's also engaging in political critique. Black magic functions a metaphor for the fantastically real evil Trujillo was capable of.

This passage is mixing it all up: we're getting loads of historical facts about Trujillo's reign of terror, and John F. Kennedy's assassination, but we're being told all of this by a fictional narrator who is also claiming that Kennedy was killed by a curse that Trujillo unleashed on him.

We're getting lots of hybridity here: fact and fiction, real and magical, all jumbled together. This, as we've seen, is something Magical Realist writers do again and again—but here we can see how it's being used pretty explicitly to make a political statement. That's right: even fantasy can have a dangerous edge.