28 - The Dominican Republic

Summary

There are few academic studies of the changes which have taken place in the Dominican Republic during the last sixty years, and these generally devote more attention to the political process than to the evolution of economy and society.

On the antecedents and origins of the Trujillo era there are two important political histories: Luis Felipe Mejía, De Lílís a Trujillo: Historia contemporánea de la República Dominicana (Caracas, 1944), and Víctor Medina Benet, Los responsables (Santo Domingo, 1976). Both excellent monographs are based partially on the documented memoirs of the authors, who were witnesses to the fall of President Horacio Vásquez and were present when Trujillo conspired to seize power and establish his dictatorship. The outstanding book on the Trujillo regime is Jesús de Galíndez, La era de Trujillo: Un estudio casuístico de una dictadura hispanoamerkana (Santiago, Chile, 1956), which began as a doctoral dissertation at Columbia University and is full of accurate documentation, mostly official publications and newspapers. More revealing of the intimate life of the regime is Gregorio Bustamante, Una satrapía en el Caribe (Mexico, D.F., 1950). Bustamante is the pseudonym of José Almoina, who had earlier been Trujillo’s secretary. Both Galíndez and Almoina were Spanish exiles from the Civil War, and both were assassinated on Trujillo’s orders for having written these books.