The Dictator's Seduction: Politics and the Popular Imagination in the Era of Trujillo (review)

At the start of his annual report for 1955 on the Dominican Republic, London's ambassador, T. Ravensdale, criticised the expenditure of a third of the national budget on "Fair of Peace and Brotherhood of the Free World", which had "involved a disproportionate diversion of effort and money to an ephemeral spectacle on a scale which a small under-developed country can ill afford". Amongst its many scholarly gifts, Robin Derby's rich, original and deservedly prize-winning study shows how what Mr. Ravensdale saw as "pretentious…make-believe" and part of Generalísimo Trujillo's "megalomania" in fact formed part of a "vernacular politics", which, by mining deep into and exploiting popular culture, provided vital support and gave a quite distinct political style to a prolonged authoritarian regime (1930-61). At the outset of her book Derby makes it fully clear that the Trujillato depended throughout on a repressive climate, selective assassination—that of the three Mirabal sisters is probably the most infamous—and all the familiar apparatus of dictatorship comparable with that across the border in Haiti and of a regional type evident in Cuba under Batista or Nicaragua under Somoza. This, though, is not the principal object of her inquiry, which is to provide a much wider cultural analysis of a political history in which popular compliance was built and secured by means not normally considered by political science and often limited to discrete anthropological and sociological studies.

Focusing on everyday forms of state domination, Derby shows how the regime exploited popular idioms of masculinity and fantasies of race and class mobility. She argues that the most insidious aspect of the dictatorship was how it appropriated quotidian practices such as gossip and gift exchange, emphasizing the role that public ritual played in Trujillo's exercise of power—the Feria is by no means the only ceremonial parade, rally and special event described here. The dictator's regime was profoundly personalist and calibrated along dynastic lines, based on systematic and systemic corruption, but it also included the people in affairs of state on an unprecedentedly massive scale. This is a process that one can perceive from the very start with the rebuilding of Santo Domingo following Hurricane Zenón of 1930, but by the 1950s the regime had established an extensive network for exploiting popular cultural practices and thereby endowing itself with an apparatus of consent and structure of legitimation. Perhaps understandably, since Perón was overthrown weeks before the holding of the Feria, Robin Derby considers the degree that Trujillo measured up as a "populist" alongside the Argentine president most generally considered as the exemplar of that political style (and through the work of Ernesto Laclau, most influentially studied in a post-Marxist analytical idiom). She finds more distinctions than commonalities, perhaps best illustrated through her discussion of the conviction that Trujillo embodied the popular barrio antihero, the tíguere, how this stoked a fantasy of upward mobility, and how a rumour that he had a personal guardian angel suggested he was uniquely protected from his enemies. There are very few such motifs in the repertoire of Peronismo, even when associated with Evita.

In fact, whilst sensitive and respectful of the particular regional conjuncture—Washington was not slow to spot the dangerous fragility of Trujillo's system in the wake of the Cuban Revolution—this book has as much to say about cultural history over the longue durée. Derby's understanding of the salience of the motifs of social mobility is rooted in the particularly strong profile of free blacks in Santo Domingo from the colonial era—the theme of an earlier study (Derby 2003). Here, the author enriches a veritable treasure-trove of documentary material drawn from official and personal sources with oral history, the whole being blended in a prose style that is markedly fluent and delightfully unpretentious. One can certainly find the imprint of Bourdieu, Taussig, Geertz, Mauss...