Page 332 - Arte e Historia

Danilo De los Santos

are responsible for our first editions of books, including
«Lyre from Quisquella» by José Castellanos, printed in
1874. It also entails editorial connections especially with
Spain, and the formation of public libraries created by
civil lawyers, including Pedro de Jesús Peña y Reynoso
and Eugenio Deschamps, founders of cultural societies
in Santiago. English Victorianism and the French Belle
Époque («beautiful era») are welcomed in major cities of
the republic that, besides the inhabitants Creoles, have
different foreign presences: Arab, Caribbean, Chinese,
North Americans and Europeans, all of them influenc-
ing the transformation of cities’ lifestyles, as well as add-
ing new components to the Dominican racial makeup.
Concurrently, the inland distinctive universe of the peas-
ant, retaining a spiritual and material culture of ancestral
traditions and customs, somehow segregated from the
urban fringe that creates typical activities of the popular
culture: vendors, markets, town criers…

After Báez dictatorship, there are more than ten
governments between 1874-1880, including the former
strongman as one of the leaders during that period. The
contentious nature of the different party factions, being
the political reality of the nation, continued creating an
unstable chaos until the arrival of the provisional govern-
ment of the Liberals headed by General Gregorio Luper-
ón (1879-1880) and the Constitutional sector of Fernan-
do Arturo Meriño (1880-1802), Ulysses Heureaux, alias
Lilis (1882-1884) and Francis Gregory Billini-Alejandro
Woss y Gil (1884-1886). All these constitutional govern-
ments, directly or indirectly, set in motion Lilis dictator-
ship (1887-1899), coinciding with modern transforma-
tions that define the economic, industrial, demographic,
socio-cultural, and even the State with its control of the
military. Instituting, by this manner, authoritarian con-
trols based on the espionage facilitated by the new type
of communication (post, telegraph, railways… and harm-
ful loans with foreign capital. It is the stage in which U.S.
imperialism replaces the European empires, and Ameri-
ca is at the mercy of the Monroe Doctrine and the dollar

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