A sentence that stood out to me was “paranoia became a national characteristic” (2) and its implications as to how invasive Trujillo’s regime was as well as the external perception of the nation and its citizens. What I also found very interesting was the notion of gift giving and how it generated this sense of owing to Trujillo. I can’t say I fully understand how this could go along with the terror the average citizen must have felt but two statements can potentially be true at once.
Furthermore, I could not initially see the way Trujillo could be called a populist leader, given the fact he was shown as an enemy of the elite and a terror to the people. By the end of the text, however, I can understand how alluring the promise of establishing an identity for Dominicans to be seen as people rather than “faceless rabble” (23) could be.