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Ciferri’s Directorship Comes to an End
From the very outset, the regime of Rafael L. Trujillo was clearly incompatible with the country’s social and
democratic development, so it is not surprising to learn that it was decided during the dictator’s first term to
“resolve, once and for all, the problem of the National School of Agriculture.” The argument was that the
school, “under its old organization, was not bearing fruit as expected.” The scientific organization designed
by Dr. Ciferri was accused of pursuing, “in short, a misguided objective”—that of training agricultural techni-
cians or expert agronomists who were “logically destined to become bureaucratic, white-coated professionals
instead of technically trained hands prepared to intervene directly in the struggle with the earth.” Thus Trujil-
lo’s “successful reform” of the National School of Agriculture consisted of regressing to the old Experimental
Station in Haina, just as originally conceived by the government of the U.S. occupation in 1920, that is to say,
“to prepare Teachers of Cultivation and Managers of Rural Farms, a title sufficient in itself to explain the ref-
ormation plan devised by the Government.”
42
Although in the
Memoria
for 1930 the new Secretary of State for Agriculture, Rafael César Tolentino, re-
ferred only to the rehabilitation of the School of Agriculture and of the Experimental Station (using the names
given by the U.S. Marines during the military occupation), it was soon revealed that, in effect, the new Domin-
ican government had repudiated the development of scientific capabilities in the field of agriculture that would
have enabled an autonomous, balanced growth from the ecological, social, and human perspective, and conse-
quently would have advanced the goal of independent food sovereignty in the Dominican Republic. Instead,
the Trujillo regime preferred to train inspectors of crops and produce, as well as agriculture instructors who
DR. RAFFAELE CIFERRI’S CONTRIBUTIONS IN THE DOMINICAN REPUBLIC