The Eastern Stars (17 page)

Sugar was still there, but it was now secondary to employers such as CEMEX and César Iglesias, an old San Pedro factory making soap, flour, and butter that had eight thousand workers.

The Porvenir mill was off a street in central San Pedro. It used to be in the northern rural area like Consuelo. But the town—which, like the country, tripled in population in a generation—grew around Porvenir just as it may eventually grow past Consuelo. That is what is happening in the Dominican Republic: more and more rural areas are being taken over by the shacks of urban sprawl. Already a grid of dirt roads with modest concrete houses with corrugated metal roofing had spread north of Porvenir.

The mill itself, Porvenir, “Future,” was a shack, albeit a large one five or six stories high but mostly slapped together with the ubiquitous Caribbean building material, corrugated metal. It was dark inside, but hot white rays of sunlight shot through seams in the metal skin, slashing across the huge dark space at dramatic angles. Workers who stood on top of a two-story-high tank for cane juice could look longingly at a ball field where young signed prospects trained for the Pittsburgh Pirates.

The tall, dark shed housed monstrous nineteenth-century cast-iron machinery: two-story-high cogwheels with menacing teeth for cane crushing; wood-burning furnaces for cooking the juice, stacks of chopped trees at the ready; tall cane elevators; and huge conveyor belts.

All this for what was now four months of operation a year. Some of the better jobs lasted six months. Some workers earned 20 pesos an hour to clean machines and others 800 pesos a month to supervise. Some workers had nothing to do at all. Porvenir was controlled by the ruling Dominican Liberation Party, the PLD, and party members in good standing could get paid to do absolutely nothing. And some of those jobs were year-round. Killing time, unlike cane crushing, is not seasonal. And so some workers were at the mill in the dead season, showing up every day, sitting around, sometimes gratefully wearing purple hats, the party color, with a picture of Leonel Fernández on them because they did have reason to say
“ Gracias, Presidente.”

Guards stood at a chain-link gate manipulating a thick chain and a padlock, letting people in and out as though the era of Trujillo were still alive and well at the sugar mill. A woman worker wanted to go out, explaining that she had a family emergency, and the guard told her that if she left she would not be let back in until the next day, thereby forfeiting a day’s wages.

In a good year, when there was not much rain, Porvenir produced forty-two tons of sugar in its four-month operation. In Brazil the waste from crushed cane, biomass, fueled cane ethanol production to meet most of the country’s energy needs. But in the Dominican Republic, which did not produce ethanol and ran on expensive imported oil, a little biomass was sold to paper mills and the rest was just burned as scrap.

 

T
wenty-first-century Consuelo still looked like a village: most streets were unpaved, and two-story buildings stood out. The mill in Consuelo, more spacious than Porvenir, was set in an immense area of weed-covered lots and, like Porvenir, was covered in corrugated metal several stories high. The mill was fenced off and surrounded by a dirt road. Along the other side of that road were green wood-shuttered Caribbean houses originally built for the upper-echelon mill workers, fine old houses rotting in the tropics. The families of those mill workers still lived in these homes, although most of the residents didn’t work in the mill anymore.

Inside, one of the crushing machines was stamped
Farrel Foundry and Machine Co., Ansonia, Conn., 1912.
After the 1950s, parts were no longer available for these monsters, stories high, with teeth, shafts, and belts. Now Consuelo had its own machine shop with lathes and other machinist’s tools where parts were made to keep these antiques running. Nor did they depend on the vagaries of Dominican utilities: Consuelo had its own power plant. A generation earlier, this had been the leading San Pedro mill, and once the
zafra
began, there could be no stopping, night or day, for eight months. But now the company struggled to stay running for four months.

At a small street bar, just a shed by the side of the road, two men were having coffee—good strong Dominican coffee that tasted as though half the sugar of Consuelo had been dumped in it. People in sugar towns eat sugar. They start sucking on cane stalks as children and develop a sugar-craving palate.

The man behind the bar spoke Creole because his father had come to Consuelo to cut cane from Haiti. The only other customer spoke English because his father had come to Consuelo to cut cane from Saint Kitts. He had been a sugar maker, sometimes called a chemist: the man who supervised the actual boiling and making.

Did that job pay well?

“No, the only job in a sugar mill that pays well is owner.”

Despite their different languages, they understood each other and asked a question that was still frequently asked in San Pedro: Why wasn’t sugar profitable anymore? “I don’t know what happened,” said the one who spoke Creole.

“I know,” said the other in English. “There used to be money in sugar.”

There was not much money in sugar anymore, and so there were not many jobs in it, although Consuelo now had 45,000 residents—which was more than all of San Pedro had when there was a lot of money in sugar. Much of Consuelo was still a village of small one-story pastel houses set close to each other, gardened with tropical plants and shrubs. Some of the few paved streets even had sidewalks. It was a tidy, orderly town where people took pride in their homes despite the fact that there really wasn’t any work. They had not been living any better when there was.

One of the leading economic activities in this neighborhood, a short distance from the main town, was to drive a
motoconcho
and charge passengers to cling precariously behind as the scooter sped over and around potholes. The noisy two-wheelers swarmed around Consuelo like flies on old meat.

Fortunately, most families in Consuelo had relatives outside of the country who shipped them money. This was not unusual. It was estimated that more than ten percent of the Dominican population lived in the United States. Large-scale immigration began in 1966, when Balaguer, with the help of U.S. troops, got back into power and began killing supporters of Juan Bosch and the left. It continued at a rate of about 150,000 a year. Dominicans often speak disparagingly of these Dom Yors, sometimes calling them
encadenados
(people in chains) because of the New York street fashion of wearing gaudy gold chains. But communities like Consuelo could not survive without them. In New York and around the United States, establishments whose only business was wiring money to relatives in the Dominican Republic sent several million dollars every day.

 

O
ne of the important mills of the Dominican Republic’s sugar-based economy had been Santa Fe, which was now closed, although people still lived in the surrounding shacks, where sugar workers had been housed. Narrow dirt alleys separated the shacks, and garbage heaps were everywhere. Children played on them. Bit by bit, the mill was vanishing. The unemployed sugar workers who still lived in Santa Fe, George Bell’s old neighborhood—many of whom were of Haitian ancestry—made up for periodic shortfalls in cash by stripping some of the mill and selling it as scrap metal. “Haitians,” one Macorisano grumbled, showing that old attitudes endured. “The Haitians strip everything. Soon they will start chopping down all the trees for charcoal. You look in Haiti: there’s not a tree left standing except at the Dominican border.”

 

A
Macorisano who had been away for only a decade would immediately notice the difference on returning to his hometown. He would drive in from the capital on a wide, well-paved four-lane highway built in 2006 to enable tourists to get from the airport to the beach resorts of Guayacanes and Juan Dolio. The coastline leading into San Pedro offered a Caribbean Sea like blue agate, sheltered by coral reefs that made fine-sand beaches. Juan Dolio and especially Guayacanes were originally fishing communities where the fishermen launched their open boats from the beach—some under oar power, others with outboard engines.

Typical of Dominican history, there are two competing versions of the origin of the name Juan Dolio. It is at least agreed that no such person ever existed. It either is a bastardization of the term
juego de lengua
, tongue twister, or—the more logical and therefore less preferred version—comes from
juando
, or conch
,
one of the many pastel shells in a variety of intriguing forms that wash up on the beach.

In the 1980s, when there were not many Dominican resorts, weekend recreation spots were built here for affluent people from the capital. A ferry ran between Santo Domingo, San Pedro, and Puerto Rico. A highway wasn’t needed until the resorts began to attract better-paying foreigners. It has been Dominican policy to develop beach resorts with fast access to and from a nearby airport so that visitors see as little of the country as possible. The Santo Domingo airport, located halfway between the capital and San Pedro, would be close enough. To get to the hotels, the visitor had only to turn off the highway and travel for a brief stretch through a pretty, wooded zone via a washed-out narrow two-lane road that Dominicans used to drive on to get to the hotels. The road became full of such enormous potholes that the speed bumps placed before each hotel entrance seemed unnecessary.

While the streets of San Pedro were choked in traffic, the new four-lane highway leading to it was usually lightly traveled because it was designed for more traffic than tourism created. Most of the tourists did not even rent cars. Those who did steered around slow, lumbering buses and buzzing motor scooters, the primary methods of transportation for most Dominicans. The scooters were so underpowered that they often used the wide shoulders of the highway. Only a few affluent Dominicans, many of them baseball players, sped by in their SUVs.

When it was
zafra
time, that became evident by the cane trucks swaying down the highway, flatulent with black smoke, and by the smoke clouds puffing out of the two tall stacks of Ingenio Cristóbal Colón just outside of town. Some things never change. But upon exiting the highway and climbing the pockmarked pavement of the bridge over the Río Higuamo—still wide and muddy, with thickly grown tropical banks, the white steeple of the cathedral visible in the distance—the traveler encountered something surprising at the entrance to town.

Here was a poor and crumbling neighborhood known as Placer Bonita that had produced numerous major-league players, including the pitcher Josias Manzanillo, infielder Juan Castillo, and pitcher Salomón Torres. In the middle of this dilapidated old barrio was what appeared to be a huge stage announced by high steel arches. It was a sculpture commissioned by the city from artist José Ignacio Morales for almost seven million pesos—which, thanks to a bad exchange rate, was only slightly more than $200,000 but was nevertheless a serious expenditure for a Dominican town.

In this work—erected in 2006, the same year the highway into town was built—the artist seemed to exhibit a documentarian’s urge to collect all the important images of San Pedro and display them on this spacious platform in no particular order. There was a pen and inkwell for San Pedro the city of poets, and of course two baseball players, a cane cutter, and the actual steam locomotive from a train that once hauled carts of cane to the Porvenir mill. There was also a strange dancing figure with a feather headdress known as a Guloya, a popular symbol of
cocolo
culture.

But for all the exuberance of this display, there was also a touch of realism: climbing up the platform were giant land crabs that seemed about to eat the cane cutter, the baseball players—everyone. At sunset, when the shadows are long, it becomes clear that San Pedro really is full of land crabs that, for unknown reasons, cross the roads at that time of day, ready—like mold, humidity, mosquitoes, hurricanes, and a thousand other tropical menaces—to devour this town.

The different reincarnations of San Pedro were apparent along the city streets like rings in the cross section of a tree. Downtown was a mix of architectures, all made homogeneous by the same palette of turquoise, pink, yellow, and apricot. There were old pre-sugar-boom, rural Caribbean wood-shingle houses with fretwork above the doorways. The sun parched the brightly painted wood of these houses, some of which listed slightly, while the darkness inside made them look abandoned. But they were designed to keep out sunlight, and their simple architecture with pitched roofs was conceived with an understanding of the climate and so they last forever, surviving sun and rot and hurricanes.

The fine old late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century buildings from the days of the sugar boom, with high arched doorways and ornate cornices and charming balconies, had not fared as well. A few of these buildings were well preserved; others were worn but surviving; many were gutted; some were roofless; and some were no more than a miraculously preserved façade in a vacant lot.