The Eastern Stars (6 page)

The Dominican Republic, which did not have slavery, was not competitive with Cuba and Puerto Rico until the 1870s, when the practice began to be abolished in Spanish colonies. In 1876 a Cuban, Juan Antonio Amechazurra, began exploring the possibilities of sugar production in San Pedro, and on January 9, 1879, just north of town, he opened the first
ingenio
, a steam-powered sugar mill named Ingenio Angelina. The
ingenio
—the word means “ingenuity”—was a modern wonder—state-of-the-art technology for its day in the Dominican Republic—and became the name of both the machine and the entire sugar mill. Until then, cane had been fed to a grinder powered by oxen or other livestock, a machine known in Spanish as a
trapiche
.

In both the U.S. and Europe, sugar was losing its luxury status and becoming a basic food for the working class, an important market in the Industrial Revolution. In November 1880 the government facilitated a San Pedro sugar industry by granting permission for San Pedro de Macorís to become an international port. The following year another Cuban, Santiago W. Mellor, founded Ingenio Porvenir on the edge of town. In 1882, Puerto Ricans started a mill and two different Dominican companies founded Ingenio Cristóbal Colón and Ingenio Consuelo, which was sold to a Cuban in 1883. By 1884, five years after the first San Pedro mill had opened, six modern steam-powered sugar mills were operating in San Pedro and shipping their sugar abroad from the port in town. Another, Quisqueya, opened in 1892 and an eighth, Las Pajas, in 1918.

In a town of a few thousand people, millions of dollars were spent on infrastructure: the port facility, the mills,
bateys
for the workers, train lines to carry the cane from the field to the mills . . .

Throughout the nineteenth century, starting with the Haitian revolution and continuing through the abolition of slavery in the French, British, and Danish colonies of the Caribbean, there was a move in Europe away from labor-intensive sugarcane processing, replacing it with sugar beet production. By the end of the century, more sugar from sugar beets—which grew well in Europe—was being produced than cane sugar.

Meanwhile, the Spanish colonies of Cuba and Puerto Rico were maintaining a slave economy and, almost free of competition, still developing sugarcane production, which continued to increase even after the Spanish ended slavery in the last two decades of the nineteenth century. After the turn of the century, the cane sugar industry overtook the beet sugar industry. Subsequently the European sugar industry was destroyed by World War I, leaving Caribbean sugar as the only alternative. During the war, U.S. investment in the Spanish Caribbean, much of it in sugar, reached heights never seen before or since. By the end of the conflict, Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Dominican Republic produced almost a third of all the sugar sold in the world market. Between 1913 and 1926, Dominican sugar production quadrupled. Most of that growth was under U.S. military occupation.

In those years, sugar replaced coffee as the leading export of the Dominican Republic, a shift that had already occurred in Cuba and Puerto Rico. With this expansion, Europe, including Spain, ceased to be the primary consumer of sugar from the Spanish Caribbean, replaced by the sweet tooths of America. This switch in markets was a harbinger for the future of the Caribbean. Between the end of the American Civil War and 1890, American sugar consumption tripled. American sugar companies in mid-century were buying sugarcane and processing it in American cities. In 1870, sugar refining was the leading industry of New York City.

Gradually it became apparent that refining the sugar where it was grown and shipping it, a far less bulky product than cane, was more cost-effective. While foreign capital brought new technology to the mills—better grinders, railroads, and electricity—the fields remained equipped with little but the muscle of the worker and the machete. Few Dominicans were available for this labor.

While slavery continued in Puerto Rico until 1873 and in Cuba until 1886, the Dominican Republic had not had slavery since it was stopped by the Haitian occupiers in 1822. There were few Dominicans with agricultural skills looking for work, because over several generations they had settled into family farming. The Dominican Republic was a nation of small-scale farmers, and an underpopulated one at that. Estimates of the total population of the country in 1875 are as low as 150,000 people.

But land was available, and the Dominican government charged little in export duties. By the late nineteenth century, San Pedro de Macorís became the sugar center of the Dominican Republic. Two-thirds of Dominican land planted in cane was in San Pedro. After the World War, sugar companies aggressively searched for more land. In 1923 a subsidiary of an American firm, South Porto Rico Sugar Company, burned to the ground two small villages near San Pedro—El Caimonal and Higueral—so that it could expand fields in neighboring La Romana. The company offered no compensation to the 150 families they had made homeless. To the Americans, both the sugar companies and the military, clearing peasants off land around San Pedro created not only land for planting but landless peasants in search of agricultural work. As long as peasants had land to cultivate, they were not interested in underpaid wage labor in the sugar fields: at the turn of the century, mill owners had been arguing that the Dominican Republic was unsuited for the sugar industry because the combination of underpopulation and abundant fertile land made it easy for peasants to operate small farms, so they were not interested in working for the mills.

The fact that sugar companies, especially the American ones, took possession of far more land than they planted—more than half the land owned by sugar companies was never used—is evidence that they wanted the farmers more than the farms. But this never really worked. The various schemes by which the sugar companies and the Marines tricked or forced peasants off their land during U.S. occupation did not mobilize them to work for the sugar companies but instead incited them to organize an armed guerrilla movement against the occupation that was active in the east from 1917 to 1922.

The sugar producers’ next idea was to bring in temporary workers from the Canary Islands and Puerto Rico. But then they realized that sugar workers from the British Caribbean were available. After slavery was abolished in the British Caribbean in 1838, the sugar industry on those islands went into decline and their mills did not take advantage of the improved technology of the Industrial Revolution. English-speaking black workers began to migrate seasonally for sugar harvests in Cuba, the banana harvest in Central America, dock construction in Bermuda, and, later, construction work on the Panama Canal. Just as the Dominican sugar industry was developing in the 1870s, steamships were replacing sail-powered transportation in the Caribbean, and workers were becoming more mobile.

At the same time, the sugar companies in San Pedro were beginning to appreciate the advantages of recruiting a more desperate foreign workforce, especially after a strike by Dominican workers in 1884 forced the companies to back off from a wage reduction. Starting in 1893, the sugar companies in San Pedro started recruiting workers from Saint Thomas, Saint John, Saint Kitts, Nevis, Anguilla, Antigua, and Saint Martin. On some islands, such as Anguilla, almost the entire male workforce would leave for the Dominican Republic at harvesttime. Every year about 4,500 workers would arrive at San Pedro just as the
zafra
, the cane harvest, was about to start. One result was that wages in sugar fields steadily declined. The migrants in San Pedro would work for twenty-five cents a day, half of the salary of a Dominican agricultural worker. The migrants had no negotiating power. Dominicans could threaten to go back to the land, but the immigrants had to accept wages and conditions or face deportation. Furthermore, once the companies discovered this source of labor, they had an endless supply of replacements for disgruntled workers.

In San Pedro they called the migrant workers
cocolos
. There is great debate on the origin and meaning of the word and whether or not it is pejorative. Regardless of its original tone and meaning, today in San Pedro, descendants of Eastern Caribbean sugar workers proudly call themselves
cocolos
. Some have speculated that the word is of Bantu origin. The usual explanation is that it was a mispronunciation by the Spanish-speaking people of San Pedro of the name of the British Virgin Island of Tortola, from where some
cocolos
came. But some nineteenth-century writers referred to Haitians as
cocolos,
and a late-nineteenth-century poem by José Joaquín Pérez of Santo Domingo referred to a Taino boy as a
cocolo
.

The big issue that Dominicans had with the
cocolos
was not their language or nationality but their skin color, which in most cases was black. It has made San Pedro, even today, one of the blackest areas of the Dominican Republic. Because this is a mulatto country, there has always been a sense that it could change, gradually becoming blacker or whiter: just as the Haitian occupiers had wanted to blacken it, Dominicans who developed a historic resentment and fear of Haitians wanted to whiten it.

And here were the
cocolos
coming to San Pedro and blackening the population. Dominicans in other parts of the country were growing concerned not only about the blackening of San Pedro but about foreign labor working for foreign-owned sugar companies: the eastern provinces were separating from the Dominican Republic. With great resentment, Dominican merchants complained that the
cocolos
took their money home with them rather than spending it in San Pedro. After some fifteen years of importing
cocolos
, newspapers started running articles about this “undesirable” immigration. In 1912, the legislature in Santo Domingo passed a law imposing restrictions on bringing in people who were not white. But in San Pedro both the sugar companies and the general population that was benefiting from the sugar boom ignored this legislation. Given the quantities of money they were generating, no one wanted to fight with the sugar companies.

The Dominicans wanted them to stay through the
zafra
. As early as the 1890s, sugar companies were advancing the
cocolos
their salaries in the form of credit at overpriced company stores. This kept them on the
bateys
, since they no longer had any money to spend elsewhere. Of course, such practices made sugar work even more unattractive to Dominicans and ensured that the sugar companies would have to import labor.

While by contract the sugar companies agreed to pay for foreign workers’ voyages home, a 1919 law made it illegal for them to receive their return fares until the harvest was done. At Angelina the company would not even return a worker who had been incapacitated by injury. Also in 1919 a law was decreed barring immigration to the Dominican Republic by anyone who was not Caucasian. Nonwhites who entered the country were required to register and get a permit within their first four months in the country.

Yet Eastern Caribbean
cocolos
kept coming until the late 1920s, when they were almost entirely replaced by Haitian workers, sometimes also referred to as
cocolos
. Because of the 1912 anti-immigration law, statistics started to be kept. Between 1912 and 1920, according to official records, 39,000 of these Eastern Caribbean people came to San Pedro.

During World War I, with U.S. troops occupying both Haiti and the Dominican Republic, Haitians started replacing the Eastern Caribbeans as migrant workers. A total of 22,121 Haitians came for the
zafra
in 1921, and forty-three percent of them went to the mills of San Pedro. But by then thousands of Eastern Caribbean workers had come, many with women, and settled in San Pedro in mill communities such as Consuelo. By 1914, one in four legal immigrants was female.

All of these many thousands of foreign workers were to have an enormous impact on small, underpopulated San Pedro. Less and less Spanish was spoken in San Pedro. The Haitians spoke Creole, their own Africanized French, and the Eastern Caribbean people spoke English, except for the occasional French speaker from Saint Martin.

American mill owners liked English-speaking workers and gave them easier, better-paying jobs in the mills. They were upwardly mobile and were able to bring in relatives from their native islands and find them positions too. Some left the mill and got jobs in town at the bustling port on the Higuamo River. Almost all sugar loading at the ports was done by
cocolos
and the railroads that operated at the sugar mills were almost entirely operated by
cocolos
.

During the American occupation, Americans were less interested in race than money, and with Europe and its beet production destroyed, fortunes were being made on Caribbean sugar. At its peak in 1922, Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Dominican Republic produced thirty-eight percent of the world’s cane sugar and twenty-seven percent of total world sugar. Cuban sugar alone sold that year for $1 billion.

Even though in the Dominican Republic a higher percentage of sugar production was American owned than in Cuba and Puerto Rico, the Dominican producers did not receive the same preferential treatment as the other two islands. Puerto Rican sugar could enter the U.S. tariff-free, and Cuban sugar had a twenty-percent reduction in sugar tariff. This made it difficult for Dominican sugar to be competitive in the U.S., but fortunately Europe in ruins created a huge market for Dominican sugar mills. Historians termed the sugar boom in the Spanish Caribbean during the early decades of the twentieth century the “Dance of the Millions”—millions of dollars generated in the sugar fields.

The Dominican Republic now had an export-based economy, and the center of that export economy—the center of the Dominican economy from the late nineteenth century into the 1930s—was the sugar industry and the
ingenios
of San Pedro de Macorís: Consuelo, Las Pajas, Quisqueya, Angelina, Santa Fe, Cristóbal Colón, and Porvenir.