The Eastern Stars

by Mark Kurlansky

  After Trujillo was killed, for the next thirty years Dominican politics replaced the reds and the blues with Joaquín Balaguer and Juan Bosch. These two eternal brotherly enemies—Balaguer, the right-wing caudillo who had served as Trujillo’s president, and Bosch, the leftist idealist, friend of Fidel Castro—had so much in common that they appeared to be mirror images of the same person. Balaguer was born in 1906 in the northern Cibao region, a member of an elite group in the country’s wealthy region with the whitest population. Bosch was born in the same region and social class three years later. Bosch had a Puerto Rican mother, and Balaguer a Puerto Rican father. They were both white in a country where only about fifteen percent of the population is white. They both had literary aspirations, although Bosch’s tough and realistic short stories garnered more respect than Balaguer’s flowery, nineteenth-century-style poetry. More highly regarded was Balaguer’s writing on literature, which always reserved ample space for praising the work of his frère-ennemi, Juan Bosch.

  One worked for Trujillo, the other opposed him and went into exile. They both lived and played central roles in the nation’s political life into their nineties, both seemingly refusing to either retire or die. The two old enemies could even join together to keep a third party out.

  Balaguer was an aesthete who never married and lived in the servant quarters of the house of his six sisters. He wore dark suits and a fedora, and his only extravagances were a specially made limousine known as the Balaguermobile and a huge, dark, elaborately carved desk that he inherited from Trujillo, his extravagant predecessor. It was rumored that Balaguer had fathered illegitimate children throughout the country, but this speculation may have come from the difficulty Dominicans had in accepting men of power who were not oversexed. The sexual exploits of most of them, especially Trujillo and his son Ramfis, were legendary. When Trujillo’s assassins caught up with him on the road, it was said the dictator was on his way to a tryst.

  But just their haberdashery showed the difference between the caudillos: Trujillo looked like a feathery cross between Napoleon and Lord Nelson as seen in a Gilbert and Sullivan operetta, while Balaguer resembled actor Karl Malden doing a credit card commercial.

  Balaguer, with or without sex, lived to be the oldest head of state in the world—was he preserved by celibacy, another worrying rumor mill asked—hanging on after he was legally blind and his hearing had faded. Interviewed at his huge desk, which made the small man look even smaller, this writer asked him why the electrical system was constantly failing. While he was denying this obvious truth, the electricity went off in the palace, but Balaguer continued with his denial, too blind to know what had happened.

  Bosch was also a colorful octogenarian. He liked to take journalists to the slums and show his outrage at the wretched housing by pulling shacks apart while the poor family helplessly watched what little they had being torn up. Successive U.S. governments liked Balaguer, who had formed his right-wing party while in exile in New York. The Kennedy administration initially supported Bosch despite the claim of opponents that he was a communist. But once in power, as a result of one of the rare untainted democratic elections in Dominican history, Bosch made the mistake of seeking economic independence from the U.S. by awarding public contracts to Europeans. Washington began to fear Bosch, and after he was removed in a military coup in 1963, the U.S. invaded to prevent him from coming back to power. They put in his place Balaguer. In most Balaguer elections, fraud was suspected and violence was employed: in 1966, Balaguer had 350 Bosch supporters killed in order to ease his return to power. The U.S. accepted this as long as it was keeping Bosch from office. Once Bosch was no longer the opponent, the U.S. started criticizing the nearly nonagenarian president’s proclivity for fraud.

  In 1992, for the four-hundredth anniversary of Christopher Columbus’s arrival, Balaguer ignored how badly the explorer is regarded in the Dominican Republic and spent $200 million to build a monument to him that could project light in the shape of a cross into the sky that would be visible for ten miles—that is, if they can ever get enough electrical power to light it up.

  Having seen the U.S. completely manipulate the destiny of their country for generations, Dominicans understandably make the mistake of thinking that their country is a major priority of U.S. policy. But, in fact, the mistake of the nineteenth-century annexationists—who, once their proposal came to a Senate vote, discovered that no one in Washington was really interested in their country—is continually repeated. After President Lyndon Johnson sent troops to occupy the Dominican Republic, he sent down his top national security adviser, McGeorge Bundy, to report on the situation. But it turned out that the main reason for the assignment was not Johnson’s concern about the Caribbean nation he had just invaded but to force Bundy to cancel a planned debate with leading scholars on Vietnam policy. It was Vietnam, not the Dominican Republic, that was preoccupying Washington. It is always something else.

  CHAPTER TWO

  The First Question

  The first question most people ask when they learn how many Major League Baseball players have been produced by this one small town of San Pedro de Macorís is “What’s in the water?” There seem to be numerous things in the water, some from the Mexican cement factory along the Higuamo River. But there is probably nothing in the water that would help with baseball. San Pedro baseball was not born from the water but from the history of the town.

  Dominicans tend to be more attached to their regions than to their country, a fact that has proved important in the organization of baseball. One of the reasons it is so difficult to define Dominican culture is that although it is a small country—it is large only by Caribbean standards—the Dominican Republic has distinct regions with different histories, different economies, different traditions, even different racial makeups. This was true to some degree even before Europeans arrived. The previous people, the Tainos, had divided the island into five regions, each with its own ruler, or cacique. San Pedro, along the southern coast, forty miles east of the capital, is in the eastern part of the island, which is why its baseball players are called the Eastern Stars. It was part of the Taino region of Higüey, ruled when the Spanish arrived by a cacique named Cayacoa. Once the Spanish took over, the history and culture of the regions diverged even more dramatically. Baseball came out of the unique history of San Pedro de Macorís and the southeastern region.

  The Tainos of Hispañola were from a group known as Arawaks who came from South America but spread northward into the Greater Antilles. Two of their best-known inventions were hammocks, which they called hamacas, and a musical instrument known as maracas. Two things that they had in common with the current inhabitants: they ate the root of the cassava plant, known today in Spanish by the word yuca, said to be of Taino origin, and they played a ball game for which they constructed fields throughout their communities. The Taino word for both their ball game and their ballpark is the Dominican word for a cane-worker village, a batey. While Tainos are clearly the reason that today’s Dominicans eat so much yucca, the fact that the current residents are also a ballpark-building people is a coincidence, an accident of history, like the fact that the Tainos, too, had extreme reverence for their mothers.

  The Tainos were a seafaring people, which is why these South Americans spread so far north in the Caribbean. Another reason is that they were driven there by a more aggressive South American group, the Caribs, who were also expanding into the Caribbean. When Columbus came to the Caribbean, he sailed into an ongoing war between the Tainos and the Caribs. When he first encountered the Caribs, on Guadeloupe, he claimed that they were breeding Tainos for food and that their body parts were hung to cure like sides of beef. He said he was so revolted by this that he attacked and killed every Carib he could find, but since that was what he generally did, it has to be wondered if this was a fabricated excuse. However, the Caribs and the Tainos were clearly at war, and the Tainos seemed to be losing. Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo, an early Spanish historian of
Santo Domingo, wrote that the cacique Cayacoa was one of the more ferocious resisters of the encroaching Caribs.

  The Tainos built excellent dugout canoes, and in fact invented the word canoe, or canoa. They caught fish in nets, with hook and line, with spears or with traps, which are the same techniques used in San Pedro today.

  In Taino Higüey, a people settled at the mouth of the Higuamo, where the river is wide and brackish and full of fish. No doubt drawn there by the fishing, this people called themselves Macorixes. Not only did the Macorixes have abundant river fish to net, oysters to pluck from the mangrove roots of the brackish water, and crabs to chase out of the holes they dug in the earth of the marshlands, but they could go to sea and try to land giant fish such as marlin, which were sometimes longer than the Macorix canoes. In short, it was a good spot for fishing and, set as it was a little upriver from the sea, was safe from all but the most furious of storms, known in Taino as a huracán.

  Soon after the Spanish arrived, they began the conquest of Higüey and, when the Tainos resisted, unleashed a war of extermination. By 1504, with the territory more firmly under control, Juan Ponce de León was appointed governor of Higüey.

  At the mouth of the Higuamo, people continued to fish, primarily from the eastern bank; but as time went on, a village also grew on the western bank. The area went by various names. The original settlement was and is still called Punta de Pescadores, Fishermen’s Point. But just as pragmatic and illustrative was another name, Mosquito or Mosquitisol, named for the other creatures besides fish for which the marshy area was known.

  Soon after independence in 1844—some say in 1846, others insist not until 1858—the town started to be called San Pedro de Macorís, after both Saint Peter, the patron saint of fishermen, and the Macorixes, the original Taino fishermen. The people were for the moment free of the Spanish, and Taino names were starting to come into fashion: throughout Dominican history, Taino names have become in vogue whenever anti-Spanish sentiment or Dominican nationalism is popular.

  San Pedro de Macorís, with its sheltered riverfront and its short sea voyage to the capital, became a commercial port for local products, especially fish and plantains. In fact, there was a period in the late 1860s and 1870s when the town was referred to as Macorís de Plántanos. Other crops, such as corn and beans, were also shipped from the port. But Macorís de Plántanos was about to undergo a dramatic change.

  The booming Cuban sugar industry started to spread to San Pedro, which had the flat, humid tropical land suited for growing cane, was close to the capital, and had its own seaport. The return of Spanish government in 1861 brought in Spanish and Italian entrepreneurs looking for opportunities and interested in sugar.

  Then, on October 10, 1868, in Cuba, a wealthy Cuban landowner from Yara named Carlos Manuel de Céspedes made a speech from his farm, forever after known in Cuban history as the grito de Yara, in which he renounced both Spanish rule and slavery. He set his own slaves free. Thirty-seven other planters around Yara also freed their slaves and formed an army. So began a failed war of independence known as the Ten Years’ War. Since this was largely an agricultural war—in fact, historians often attribute the movement’s failure to its inability to attract support from Havana—wealthy Cuban landowners fled. Many of them were sugar producers who went to the Dominican Republic.

  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 ex
pand 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.