The Eastern Stars

by Mark Kurlansky

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.

  Twenty-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.

  One 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 sur
prising 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.

  The cathedral was perfectly maintained, and so fresh and bedecked with bobbles and swirls that it looked as though it would melt in the tropical heat. It was the tallest, whitest thing around, the steeple looking almost electric in the hard sun with a black afternoon storm sky in the background. And the yellow City Hall still looked as decorated as the gooey piped cakes displayed under glass at the pastry shops.

  And there was modern concrete, the innovation San Pedro is proud to have introduced to the Dominican Republic. Since that first concrete structure went up, many more followed, including four big chain department stores, office buildings, apartment buildings, and, inexplicably, numerous shoe stores—none more than a few stories high.

  The port, where seaplanes once landed and sugar once was shipped but was now barely used, filled a long swath of riverfront with abandoned hangars and warehouses. The Parque Central, or Central Park, on the other hand, was still the social center it was intended to be. Between street vendors, sidewalk musicians, people taking a break and those with simply nothing to do, this square of palms and local tropical trees and plants was never empty.

  Across from the park was a popular restaurant, Amable, which specialized in pasteles en hojas and batidas de lechosa. With its plastic chairs and tables, it looked like a fast-food restaurant except that it was decorated with San Pedro paintings and sculptures. Macorisanos would tell you with their local pride that the pasteles were a local specialty. They were either mashed cassava root or ground bananas filled with meat and steamed in banana leaves. In fact they were tamales, a food invented in central and southern Mexico by an indigenous people—anthropologists disagree about which one—long before the arrival of the Spanish. After the Cubans got tamales, they brought them—as well as sugar and baseball—to San Pedro, where they became part of local life. Batidas de lechosa, papaya milk shakes with lots of sugar, probably did not originate locally, either, although the word lechosa for papaya is authentically and uniquely Dominican.

  The clearest expression of a unique San Pedro culture is the cocolos, who are sometimes heard singing their Afro-Caribbean music in the Parque Central. The cocolos also maintained a dance troupe, which was what was being honored by the statue of the man with the feather headdress on the crab-infested platform at the entrance to town.

  The troupe was led by Donald Warner Henderson, nicknamed Linda, a mischievous little seventy-six-year-old man with glasses, a West Indian lilt to his English, and a wry sense of humor. His father was from Antigua and his mother Saint Kitts. Both came to San Pedro for work in the cane fields at age twenty-four. Linda’s father cut cane on various estates, but Linda himself was a tinsmith by trade and noticeably proud that he had never worked in the cane fields.

  The cocolo dances of San Pedro came from Antigua, Nevis, and Tortola and were passed down through families. Linda’s father had danced traditional dances in Antigua. In the British West Indies they would dance on Christmas Day. “Christmas belongs to us and Christmas eve belongs to Dominicans,” he explained. “On Christmas eve we serenade and Dominicans eat and drink.”

  The cocolos also perform their dances on February 27, the national holiday—which, interestingly, celebrates independence not from Spain but from Haiti, which withdrew its occupation forces on February 27, 1844.

  The most colorful and famous dance costume, the Guloya, featured in the sculpture at the entrance to town, is misunderstood by the non-cocolos of San Pedro. Guloyas are Goliaths who combat Davids in a different cocolo dance. The dancers with feather headdresses are Indians for a dance called Los Indios Salvajes in which cocolos dress like Indians and dance around waving tomahawks—just one of many aspects of Caribbean culture that Americans would find politically incorrect. But the Spanish didn’t leave any Indians to protest. The wild Indians seem to wear as many colors as they can find, with their beaded masks with long black pigtails, beaded costumes with capes, tall peacock feather headdresses, and painted tomahawks.

  Many other dances are in their repertoire, including one, believed to be of English origin, in which a man goes out to gather wood for a fire, then comes home to find his wife with another man, whom he chases with a stick. Traditionally, none of the dancers are supposed to be identified until evening, when the masks are taken off. But in reality many of the cocolo dancers sit around in their beads without masks, getting so drunk before the dance begins—traditionally on guavaberry, but shots of rum work well, too—that they are well exposed before they ever get their masks on.

  Cocolo music is African and is performed using a snare drum, a larger drum, a wooden flute, and triangles. The dances are clearly African as well. Cocolos, who have such a distinctive presence in San Pedro culture, are always the stars of these fiestas; but the other Dominicans also celebrate, often wearing bull masks and chasing people in the crowds. Women do wild things with toothpicks spiking out of their hair, and some men wear fetching gowns. In fact, if you look closely in the bars, which spill out onto the streets, many of the women could use closer shaves. Macorisanos of Haitian origin crowd close together in the street for African slow dancing. No one gets more out of a small, slow movement than a Haitian dancer. There is always a Fidel Castro or two and a few Zorros on horseback. Young people come in from the bateys on horseback. It’s surprising that the fast and loud, buzzing motorbikes and merengue blasting from trucks don’t panic the horses, but Dominican horses, like Dominican people, are used to noise.

  Cocolo food is Eastern Carib
bean, which is also a bit African and has had a huge influence on San Pedro. They eat salted fish—not the imported salt cod of their English islands but cured local fish—as well as pigeon peas, which come from Africa; calaloo, the broad leaves of a tuber, which are cooked like a spinach soup; and fungi, the Eastern Caribbean corn dish. Although corn is one of the few indigenous pre-Columbian Caribbean foods, the name for the dish is African. On some islands it is funchi, and if okra—which is also African—is added, it is called coo-coo. Rincón Cocolo, a restaurant of a few tables in a small room painted green in downtown San Pedro, specialized in these dishes, most of which are unknown in the Dominican Republic outside of San Pedro.

  Gladys María José was born in San Pedro in 1923. Her father was Haitian and her mother was from Dominica. Her mother died when she was very young. Her father came to cut cane and stayed illegally, making up the name José for her because he was afraid that with his foreign family name she might be deported. She was the cook at Rincón Cocolo and she gave this recipe for fungi:Take cornmeal and put it in a pot with salt over low heat. Then wet flour with cold water. Then gather up the wet flour and put it in the pot that has the cornmeal. Stir fast so that it doesn’t make balls. Add a little butter and stir it in.

  Cocolo cooking, like drinking guavaberry and playing plaquita, has become a part of San Pedro life adopted by the rest of the population. Almost every housewife in San Pedro makes pescado y domplin. The domplin, or dumplin, pronounced “doompleen,” is the typical British Caribbean dumpling served from Jamaica to Saint Kitts: a heavy little ball made from flour and water. If a town can have its own dish, this would be San Pedro’s. Most Macorisanos do not know that domplin is from an English-language word.

  Linda was born in a neighborhood called Miramar, meaning “see the sea,” which is literally true. Because San Pedro’s waterfront was on the river, the side facing the Caribbean Sea was an undeveloped back barrio where poor people, many of them sugar workers, lived. Miramar has produced a number of major-league players in recent years, including catcher Ángel Peña, infielder Fernando Tatis, pitcher Lorenzo Barceló, and outfielder Luis Mercedes. They played on the streets. Tatis described tearing up blankets to make balls: “We tore blankets in strips and rolled them tight and sewed them together. We loved baseball so much, we would play with anything.” Miramar is no longer poor. In the 1960s, in the push to make San Pedro more tourist friendly, a broad boulevard was built by the oceanfront where a rocky coral coast leads to a perfect, bright Caribbean Sea, blue for miles on a good day. Like the longer seaside boulevard in Santo Domingo and the one in Havana, it is called the Malecón.