The Eastern Stars

by Mark Kurlansky

  A whole other town grew by the Malecón. There was a huge and sumptuous school of hotel management, clean and well-presented private schools, government buildings, well-kept modern apartment buildings, and gardened, one-story, California-style ranch houses. It became an expensive neighborhood. Even water and electricity cost more, and few could afford to live there. Much of this neighborhood was oddly deserted. The clean and well-paved streets were empty. In an otherwise bustling town, this center was devoid of cars: even the ubiquitous scooters and motorcycles of the rest of the town, and the rest of the Dominican Republic, were absent. There were not even pedestrians.

  Tourism settled into the beaches outside of town. Only a few tourists came in for a brief walk around the park and a look at the cathedral. The Malecón was for locals: a quiet stretch of oceanfront by day with a few coconut or sugarcane vendors. Past the coral rocks and the palm trees was a postcard-perfect vista of a turquoise and cobalt-blue Caribbean Sea interrupted only by a few local touches, such as the rusting carcasses of ships wrecked in storms and, perched dramatically on a rock above the sea, an outhouse, because a lot of Presidente beer was consumed at night along the Malecón. After dark it was the place, with merengue exploding from phenomenally powerful speakers that rattled the windows in the nearby hotel, the only attempt at a business- or tourist-class hotel in town. The music came from many clubs, one of the most popular of which, the Café Caribe, was owned by Alfredo Griffin. The sad bachata ballads were for earlier hours. At night, merengue was still the music.

  Macorisanos came every night until late, on foot, on scooters, by car—whatever they had—and cruised the Malecón, the women dressed in tight, sparkling fantastic clothes contrasting with a lot of exposed skin of every color, the men drinking and looking. If you had a car, you could do the “Malecón crawl,” driving five or ten miles an hour, checking everything and everyone out.

  Traveling north from downtown most hours of the day, the traffic was crammed into unmarked lanes—as many lanes as would fit. Mixed in with ailing buses coughing black smoke, trucks, and cars were carts pulled by those lean and fearless Dominican horses.

  There were traffic lights, but they didn’t always work. The rule was to drive up to them and see if anything happened, then the bravest started through first. The system worked so well it made you wonder if towns really need traffic lights.

  Anyone with a car who stopped at a traffic light was quickly swarmed by tigres—local boys who washed windshields and demanded pay. They were a little gentler than the tigres of Santa Domingo, and they tried to do a good job on the windshields before the light changed. They were hardworking, enterprising youths earning pennies on a hot afternoon, looking for some way to survive other than crime. Another possibility was to work the Parque Central or the Malecón with a shoeshine kit, as Sammy Sosa did as a boy. But with the popularity of canvas sports shoes, that was getting to be an even tougher business. Another possibility was to go to the rural outskirts and get some cane, oranges, plantains, or other produce to sell on the street.

  On Calle 27 in San Pedro, the neighborhood Rico Carty brought electricity to when he built his own house, a row of mansions sprang up. A large Mediterranean-style house that somehow ended up looking more like a Pizza Hut was the home of George Bell. Alfredo Griffin’s house was there. Joaquín Andújar also had a large house, but either out of modesty or for reasons of security, it was hidden behind a wall. The neighborhood used to be known as a baseball player’s ghetto, but Bell and Andújar lost their houses in divorces. Still, the houses stood as a reminder to young tigres of what a major-league career could do for them.

  Nearby, on Calle Duverge, was a sprawling two-story building with balconies, an ornate gate, and seemingly the largest satellite dish in San Pedro—the house Sammy Sosa built for his mother. Also nearby was Plaza 30/30, a small, three-story, horseshoe-shaped, turquoise-colored shopping center with pricey shops built by Sammy Sosa in 1996. Actually it said PLA 30/30, because the sign had lost its ZA. The name referred to Sosa’s 1993 season, in which he hit thirty-three home runs and stole thirty-six bases. Two years later he hit thirty-six home runs and stole thirty-four bases in the same season. As of 2009, there had been fifty-two “30/30” players—those who have hit at least thirty home runs and stolen at least thirty bases in a single season—starting with Ken Williams’s thirty-nine home runs and thirty-seven stolen bases in 1922. Despite the arbitrariness of the figures, it is considered a distinction to be a 30/30 player, because home runs are the ultimate baseball test of strength, usually hit by large, burly men, and base stealing is the ultimate test of speed, usually performed by smaller, lithe men. Few players have both the speed to steal bases and the strength to hit home runs. But Sosa’s record of having done it twice does not even stand in San Pedro, since Alfonso Soriano, born in the sugar-mill barrio of Quisqueya, debuting in 2002 for the Yankees, did it four consecutive seasons. In 2006, Soriano hit forty-six home runs and stole forty-one bases, becoming one of only four 40/40 players. In fact, the same year he hit more than forty doubles, so he became the first 40/40/40 player in major-league history. This statistic, which is cited more often in San Pedro than anywhere else, demonstrates nothing as much as baseball’s unending thirst for statistics and records.

  Nevertheless, Sammy Sosa was the first player in San Pedro to have a shopping mall named after his statistics. There was little doubt about whose shopping mall it was, since in the center, where the bougainvilleas grew, was a fountain and in the fountain stood a full-color statue of Sosa at bat. The statue wasn’t recognizable as Sammy, but it wore a number 21 Chicago Cubs uniform. Also in the mall was a discotheque named the Sammy Club Disco.

  Many of the streets of San Pedro were unpaved, or the pavement was so badly crumbling that they were in the process of unpaving. Like all Caribbean towns, San Pedro smelled of overripe fruit and burning charcoal. More English language—the language of both cocolos and baseball—was heard here than in other Dominican towns. Many of the stores had English names, such as the downtown salon called the Hair Gallery.

  San Pedro’s commerce spilled onto the street from the kind of one-story Latin American concrete architecture that tried to avoid drabness by being painted in the industrial color palette used in the making of Popsicles. In the end, most of these newer buildings resembled dirty bubble gum. The metal grating on every door and window made the houses look like smiling teenagers with their braces showing. The gratings were to lock out criminals. Street crime, robberies, break-ins, and muggings in this century became an unprecedented problem everywhere in the Dominican Republic. It was worse in Santo Domingo, but it had become serious enough in San Pedro for Mayor Echavaría to consider it his leading problem.

  Young people were not finding a way to earn a living. The problem shifted from unemployment to underemployment. In recent years, inflation soared and the currency plunged, and most of those who found work still did not have enough money to meet their needs. It used to be, in this area of agriculture, cattle ranching, ubiquitous small-scale farming, and fishing, that even a poor person ate because food was cheap. Now, for the first time, people were struggling to buy enough to eat.

  The Dominican government provides few safety nets for the poor. Juan Bosch and José Francisco Peña Gómez had called for such programs but never had a chance to implement them. Once in power, Leonel Fernández, Juan Bosch’s protégé, abandoned such ideas and instead developed an infrastructure for foreign investment, declaring that he was making the Dominican Republic “the Singapore of the Caribbean.” He garnered some popularity by stabilizing the economy. Because Fernández was barred by law from a second term, the opposition under Hipólito Mejía came to power on the promise of social programs and did manage to increase spending on education and social services, including the country’s first government-financed retirement program. Wanting to do more, he used his legislative majority to end the term limit, and this allowed Fernández to come back and defeat him, using his next presidency t
o build still more infrastructure, such as new highways, but without the growth in social programs or the economic stability he had achieved in his first term. A poor Dominican still had to live by his wits to survive.

  Traffic moved slowly around potholes, past tigres and uncertain traffic lights from the statue at the entrance to town past the Tetelo Vargas Stadium, which, like the Catholic churches of old, was never closed. The almost gridlocked street curved past all the low-ceilinged chicken restaurants, their large-screen televisions showing baseball games. Plastic chairs scattered on the street with the smell of fried chicken, plantains, yucca, and rum. The street then wound by a sprawling fenced-off landscaped area. It was the campus of the Universidad Central del Este, which, since its founding in 1970, had become one of the biggest changes in San Pedro.

  For only 9,000 pesos a semester, a little less than $300, a student could become a teacher. To become a doctor cost only 6,500 pesos a semester, about $200, for the first two years and then 12,500 pesos a semester for another two years. Only four years and $1,600 for a medical degree may seem like a bargain to an American, and in fact Americans attended the medical school. But this was a great deal of money to be able to set aside from most jobs in San Pedro.

  It would take most of a year just to earn one semester’s tuition working near the university in the “free zone.” The original 774,000-square-yard zone, established in 1971 under the same Balaguer development program as the university, soon filled, and a second zone was built. The plan was to allow foreign manufacturers, mostly of clothing but also some jewelry, shoes, and low-technology industrial products, to bring in parts duty-free, have them assembled by inexpensive Dominican labor, and ship them out. The Dominicans didn’t get much for this, but it didn’t cost them much, either. The Dominican government spent little more than $50,000 to build the zone. The companies have been mainly American. Anyone who breathed a word about unions or organizing for better wages would be quickly locked out, and so American manufacturers were provided with very cheap labor and Macorisanos were offered jobs that paid barely a subsistence salary. Once the Dominican peso went into free fall against the dollar in the 1990s, Dominican labor cost Americans less than fifty cents an hour. In the first four years of the twenty-first century, the peso fell again, losing about half its value. In dollar terms it made Dominican workers a bargain, but they had to put in ten- and eleven-hour days to earn enough to survive. It didn’t even create a significant increase in San Pedro port traffic.

  The free zone and tourism were cited by Echavaría as “the two main pillars of the San Pedro economy.” Tourism jobs also meant long hours and low wages. A man named José was born in 1959 in a small farming town in the interior of the eastern region. His father owned a very small plot of land on which he grew bananas and a few other crops. They worked hard, but life was cheap and they had enough to eat. In 1980, José left the town and came to San Pedro because he had heard that jobs were available in the free zone. He got a job with an American shoe manufacturer. After twenty years he had worked his way up to supervisor and was earning 800 pesos a week, about $100 a month, which was a high salary for the free zone. “It was very bad pay,” José remembered. “But it was so cheap to live then.”

  However, prices started to go up and José’s salary didn’t, and by the year 2000 he was finding it very hard to live on his income as a supervisor for the American shoe company. So, despite the fact that he had only a grade-school education, he taught himself how to speak English in order to get a job in that other pillar of the San Pedro economy: tourism. He got a job as a porter in a beach resort hotel and earned 1,400 pesos a week. But that 1,400 pesos did not go as far as the 800 pesos at the free zone had ten years earlier.

  José shrugged. “What could I do?” he said. “I came from a very small town. There was no baseball. I never had the chance to play it.”

  Ángel Valera de los Santos, an octogenarian, had been working in City Hall since 1948, when it was a much smaller city with only a few thousand people and few cars.

  “Sixty years ago, San Pedro was much more prosperous but there were far fewer opportunities,” he said. “Sugar was the economy. There was no tourism or free zone. There was César Iglesias. But now the wealthy families have all moved to Santo Domingo, where there are more investment opportunities. They all moved when sugar died.”

  Many new jobs had been created in San Pedro: driving a motosconcho, working in one of the big stores, such as Jumbo or Iberia, or in the free zone, or in tourism. Politicians liked to boast of the jobs they had brought in and the economic development they had fostered, but in truth most economic development in San Pedro de Macorís meant only the creation of underemployment.

  But there was baseball.

  CHAPTER NINE

  The City of Baseball

  In the handsome City Hall, on the second floor, was a room marked “Departamento de Cultura.” It was a cramped little room with tiled walls. The dimensions and lack of windows suggested that it might have once been a closet. There was enough space for a desk, a file cabinet, and three chairs. Benancio Rodríguez Montaño, a thin, four-foot-tall elderly man with sunken cheeks and no teeth, was in charge. On the rare occasion when a visitor came to the Department of Culture, he would show them to a seat, pour a cup of strong, sugary Dominican coffee, and remain standing, which usually brought him to the visitor’s eye level.

  Questions about baseball irritated him. “Everyone says this is the city of baseball players, but before that it was the city of poets. There was Gastón Fernando Deligne, Pedro Mir, and here, there is me,” he said proudly. “I am a poet too. Look, I was improvising just this morning.” Then he took out a dog-eared envelope covered with writing and recited in cadence his latest sixteen lines about loss and vanishing culture in a style vaguely reminiscent of Gastón Deligne.

  He may have been right about the loss of culture—“the rose lost from the garden”—but it was clear to most anyone that San Pedro de Macorís, the city of poets, was now the city of baseball.

  Not everyone in San Pedro was desperately poor. Most of those who weren’t were baseball players. They were easy to spot because they looked a little larger, a little better fed, and more muscular. If he was gangly, he was probably a shortstop. If you shook hands and his hand was large and powerful and the skin as coarse as a leather glove, he was probably a pitcher. They spoke American English and, in fact, they looked a little like Americans. This was why any large American in San Pedro was frequently asked, “Did you play baseball?” If you said yes—and most Americans have played a little baseball while growing up—invariably the next question was “Did you sign?”

  The idea of playing baseball simply for fun had become a rare notion in San Pedro. In the hundreds of fields around town, many variations, like softball, plaquita, and cricket, were played for fun. Some played molinete, a Cuban variation on softball in which the underhanded pitch can travel more than 100 miles per hour. But even this was getting a little serious. Molinete in San Pedro had corporate sponsors, and the players were paid professionals.

  Once baseball players started going to the U.S. and coming back with the money to buy mansions and SUVs, baseball was no longer about fun: it was about salvation, the one option that could work. Of course, most of the players around town had not made the major leagues, but many had made enough money somewhere in the game to start a business or take some kind of small step up.

  It was no great trick to pick out those big, strong, American-trained and, more important, American-fed ballplayers. In the supermarket there was Ervin Alcantara, age twenty-seven. A few years earlier he had been practicing in a San Pedro field when a scout noticed him; in 2003 he was signed to the Astros. He played minor-league ball until 2007 and then was released. Now he was playing with the Estrellas. Since he never made it into the majors, his salary in the Dominican League was not very high, but it was still a lot better than a salary in the free zone. Also—and this seldom gets said—it was a lot more fun.


  Everywhere in San Pedro, baseball connections were to be found. Ramón Pérez Tolentino, a pastry maker with a little shop in Consuelo, lovingly displayed in glass cases his work with white fluffy swirls and bright-colored jellies. He used to coach Manny Acta. Acta never made it to the majors as a player, but as manager of the Washington Nationals he became the first Macorisano to manage a major-league team and also the youngest manager in the majors. His old coach, the pastry maker back in Consuelo, now ran the Consuelo chapter of the Manny Acta Foundation, which supplied baseball equipment and training to young Dominicans.

  Danilo Rogers was a cocolo who grew up in downtown San Pedro. His grandfather was from Anguilla and had come to San Pedro to work at Ingenio Consuelo. He became a “mixer,” a technician who made white sugar. Danilo played ball and signed with the Atlanta Braves, playing left field on the A and Double A teams. He never made it to the majors, but he put away enough money to start a pleasant, airy restaurant serving Dominican food. His specialty was mofongo, a very Dominican dish, although, typically, the Puerto Rican sugar people brought it here. It is made from mashed plantains, fried in fat and garlic. Anyone who complained that mofongo is too heavy satisfied the Dominican definition of a gringo. Here is Danilo’s recipe:Fry plantains with pork, beef, chicken, whatever you want to do it with. Also chicharón, the fat layer under the skin of pork. Crush the chicharónes and plantains in a pilón, a Caribbean mortar and pestle for mashing bananas, with butter, garlic, salt and pepper.