The Eastern Stars

Table of Contents

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Belly of Paris,
by Émile Zola

Published by the Penguin Group

Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) • Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England • Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd) • Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd) Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi-110 017, India • Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd) Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

 

Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

Copyright © 2010 by Mark Kurlansky

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions. Published simultaneously in Canada

 

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

 

Kurlansky, Mark.

The Eastern stars : how baseball changed the Dominican town of San Pedro de Macorís / Mark Kurlansky.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

eISBN : 978-1-101-18686-2

1. Baseball—Dominican Republic—San Pedro de Macorís—History.

2. Baseball players—Dominican Republic—San Pedro de Macorís—History. I. Title.

GV863.29.D65K

796.35707293’82—dc22

 

 

 

While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers and Internet addresses at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors, or for changes that occur after publication. Further, the publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

A MIS VIEJOS AMIGOS EL PUEBLO DOMINIC ANO, EN LA ESPERANZA QUE UN DÍA ENCUENTRE LA JUSTICIA Y PROSPERIDAD QUE USTED SE MERECE

 

 

AND FOR TALIA FEIGA, WHOSE GREAT HEART IS BIG AS A MOUNTAIN

—Pedro Mir, “Si Alguien Quiere Saber Cuál Es Mi Patria” “If Someone Wants to Know Which Country Is Mine”

 

 

 

T
his is a book about what is known in America as “making it.” And like all such tales, it is also a story about not making it. In this Dominican town, San Pedro de Macorís, the difference between making it and not making it is usually baseball.

If you do not make it, there is sugarcane—but only for half the year. Sometime between Christmas and the Dominican national holiday on February 27, depending on how rainy the summer was, the
pendones
—white feathery shoots—appear above the rippling green cane fields of San Pedro de Macorís. In the English-speaking islands of the Caribbean, where many of the families of San Pedro’s sugar workers originated, the field is said to be “in arrow” because the
pendones
point upward. It means that the sugarcane is ripe for cutting and the cane harvest, the
zafra
, can begin.

It is an exciting moment, because most people who work in sugar here have employment only during the four to six months of the
zafra
. In an election year, such as 2008, at the beginning of the harvest a sign goes up at the Porvenir sugar mill, which is controlled by the ruling party. It says,
“Gracias, Presidente, por una nueva zafra,”
Thank you, President, for a new cane harvest, as though he, Leonel Fernández, the New York-educated caudillo—running again as he had in 2004 and in 1996, which was the last time Dominicans believed he offered anything new, his face on posters everywhere with the smile of an encyclopedia salesman—had personally caused the sugarcane to grow.

Some of the San Pedro mills—Santa Fe, Angelina, Puerto Rico, and Las Pajas—no longer operate. Four working mills remain, though not at full capacity: Quisqueya, Consuelo, Cristóbal Colón, and Porvenir. When the
zafra
is on, red glows can be seen from San Pedro along the northern horizon where the mill fires burn all night, cooking down cane juice. Porvenir, which in Spanish means “future,” was originally on the edge of the city like the others, but the town grew around it and now trucks full of grape-red sticks of cane must drive through the traffic-clogged center of town to deliver to the mill.

Street kids, the ones who survive by shining shoes or washing the windshields of the cars that stop at traffic lights, run behind the trucks and pull off canes to suck. Sometimes they hold a stick of cane in a batter’s stance. On the street, San Pedro boys regularly coil into a batter’s stance anyway. Having a stick in hand, some can’t resist taking a practice swing with a small rock—a dangerous habit in the crowded parts of town. But if they were to make a mistake and hit a rich man’s shiny large SUV, chances are the wealthy driver hiding behind the smoked glass would be a baseball player who not that many years before had himself been whacking around stones with a stalk of sugarcane.

The road out of town that leads to the other mills begins at the green, white, and ocher Estadio Tetelo Vargas, home of the Estrellas Orientales, the Eastern Stars. San Pedro’s long-suffering and always promising baseball team, founded in 1910, is older than many of the major-league clubs in America. With a center-field wall at 385 feet, Tetelo Vargas is a major-league-size field, though with fewer seats, more like a Triple A stadium. Behind the outfield wall, the drooping fronds of tall palms can be seen, and in the distance, sticking up behind right field, the smokestack of Porvenir.

The road alongside the stadium goes straight north—a rutted pockmarked remnant of the once paved two-lane route that has hosted too many trucks, which now dangerously zigzag around potholes. The road leads through the rural zone that is still San Pedro to whole villages that have grown up around the mills after which they were named: Angelina, Consuelo, Santa Fe . . . Soon—still in San Pedro—the road seems like a causeway over a vast vegetable sea with lapping silver and green waves of sugarcane. Some already-cleared fields look as if they had gotten bad haircuts. Leggy white birds called
galsas
graze there until sunset, when they nest in the trees at the fields’ edges.