The Eastern Stars (2 page)

At lunchtime the
galsas
were still in the fields and the cane cutters in Consuelo were under the trees, resting in the shade from a broiling midday sun. Cutting cane is the worst job in the Dominican Republic, the hardest work for the least pay. It has always been said that no Dominican would ever do such work—never even want to be seen doing it. Desperate people from other sugar-producing islands with dying sugar industries were brought in to cut the cane. And so places like Consuelo have a polyglot culture with West Indian English and Haitian Creole as commonly spoken as Spanish and often mixed in the same sentence.

But that was in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when the Dominican Republic was an underpopulated country with a booming sugar industry. Today it is the reverse, and the job market is becoming desperate. In this field the resting cane cutters were born Dominican.

No one really cared how long a lunch break they took. They would not stop for long, because they were paid by the ton, not the hour. But they needed some rest, especially while the sun was high.

There were several varieties of cane grown here, and this field had been planted with what is called
Angola pata de maco
. It is a hard red stalk that takes a mighty whack from a machete, the stroke repeated hundreds of times in the course of a day. But it is not the toughness of the cane that cutters care about: it is the density and water content. Some types of cane are considerably heavier than other types, and a cutter negotiated to get a field like this, with “good cane,” because they were paid by weight.

They were paid 115 pesos for chopping a ton of cane and piling it into open railroad cars with rods along the sides to hold the stalks in. One hundred fifteen pesos was about $3.60 in 2009 dollars. In one day, two cutters working together could fill a car, which held four tons. A locomotive that passed by regularly would haul the car off to the mill. In the sugar industry the Dominican cane cutter, left to do everything himself without the use of machines, is considered one of the least-productive cane cutters in the world. This is not from a lack of work but rather from the intensity of the work. Efficiency of labor, a normal concept in the development of most industry, did not exist in Dominican sugar. Equations such as the number of man-hours to produce a ton of sugar were of little interest to the unregulated adventurers who came to the Dominican Republic to produce sugar. The cost of labor was so low, the quantity of sugar that could be produced so enormous, and the profits so staggering that no one was pondering better means of production. After the initial decades when the sugar men arrived and built their state-of-the-art mills, there was not even a great effort to upgrade equipment.

So, while everywhere else the fields are set on fire so that the leaves burn away before harvesting, in the Dominican Republic the single cutter must chop the tough green stalk close to the ground, then chop it into three equal parts and toss them into a railroad car. In Jamaica, where the cane is burned first and the cane cutter does not do the loading, the cutter averages seven tons a day. A good cutter in San Pedro could cut two tons a day.

Cutters worked from seven in the morning to five at night, but in the middle of the day, when the sun was highest, they needed shade, food, and rest. It would be easy to imagine that men who did such work would be big, solidly built, muscular workers, but that would require an ample protein diet, which they didn’t have. Elio Martínez, one of the cutters, was not a large man. He was lean and of middling height and had a soft voice. He was fifty-seven years old and had been cutting cane since he was sixteen. His father, who had also been a cane cutter, and his mother were both Haitian.

For lunch he was drinking cane juice, which, though of little nutritional value, was sweet and refreshing, and the sugar gave a momentary energy boost and made an empty stomach feel full. Part of the trick was to find the ripest stalk, and he felt through the hundreds of reddish stumps sticking out from the two-ton pile in a full wagon ready to be hitched to the locomotive. When he found a juicy one, recognizable by touch and its dark maroon color, he grabbed on and yanked the five-foot stick out of the wagon. He held it horizontally with his left hand and with his right lifted a hard wood stick, which he smacked several times into the center of the cane. Then he turned the cane and struck a few more blows until the fibers in the middle appeared slightly mashed. Then he leaned his head back and, holding the cane with both hands, twisted it until green juice poured into his mouth as though from a faucet. He repeated the process with several carefully chosen canes.

 

A
bout five miles away, in the center of San Pedro, was a two-story apartment building constructed in the style of a motel. It had a chain-link gate so that it could be locked to protect the apartments, the large late-model SUVs parked in front of the building, and the privacy of the well-known tenants.

A fit-looking man in a bass-fishing T-shirt was on the lawn by the building with a bottomless metal cage. “Watch this, this is funny,” he said to another muscular man. One end of the cage was propped off the ground with a plastic water bottle with a blue nylon string tied to it. The man in the bass-fishing T-shirt sat fifteen feet away, holding the string. He had spread corn under the cage for bait. Some pigeons were approaching it.

His name was Manny Alexander, and he had grown up not far away in downtown San Pedro. His family was so poor, their small house so crowded, that he shared a bed with several brothers and sisters. Then, in February 1988, when he was sixteen years old, he signed a contract with the Baltimore Orioles as a shortstop. The Orioles organization paid him a signing bonus of $2,500, a small bonus today but a respectable one in 1988.

“The first thing I did was I bought a bed,” Alexander recalled. “I wanted a small bed all to myself. Then I got a radio, some clothes, food.” More toys followed. Although his major-league career was not illustrious and he was not a top-salaried player, in his eleven years in the majors he did earn more than $2 million, which, here in San Pedro, could go a very long way.

Had he been working, this would have been lunchtime. But Manny was on no particular schedule. He wanted to show his pigeon trap to his friend José Mercedes. Mercedes was born in El Seibo, northeast of San Pedro, but had been living here since the late 1980s. He was a pitcher who also signed with the Orioles. His major-league career began at the age of twenty-three in 1994 and lasted only nine years. But that was enough time to earn several million dollars. He was relaxing this day after having started the night before for the Santo Domingo team, Licey, which had defeated the home team, the Estrellas Orientales, further diminishing San Pedro’s fast-vanishing lead in the final games of the season. Licey had a largely major-league pitching staff.

Manny squatted on the ground, string in hand, waiting to yank the bottle out and trap the pigeons as soon as they mustered the foolhardy courage to venture under the cage to eat the corn. The birds were inching toward the trap with jerky steps when suddenly a new bright copper-colored Ford van pulled up, blasting a merengue, which is the accepted way to play the national music. The pigeons, lacking a Dominican sensibility, left in a panic.

On the back of the vehicle in large figures was the number 47, the uniform number of the pitcher Joaquín Andújar. Andújar was an exceptional pitcher who had helped the St. Louis Cardinals win the World Series in 1982 with successful starts in two games. Curiously, many of the former ballplayers had smoked windows on their cars so that the driver could not be identified, as though to preserve their anonymity, but then they placed their numbers on the outside to make sure that everyone would know who they were. Many of the former major leaguers in San Pedro drove large, expensive cars. However, the real status was not the value of the cars but the cost of the gasoline they ate up. Most people in San Pedro could not have afforded to drive one of these cars if it were given to them.

The pigeons weren’t the only ones startled by Andújar’s midday arrival. It was well known in San Pedro that Andújar, who was out late every night, was seldom up and out of his apartment by midday. His days usually began in the afternoon.

Andújar, a trim six-foot man, not particularly big for a pitcher, and on this day meticulously dressed in a yellow sweater—unusual dress for midday in the Dominican Republic unless you spend your time in air-conditioning—came over and argued with Mercedes about his trap. Mercedes insisted that the string should be tied to the cage and not the bottle. They tried it his way and the pigeons returned, but they were now too cautious to chance going under the cage.

The three men joked about eating the pigeons they caught. But they weren’t eating them, just keeping them in a large cage as pets. It was just for fun. Manny Alexander laughed. “That’s why the Dominican Republic is so good: we’re free here,” he said.

 

B
ack in the Consuelo cane field, Dionicio Morales, known to cane cutters as Bienvenido, which means Welcome, strolled sleepily over to the wagon for his lunch. He was not as lean as Elio and the others resting under the trees. A slight paunch indicated a somewhat better position in life. The son of a Haitian father and Dominican mother, he was the exact same age as Elio but had six more years’ experience. He had started in the cane fields when he was ten years old. “I’ve done every job,” he said, but it sounded more like a complaint than a boast. “I cut, I planted, I cleaned fields.”

Now Dionicio was a field supervisor, on this day in charge of the handful of weary cutters resting in this field. He earned 8,000 pesos a month, about $250, which worked out to about a dollar more a day than a cutter who averaged two tons. But he had the luxury of a stable salary, at least during the four-month
zafra
. In the mid-twentieth century his father crossed the island from Haiti to cut cane for three cents a ton. Dionicio remembers those even harder days when only a dirt trail led from Consuelo into town, and sugar people never left the fields. The sugar companies provided housing in the fields in little villages called
bateys
, a word that before the Spanish came to this country was the name of a ball game. Field workers and their families lived there and bought supplies and food from the company store, which gave them credit. These purchases ended up consuming most or all of their meager pay. If the cane workers wanted their children to go to school, the children had to walk for miles, but this was a considerable improvement over earlier times when there was simply no school. The major difference was that with the paved road, the baseball stadium in the center of San Pedro was only fifteen minutes away. The cutters still owned no transportation. But for the amount of money they earned cutting a few hundred pounds of cane—a few pesos—they could get a ride into the center of town on the back of a motor scooter. This was the leading form of transportation in San Pedro, known as a
motoconcho
.

Dionicio and Elio both lived, along with a few hundred other families of field workers, near this field in the Batey Experimental. The workers there did not live in barracks, as in some of the worst
bateys
, but in separate tin-roofed concrete houses with one to three small rooms. From time to time running water and electricity functioned. Families grew some of their own food in the
bateys
, especially
plántanos
, cassava root, which was known here as yucca, and pigeon peas—all Caribbean staples that were easy to grow. Some made extra money by buying oranges and selling them along the unpaved streets of the
batey
.

“It’s not so bad if you earn good money,” Dionicio said of the
batey
he called home. “If you don’t earn much money, it’s hard.” Many of the people in Batey Experimental—especially between
zafras
, the period known as the “dead time”—didn’t earn anything.

There were not a lot of choices for work in San Pedro de Macorís. Asked how he liked his work, Elio Martínez shook his head emphatically in the negative as though he had just tasted something bitter. Then he quickly added, “But I have to earn money.”

Not everyone in San Pedro cut cane. Some worked in the sugar mills. Some were fishermen. Some sold oranges and some drove
motoconchos
. Some played baseball, which was increasingly what San Pedro was known for, now that the sugar industry was dying.

Sugar and baseball had exchanged places. A town where some baseball was played but was known in the world only by the sugar industry had become a town with some sugar that was known in the world chiefly by baseball organizations and fans. The sugar town of San Pedro had become San Pedro the baseball town. It was, of course, also a place where people wrote poetry, fell in love, raised children, built good and bad marriages, fished the sea, grew other crops, had shops and businesses—even played other sports, such as basketball and boxing. But it was San Pedro’s fate to be known in the world for only one thing at a time. That a town of this size would achieve fame at all in a small, poor country seldom looked at by the rest of the world except when it was invaded is remarkable. A century ago, if San Pedro was mentioned abroad, if there was any response at all, it was likely, “Oh, yes, the sugar place.” Today it is usually, “Oh, yes, that town where all the shortstops come from.”

Back when San Pedro was that sugar town, baseball began in these sugar fields. In San Pedro the history of sugar—a story of poverty and hunger—and the history of baseball—a tale of millionaires—have always been tightly intertwined. It was sugar companies that brought in the game and cricket-playing Eastern Caribbean sugar workers who provided the players. In some cases sugar even supplied the baseball itself, a hardball fashioned from molasses. Later, when the game came to other parts of the country, different balls were used. In Haina, farther down the coast on the other side of Santo Domingo—where the Alous, one of the great baseball-playing families, grew up—there was no sugar but there were lemon groves, and so lemons became balls—not nearly as durable as sugar.