The Eastern Stars Read online

  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.

  Back 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.

  This is a story about making it; about the slight twists and turns that determine success and failure, and how each changes lives—about a world where the right or wrong nod from a coach on a farm team, so called for their obscure American locations, can make the difference between earning a few million dollars a year or going back home and earning a few hundred dollars a year. And that is a difference that determines the lives of more than a dozen family members too. Life is a precarious thing often decided by the strength of an arm, the fluidity of a swing, or the sureness of a gloved hand. Even in San Pedro, not everyone has the talent to be a baseball player. What it most always comes down to in life is how well we play the cards that are dealt us. Like poker, life is a game of skill that stems from luck. It does not come as a revelation to most of us that life is essentially unfair. That is why we so admire the ones who play it well.

  Throughout the Caribbean, the poor live on dreams. Generation after generation goes by and the hard life gets no easier. But there is always hope. In Kingston, Jamaica, slum kids practice their singing and hope to be the next Bob Marley or Jimmy Cliff. In San Pedro de Macorís they practice their swing and dream of Sammy Sosa.

  By 2008, seventy-nine men from San Pedro had already made it into the major leagues, where the average salary was $3 million. But Elio Martínez did not play baseball. He beat one more stalk of cane and twisted it above his mouth for a last drink. Soon lunch would be over. Gracias, Presidente.

  PART ONE

  SUGAR

  La caña triturada, como una lluvia de oro,

  en chorros continuados, baja, desciende y va

  allí donde la espera la cuba, para hacerla

  miel, dulce miel, panal.

  El sol que la atraviesa con rayo matutino,

  de través, como un puro y muy terso cristal,

  sugestiona, persuade, que se ha liquefacto

  la misma luz solar.

  The ground-up cane, ring of gold,

  continuously spurting, comes down, goes down and goes

  where the bucket awaits it, to make of it

  Honey, sweet honey, honeycomb.

  The sun shining straight through it with morning rays,

  crossw
ise, like a pure, terse glasswork,

  suggesting, persuading, that what has liquefied

  Is the very light of the sun.

  —Gastón Fernando Deligne, “Del Trapiche”

  CHAPTER ONE

  Like the Trace of a Kiss

  It is easier to describe San Pedro de Macorís, and the unique history and cultural blend that formed it, than it is to explain the country in which it was formed. There is a strange ambivalence to the Dominican Republic. Pedro Mir, the Dominican poet laureate from San Pedro de Macorís, described his country as:Simply

  transparent,

  Like the trace of a kiss on a spinster

  Or the daylight on rooftops.

  Of the nations called the large-island Caribbean, the ones that by size should dominate the region, the Dominican Republic is the one with the least impact and the least distinct culture. The others all have poetic names: Haiti, Cuba, Jamaica, Puerto Rico, and Trinidad. The Dominican Republic has a name that seems a temporary offering until a better idea comes along. Even Puerto Rico, which has the odd history of having never been an independent nation, seems to have a stronger sense of itself. The Dominican Republic, one of the first independent nations in the Caribbean, seems to struggle with its identity.

  It is a country that has usually been out of step with history, left behind in the Spanish empire, left behind in the independent Caribbean; even on its own island, it is the country that isn’t Haiti. Almost as poor as Haiti but not quite, neither as tragic nor as romantic, the Dominican Republic missed the first sugar boom in the eighteenth century and came late to the second one in the nineteenth century. As with baseball, its sugar industry ran behind those of Cuba and Puerto Rico, and the Dominicans had trouble positioning themselves.

  Dominicans speak Spanish, but it is not a very Spanish place. It is neither as Latino nor as African as Cuba. Dominicans have developed distinctive and celebrated music forms, but they are not as influential nor as recognized as the many forms of Cuban music or Jamaican reggae or Trinidadian calypso. It does not have the strong tradition of visual arts and folk crafts for which Haiti is known, and in fact Dominican tourist shops are filled with Haitian paintings and crafts and bad knockoffs of them. They also sell tourists Cuban cigars because Dominican ones, some of which are very good, don’t have the same cachet.

  The Dominican Republic is nothing like its neighbor across the island, Haiti, which is a far more African place. But except for the Spanish language and baseball, it doesn’t very much resemble Cuba or Puerto Rico, either. Despite a long and mostly painful relationship with the United States and the fact that money shipped home by Dominicans in the United States is a major prong of the struggling economy—the third poorest in the Americas—the Dominican Republic has not become very Americanized, either. Major League Baseball is acutely aware that the Dominican ballplayers sent to the U.S. are lost in a very strange and different land.

  It is tempting to say that baseball defines it, but it got the game from Cubans, Puerto Ricans, and Americans. Dominicans have excelled in the game, and in the last few decades baseball has at last become something at which Dominicans dominate—at last, something they can be known for—and this is a source of pride. From 1956—when Ozzie Virgil, from the northern Dominican town of Monte Cristi, became an infielder for the New York Giants—through 2008, 471 Dominicans played in at least one major-league game. One in six of them have come from the relatively small town of San Pedro de Macorís.

  But even this celebrated accomplishment may be slightly tarnished by the fact that Cubans dominate Caribbean play and always have. It is U.S. law, which forced Cuban ballplayers to defect if they wanted to play in the U.S., that gave Dominicans their opening in baseball. In February 1962, when the United States imposed an embargo on Cuba, only six Dominicans had ever played in the major leagues.

  Despite all its murky ambiguity, the Dominican Republic really is a distinct country with its own society and culture and way of doing things unlike anyplace else. This has made Dominicans love their homeland and yearn for it when they are away. It is just not very easy to articulate what it is. In the past twenty years there has been a marked growth in tourism, but it has been a style of tourism that spirits away visitors to walled-off resorts, safely away from the Dominican reality. The impression these visitors are left with is so false that the country may be even less known than it was when almost no one came.

  There are Dominican characteristics. Not surprisingly, given the violent history of the Dominican Republic, there is violence in everyday Dominican life. There is domestic violence, but also the recent decline in the economy has been accompanied by a rise in street crime, especially by young men. The mayor of San Pedro, Ramón Antonio Echavaría, said street crime was the biggest problem facing his town. But also national human rights groups complained that in 2008 alone almost 500 people, most of them under the age of thirty-five, were shot and killed on the street by police, who admit to only 343 of the killings.

  Despite all this, Dominicans have a sweetness to their demeanor. They smile and embrace one another far more easily than most people. Americans, trying to instill American ideas of sportsmanship, tell ballplayers in Dominican youth programs to come out and shake their opponents’ hands after a game. They come out to the field and for a brief moment begin the unnatural hand-shaking ritual but quickly begin hugging each other. That is what Dominicans do.

  Dominican men are infamous for sexism. Yet women are common—though far from dominant—in the professions, especially as doctors. The image of the strong Dominican woman is celebrated—notably the three Mirabal sisters, upper-class women who resisted the Trujillo dictatorship and were murdered on their way home from visiting their husbands in prison. In fact, the founding legend of Dominican resistance was a Taino woman named Anacaona. After her husband was killed by the Spanish, Anacaona became leader of all the Tainos and was captured by the Spanish while trying to negotiate peace. The Spanish governor, Nicolás de Ovando, had her hanged.

  Mothers are revered, and it is not unusual for a man to decide to use his mother’s last name rather than the traditional father’s name. In Spanish names, there are two last names, the father’s and then the mother’s. Although the father’s name is in the middle rather than the end, by tradition it is the one that is used. But Dominicans often choose their mothers’ names. An example is the slugger Ricardo Jacobo Carty. Jacobo was his father’s name and Carty his mother’s, and by Spanish tradition he would have been called either the full name or Ricardo Jacobo, but instead he always called himself Rico Carty, after his mother. There are many other San Pedro examples.

  Dominicans are very attached and loyal to their families. This, of course, is not uniquely Dominican, but what is striking is how much they focus on immediate family and often how little interest is shown in the broader community. The sense of nation is even weaker still.

  Like many Caribbeans, Dominicans love to dance, often excel at it, and find fellow countrymen who can’t dance to be odd. It seems that a love of dance has always been a Dominican trait. The eighteenth-century Spanish colonial rulers were disturbed by the ubiquity of Dominican dancing, and in 1818 the governor finally issued an edict prohibiting dancing on public streets at night without a permit. Many Dominican dances of the period, as in other Caribbean islands, were rooted in the European dances of the day, such as the minuet.

  Then, in the nineteenth century, the merengue appeared. To Dominicans, this music form is one of the few things that are distinctly and uniquely Dominican. But musicologists point out that a number of islands, such as Cuba and Puerto Rico, had merengues and may possibly have had them significantly earlier. Worse, from the Dominican point of view, one of the earliest merengues originated in Haiti, and the music appears to have first turned up on the Dominican side in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, when Haitians started coming over during the very violent Haitian revolution. Dominicans can live with the idea that their game, baseball, came from
America and Cuba but not that their music came from Haiti. The Dominican Republic was invaded and occupied several times by the black nation with whom it shares its island, and anti-Haitianism, often expressed in racial terms, is a central Dominican obsession. In fact, it is popularly believed, though probably not true, that merengue was created to celebrate the end of Haitian occupation in 1844.

  The music was named after meringue, the sweet and fluffy confection that is nothing more than egg whites, air, and sugar. Both the word and confection are French, suggesting a Haitian connection.

  Merengue was always dance music. Throughout its many changes, it has remained in swiftly bouncing 2/4 time, heavy on the downbeat. It was originally played on numerous variations of guitar made of a gourd with ridges that is scraped, called a güiro—the modern metal version is called a güira—and a drum that was beaten on one end and played with sticks on the other. Dominicans have tried to attach symbolic importance to this drum because it has a male and a female side. The pounded side has a billy-goat skin and the stick side is covered with the skin of a she-goat. Dominicans commonly say that the güiro is an authentic Dominican instrument invented by the pre-Columbian Taino Indians. Anthropologists have refuted this. In fact, there is some troubling evidence that it may really have come from Puerto Rico.

  About the time the accordion was added to the merengue band, the music was denounced by prominent citizens, including former president Ulises Francisco Espaillat. Espaillat claimed that merengue was dangerous and called it “fatal” because it attacked the nervous system and caused imagination to spin out of control.