The Eastern Stars Page 5

  At the same time, the sugar companies in San Pedro were beginning to appreciate the advantages of recruiting a more desperate foreign workforce, especially after a strike by Dominican workers in 1884 forced the companies to back off from a wage reduction. Starting in 1893, the sugar companies in San Pedro started recruiting workers from Saint Thomas, Saint John, Saint Kitts, Nevis, Anguilla, Antigua, and Saint Martin. On some islands, such as Anguilla, almost the entire male workforce would leave for the Dominican Republic at harvesttime. Every year about 4,500 workers would arrive at San Pedro just as the zafra, the cane harvest, was about to start. One result was that wages in sugar fields steadily declined. The migrants in San Pedro would work for twenty-five cents a day, half of the salary of a Dominican agricultural worker. The migrants had no negotiating power. Dominicans could threaten to go back to the land, but the immigrants had to accept wages and conditions or face deportation. Furthermore, once the companies discovered this source of labor, they had an endless supply of replacements for disgruntled workers.

  In San Pedro they called the migrant workers cocolos. There is great debate on the origin and meaning of the word and whether or not it is pejorative. Regardless of its original tone and meaning, today in San Pedro, descendants of Eastern Caribbean sugar workers proudly call themselves cocolos. Some have speculated that the word is of Bantu origin. The usual explanation is that it was a mispronunciation by the Spanish-speaking people of San Pedro of the name of the British Virgin Island of Tortola, from where some cocolos came. But some nineteenth-century writers referred to Haitians as cocolos, and a late-nineteenth-century poem by José Joaquín Pérez of Santo Domingo referred to a Taino boy as a cocolo.

  The big issue that Dominicans had with the cocolos was not their language or nationality but their skin color, which in most cases was black. It has made San Pedro, even today, one of the blackest areas of the Dominican Republic. Because this is a mulatto country, there has always been a sense that it could change, gradually becoming blacker or whiter: just as the Haitian occupiers had wanted to blacken it, Dominicans who developed a historic resentment and fear of Haitians wanted to whiten it.

  And here were the cocolos coming to San Pedro and blackening the population. Dominicans in other parts of the country were growing concerned not only about the blackening of San Pedro but about foreign labor working for foreign-owned sugar companies: the eastern provinces were separating from the Dominican Republic. With great resentment, Dominican merchants complained that the cocolos took their money home with them rather than spending it in San Pedro. After some fifteen years of importing cocolos, newspapers started running articles about this “undesirable” immigration. In 1912, the legislature in Santo Domingo passed a law imposing restrictions on bringing in people who were not white. But in San Pedro both the sugar companies and the general population that was benefiting from the sugar boom ignored this legislation. Given the quantities of money they were generating, no one wanted to fight with the sugar companies.

  The Dominicans wanted them to stay through the zafra. As early as the 1890s, sugar companies were advancing the cocolos their salaries in the form of credit at overpriced company stores. This kept them on the bateys, since they no longer had any money to spend elsewhere. Of course, such practices made sugar work even more unattractive to Dominicans and ensured that the sugar companies would have to import labor.

  While by contract the sugar companies agreed to pay for foreign workers’ voyages home, a 1919 law made it illegal for them to receive their return fares until the harvest was done. At Angelina the company would not even return a worker who had been incapacitated by injury. Also in 1919 a law was decreed barring immigration to the Dominican Republic by anyone who was not Caucasian. Nonwhites who entered the country were required to register and get a permit within their first four months in the country.

  Yet Eastern Caribbean cocolos kept coming until the late 1920s, when they were almost entirely replaced by Haitian workers, sometimes also referred to as cocolos. Because of the 1912 anti-immigration law, statistics started to be kept. Between 1912 and 1920, according to official records, 39,000 of these Eastern Caribbean people came to San Pedro.

  During World War I, with U.S. troops occupying both Haiti and the Dominican Republic, Haitians started replacing the Eastern Caribbeans as migrant workers. A total of 22,121 Haitians came for the zafra in 1921, and forty-three percent of them went to the mills of San Pedro. But by then thousands of Eastern Caribbean workers had come, many with women, and settled in San Pedro in mill communities such as Consuelo. By 1914, one in four legal immigrants was female.

  All of these many thousands of foreign workers were to have an enormous impact on small, underpopulated San Pedro. Less and less Spanish was spoken in San Pedro. The Haitians spoke Creole, their own Africanized French, and the Eastern Caribbean people spoke English, except for the occasional French speaker from Saint Martin.

  American mill owners liked English-speaking workers and gave them easier, better-paying jobs in the mills. They were upwardly mobile and were able to bring in relatives from their native islands and find them positions too. Some left the mill and got jobs in town at the bustling port on the Higuamo River. Almost all sugar loading at the ports was done by cocolos and the railroads that operated at the sugar mills were almost entirely operated by cocolos.

  During the American occupation, Americans were less interested in race than money, and with Europe and its beet production destroyed, fortunes were being made on Caribbean sugar. At its peak in 1922, Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Dominican Republic produced thirty-eight percent of the world’s cane sugar and twenty-seven percent of total world sugar. Cuban sugar alone sold that year for $1 billion.

  Even though in the Dominican Republic a higher percentage of sugar production was American owned than in Cuba and Puerto Rico, the Dominican producers did not receive the same preferential treatment as the other two islands. Puerto Rican sugar could enter the U.S. tariff-free, and Cuban sugar had a twenty-percent reduction in sugar tariff. This made it difficult for Dominican sugar to be competitive in the U.S., but fortunately Europe in ruins created a huge market for Dominican sugar mills. Historians termed the sugar boom in the Spanish Caribbean during the early decades of the twentieth century the “Dance of the Millions”—millions of dollars generated in the sugar fields.

  The Dominican Republic now had an export-based economy, and the center of that export economy—the center of the Dominican economy from the late nineteenth century into the 1930s—was the sugar industry and the ingenios of San Pedro de Macorís: Consuelo, Las Pajas, Quisqueya, Angelina, Santa Fe, Cristóbal Colón, and Porvenir.

  From the eastern bank of the Higuamo River, an affluent town of elegance and culture was emerging. In 1888, the leading poet of the nineteenth-century Dominican Republic, thirty-year-old Gastón Fernando Deligne, a native of Santo Domingo, abandoned the capital for San Pedro de Macorís, where he wrote much of his important work until his death in 1913. Joaquín Balaguer, the right-wing caudillo, literary scholar, and poet, rated him one of the best poets and wrote that he had the ability “to put together in the same composition, at times the same stanza, the most prosaic of realistic details along with the loftiest thoughts and most evolved forms.”

  Other literary figures followed, and San Pedro for a time was known for its poets. The year Deligne died, Pedro Mir, the leading Dominican poet of the twentieth century, was born in San Pedro. Typical of the increasingly cosmopolitan nature of San Pedro, Mir’s father was a Cuban sugar mill engineer who had come to San Pedro to work for Cristóbal Colón and there met and married Pedro’s mother, who was from Puerto Rico. Mir was working in the Cristóbal Colón mill, when the leftist Juan Bosch, a major literary figure in the 1930s, took an interest in his poetry. The reverse of Deligne, Mir started in San Pedro but ended up building his reputation in Santo Domingo—except during the period from 1947 to 1961, when he fled the Trujillo regime and lived in Cuba. In 1984 the Dominican legislature
named him poet laureate. Typical of the bizarre contradiction that was Balaguer, the literary critic praised Mir for using his poetry to stand up to the “despotism and social injustice” that Balaguer the politician participated in.

  Ludín Lugo Martínez, born in San Pedro, was a leading Dominican woman poet and novelist. René del Risco Bermúdez, born in San Pedro in 1937, was a poet and short story writer who suffered prison and exile in the Trujillo years and then, in 1974—just when his reputation was growing—died in an automobile accident at the age of thirty-seven. And there have been numerous others. If San Pedro had not been so successful at baseball, it would have been famous for its poets.

  During the sugar-boom years, there was considerable intellectual life in San Pedro. Among the young people involved in the poetry scene was Evangelina Rodríguez Perozo, born in 1879, who went off to Paris to study medicine and returned to be the first native-born doctor in Dominican history. There was considerable interest in the advancement of women in San Pedro. In 1886, Deligne began championing the idea that women were entitled to the same education as men. In 1922, the first feminist political organization in Dominican history, the Dominican Feminist Association for the Rights of Woman, was established in San Pedro by Petronila Angélica Gómez, a journalist and teacher. Its magazine, Fémina, was the first in the Dominican Republic to be edited by women. It published for seventeen years.

  Built on sugar money, a handsome town emerged with ornate homes and stores in architectural styles from Belle Époque to Art Deco. A central park with tropical gardening was created, and a new white cathedral, finished in 1913, defined the skyline as it gleamed in the sun. A stately two-story balconied yellow and white City Hall, pretty as a cake, was built next to the cathedral. When Macorisanos walked around the elegant center of town—even if they were poor sugar workers—they dressed up in white linen.

  After the 1916 invasion, Rear Admiral Harry Shepard Knapp, who headed the military government that now ruled the Dominican Republic, began touring his fiefdom. He did not arrive in San Pedro until January 25, 1918, by which time he had already seen most of the country. He was stunned by San Pedro, a town of elegance and culture and economic development far beyond anywhere else he had been. Indeed, the very first automobile ever seen in the Dominican Republic was a Ford brought over by the owner of the Santa Fe sugar mill in 1912. San Pedro also had the first asphalt-paved street in the country. It had the country’s first automatic telephone line, which connected with the capital. It also was the first city in the country to use concrete construction and built the first three-story building.

  In 1922, when the first census in San Pedro was conducted, 38,609 people lived there, of whom more than a third, 10,145, were foreigners. These were not just cane workers; they included the Americans, Italians, Cubans, and other foreigners who ran the sugar industry. And there were immigrants from Lebanon who in the first decades of the twentieth century were settling in the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Jamaica, and other parts of the Caribbean.

  After Trujillo took power in 1930, Pan Am began offering flights by seaplane from Santo Domingo. The planes would land in the Higuamo River and let passengers out at the port, which was a short stroll to the cathedral, the town hall, the shops, and the park in this little pearl of a city. But by then San Pedro’s fortunes were beginning to change.

  By 1931 the value of goods shipped from the port of San Pedro was less than half of what it had been in 1926. The sugar boom was cooling off, and the Dominican Republic was the producer with the least access to foreign markets. But sugar production continued, increasing faster than demand on all three islands, and the Cuban government—and soon after, the U.S. government—began imposing restrictions on production aimed at preserving the price. Since the early 1930s, with the exception of a few brief bubbles, the value of sugar on the world market has steadily declined.

  Neither was Trujillo good for San Pedro. While the city had its share of Trujillo supporters, it had come to the general’s attention that he had a considerable number of opponents in the sugar city to the east. In any event, he did not want any competitors with Santo Domingo, the capital, which he regarded as “his” city. In fact, he changed the capital’s name to Ciudad Trujillo: Trujillo City. He had come to power on August 16, 1930. A few weeks later, on September 3, Hurricane San Zenón destroyed Santo Domingo. Trujillo saw this as his opportunity to rebuild the city in his image. San Pedro was forgotten as sugar faded and the dictator who completely controlled the economy diverted all resources to the city that now bore his name.

  But San Pedro de Macorís had one thing left. During the half-century sugar boom, among all the firsts of the small eastern town on the Higuamo, there was this: in 1886, Dominican baseball began to be played in the sugar mills of San Pedro.

  The Spanish-American War is generally credited for launching America’s great imperialist adventure in the Spanish Caribbean, because the U.S. in effect replaced Spain as the colonial power in Cuba and Puerto Rico. But American businessmen had long been interested in the two islands, and sugar producers began operating in Cuba back in the time when baseball was just getting started in the U.S., in the 1830s and 1840s. And these same Cubans came to San Pedro. It is ironic that when the sugar producers built housing for workers and named them bateys after the Taino ball fields, they did not know that these bateys would be one of the greatest wellsprings of ballplaying talent ever known.

  CHAPTER THREE

  The Question of First

  Baseball is a game that loves facts but spawns myths. It is often stated that the first baseball game was organized in 1839 in Cooperstown, New York, by Abner Doubleday, who invented the baseball diamond and codified the rules. This was the conclusion of a commission established in 1908 to once and for all determine the sport’s ambiguous origin. It was led by sporting-goods entrepreneur Al Spalding. Abner Doubleday, a Civil War general, in 1839 was a cadet at West Point, which was a long journey to Cooperstown, a town that has no record of Doubleday’s having ever been there. There is no record that Doubleday himself ever said anything about his connection with baseball, and most historians—including those at the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, where it is a founding myth—discount the story. What is known is that baseball came out of English sports, possibly including cricket, which goes back to at least the sixteenth century, with roots centuries earlier. Rounders, another English game, was almost certainly a precursor of baseball in America. There were many eighteenth-century variations on both the game and its name. There was town-ball, round-ball, and a game called base, and it is still being argued which of these or which combination was the origin of baseball.

  The only fact in the Abner Doubleday story that seems to be true is the date: 1839. Somewhere around then these games had evolved into something recognizable as baseball. It was originally a sport for city people, and in 1845 a Manhattan book dealer, Alexander Cartwright, wrote a rule book for his local club, the Knickerbockers, who would later change their name to the Yankees. Cartwright’s rules became the rules of baseball, and he traveled around the country establishing baseball clubs in various cities. By 1857 there were sixteen clubs in New York City alone. The Civil War helped spread the sport throughout the United States. But it was sugar—that is, American sugar executives—who brought it to the Caribbean during the Dance of the Millions.

  The American presence in Cuba predates baseball and even sugar interests. When America was a British colony, there was a considerable British presence in Cuba. In 1762 the British even took over Havana for several months. While the Dominican Republic seemed a distant, unknown place to Americans, Cuba was regarded as nearby and familiar. In 1817, when the Spanish declared Cuban ports open to international trade, American business stepped in. Cubans became familiar with Americans and American culture. American companies won contracts for development, especially in Havana, where both the gas street lighting and the granite cobblestone pavement were American. There were American consulates throughou
t the island.

  And so by the 1860s, when baseball was becoming established as the American national pastime, the Cubans were learning about it and started playing it. The Spanish may have inadvertently tied the independence movement to baseball in a self-fulfilling prophecy when in 1868, at the start of the Ten Years’ War, they banned the game, suspecting that it was somehow a pro-independence conspiracy. There was no clear tie, at least until the ban, but affluent young men were becoming independentistas , and they were also taking up baseball, which the Spanish saw as an incursion by Americans and also an excuse for the rebels to arm themselves with wooden clubs.

  The failed 1868 -1878 war cemented Cubans to the American sport not only because the Spanish had made the accusation but because pro-independence Cubans, including José Martí, fled to the United States, where baseball was becoming a craze. The Cubans learned the game and even organized Cuban and Cuba-versus-U.S. games. Martí himself was seen at a Key West game in which the Cubans beat the Americans. Martí, always aware that after the Spanish were defeated the Americans would be the next problem, reportedly claimed the victory was a good omen for the cause of independence.

  Cuban baseball, like American baseball, has a mythical first game. In Matanzas in 1866 according to one story, the crew of an American ship decided to teach the game to the Cuban dockworkers who were loading sugar. In another version an American ship tied up for repairs and taught the men fixing their ship. In some of the versions the Americans were trying to sell the Cubans baseball equipment. But there is also another story that says the first game was not even in Matanzas but in Havana, from where two affluent young Habaneros named Ernesto and Nemesio Guillot had been sent off to Spring Hill College, a prep school in Mobile, Alabama. They came home in 1864 with bats, balls, and Cartwright’s rule book and trained a team in the affluent Vedado section of Havana, making this neighborhood, according to some baseball historians such as Peter Bjarkman, the true birthplace of Cuban baseball—not the always cited Matanzas of two years later. The Guillot story, unlike the Matanzas versions, is unromantic enough to be true.