The Eastern Stars Part 1

The Eastern Stars.

Mark Kurlansky.

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

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

(Tanto arrojo en la lucha irremediable.

Y an no hay quien lo sepa!.

Tanto acero y fulgor de resistir Y an no hay quien lo vea!).

(So much daring in the unresolvable struggle Even though there is no one who knows it!.

So much steel and flashing in resistance Even though there is no one who sees it!).

-Pedro Mir, "Si Alguien Quiere Saber Cul Es Mi Patria" "If Someone Wants to Know Which Country Is Mine".

PROLOGUE.

Gracias, Presidente.

This 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 Macors, 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 Macors. 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 Fernndez, 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, Cristbal Coln, 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 gla.s.s 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.

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 pa.s.sed 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 quant.i.ty 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 Martnez, 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.

About 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 ba.s.s-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 ba.s.s-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 ill.u.s.trious 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 Jose 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 Joaqun Andjar. Andjar 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 Andjar's midday arrival. It was well known in San Pedro that Andjar, who was out late every night, was seldom up and out of his apartment by midday. His days usually began in the afternoon.

Andjar, 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 plntanos, ca.s.sava 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 Macors. Asked how he liked his work, Elio Martnez 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 mola.s.ses. Later, when the game came to other parts of the country, different b.a.l.l.s 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 b.a.l.l.s-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 Macors 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 Martnez 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 caa triturada, como una lluvia de oro,

en chorros continuados, baja, desciende y va

all donde la espera la cuba, para hacerla miel, dulce miel, pa.n.a.l.

El sol que la atraviesa con rayo matutino, de traves, 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,

crosswise, like a pure, terse gla.s.swork,

suggesting, persuading, that what has liquefied Is the very light of the sun.

-Gastn Fernando Deligne, "Del Trapiche"

CHAPTER ONE.

Like the Trace of a Kiss.

It is easier to describe San Pedro de Macors, 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 Macors, 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 ident.i.ty.

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 p.r.o.ng 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 Macors.

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, Ramn Antonio Echavara, 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 s.e.xism. 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-cla.s.s 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, Nicols de Ovando, had her hanged.