The Eastern Stars Part 5

"I know," said the other in English. "There used to be money in sugar."

There was not much money in sugar anymore, and so there were not many jobs in it, although Consuelo now had 45,000 residents-which was more than all of San Pedro had when there was a lot of money in sugar. Much of Consuelo was still a village of small one-story pastel houses set close to each other, gardened with tropical plants and shrubs. Some of the few paved streets even had sidewalks. It was a tidy, orderly town where people took pride in their homes despite the fact that there really wasn't any work. They had not been living any better when there was.

One of the leading economic activities in this neighborhood, a short distance from the main town, was to drive a motoconcho and charge pa.s.sengers to cling precariously behind as the scooter sped over and around potholes. The noisy two-wheelers swarmed around Consuelo like flies on old meat.

Fortunately, most families in Consuelo had relatives outside of the country who shipped them money. This was not unusual. It was estimated that more than ten percent of the Dominican population lived in the United States. Large-scale immigration began in 1966, when Balaguer, with the help of U.S. troops, got back into power and began killing supporters of Juan Bosch and the left. It continued at a rate of about 150,000 a year. Dominicans often speak disparagingly of these Dom Yors, sometimes calling them encadenados (people in chains) because of the New York street fashion of wearing gaudy gold chains. But communities like Consuelo could not survive without them. In New York and around the United States, establishments whose only business was wiring money to relatives in the Dominican Republic sent several million dollars every day.

One of the important mills of the Dominican Republic's sugar-based economy had been Santa Fe, which was now closed, although people still lived in the surrounding shacks, where sugar workers had been housed. Narrow dirt alleys separated the shacks, and garbage heaps were everywhere. Children played on them. Bit by bit, the mill was vanishing. The unemployed sugar workers who still lived in Santa Fe, George Bell's old neighborhood-many of whom were of Haitian ancestry-made up for periodic shortfalls in cash by stripping some of the mill and selling it as sc.r.a.p metal. "Haitians," one Macorisano grumbled, showing that old att.i.tudes endured. "The Haitians strip everything. Soon they will start chopping down all the trees for charcoal. You look in Haiti: there's not a tree left standing except at the Dominican border."

A Macorisano who had been away for only a decade would immediately notice the difference on returning to his hometown. He would drive in from the capital on a wide, well-paved four-lane highway built in 2006 to enable tourists to get from the airport to the beach resorts of Guayacanes and Juan Dolio. The coastline leading into San Pedro offered a Caribbean Sea like blue agate, sheltered by coral reefs that made fine-sand beaches. Juan Dolio and especially Guayacanes were originally fishing communities where the fishermen launched their open boats from the beach-some under oar power, others with outboard engines.

Typical of Dominican history, there are two competing versions of the origin of the name Juan Dolio. It is at least agreed that no such person ever existed. It either is a b.a.s.t.a.r.dization of the term juego de lengua, tongue twister, or-the more logical and therefore less preferred version-comes from juando, or conch, one of the many pastel sh.e.l.ls in a variety of intriguing forms that wash up on the beach.

In the 1980s, when there were not many Dominican resorts, weekend recreation spots were built here for affluent people from the capital. A ferry ran between Santo Domingo, San Pedro, and Puerto Rico. A highway wasn't needed until the resorts began to attract better-paying foreigners. It has been Dominican policy to develop beach resorts with fast access to and from a nearby airport so that visitors see as little of the country as possible. The Santo Domingo airport, located halfway between the capital and San Pedro, would be close enough. To get to the hotels, the visitor had only to turn off the highway and travel for a brief stretch through a pretty, wooded zone via a washed-out narrow two-lane road that Dominicans used to drive on to get to the hotels. The road became full of such enormous potholes that the speed b.u.mps placed before each hotel entrance seemed unnecessary.

While the streets of San Pedro were choked in traffic, the new four-lane highway leading to it was usually lightly traveled because it was designed for more traffic than tourism created. Most of the tourists did not even rent cars. Those who did steered around slow, lumbering buses and buzzing motor scooters, the primary methods of transportation for most Dominicans. The scooters were so underpowered that they often used the wide shoulders of the highway. Only a few affluent Dominicans, many of them baseball players, sped by in their SUVs.

When it was zafra time, that became evident by the cane trucks swaying down the highway, flatulent with black smoke, and by the smoke clouds puffing out of the two tall stacks of Ingenio Cristbal Coln just outside of town. Some things never change. But upon exiting the highway and climbing the pockmarked pavement of the bridge over the Ro Higuamo-still wide and muddy, with thickly grown tropical banks, the white steeple of the cathedral visible in the distance-the traveler encountered something surprising at the entrance to town.

Here was a poor and crumbling neighborhood known as Placer Bonita that had produced numerous major-league players, including the pitcher Josias Manzanillo, infielder Juan Castillo, and pitcher Salomn Torres. In the middle of this dilapidated old barrio was what appeared to be a huge stage announced by high steel arches. It was a sculpture commissioned by the city from artist Jose Ignacio Morales for almost seven million pesos-which, thanks to a bad exchange rate, was only slightly more than $200,000 but was nevertheless a serious expenditure for a Dominican town.

In this work-erected in 2006, the same year the highway into town was built-the artist seemed to exhibit a doc.u.mentarian's urge to collect all the important images of San Pedro and display them on this s.p.a.cious platform in no particular order. There was a pen and inkwell for San Pedro the city of poets, and of course two baseball players, a cane cutter, and the actual steam locomotive from a train that once hauled carts of cane to the Porvenir mill. There was also a strange dancing figure with a feather headdress known as a Guloya, a popular symbol of cocolo culture.

But for all the exuberance of this display, there was also a touch of realism: climbing up the platform were giant land crabs that seemed about to eat the cane cutter, the baseball players-everyone. At sunset, when the shadows are long, it becomes clear that San Pedro really is full of land crabs that, for unknown reasons, cross the roads at that time of day, ready-like mold, humidity, mosquitoes, hurricanes, and a thousand other tropical menaces-to devour this town.

The different reincarnations of San Pedro were apparent along the city streets like rings in the cross section of a tree. Downtown was a mix of architectures, all made h.o.m.ogeneous by the same palette of turquoise, pink, yellow, and apricot. There were old pre-sugar-boom, rural Caribbean wood-shingle houses with fretwork above the doorways. The sun parched the brightly painted wood of these houses, some of which listed slightly, while the darkness inside made them look abandoned. But they were designed to keep out sunlight, and their simple architecture with pitched roofs was conceived with an understanding of the climate and so they last forever, surviving sun and rot and hurricanes.

The fine old late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century buildings from the days of the sugar boom, with high arched doorways and ornate cornices and charming balconies, had not fared as well. A few of these buildings were well preserved; others were worn but surviving; many were gutted; some were roofless; and some were no more than a miraculously preserved faade in a vacant lot.

The cathedral was perfectly maintained, and so fresh and bedecked with bobbles and swirls that it looked as though it would melt in the tropical heat. It was the tallest, whitest thing around, the steeple looking almost electric in the hard sun with a black afternoon storm sky in the background. And the yellow City Hall still looked as decorated as the gooey piped cakes displayed under gla.s.s at the pastry shops.

And there was modern concrete, the innovation San Pedro is proud to have introduced to the Dominican Republic. Since that first concrete structure went up, many more followed, including four big chain department stores, office buildings, apartment buildings, and, inexplicably, numerous shoe stores-none more than a few stories high.

The port, where seaplanes once landed and sugar once was shipped but was now barely used, filled a long swath of riverfront with abandoned hangars and warehouses. The Parque Central, or Central Park, on the other hand, was still the social center it was intended to be. Between street vendors, sidewalk musicians, people taking a break and those with simply nothing to do, this square of palms and local tropical trees and plants was never empty.

Across from the park was a popular restaurant, Amable, which specialized in pasteles en hojas and batidas de lechosa. With its plastic chairs and tables, it looked like a fast-food restaurant except that it was decorated with San Pedro paintings and sculptures. Macorisanos would tell you with their local pride that the pasteles were a local specialty. They were either mashed ca.s.sava root or ground bananas filled with meat and steamed in banana leaves. In fact they were tamales, a food invented in central and southern Mexico by an indigenous people-anthropologists disagree about which one-long before the arrival of the Spanish. After the Cubans got tamales, they brought them-as well as sugar and baseball-to San Pedro, where they became part of local life. Batidas de lechosa, papaya milk shakes with lots of sugar, probably did not originate locally, either, although the word lechosa for papaya is authentically and uniquely Dominican.

The clearest expression of a unique San Pedro culture is the cocolos, who are sometimes heard singing their Afro-Caribbean music in the Parque Central. The cocolos also maintained a dance troupe, which was what was being honored by the statue of the man with the feather headdress on the crab-infested platform at the entrance to town.

The troupe was led by Donald Warner Henderson, nicknamed Linda, a mischievous little seventy-six-year-old man with gla.s.ses, a West Indian lilt to his English, and a wry sense of humor. His father was from Antigua and his mother Saint Kitts. Both came to San Pedro for work in the cane fields at age twenty-four. Linda's father cut cane on various estates, but Linda himself was a tinsmith by trade and noticeably proud that he had never worked in the cane fields.

The cocolo dances of San Pedro came from Antigua, Nevis, and Tortola and were pa.s.sed down through families. Linda's father had danced traditional dances in Antigua. In the British West Indies they would dance on Christmas Day. "Christmas belongs to us and Christmas eve belongs to Dominicans," he explained. "On Christmas eve we serenade and Dominicans eat and drink."

The cocolos also perform their dances on February 27, the national holiday-which, interestingly, celebrates independence not from Spain but from Haiti, which withdrew its occupation forces on February 27, 1844.

The most colorful and famous dance costume, the Guloya, featured in the sculpture at the entrance to town, is misunderstood by the non-cocolos of San Pedro. Guloyas are Goliaths who combat Davids in a different cocolo dance. The dancers with feather headdresses are Indians for a dance called Los Indios Salvajes in which cocolos dress like Indians and dance around waving tomahawks-just one of many aspects of Caribbean culture that Americans would find politically incorrect. But the Spanish didn't leave any Indians to protest. The wild Indians seem to wear as many colors as they can find, with their beaded masks with long black pigtails, beaded costumes with capes, tall peac.o.c.k feather headdresses, and painted tomahawks.

Many other dances are in their repertoire, including one, believed to be of English origin, in which a man goes out to gather wood for a fire, then comes home to find his wife with another man, whom he chases with a stick. Traditionally, none of the dancers are supposed to be identified until evening, when the masks are taken off. But in reality many of the cocolo dancers sit around in their beads without masks, getting so drunk before the dance begins-traditionally on guavaberry, but shots of rum work well, too-that they are well exposed before they ever get their masks on.

Cocolo music is African and is performed using a snare drum, a larger drum, a wooden flute, and triangles. The dances are clearly African as well. Cocolos, who have such a distinctive presence in San Pedro culture, are always the stars of these fiestas; but the other Dominicans also celebrate, often wearing bull masks and chasing people in the crowds. Women do wild things with toothpicks spiking out of their hair, and some men wear fetching gowns. In fact, if you look closely in the bars, which spill out onto the streets, many of the women could use closer shaves. Macorisanos of Haitian origin crowd close together in the street for African slow dancing. No one gets more out of a small, slow movement than a Haitian dancer. There is always a Fidel Castro or two and a few Zorros on horseback. Young people come in from the bateys on horseback. It's surprising that the fast and loud, buzzing motorbikes and merengue blasting from trucks don't panic the horses, but Dominican horses, like Dominican people, are used to noise.

Cocolo food is Eastern Caribbean, which is also a bit African and has had a huge influence on San Pedro. They eat salted fish-not the imported salt cod of their English islands but cured local fish-as well as pigeon peas, which come from Africa; calaloo, the broad leaves of a tuber, which are cooked like a spinach soup; and fungi, the Eastern Caribbean corn dish. Although corn is one of the few indigenous pre-Columbian Caribbean foods, the name for the dish is African. On some islands it is funchi, and if okra-which is also African-is added, it is called coo-coo. Rincn Cocolo, a restaurant of a few tables in a small room painted green in downtown San Pedro, specialized in these dishes, most of which are unknown in the Dominican Republic outside of San Pedro.

Gladys Mara Jose was born in San Pedro in 1923. Her father was Haitian and her mother was from Dominica. Her mother died when she was very young. Her father came to cut cane and stayed illegally, making up the name Jose for her because he was afraid that with his foreign family name she might be deported. She was the cook at Rincn Cocolo and she gave this recipe for fungi:Take cornmeal and put it in a pot with salt over low heat. Then wet flour with cold water. Then gather up the wet flour and put it in the pot that has the cornmeal. Stir fast so that it doesn't make b.a.l.l.s. Add a little b.u.t.ter and stir it in.

Cocolo cooking, like drinking guavaberry and playing plaquita, has become a part of San Pedro life adopted by the rest of the population. Almost every housewife in San Pedro makes pescado y domplin. The domplin, or dumplin, p.r.o.nounced "doompleen," is the typical British Caribbean dumpling served from Jamaica to Saint Kitts: a heavy little ball made from flour and water. If a town can have its own dish, this would be San Pedro's. Most Macorisanos do not know that domplin is from an English-language word.

Linda was born in a neighborhood called Miramar, meaning "see the sea," which is literally true. Because San Pedro's waterfront was on the river, the side facing the Caribbean Sea was an undeveloped back barrio where poor people, many of them sugar workers, lived. Miramar has produced a number of major-league players in recent years, including catcher ngel Pea, infielder Fernando Tatis, pitcher Lorenzo Barcel, and outfielder Luis Mercedes. They played on the streets. Tatis described tearing up blankets to make b.a.l.l.s: "We tore blankets in strips and rolled them tight and sewed them together. We loved baseball so much, we would play with anything." Miramar is no longer poor. In the 1960s, in the push to make San Pedro more tourist friendly, a broad boulevard was built by the oceanfront where a rocky coral coast leads to a perfect, bright Caribbean Sea, blue for miles on a good day. Like the longer seaside boulevard in Santo Domingo and the one in Havana, it is called the Malecn.

A whole other town grew by the Malecn. There was a huge and sumptuous school of hotel management, clean and well-presented private schools, government buildings, well-kept modern apartment buildings, and gardened, one-story, California-style ranch houses. It became an expensive neighborhood. Even water and electricity cost more, and few could afford to live there. Much of this neighborhood was oddly deserted. The clean and well-paved streets were empty. In an otherwise bustling town, this center was devoid of cars: even the ubiquitous scooters and motorcycles of the rest of the town, and the rest of the Dominican Republic, were absent. There were not even pedestrians.

Tourism settled into the beaches outside of town. Only a few tourists came in for a brief walk around the park and a look at the cathedral. The Malecn was for locals: a quiet stretch of oceanfront by day with a few coconut or sugarcane vendors. Past the coral rocks and the palm trees was a postcard-perfect vista of a turquoise and cobalt-blue Caribbean Sea interrupted only by a few local touches, such as the rusting carca.s.ses of ships wrecked in storms and, perched dramatically on a rock above the sea, an outhouse, because a lot of Presidente beer was consumed at night along the Malecn. After dark it was the place, with merengue exploding from phenomenally powerful speakers that rattled the windows in the nearby hotel, the only attempt at a business- or tourist-cla.s.s hotel in town. The music came from many clubs, one of the most popular of which, the Cafe Caribe, was owned by Alfredo Griffin. The sad bachata ballads were for earlier hours. At night, merengue was still the music.

Macorisanos came every night until late, on foot, on scooters, by car-whatever they had-and cruised the Malecn, the women dressed in tight, sparkling fantastic clothes contrasting with a lot of exposed skin of every color, the men drinking and looking. If you had a car, you could do the "Malecn crawl," driving five or ten miles an hour, checking everything and everyone out.

Traveling north from downtown most hours of the day, the traffic was crammed into unmarked lanes-as many lanes as would fit. Mixed in with ailing buses coughing black smoke, trucks, and cars were carts pulled by those lean and fearless Dominican horses.

There were traffic lights, but they didn't always work. The rule was to drive up to them and see if anything happened, then the bravest started through first. The system worked so well it made you wonder if towns really need traffic lights.

Anyone with a car who stopped at a traffic light was quickly swarmed by tigres-local boys who washed windshields and demanded pay. They were a little gentler than the tigres of Santa Domingo, and they tried to do a good job on the windshields before the light changed. They were hardworking, enterprising youths earning pennies on a hot afternoon, looking for some way to survive other than crime. Another possibility was to work the Parque Central or the Malecn with a shoeshine kit, as Sammy Sosa did as a boy. But with the popularity of canvas sports shoes, that was getting to be an even tougher business. Another possibility was to go to the rural outskirts and get some cane, oranges, plantains, or other produce to sell on the street.

On Calle 27 in San Pedro, the neighborhood Rico Carty brought electricity to when he built his own house, a row of mansions sprang up. A large Mediterranean-style house that somehow ended up looking more like a Pizza Hut was the home of George Bell. Alfredo Griffin's house was there. Joaqun Andjar also had a large house, but either out of modesty or for reasons of security, it was hidden behind a wall. The neighborhood used to be known as a baseball player's ghetto, but Bell and Andjar lost their houses in divorces. Still, the houses stood as a reminder to young tigres of what a major-league career could do for them.

Nearby, on Calle Duverge, was a sprawling two-story building with balconies, an ornate gate, and seemingly the largest satellite dish in San Pedro-the house Sammy Sosa built for his mother. Also nearby was Plaza 30/30, a small, three-story, horseshoe-shaped, turquoise-colored shopping center with pricey shops built by Sammy Sosa in 1996. Actually it said PLA 30/30, because the sign had lost its ZA. The name referred to Sosa's 1993 season, in which he hit thirty-three home runs and stole thirty-six bases. Two years later he hit thirty-six home runs and stole thirty-four bases in the same season. As of 2009, there had been fifty-two "30/30" players-those who have hit at least thirty home runs and stolen at least thirty bases in a single season-starting with Ken Williams's thirty-nine home runs and thirty-seven stolen bases in 1922. Despite the arbitrariness of the figures, it is considered a distinction to be a 30/30 player, because home runs are the ultimate baseball test of strength, usually hit by large, burly men, and base stealing is the ultimate test of speed, usually performed by smaller, lithe men. Few players have both the speed to steal bases and the strength to hit home runs. But Sosa's record of having done it twice does not even stand in San Pedro, since Alfonso Soriano, born in the sugar-mill barrio of Quisqueya, debuting in 2002 for the Yankees, did it four consecutive seasons. In 2006, Soriano hit forty-six home runs and stole forty-one bases, becoming one of only four 40/40 players. In fact, the same year he hit more than forty doubles, so he became the first 40/40/40 player in major-league history. This statistic, which is cited more often in San Pedro than anywhere else, demonstrates nothing as much as baseball's unending thirst for statistics and records.

Nevertheless, Sammy Sosa was the first player in San Pedro to have a shopping mall named after his statistics. There was little doubt about whose shopping mall it was, since in the center, where the bougainvilleas grew, was a fountain and in the fountain stood a full-color statue of Sosa at bat. The statue wasn't recognizable as Sammy, but it wore a number 21 Chicago Cubs uniform. Also in the mall was a discotheque named the Sammy Club Disco.

Many of the streets of San Pedro were unpaved, or the pavement was so badly crumbling that they were in the process of unpaving. Like all Caribbean towns, San Pedro smelled of overripe fruit and burning charcoal. More English language-the language of both cocolos and baseball-was heard here than in other Dominican towns. Many of the stores had English names, such as the downtown salon called the Hair Gallery.

San Pedro's commerce spilled onto the street from the kind of one-story Latin American concrete architecture that tried to avoid drabness by being painted in the industrial color palette used in the making of Popsicles. In the end, most of these newer buildings resembled dirty bubble gum. The metal grating on every door and window made the houses look like smiling teenagers with their braces showing. The gratings were to lock out criminals. Street crime, robberies, break-ins, and muggings in this century became an unprecedented problem everywhere in the Dominican Republic. It was worse in Santo Domingo, but it had become serious enough in San Pedro for Mayor Echavara to consider it his leading problem.

Young people were not finding a way to earn a living. The problem shifted from unemployment to underemployment. In recent years, inflation soared and the currency plunged, and most of those who found work still did not have enough money to meet their needs. It used to be, in this area of agriculture, cattle ranching, ubiquitous small-scale farming, and fishing, that even a poor person ate because food was cheap. Now, for the first time, people were struggling to buy enough to eat.

The Dominican government provides few safety nets for the poor. Juan Bosch and Jose Francisco Pea Gmez had called for such programs but never had a chance to implement them. Once in power, Leonel Fernndez, Juan Bosch's protege, abandoned such ideas and instead developed an infrastructure for foreign investment, declaring that he was making the Dominican Republic "the Singapore of the Caribbean." He garnered some popularity by stabilizing the economy. Because Fernndez was barred by law from a second term, the opposition under Hiplito Meja came to power on the promise of social programs and did manage to increase spending on education and social services, including the country's first government-financed retirement program. Wanting to do more, he used his legislative majority to end the term limit, and this allowed Fernndez to come back and defeat him, using his next presidency to build still more infrastructure, such as new highways, but without the growth in social programs or the economic stability he had achieved in his first term. A poor Dominican still had to live by his wits to survive.

Traffic moved slowly around potholes, past tigres and uncertain traffic lights from the statue at the entrance to town past the Tetelo Vargas Stadium, which, like the Catholic churches of old, was never closed. The almost gridlocked street curved past all the low-ceilinged chicken restaurants, their large-screen televisions showing baseball games. Plastic chairs scattered on the street with the smell of fried chicken, plantains, yucca, and rum. The street then wound by a sprawling fenced-off landscaped area. It was the campus of the Universidad Central del Este, which, since its founding in 1970, had become one of the biggest changes in San Pedro.

For only 9,000 pesos a semester, a little less than $300, a student could become a teacher. To become a doctor cost only 6,500 pesos a semester, about $200, for the first two years and then 12,500 pesos a semester for another two years. Only four years and $1,600 for a medical degree may seem like a bargain to an American, and in fact Americans attended the medical school. But this was a great deal of money to be able to set aside from most jobs in San Pedro.

It would take most of a year just to earn one semester's tuition working near the university in the "free zone." The original 774,000-square-yard zone, established in 1971 under the same Balaguer development program as the university, soon filled, and a second zone was built. The plan was to allow foreign manufacturers, mostly of clothing but also some jewelry, shoes, and low-technology industrial products, to bring in parts duty-free, have them a.s.sembled by inexpensive Dominican labor, and ship them out. The Dominicans didn't get much for this, but it didn't cost them much, either. The Dominican government spent little more than $50,000 to build the zone. The companies have been mainly American. Anyone who breathed a word about unions or organizing for better wages would be quickly locked out, and so American manufacturers were provided with very cheap labor and Macorisanos were offered jobs that paid barely a subsistence salary. Once the Dominican peso went into free fall against the dollar in the 1990s, Dominican labor cost Americans less than fifty cents an hour. In the first four years of the twenty-first century, the peso fell again, losing about half its value. In dollar terms it made Dominican workers a bargain, but they had to put in ten- and eleven-hour days to earn enough to survive. It didn't even create a significant increase in San Pedro port traffic.

The free zone and tourism were cited by Echavara as "the two main pillars of the San Pedro economy." Tourism jobs also meant long hours and low wages. A man named Jose was born in 1959 in a small farming town in the interior of the eastern region. His father owned a very small plot of land on which he grew bananas and a few other crops. They worked hard, but life was cheap and they had enough to eat. In 1980, Jose left the town and came to San Pedro because he had heard that jobs were available in the free zone. He got a job with an American shoe manufacturer. After twenty years he had worked his way up to supervisor and was earning 800 pesos a week, about $100 a month, which was a high salary for the free zone. "It was very bad pay," Jose remembered. "But it was so cheap to live then."

However, prices started to go up and Jose's salary didn't, and by the year 2000 he was finding it very hard to live on his income as a supervisor for the American shoe company. So, despite the fact that he had only a grade-school education, he taught himself how to speak English in order to get a job in that other pillar of the San Pedro economy: tourism. He got a job as a porter in a beach resort hotel and earned 1,400 pesos a week. But that 1,400 pesos did not go as far as the 800 pesos at the free zone had ten years earlier.

Jose shrugged. "What could I do?" he said. "I came from a very small town. There was no baseball. I never had the chance to play it."

ngel Valera de los Santos, an octogenarian, had been working in City Hall since 1948, when it was a much smaller city with only a few thousand people and few cars.

"Sixty years ago, San Pedro was much more prosperous but there were far fewer opportunities," he said. "Sugar was the economy. There was no tourism or free zone. There was Cesar Iglesias. But now the wealthy families have all moved to Santo Domingo, where there are more investment opportunities. They all moved when sugar died."

Many new jobs had been created in San Pedro: driving a motosconcho, working in one of the big stores, such as Jumbo or Iberia, or in the free zone, or in tourism. Politicians liked to boast of the jobs they had brought in and the economic development they had fostered, but in truth most economic development in San Pedro de Macors meant only the creation of underemployment.

But there was baseball.

CHAPTER NINE.

The City of Baseball In the handsome City Hall, on the second floor, was a room marked "Departamento de Cultura." It was a cramped little room with tiled walls. The dimensions and lack of windows suggested that it might have once been a closet. There was enough s.p.a.ce for a desk, a file cabinet, and three chairs. Benancio Rodrguez Montao, a thin, four-foot-tall elderly man with sunken cheeks and no teeth, was in charge. On the rare occasion when a visitor came to the Department of Culture, he would show them to a seat, pour a cup of strong, sugary Dominican coffee, and remain standing, which usually brought him to the visitor's eye level.

Questions about baseball irritated him. "Everyone says this is the city of baseball players, but before that it was the city of poets. There was Gastn Fernando Deligne, Pedro Mir, and here, there is me," he said proudly. "I am a poet too. Look, I was improvising just this morning." Then he took out a dog-eared envelope covered with writing and recited in cadence his latest sixteen lines about loss and vanishing culture in a style vaguely reminiscent of Gastn Deligne.

He may have been right about the loss of culture-"the rose lost from the garden"-but it was clear to most anyone that San Pedro de Macors, the city of poets, was now the city of baseball.

Not everyone in San Pedro was desperately poor. Most of those who weren't were baseball players. They were easy to spot because they looked a little larger, a little better fed, and more muscular. If he was gangly, he was probably a shortstop. If you shook hands and his hand was large and powerful and the skin as coa.r.s.e as a leather glove, he was probably a pitcher. They spoke American English and, in fact, they looked a little like Americans. This was why any large American in San Pedro was frequently asked, "Did you play baseball?" If you said yes-and most Americans have played a little baseball while growing up-invariably the next question was "Did you sign?"

The idea of playing baseball simply for fun had become a rare notion in San Pedro. In the hundreds of fields around town, many variations, like softball, plaquita, and cricket, were played for fun. Some played molinete, a Cuban variation on softball in which the underhanded pitch can travel more than 100 miles per hour. But even this was getting a little serious. Molinete in San Pedro had corporate sponsors, and the players were paid professionals.

Once baseball players started going to the U.S. and coming back with the money to buy mansions and SUVs, baseball was no longer about fun: it was about salvation, the one option that could work. Of course, most of the players around town had not made the major leagues, but many had made enough money somewhere in the game to start a business or take some kind of small step up.

It was no great trick to pick out those big, strong, American-trained and, more important, American-fed ballplayers. In the supermarket there was Ervin Alcantara, age twenty-seven. A few years earlier he had been practicing in a San Pedro field when a scout noticed him; in 2003 he was signed to the Astros. He played minor-league ball until 2007 and then was released. Now he was playing with the Estrellas. Since he never made it into the majors, his salary in the Dominican League was not very high, but it was still a lot better than a salary in the free zone. Also-and this seldom gets said-it was a lot more fun.

Everywhere in San Pedro, baseball connections were to be found. Ramn Perez Tolentino, a pastry maker with a little shop in Consuelo, lovingly displayed in gla.s.s cases his work with white fluffy swirls and bright-colored jellies. He used to coach Manny Acta. Acta never made it to the majors as a player, but as manager of the Washington Nationals he became the first Macorisano to manage a major-league team and also the youngest manager in the majors. His old coach, the pastry maker back in Consuelo, now ran the Consuelo chapter of the Manny Acta Foundation, which supplied baseball equipment and training to young Dominicans.

Danilo Rogers was a cocolo who grew up in downtown San Pedro. His grandfather was from Anguilla and had come to San Pedro to work at Ingenio Consuelo. He became a "mixer," a technician who made white sugar. Danilo played ball and signed with the Atlanta Braves, playing left field on the A and Double A teams. He never made it to the majors, but he put away enough money to start a pleasant, airy restaurant serving Dominican food. His specialty was m.o.f.ongo, a very Dominican dish, although, typically, the Puerto Rican sugar people brought it here. It is made from mashed plantains, fried in fat and garlic. Anyone who complained that m.o.f.ongo is too heavy satisfied the Dominican definition of a gringo. Here is Danilo's recipe:Fry plantains with pork, beef, chicken, whatever you want to do it with. Also chicharn, the fat layer under the skin of pork. Crush the chicharnes and plantains in a piln, a Caribbean mortar and pestle for mashing bananas, with b.u.t.ter, garlic, salt and pepper.

Young baseball players in San Pedro were fit, serious, and clean. Theirs was a disciplined youth. Their games, which took place every day all over town, were played with great seriousness. When a coach demonstrated a move, the boys would imitate it like ballet dancers learning a new step. This was not playing, it was working. Nevertheless, they were amusing games to watch, because the players had a thrilling combination of talent, determination, and undeveloped skills. A fly ball soared to center field and the center fielder, for no apparent reason, dropped the ball. But he had a good arm and threw quickly to shortstop. The shortstop, with bad hands but quick reflexes, also dropped the ball but quickly scooped it up and then tossed it to third base. The swift runner, who had been sprinting hard but was thrown a little off his step because he never expected to be running this far on a routine fly ball, was tagged out at third. One out-the same result had the center fielder caught the ball in the first place, but much more interesting.

There were a lot of scouts in San Pedro, but there were also a lot of baseball games to watch. Dany Santana, a native Macorisano who scouted for the Tampa Bay Rays, estimated that there were between thirty and forty baseball fields in town that he regularly dropped in on. One way an ex-ballplayer could make money was to buy a small plot of land, build one or two baseball diamonds, and rent them out. If he spent some money and put in dormitories, a gym, and some other facilities, he might be able to rent it out to a major-league franchise for a high price. But there was a market for lesser facilities as well.

Santana often scouted Astin Field, a ballpark of major-league dimensions, measuring four hundred feet from home plate to the center-field wall. During games or even practice, boys waited in the papaya trees around the walls, just as they did in the palms around Tetelo Vargas Stadium, for a foul ball or home run. The owner, Astin Jacobo, Jr., like many ballpark owners, was an ex-player, signed by scout Rafael Vsquez.

Vsquez was a legend in San Pedro. Before he was a scout, he had been a pitcher from nearby La Romana; in 1976 he threw twelve pitches for a Pittsburgh Pirates scout and was signed immediately. His rise was phenomenally swift. In the Rookie League in Bradenton, Florida, he struck out five batters in a row and was immediately sent up to a Cla.s.s A team. It took him only two years from signing until he played on a major-league team, the Seattle Mariners. But his major-league career lasted just one season, in which he pitched in only nine games for the Mariners, first as a starter and then as a reliever; then he was sent down to Triple A, never to rise again. What made him famous in San Pedro-what the name Rafael Vsquez meant to Macorisanos, lovers of Macorisano baseball trivia-was that he was the first Dominican pitcher ever to get a win against the New York Yankees.

Vsquez went on to be a scout for the Kansas City Royals, for whom he signed Jacobo, who did not become a star, either. But Astin Jacobo was a famous name-perhaps more famous in the Bronx, where he was born, than in San Pedro. His father, Astin Jacobo, Sr., was from Consuelo, and like many people in Consuelo was a cousin of Rico Carty, whose paternal last name was also Jacobo. Astin Sr. scouted for the Houston Astros, but he was also one of the men who tried to organize the workers in Consuelo and consequently had to flee Trujillo. In the 1970s, the worst period for the South Bronx-when gunfire ignited fires that burned down whole blocks, and many buildings were abandoned-he settled in the Crotona neighborhood. There Jacobo, known as Jacob, became an activist in a troubled and impoverished community, saving buildings, getting City Hall involved, turning abandoned lots into gardens and baseball fields. There is still a street and a baseball field named after him.

His son owned the field in San Pedro, and on most days there was baseball practice there and almost always a few scouts taking a look. On the concrete block of seats behind home plate was written "Scouts Only."

Dany Santana often went to Astin Field to watch a lean fifteen-year-old pitcher with a hard fastball and a nice breaking ball. Good breaking b.a.l.l.s were unusual for young San Pedro pitchers. In his first two years with Tampa Bay, Santana signed twenty-eight players but distinguished himself with pitchers including Cristfar Andjar, Joaqun's son, and Alexander Colome, also from San Pedro-a closer who at the age of sixteen was already throwing a 97-mile-per-hour fastball.

When his young pitcher went to the mound, Santana took up position behind the backstop with a stopwatch. This was unusual. Scouts usually stood in that spot with a handheld radar gun the size of a hair dryer to check the speed of the fastball. But Tampa Bay scouts were influenced by Eddy Toledo, the veteran scout who signed twenty-seven major leaguers, mostly for the Mets, before switching to Tampa Bay in 2006. Eddy never used a radar gun and frequently said, "I have two eyes: one is to watch arm movement, the other is a radar." Many organizations emphasize the speed of pitches-especially in the Dominican Republic, where many pitching prospects have only a fastball and a changeup. But Tampa Bay scouts under Toledo were more concerned with the fluidity and speed of the pitcher's movement than the actual speed of the ball after release. A pitcher with a fast movement was difficult to steal bases on, and they believed that good arm movement was a harbinger of good future development.

This youngster had a very good movement. It was also apparent without a radar gun that his fastball had considerable velocity.

Then Santana spied a young outfielder he didn't know.

"How old are you?" he asked the boy.

The boy began to glow. He was fifteen years old and a major-league scout was talking to him.

"Are you from San Pedro?"

He was. This was good because, being a Macorisano himself, Santana believed San Pedro players were a quality brand. Furthermore, the boy was from Santa Fe. Santana liked that because a lot of good players had come out of Santa Fe. So he patted the boy on the shoulder and sent him back to the outfield, the player's stride showing new bounce and his black skin heating to a shade of mahogany.

This was how Santana liked to work: identify talent at fifteen, watch him develop for a year and a half, sign him at sixteen and a half. It would be safer to sign prospects at twenty, but then the organization would not be able to play a hand in their development. Besides, by law all boys who are over sixteen become available for signing on July 2, and that is the day most of the good prospects are bought up by one organization or another.

If a prospect is of age and not signed on July 2, he could be signed at any time of year, so when a scout found talent in a player who was over sixteen, he signed him quickly. That past winter Santana had seen a boy in a field in Barrio Mexico, not far from Tetelo Vargas Stadium. Santana said he "reminded me of Tony Fernndez, the way he used his glove." He asked him to run and the boy hunkered down and performed a fast sprint. Then he asked him to show him how he swung the bat. The boy went into a batting stance and did a few swings for him. Santana signed him immediately with a $26,000 bonus, an average bonus at the time.

The age limit had been established in 1984. Before that, it sometimes seemed that scouts were s.n.a.t.c.hing children from their homes. Epy Guerrero boasted of signing thirteen-year-olds. Not that this was a good way to treat children, but on the other hand, it took a scout of rare skill to recognize a player's potential at the age of thirteen. In 1986 it was recounted in The Washington Post that a terrified family reported their son missing and the Dominican commissioner of baseball located him hidden away by a scout in the training camp of a major-league team.

It is part of the tradition of Dominican kleptocracy, this idea that Major League Baseball could come here as did the Spanish, as did the sugar companies and do whatever they wanted to do. It is an image that neither the Dominican government nor Major League Baseball wants. And so, periodically, regulations are made. The age-sixteen-and-a-half rule helped lessen the unfair treatment of teenagers. A better minimum age would have been eighteen so that prospects finished high school education before leaving. But most baseball players, except big hitters, have their best years when they are in their twenties. This is when they have the most speed running bases, the most agility for fielding, and the best arms for throwing and especially pitching. Most players take about four years to develop for the majors. Few Dominican players had finished high school when they went off to their professional baseball careers, but for that matter fewer than one in three Dominicans had a high school education anyway. When a sixteen-year-old boy signed with a major-league organization, he had little education and no other skills: succeeding in baseball became his only chance. An occasional Rafael Vsquez did it in much less time, but then he washed out in one season. A few, like Jose Reyes, did it in only three years and went on to be stars. But when Major League Baseball signed a prospect, they calculated that it would take four years to get him into a major-league game. Some players, like Alfredo Griffin, find their rhythm that first year. Others take a year or two more to start realizing their full potential.

So signing a player at sixteen meant that he would probably hit his athletic stride at about the age of twenty-two. Physically they might be ready to reach full potential at age twenty if they could be signed at age fourteen, but sixteen was still workable. Another factor in the equation was the widespread and unproven belief, both by Dominican and American baseball people, that Dominican boys took longer to mature.

These teenagers who gambled everything on Major League Baseball signed a contract, got a signing bonus, and appeared to be on their way. But statistically their complete success remained very unlikely. A few hundred Dominicans are signed in a year, and probably only about three percent, maybe a dozen players, will ever play in a major-league stadium. And there is very little money in baseball between the signing bonus and the first major-league season.

First they are taken to the club's training ground in the Dominican Republic: the academy. From there they play a series of exhibition games known as Dominican Summer League. This is a last look before sending them to the United States. If they do well and are not released, they are then shipped to the States, usually to a remote, rural place, because that is where minor-league baseball is played. Sometimes they are brought to spring training first, but then they go to the Rookie League. Then, if they advance, they go to a Cla.s.s A team. Sometimes, before getting there, players go to a subdivision, Cla.s.s A Short Season. If they do well, they are moved up to Cla.s.s A. From there they advance to Double A, unless they are released first. From there, things get even tougher. The last level, Triple A, is not far behind major league-except for the size of the stadium, the salaries, the perks. Triple A is full of major-league players. It is where major leaguers are sent to work out their problems or to get in some practice games while recovering from injuries. Some but not all major leaguers get back to the big leagues. A few new recruits get called up from Triple A to the major-league team. Some of those fail under pressure and are sent back down, but at least those few get to say they were in the major leagues. Most don't even get to Triple A.

The job of handing new prospects their signing bonus checks fell to a Dominican employee of Major League Baseball, Aaron Rodrguez. "What I love about it," said Rodrguez, "is that the first thing most kids do with their money is improve their parents' house. If it was wood it becomes blocks, or they paint it. But I always tell them to save a part of it. I tell them, 'You are not big leaguers, and this is the biggest amount of money you are going to see until you get in the major leagues, and you may not get to the majors.'"

They earned nothing while training at the academy. Dominican Summer League paid $600 a month, which was better than the sugar mills or the free zone or a resort-hotel job but not life changing. Even when they got to the U.S., minor-league players earned little. Not until the majors was there another chance at significant money. Usually the lecture was not necessary. Most of the young Dominicans bought something for their family. In many cases, a signing bonus alone is enough to change an entire family's future.

Alberto Medina worked as a welder on the big machines in Consuelo for sixteen pesos a day. His father was a field supervisor earning four pesos a day. Medina said, "If a kid gets a signing bonus of $25,000, that's a million pesos! He isn't poor anymore."

In the first few years of the twenty-first century, $25,000 was an average signing bonus, already ten times as much as Rico Carty, George Bell, and Sammy Sosa were paid.

In 2008, 423 young Dominicans signed major-league contracts and were paid a total of $41,057,000 in signing bonuses. Both the number of players signed and the total amount of bonus money steadily increase from year to year. On July 2, 2008, under intense compet.i.tion, a sixteen-year-old pitcher from Puerto Plata, Michael Inoa, received a $4.5 million signing bonus from the Oakland A's. He was a six-foot-seven-inch right-hander throwing faster than 90 miles per hour. Height is increasingly valued in pitching, especially after the impressive career of Randy Johnson, who was six feet, ten inches tall and threw 100 miles per hour. A taller pitcher has long arms and releases the ball significantly closer to home plate, giving the hitter a split second less to identify the pitch. But also being longer and higher, he can get more torque on the throw because he is coming down from a higher position, which is why the pitcher's place was raised to a mound in the first place.

Some of the scouts compared Inoa to Randy Johnson. But Johnson was taller and he was left-handed. Left-handed pitchers are more valuable because they are rare. A six-foot-seven-inch right-handed pitcher from San Pedro had recently made it into baseball record books. On August 22, 2007, Daniel Cabrera, pitching for the Orioles, let a three-run lead slip past him and the Texas Rangers went on to win 30 to 3, the worst loss in Major League Baseball history since 1897.

The Inoa bonus created a whole new level of daydreams among Dominican teenagers. Real wealth could be attained without a career, with only a signing bonus. Part of the reason was the rule concerning sixteen-year-olds. Every year there was a new crop of players who were to become available on July 2. All the scouts knew who they were before that date and had decided how far they were prepared to go in order to get which player. In 2008, Inoa was the one they were talking about most. The Red Sox had given more than a million-dollar bonus to a pitcher the summer before, and the talk was that the club that wanted Inoa was going to have to ante up even more.

This kind of climate has done much to boost signing bonuses well over the $100,000 level, and they keep going up. In the 1990s, with bonuses increasing, scouts began thinking that there was more money in signing bonuses than in a major-league paycheck for scouting. Herman Martnez, a player from San Pedro who had turned scout, said of scouting, "You don't get rich, but you can live on it." But then a better opportunity started to appear, and Martnez, like many other scouts, left scouting to start a baseball school.

The idea was not originally Dominican. After the draft was established in the U.S., men known as bird dogs began earning a living by training promising youth for the draft. In the Dominican Republic they became known as buscones, from the Spanish verb buscar, to look for. A buscn looked for promising youth, sometimes no more than twelve or thirteen years old, and worked with them every day for years, feeding them, training them, teaching them what they needed to know until they were ready, then got them a major-league tryout. When one of their boys signed, they got a percentage of the bonus. The percentage was not fixed: it was typically a quarter and sometimes as much as a half of the bonus.

Not only was there the possibility of earning more money as a buscn than a scout, but to the way of thinking of some scouts, buscones were having all the fun. In the days of Avila and Guerrero, a scout scoured the wild Dominican countryside, sometimes sleeping in a jeep because there were no hotels. Now someone was leading them to prospects. The buscones were the ones who got to buscar.

One of the first buscones in San Pedro plowed up the garden in front of his house to use as a training field. Soon they were occupying bigger fields and parks, renting or buying s.p.a.ces. Bringing in millions a year, signing bonuses had become the biggest business in San Pedro.

Apollinaire Batista, like many Consuelo natives, was the son of a Haitian cane worker. Batista was a buscn. He supplied all his own equipment, trained teenagers until they were ready to be seen by major-league scouts, and arranged tryouts. If they signed, he said, he took five percent of the bonus, which was an unusually small cut. After the player was signed he found a new prospect, so that he was always working with a small group. He liked to get them at the age of twelve so that he had four years to develop them and they could be ready the moment they were old enough. The younger a prospect, the more money he fetched. So buscones wanted to present all their players as young as possible. But they also had to make sure they were ready, because a second or third tryout gets harder to arrange. Batista had players who were not ready until the age of twenty, which meant a significantly smaller bonus. "You can't show them until they are ready," he pointed out, shrugging.

The boys worked out in the morning and went to school in the afternoon. Batista's goal was to get every boy that he took on signed to a major-league organization. In his best year he got five boys signed. Francisco de los Santos, a seventeen-year-old right-handed pitcher who threw faster than 90 miles per hour and also had a good changeup and several breaking b.a.l.l.s, was signed by the Mets in 2008. His bonus was $25,000, which was a considerable amount of money in Consuelo, even though by 2008, the year of the $4.8 million pitcher, $25,000 indicated only a modic.u.m of excitement on the part of the Mets. Bartolo Nicolas, a young outfielder, signed with the Blue Jays for $20,000. Once those two were signed, Batista had another seven ready to show to scouts.