Part 4 (2/2)

PART TWO.

DOLLARS.

La esperanza es la muerte de la muerte.

La esperanza es la esperanza

de reanudar la juventud del pueblo.

Hope is the death of death

Hope is the hope to restore people's youth.

-Pedro Mir, ”Concierto de Esperanza para la Mano Izquierda” (”Concert of Hope for the Left Hand”).

CHAPTER EIGHT.

The Fourth Incarnation of San Pedro.

The oldest and most timeless part of San Pedro, Punta de Pescadores, never had a single reincarnation. Just before the bridge leading to the town along the mangrove coast of the Ro Higuamo, slightly upriver from the port on the opposite side, was a little village of pastel one-story houses on unpaved roads by the river's edge. In Ernest Hemingway's novel The Old Man and the Sea, the Cuban fisherman Santiago bravely goes to sea in his small open-deck boat to hand line for billfish as big as his craft. That way of life was still alive in twenty-first-century Punta de Pescadores. This was one of the rare San Pedro neighborhoods that did not produce Major League Baseball players. It produced fishermen.

They fished in deep-welled nineteen-foot open boats, the old ones made of wood, the newer ones of fibergla.s.s. It was essentially a rowboat, but with outboard engines mounted on the back. They had to go a long distance to catch fish-farther all the time as fish became scarcer, because too many were being caught and because of pollution.

Gasoline for the outboards was expensive, and the only viable fishery within rowing distance had been steadily vanis.h.i.+ng since the 1990s. From their muddy sh.o.r.e, fishermen rowed a few hundred yards and dragged a net over the side. They would slap the water with the oars to scare the fish and drive them into the net. These small freshwater fish did not command a high price, but when they were plentiful, a full net-which the fishermen wove together by hand-would quickly pay for the $600 in nylon line used to make it.

This fishery was dying out because it was downstream from Cristbal Coln and a plant owned by CEMEX, the Mexican cement producer, both of which dumped pollutants in the river. A fisherman named Edwin said of CEMEX, in good New York English, ”They kill everything. There is no fish left.” Tony Echavara, the mayor, recognized the often-cited problem: ”CEMEX is a problem because of pollution, but it is very important to the local economy.”

CEMEX provided fourteen thousand jobs. The entire San Pedro sugar sector was now providing only two thousand jobs, and many of those for only half the year. Also, CEMEX brought supplies through the port, one of the few port activities left. They even provided one of the better youth baseball programs developing teenage major-league prospects.

Meanwhile, Edwin complained that although the price of gasoline was rising, the fishermen were forced to go farther every year to find fish. Their engines were small-usually only forty horsepower-but still burned twenty-five gallons in a day of fis.h.i.+ng, which meant the first 140 pounds of fish that was caught only paid for the gasoline. Some days they caught less than 140 pounds.

Edwin grew up fis.h.i.+ng from Punta de Pescadores but went abroad, becoming a Dom Yor, as Dominicans refer, not altogether kindly, to those who move to New York. He lived in Queens with his father, a former fisherman, until, as he put it, ”I did something bad and was sent back.” The reference to ”something bad” was not awkward English but a touch of satire that made Dominicans laugh about the patronizing nature of U.S. policy. The U.S. government warned Dominicans with the ultimate threat: if you don't behave, we will make you go back to your hometown. Drug convictions most often led to deportation, but Edwin did not want to explain or give his last name. However, he came back with investment money and owned five nineteen-foot fis.h.i.+ng boats.

Edwin fished the only profitable way left here, by taking his boats sixty miles out into the Caribbean. A line was planted with an anchor in 1,500 fathoms of water at one end and a buoy with a palm tree at the other. The palm, known as the balsa, provided shade, which attracted small fish, which in turn drew larger fish. The fisherman dragged a heavy handheld line with a baited hook through the shaded area and tried to hook a four-foot-long sharp-toothed, sleek, and silvery king mackerel, which Dominicans call a carite. Or the yellow fish with the huge foreheads and tender flesh that are sometimes five feet long and weigh more than fifty pounds, known here as dorado and sometimes in the U.S. as dolphin fish-except by the squeamish and politically correct, who prefer the Hawaiian name, mahimahi. There are also hefty yellowfin tuna, large sharks, and six- and seven-foot-long marlin.

Landing these fish on a small boat in open sea with a hand line takes considerable strength and stamina, and the battles may last ten minutes or longer. Some of these fish are strong enough to haul these boats; some are stronger than the forty-horsepower engine.

It is a culture of the-one-that-got-away stories, which was also the basis for Hemingway's novel. Edwin and his friend Ramn Fernndez, known in Punta de Pescadores as Sanbobi, once hooked what they estimated to be a thousand-pound blue marlin. It was clearly longer than their boat. Sanbobi hooked it on a steel cable and was so jubilant that he could not stop laughing and joking. The more somber Edwin, operating the boat, just said repeatedly, ”That's a lot of money out there.” But Sanbobi had the giant by a steel cable, and so he kept laughing as he struggled to bring it in until finally the marlin did the impossible and snapped the cable, swimming free.

Both Sanbobi and Edwin had for the time being given up on deep-sea fis.h.i.+ng because of the cost of gasoline and instead were finding smaller fish closer to sh.o.r.e. But there were no fish in the mangroves, the rooty growth along the banks of the Higuamo where oysters used to grow before the pollution killed them. Sanbobi still believed he was better off than his father, who was a worker for the Cristbal Coln mill. Of fis.h.i.+ng he said, ”It's cash every day,” in contrast to his father's seasonal employment.

The fishermen went out in the morning. In the afternoon the action switched to the other side of the river in downtown San Pedro, where the fish were taken to market, most of them stored at extremely low temperatures in walk-in freezers-a precarious business in a country known for power outages. The fishermen putt-putted back from sea and up the river with about five fish, four to seven feet long, tying up at a concrete landing with corrugated metal roofs. The fish were gutted and then hefted onto a large basket made of steel concrete-reinforcement rods and hung on a scale. Prices varied depending on the fish. A gruff man playing dominos on the dock explained dryly, ”Fish are all different. Women are all the same.” The men all laugh.

Everything-gutted fish, sh.e.l.led conch, and bags of clawless tropical spiny lobsters and crabs-was immediately dragged into the freezers, their floors covered in b.l.o.o.d.y ice. Fresh fish is not a commercial concept in the tropics.

The best place to eat fish in San Pedro was the Robby Mar, which started in 1989 on the river next to the fish market. It had a pleasant white tableclothed terrace with a view of the river and its dense, tangled mangroves. Neither stuffy-pretentious nor downscale-ugly, which are the two usual choices, it would have been popular with tourists, but tourists did not turn up very often for a meal in local restaurants because the price of a room in a resort hotel included all meals. The tourism industry did not want tourists straying away from the resorts: something might happen to them, and that would be bad for tourism.

Without tourists, Robby Mar, located near much of the city government, did lunches for government officials, who-baseball players aside-had the best jobs in San Pedro. On some days half of the restaurant was taken over by the town fire department-some twenty men and women in white uniforms with dazzling arrays of metals and battle ribbons on their chests. After a few guavaberries, everyone just had to hope that no fires started during lunchtime.

The restaurant specialized in local seafood with a long menu that included some rare specialties and some very popular San Pedro dishes, such as congrejos al ajillo.

Grind garlic in a food processor with salt and oil. If you have olive oil, it's much better. Boil crabs, take out meat, cook with a little b.u.t.ter and add garlic sauce. The same recipe can be used with fish.

But this whole world might be ending: the San Pedro of fishermen and waterfront, the original San Pedro before baseball, sugar, and even poets. Sanbobi gave Punta de Pescadores at most twenty more years. ”Kids just aren't becoming fishermen anymore,” he said. It is a trade that has gotten more and more difficult. It was different when the only alternatives were baseball and sugar. But now there were a few choices in between. Or at least it seemed that way.

San Pedro de Macors entered the twenty-first century in the town's third reincarnation. Originally it was a rural fis.h.i.+ng town, then it turned into a booming sugar center, then it became the wretchedly poor failed sugar town of the Trujillo years, when baseball was the only respite from the mills and the only way out for a lucky few. Then came the fourth reincarnation, in which San Pedro had a slightly more developed economy and baseball was no longer the only alternative to sugar, just the only good one.

Sugar was still there, but it was now secondary to employers such as CEMEX and Cesar Iglesias, an old San Pedro factory making soap, flour, and b.u.t.ter that had eight thousand workers.

The Porvenir mill was off a street in central San Pedro. It used to be in the northern rural area like Consuelo. But the town-which, like the country, tripled in population in a generation-grew around Porvenir just as it may eventually grow past Consuelo. That is what is happening in the Dominican Republic: more and more rural areas are being taken over by the shacks of urban sprawl. Already a grid of dirt roads with modest concrete houses with corrugated metal roofing had spread north of Porvenir.

The mill itself, Porvenir, ”Future,” was a shack, albeit a large one five or six stories high but mostly slapped together with the ubiquitous Caribbean building material, corrugated metal. It was dark inside, but hot white rays of sunlight shot through seams in the metal skin, slas.h.i.+ng across the huge dark s.p.a.ce at dramatic angles. Workers who stood on top of a two-story-high tank for cane juice could look longingly at a ball field where young signed prospects trained for the Pittsburgh Pirates.

The tall, dark shed housed monstrous nineteenth-century cast-iron machinery: two-story-high cogwheels with menacing teeth for cane crus.h.i.+ng; wood-burning furnaces for cooking the juice, stacks of chopped trees at the ready; tall cane elevators; and huge conveyor belts.

All this for what was now four months of operation a year. Some of the better jobs lasted six months. Some workers earned 20 pesos an hour to clean machines and others 800 pesos a month to supervise. Some workers had nothing to do at all. Porvenir was controlled by the ruling Dominican Liberation Party, the PLD, and party members in good standing could get paid to do absolutely nothing. And some of those jobs were year-round. Killing time, unlike cane crus.h.i.+ng, is not seasonal. And so some workers were at the mill in the dead season, showing up every day, sitting around, sometimes gratefully wearing purple hats, the party color, with a picture of Leonel Fernndez on them because they did have reason to say ” Gracias, Presidente.”

Guards stood at a chain-link gate manipulating a thick chain and a padlock, letting people in and out as though the era of Trujillo were still alive and well at the sugar mill. A woman worker wanted to go out, explaining that she had a family emergency, and the guard told her that if she left she would not be let back in until the next day, thereby forfeiting a day's wages.

In a good year, when there was not much rain, Porvenir produced forty-two tons of sugar in its four-month operation. In Brazil the waste from crushed cane, bioma.s.s, fueled cane ethanol production to meet most of the country's energy needs. But in the Dominican Republic, which did not produce ethanol and ran on expensive imported oil, a little bioma.s.s was sold to paper mills and the rest was just burned as sc.r.a.p.

Twenty-first-century Consuelo still looked like a village: most streets were unpaved, and two-story buildings stood out. The mill in Consuelo, more s.p.a.cious than Porvenir, was set in an immense area of weed-covered lots and, like Porvenir, was covered in corrugated metal several stories high. The mill was fenced off and surrounded by a dirt road. Along the other side of that road were green wood-shuttered Caribbean houses originally built for the upper-echelon mill workers, fine old houses rotting in the tropics. The families of those mill workers still lived in these homes, although most of the residents didn't work in the mill anymore.

Inside, one of the crus.h.i.+ng machines was stamped Farrel Foundry and Machine Co., Ansonia, Conn., 1912. After the 1950s, parts were no longer available for these monsters, stories high, with teeth, shafts, and belts. Now Consuelo had its own machine shop with lathes and other machinist's tools where parts were made to keep these antiques running. Nor did they depend on the vagaries of Dominican utilities: Consuelo had its own power plant. A generation earlier, this had been the leading San Pedro mill, and once the zafra began, there could be no stopping, night or day, for eight months. But now the company struggled to stay running for four months.

At a small street bar, just a shed by the side of the road, two men were having coffee-good strong Dominican coffee that tasted as though half the sugar of Consuelo had been dumped in it. People in sugar towns eat sugar. They start sucking on cane stalks as children and develop a sugar-craving palate.

The man behind the bar spoke Creole because his father had come to Consuelo to cut cane from Haiti. The only other customer spoke English because his father had come to Consuelo to cut cane from Saint Kitts. He had been a sugar maker, sometimes called a chemist: the man who supervised the actual boiling and making.

Did that job pay well?

”No, the only job in a sugar mill that pays well is owner.”

Despite their different languages, they understood each other and asked a question that was still frequently asked in San Pedro: Why wasn't sugar profitable anymore? ”I don't know what happened,” said the one who spoke Creole.

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