The Eastern Stars (5 page)

Trujillo ran the most successful kleptocracy in Caribbean history—not an insignificant achievement, considering the contenders. For a kleptocracy, success is marked by the amount stolen and the number of years in a position to keep stealing. Trujillo, although he ran only a small, poor country, became one of the richest men in the world and lasted longer than even the Duvaliers in neighboring Haiti—father and son combined. Of course, in reality the longest kleptocracy in Caribbean history was the centuries in which Europe sucked every ounce of wealth it could find out of its Caribbean colonies. Corporate America tried its best—after all, sugar could be grown in Florida and Louisiana, yet it was this history of kleptocracy that made the Caribbean seem appealing for business—but never lived up to the kleptocratic success of Europe. Then the Europeans and the Americans wondered at the tendency toward kleptocracy in these islands as though this were a peculiarly Caribbean affliction, perhaps caused by climate.

The key to Trujillo’s success was ruthless brutality and relentless egotism that sought to control and redefine everything in Dominican life. He owned most of the industry—including the sugar mills but also rice, beef, salt, and shoes—and controlled the baseball teams, and even dominated merengue with hits such as “Glory to the Benefactor,” “Trujillo Is Great and Immortal,” and the 1946 smash “We Want Reelection.” He danced the merengue to gain popularity with the peasant class, but he also whitened the music to appeal to the upper classes by imposing forms that came from Spanish poetry.

Dominican children placed bottle caps on their chests to resemble the leader with his self-awarded medals and custom-designed uniforms. It has long been believed that Dominican feelings of insecurity and ambivalence demanded a certain type of paternalistic strongman for leader: what is called in Spanish a
caudillo
—the type of leader that expected to be thanked for the sugar harvest. It is also widely recognized that this tendency, caudilloism, is one of the great problems of the Dominican Republic. When Trujillo came to power, one of the first officially sanctioned merengues said:

After Trujillo was killed, for the next thirty years Dominican politics replaced the reds and the blues with Joaquín Balaguer and Juan Bosch. These two eternal brotherly enemies—Balaguer, the right-wing caudillo who had served as Trujillo’s president, and Bosch, the leftist idealist, friend of Fidel Castro—had so much in common that they appeared to be mirror images of the same person. Balaguer was born in 1906 in the northern Cibao region, a member of an elite group in the country’s wealthy region with the whitest population. Bosch was born in the same region and social class three years later. Bosch had a Puerto Rican mother, and Balaguer a Puerto Rican father. They were both white in a country where only about fifteen percent of the population is white. They both had literary aspirations, although Bosch’s tough and realistic short stories garnered more respect than Balaguer’s flowery, nineteenth-century-style poetry. More highly regarded was Balaguer’s writing on literature, which always reserved ample space for praising the work of his
frère-ennemi
, Juan Bosch.

One worked for Trujillo, the other opposed him and went into exile. They both lived and played central roles in the nation’s political life into their nineties, both seemingly refusing to either retire or die. The two old enemies could even join together to keep a third party out.

Balaguer was an aesthete who never married and lived in the servant quarters of the house of his six sisters. He wore dark suits and a fedora, and his only extravagances were a specially made limousine known as the Balaguermobile and a huge, dark, elaborately carved desk that he inherited from Trujillo, his extravagant predecessor. It was rumored that Balaguer had fathered illegitimate children throughout the country, but this speculation may have come from the difficulty Dominicans had in accepting men of power who were not oversexed. The sexual exploits of most of them, especially Trujillo and his son Ramfis, were legendary. When Trujillo’s assassins caught up with him on the road, it was said the dictator was on his way to a tryst.

But just their haberdashery showed the difference between the caudillos: Trujillo looked like a feathery cross between Napoleon and Lord Nelson as seen in a Gilbert and Sullivan operetta, while Balaguer resembled actor Karl Malden doing a credit card commercial.

Balaguer, with or without sex, lived to be the oldest head of state in the world—was he preserved by celibacy, another worrying rumor mill asked—hanging on after he was legally blind and his hearing had faded. Interviewed at his huge desk, which made the small man look even smaller, this writer asked him why the electrical system was constantly failing. While he was denying this obvious truth, the electricity went off in the palace, but Balaguer continued with his denial, too blind to know what had happened.

Bosch was also a colorful octogenarian. He liked to take journalists to the slums and show his outrage at the wretched housing by pulling shacks apart while the poor family helplessly watched what little they had being torn up. Successive U.S. governments liked Balaguer, who had formed his right-wing party while in exile in New York. The Kennedy administration initially supported Bosch despite the claim of opponents that he was a communist. But once in power, as a result of one of the rare untainted democratic elections in Dominican history, Bosch made the mistake of seeking economic independence from the U.S. by awarding public contracts to Europeans. Washington began to fear Bosch, and after he was removed in a military coup in 1963, the U.S. invaded to prevent him from coming back to power. They put in his place Balaguer. In most Balaguer elections, fraud was suspected and violence was employed: in 1966, Balaguer had 350 Bosch supporters killed in order to ease his return to power. The U.S. accepted this as long as it was keeping Bosch from office. Once Bosch was no longer the opponent, the U.S. started criticizing the nearly nonagenarian president’s proclivity for fraud.

In 1992, for the four-hundredth anniversary of Christopher Columbus’s arrival, Balaguer ignored how badly the explorer is regarded in the Dominican Republic and spent $200 million to build a monument to him that could project light in the shape of a cross into the sky that would be visible for ten miles—that is, if they can ever get enough electrical power to light it up.

Having seen the U.S. completely manipulate the destiny of their country for generations, Dominicans understandably make the mistake of thinking that their country is a major priority of U.S. policy. But, in fact, the mistake of the nineteenth-century annexationists—who, once their proposal came to a Senate vote, discovered that no one in Washington was really interested in their country—is continually repeated. After President Lyndon Johnson sent troops to occupy the Dominican Republic, he sent down his top national security adviser, McGeorge Bundy, to report on the situation. But it turned out that the main reason for the assignment was not Johnson’s concern about the Caribbean nation he had just invaded but to force Bundy to cancel a planned debate with leading scholars on Vietnam policy. It was Vietnam, not the Dominican Republic, that was preoccupying Washington. It is always something else.

 

 

 

T
he first question most people ask when they learn how many Major League Baseball players have been produced by this one small town of San Pedro de Macorís is “What’s in the water?” There seem to be numerous things in the water, some from the Mexican cement factory along the Higuamo River. But there is probably nothing in the water that would help with baseball. San Pedro baseball was not born from the water but from the history of the town.

Dominicans tend to be more attached to their regions than to their country, a fact that has proved important in the organization of baseball. One of the reasons it is so difficult to define Dominican culture is that although it is a small country—it is large only by Caribbean standards—the Dominican Republic has distinct regions with different histories, different economies, different traditions, even different racial makeups. This was true to some degree even before Europeans arrived. The previous people, the Tainos, had divided the island into five regions, each with its own ruler, or cacique. San Pedro, along the southern coast, forty miles east of the capital, is in the eastern part of the island, which is why its baseball players are called the Eastern Stars. It was part of the Taino region of Higüey, ruled when the Spanish arrived by a cacique named Cayacoa. Once the Spanish took over, the history and culture of the regions diverged even more dramatically. Baseball came out of the unique history of San Pedro de Macorís and the southeastern region.

The Tainos of Hispañola were from a group known as Arawaks who came from South America but spread northward into the Greater Antilles. Two of their best-known inventions were hammocks, which they called
hamacas
, and a musical instrument known as maracas
.
Two things that they had in common with the current inhabitants: they ate the root of the cassava plant, known today in Spanish by the word
yuca
, said to be of Taino origin, and they played a ball game for which they constructed fields throughout their communities. The Taino word for both their ball game and their ballpark is the Dominican word for a cane-worker village, a
batey
. While Tainos are clearly the reason that today’s Dominicans eat so much yucca, the fact that the current residents are also a ballpark-building people is a coincidence, an accident of history, like the fact that the Tainos, too, had extreme reverence for their mothers.

The Tainos were a seafaring people, which is why these South Americans spread so far north in the Caribbean. Another reason is that they were driven there by a more aggressive South American group, the Caribs, who were also expanding into the Caribbean. When Columbus came to the Caribbean, he sailed into an ongoing war between the Tainos and the Caribs. When he first encountered the Caribs, on Guadeloupe, he claimed that they were breeding Tainos for food and that their body parts were hung to cure like sides of beef. He said he was so revolted by this that he attacked and killed every Carib he could find, but since that was what he generally did, it has to be wondered if this was a fabricated excuse. However, the Caribs and the Tainos were clearly at war, and the Tainos seemed to be losing. Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo, an early Spanish historian of Santo Domingo, wrote that the cacique Cayacoa was one of the more ferocious resisters of the encroaching Caribs.

The Tainos built excellent dugout canoes, and in fact invented the word
canoe
, or
canoa
. They caught fish in nets, with hook and line, with spears or with traps, which are the same techniques used in San Pedro today.

In Taino Higüey, a people settled at the mouth of the Higuamo, where the river is wide and brackish and full of fish. No doubt drawn there by the fishing, this people called themselves Macorixes. Not only did the Macorixes have abundant river fish to net, oysters to pluck from the mangrove roots of the brackish water, and crabs to chase out of the holes they dug in the earth of the marshlands, but they could go to sea and try to land giant fish such as marlin, which were sometimes longer than the Macorix canoes. In short, it was a good spot for fishing and, set as it was a little upriver from the sea, was safe from all but the most furious of storms, known in Taino as a
huracán
.

Soon after the Spanish arrived, they began the conquest of Higüey and, when the Tainos resisted, unleashed a war of extermination. By 1504, with the territory more firmly under control, Juan Ponce de León was appointed governor of Higüey.

At the mouth of the Higuamo, people continued to fish, primarily from the eastern bank; but as time went on, a village also grew on the western bank. The area went by various names. The original settlement was and is still called Punta de Pescadores, Fishermen’s Point. But just as pragmatic and illustrative was another name, Mosquito or Mosquitisol, named for the other creatures besides fish for which the marshy area was known.

Soon after independence in 1844—some say in 1846, others insist not until 1858—the town started to be called San Pedro de Macorís, after both Saint Peter, the patron saint of fishermen, and the Macorixes, the original Taino fishermen. The people were for the moment free of the Spanish, and Taino names were starting to come into fashion: throughout Dominican history, Taino names have become in vogue whenever anti-Spanish sentiment or Dominican nationalism is popular.

San Pedro de Macorís, with its sheltered riverfront and its short sea voyage to the capital, became a commercial port for local products, especially fish and plantains. In fact, there was a period in the late 1860s and 1870s when the town was referred to as Macorís de Plántanos. Other crops, such as corn and beans, were also shipped from the port. But Macorís de Plántanos was about to undergo a dramatic change.

The booming Cuban sugar industry started to spread to San Pedro, which had the flat, humid tropical land suited for growing cane, was close to the capital, and had its own seaport. The return of Spanish government in 1861 brought in Spanish and Italian entrepreneurs looking for opportunities and interested in sugar.

Then, on October 10, 1868, in Cuba, a wealthy Cuban landowner from Yara named Carlos Manuel de Céspedes made a speech from his farm, forever after known in Cuban history as the
grito de Yara
, in which he renounced both Spanish rule and slavery. He set his own slaves free. Thirty-seven other planters around Yara also freed their slaves and formed an army. So began a failed war of independence known as the Ten Years’ War. Since this was largely an agricultural war—in fact, historians often attribute the movement’s failure to its inability to attract support from Havana—wealthy Cuban landowners fled. Many of them were sugar producers who went to the Dominican Republic.