The Eastern Stars (7 page)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

According to official history, the first organized game between Cuban club players was on a ball field in Matanzas that still exists called Palmar del Junco on December 27, 1874. Unlike Abner Doubleday’s game in Cooperstown, it is well documented that this game between a Matanzas team and the Habana Base Ball Club did take place. But it is not clear that it was the first organized game between clubs. Historian Roberto González Echevarría suggests that it may simply have been the first game to have been written about in the press. Historians like the story of Cuban baseball beginning in Matanzas because it was a port where American ships docked, and Cubans, like Dominicans, have always been drawn to the idea of baseball being a contest in which the locals stood up to the Americans.

But the 1874 game at Palmar del Junco was between Cubans. Havana won by the astonishing score of 51 to 9. Hitting skills developed earlier than fielding skills, and early games often had such scores. Emilio Sabourín, one of the revered martyrs of Cuban independence, played left field for Havana that day and hit eight home runs. Sabourín was one of the early promoters of not only Cuban baseball but also Cuban independence. He founded and managed one of the three Havana clubs that played fourteen series between 1878 and 1892. His club won nine of them. But the worst fears of the Spanish were confirmed when it was discovered that the money Sabourín had raised by organizing baseball games was sent to the independence movement. In 1895 he was arrested and baseball was once again banned. Sabourín was shipped to an infamous military prison in Ceuta, on the Moroccan side of the Strait of Gibraltar. The left fielder, sometimes called the “father of Cuban baseball,” died there two years later.

In the 1890s, Spain was fading from the three islands and America was taking hold, and so soccer, the once popular Spanish sport, fell out of favor and was replaced by the American sport, baseball.

 

A
s in Cuba and the United States, it is not clear where baseball began in the Dominican Republic. Certainly, in the late 1870s baseball-loving Cuban
independentistas
and American baseball enthusiasts met to develop a sugar industry in San Pedro de Macorís. In San Pedro it is said that the first Dominican game was played there in 1886. But many historians and people in Santo Domingo refute this. Sugar makers were not the only Cubans to come to the Dominican Republic, and San Pedro was not their only destination. At the same time that sugar makers were building San Pedro, Ignacio Aloma and his brother Ubaldo came to Santo Domingo. They were ironworkers who built balconies and grillwork. In 1891 they formed two baseball clubs with Cuban and American players and even a few Dominicans. The two teams were known to Dominican fans by their colors, the Rojos and the Azules. Another Cuban started two teams in La Vega, in the north near the Cibao, and they were also known as the Reds and the Blues. In Cuba there were also red and blue teams, but the labels were particularly meaningful in the Dominican Republic, where politics for many decades had revolved around the Red and Blue parties.