The Eastern Stars - Mark Kurlansky [1]
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A MIS VIEJOS AMIGOS EL PUEBLO DOMINIC ANO, EN LA ESPERANZA QUE UN DÍA ENCUENTRE LA JUSTICIA Y PROSPERIDAD QUE USTED SE MERECE
AND FOR TALIA FEIGA, WHOSE GREAT HEART IS BIG AS A MOUNTAIN
(¡Tanto arrojo en la lucha irremediable
Y aún no hay quien lo sepa!
¡Tanto acero y fulgor de resistir
Y aún no hay quien lo vea!)
(So much daring in the unresolvable struggle
Even though there is no one who knows it!
So much steel and flashing in resistance
Even though there is no one who sees it!)
—Pedro Mir, “Si Alguien Quiere Saber Cuál Es Mi Patria” “If Someone Wants to Know Which Country Is Mine”
PROLOGUE
Gracias, Presidente
This is a book about what is known in America as “making it.” And like all such tales, it is also a story about not making it. In this Dominican town, San Pedro de Macorís, the difference between making it and not making it is usually baseball.
If you do not make it, there is sugarcane—but only for half the year. Sometime between Christmas and the Dominican national holiday on February 27, depending on how rainy the summer was, the pendones—white feathery shoots—appear above the rippling green cane fields of San Pedro de Macorís. In the English-speaking islands of the Caribbean, where many of the families of San Pedro’s sugar workers originated, the field is said to be “in arrow” because the pendones point upward. It means that the sugarcane is ripe for cutting and the cane harvest, the zafra, can begin.
It is an exciting moment, because most people who work in sugar here have employment only during the four to six months of the zafra. In an election year, such as 2008, at the beginning of the harvest a sign goes up at the Porvenir sugar mill, which is controlled by the ruling party. It says, “Gracias, Presidente, por una nueva zafra,” Thank you, President, for a new cane harvest, as though he, Leonel Fernández, the New York-educated caudillo—running again as he had in 2004 and in 1996, which was the last time Dominicans believed he offered anything new, his face on posters everywhere with the smile of an encyclopedia salesman—had personally caused the sugarcane to grow.
Some of the San Pedro mills—Santa Fe, Angelina, Puerto Rico, and Las Pajas—no longer operate. Four working mills remain, though not at full capacity: Quisqueya, Consuelo, Cristóbal Colón, and Porvenir. When the zafra is on, red glows can be seen from San Pedro along the northern horizon where the mill fires burn all night, cooking down cane juice. Porvenir, which in Spanish means “future,” was originally on the edge of the city like the others, but the town grew around it and now trucks full of grape-red sticks of cane must drive through the traffic-clogged center of town to deliver to the mill.
Street kids, the ones who survive by shining shoes or washing the windshields of the cars that stop at traffic lights, run behind the trucks and pull off canes to suck. Sometimes they hold a stick of cane in a batter’s stance. On the street, San Pedro boys regularly coil into a batter’s stance anyway. Having a stick in hand, some can’t resist taking a practice swing with a small rock—a dangerous habit in the crowded parts of town. But if they were to make a mistake and hit a rich man’s shiny large SUV, chances are the wealthy driver hiding behind the smoked glass would be a baseball player who not that many years before had himself been whacking around stones with a stalk of sugarcane.
The road out of town that leads to the other mills begins at the green, white, and ocher Estadio Tetelo Vargas, home of the Estrellas Orientales, the Eastern Stars. San Pedro’s long-suffering and always promising baseball team, founded in 1910, is older than many of the major-league clubs in America. With a center-field wall at 385 feet, Tetelo Vargas is a major-league-size field, though with fewer seats, more like a Triple A stadium. Behind the outfield wall, the drooping fronds of tall palms can be seen, and in the distance, sticking up behind right field, the smokestack of Porvenir.