The Eastern Stars - Mark Kurlansky [2]
The road alongside the stadium goes straight north—a rutted pockmarked remnant of the once paved two-lane route that has hosted too many trucks, which now dangerously zigzag around potholes. The road leads through the rural zone that is still San Pedro to whole villages that have grown up around the mills after which they were named: Angelina, Consuelo, Santa Fe . . . Soon—still in San Pedro—the road seems like a causeway over a vast vegetable sea with lapping silver and green waves of sugarcane. Some already-cleared fields look as if they had gotten bad haircuts. Leggy white birds called galsas graze there until sunset, when they nest in the trees at the fields’ edges.
At lunchtime the galsas were still in the fields and the cane cutters in Consuelo were under the trees, resting in the shade from a broiling midday sun. Cutting cane is the worst job in the Dominican Republic, the hardest work for the least pay. It has always been said that no Dominican would ever do such work—never even want to be seen doing it. Desperate people from other sugar-producing islands with dying sugar industries were brought in to cut the cane. And so places like Consuelo have a polyglot culture with West Indian English and Haitian Creole as commonly spoken as Spanish and often mixed in the same sentence.
But that was in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when the Dominican Republic was an underpopulated country with a booming sugar industry. Today it is the reverse, and the job market is becoming desperate. In this field the resting cane cutters were born Dominican.
No one really cared how long a lunch break they took. They would not stop for long, because they were paid by the ton, not the hour. But they needed some rest, especially while the sun was high.
There were several varieties of cane grown here, and this field had been planted with what is called Angola pata de maco. It is a hard red stalk that takes a mighty whack from a machete, the stroke repeated hundreds of times in the course of a day. But it is not the toughness of the cane that cutters care about: it is the density and water content. Some types of cane are considerably heavier than other types, and a cutter negotiated to get a field like this, with “good cane,” because they were paid by weight.
They were paid 115 pesos for chopping a ton of cane and piling it into open railroad cars with rods along the sides to hold the stalks in. One hundred fifteen pesos was about $3.60 in 2009 dollars. In one day, two cutters working together could fill a car, which held four tons. A locomotive that passed by regularly would haul the car off to the mill. In the sugar industry the Dominican cane cutter, left to do everything himself without the use of machines, is considered one of the least-productive cane cutters in the world. This is not from a lack of work but rather from the intensity of the work. Efficiency of labor, a normal concept in the development of most industry, did not exist in Dominican sugar. Equations such as the number of man-hours to produce a ton of sugar were of little interest to the unregulated adventurers who came to the Dominican Republic to produce sugar. The cost of labor was so low, the quantity of sugar that could be produced so enormous, and the profits so staggering that no one was pondering better means of production. After the initial decades when the sugar men arrived and built their state-of-the-art mills, there was not even a great effort to upgrade equipment.
So, while everywhere else the fields are set on fire so that the leaves burn away before harvesting, in the Dominican Republic the single cutter must chop the tough green stalk close to the ground, then chop it into three equal parts and toss them into a railroad car. In Jamaica, where the cane is burned first and the cane cutter does not do the loading, the cutter averages seven tons a day. A good cutter in San Pedro could cut two tons a day.
Cutters worked from seven in the morning to five at night, but in the middle of the day, when the sun was highest, they needed shade, food, and