The Eastern Stars - Mark Kurlansky [24]
A few years after the games began in 1886, the ingenios started importing Eastern Caribbean cocolos. The cocolos kept not only their own language—English with a West Indian lilt—but their own culture. They drank dark, strong, smooth rum that was steeped in the small fruit of the tropical plant guavaberry, known to science as Myrciaria floribunda. They made soup with the broad-leaved callaloo and served meat or fish with little hard-boiled flour dumplings or a cornmeal mush called fungi. They danced to their own music with their own drums, and on their holidays dressed up with costumes and masks to perform ritual dances of David and Goliath or Wild Indians.
They also had their own sports, and the most popular of these was cricket. Historians argue about the role of cricket in developing baseball in the United States, but there can be no argument about the important role of cricket in developing baseball in San Pedro. The sugar companies simply had to give the cocolos round bats and a new set of rules. They already knew the concepts of hitting, catching, baserunning, pitching, making outs, and scoring runs.
Cricket and then baseball were diversions in very hard lives. In a land once called Mosquito, malaria was rampant. So was leprosy, the disease that killed the poet Gastón Deligne. With the bad water supply of the bateys, dysentery was a frequent problem. The diet of most of the workers did not include sufficient nutrition for the twelve-hour shifts during the zafra. Serious injuries from the machinery in the mills or machetes in the field were frequent. If an injury such as loss of a limb meant that the laborer was no longer eligible for work, he received no compensation.
Coming from a different world and with a limited but better education, cocolos knew about things that Dominicans had never heard of, such as labor struggles and black people organizing. Marcus Garvey, born in Jamaica in 1887 and a forerunner of the Black Power movement, was organizing black people all over the English-speaking world, and he did not forget about the cocolos of San Pedro de Macorís. In 1919, Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association sent an organizer. Within months they had their own building in San Pedro, and within a year San Pedro was the center of an important Dominican chapter of the Garvey movement with more than a thousand members. Garvey promoted the idea of black people reuniting in Africa, and many of the cocolos talked about how they would soon be leaving the sugar mills and going to the continent of their ancestors. During the 1921 zafra, cocolos went on a strike that was quickly crushed.
The cocolos were a well-organized society, and one of the keys to that organization was a network of cricket clubs. They made their own white uniforms. But the mills were more interested in baseball. They sometimes even paid cricket players for baseball. No one paid for cricket. By the 1920s baseball had largely replaced cricket, and many of the fields where they had played it became baseball diamonds.
During the zafra, sugar workers only worked and slept, but the other six months of the year, the dead season, they had time for baseball. This free time corresponded more with the American summer baseball schedule than the winter schedule that became traditional in the rest of the Dominican Republic and the other Caribbean islands. The mills would each sponsor a team with uniforms and equipment and they would play regionales against the other mill teams. Some mills, especially Consuelo, would have so many gifted players that the team couldn’t use them all and would send a few to other mills. Several, such as Alfredo “Chico” Contón, went to play in Cuba or Puerto Rico or even the Dominican Winter League, once it started. But none of these tremendously talented players was going to the major leagues because the leagues did not hire black players.
The sugar-mill players of San Pedro were even separate from La Vega and Santo Domingo players as well as Cubans and Puerto Ricans, because all those other