The Eastern Stars - Mark Kurlansky [5]
“It’s not so bad if you earn good money,” Dionicio said of the batey he called home. “If you don’t earn much money, it’s hard.” Many of the people in Batey Experimental—especially between zafras, the period known as the “dead time”—didn’t earn anything.
There were not a lot of choices for work in San Pedro de Macorís. Asked how he liked his work, Elio Martínez shook his head emphatically in the negative as though he had just tasted something bitter. Then he quickly added, “But I have to earn money.”
Not everyone in San Pedro cut cane. Some worked in the sugar mills. Some were fishermen. Some sold oranges and some drove motoconchos. Some played baseball, which was increasingly what San Pedro was known for, now that the sugar industry was dying.
Sugar and baseball had exchanged places. A town where some baseball was played but was known in the world only by the sugar industry had become a town with some sugar that was known in the world chiefly by baseball organizations and fans. The sugar town of San Pedro had become San Pedro the baseball town. It was, of course, also a place where people wrote poetry, fell in love, raised children, built good and bad marriages, fished the sea, grew other crops, had shops and businesses—even played other sports, such as basketball and boxing. But it was San Pedro’s fate to be known in the world for only one thing at a time. That a town of this size would achieve fame at all in a small, poor country seldom looked at by the rest of the world except when it was invaded is remarkable. A century ago, if San Pedro was mentioned abroad, if there was any response at all, it was likely, “Oh, yes, the sugar place.” Today it is usually, “Oh, yes, that town where all the shortstops come from.”
Back when San Pedro was that sugar town, baseball began in these sugar fields. In San Pedro the history of sugar—a story of poverty and hunger—and the history of baseball—a tale of millionaires—have always been tightly intertwined. It was sugar companies that brought in the game and cricket-playing Eastern Caribbean sugar workers who provided the players. In some cases sugar even supplied the baseball itself, a hardball fashioned from molasses. Later, when the game came to other parts of the country, different balls were used. In Haina, farther down the coast on the other side of Santo Domingo—where the Alous, one of the great baseball-playing families, grew up—there was no sugar but there were lemon groves, and so lemons became balls—not nearly as durable as sugar.
This is a story about making it; about the slight twists and turns that determine success and failure, and how each changes lives—about a world where the right or wrong nod from a coach on a farm team, so called for their obscure American locations, can make the difference between earning a few million dollars a year or going back home and earning a few hundred dollars a year. And that is a difference that determines the lives of more than a dozen family members too. Life is a precarious thing often decided by the strength of an arm, the fluidity of a swing, or the sureness of a gloved hand. Even in San Pedro, not everyone has the talent to be a baseball player. What it most always comes down to in life is how well we play the cards that are dealt us. Like poker, life is a game of skill that stems from luck. It does not come as a revelation to most of us that life is essentially unfair. That is why we so admire the ones who play it well.
Throughout the Caribbean, the poor live on dreams. Generation after generation goes by and the hard life gets no easier. But there is always hope.