The Eastern Stars - Mark Kurlansky [55]
San Pedro de Macorís entered the twenty-first century in the town’s third reincarnation. Originally it was a rural fishing town, then it turned into a booming sugar center, then it became the wretchedly poor failed sugar town of the Trujillo years, when baseball was the only respite from the mills and the only way out for a lucky few. Then came the fourth reincarnation, in which San Pedro had a slightly more developed economy and baseball was no longer the only alternative to sugar, just the only good one.
Sugar was still there, but it was now secondary to employers such as CEMEX and César Iglesias, an old San Pedro factory making soap, flour, and butter that had eight thousand workers.
The Porvenir mill was off a street in central San Pedro. It used to be in the northern rural area like Consuelo. But the town—which, like the country, tripled in population in a generation—grew around Porvenir just as it may eventually grow past Consuelo. That is what is happening in the Dominican Republic: more and more rural areas are being taken over by the shacks of urban sprawl. Already a grid of dirt roads with modest concrete houses with corrugated metal roofing had spread north of Porvenir.
The mill itself, Porvenir, “Future,” was a shack, albeit a large one five or six stories high but mostly slapped together with the ubiquitous Caribbean building material, corrugated metal. It was dark inside, but hot white rays of sunlight shot through seams in the metal skin, slashing across the huge dark space at dramatic angles. Workers who stood on top of a two-story-high tank for cane juice could look longingly at a ball field where young signed prospects trained for the Pittsburgh Pirates.
The tall, dark shed housed monstrous nineteenth-century cast-iron machinery: two-story-high cogwheels with menacing teeth for cane crushing; wood-burning furnaces for cooking the juice, stacks of chopped trees at the ready; tall cane elevators; and huge conveyor belts.
All this for what was now four months of operation a year. Some of the better jobs lasted six months. Some workers earned 20 pesos an hour to clean machines and others 800 pesos a month to supervise. Some workers had nothing to do at all. Porvenir was controlled by the ruling Dominican Liberation Party, the PLD, and party members in good standing could get paid to do absolutely nothing. And some of those jobs were year-round. Killing time, unlike cane crushing, is not seasonal. And so some workers were at the mill in the dead season, showing up every day, sitting around, sometimes gratefully wearing purple hats, the party color, with a picture of Leonel Fernández on them because they did have reason to say “ Gracias, Presidente.”
Guards stood at a chain-link gate manipulating a thick chain and a padlock, letting people in and out as though the era of Trujillo were still alive and well at the sugar mill. A woman worker wanted to go out, explaining that she had a family emergency, and the guard told her that if she left she would not be let back in until the next day, thereby forfeiting a day’s wages.
In a good year, when there was not much rain, Porvenir produced forty-two tons of sugar in its four-month operation. In Brazil the waste from crushed cane, biomass, fueled cane ethanol production to meet most of the country’s energy needs. But in the Dominican Republic, which did not produce ethanol and ran on expensive imported oil, a little biomass was sold to paper mills and the rest was just burned as scrap.
Twenty-first-century Consuelo still looked like a village: most streets were unpaved, and two-story buildings stood out. The mill in Consuelo, more spacious than Porvenir, was set in an immense area of weed-covered lots and, like Porvenir, was covered in corrugated metal several stories high. The mill was fenced off and surrounded by a dirt road.