The Eastern Stars - Mark Kurlansky [56]
Inside, one of the crushing machines was stamped Farrel Foundry and Machine Co., Ansonia, Conn., 1912. After the 1950s, parts were no longer available for these monsters, stories high, with teeth, shafts, and belts. Now Consuelo had its own machine shop with lathes and other machinist’s tools where parts were made to keep these antiques running. Nor did they depend on the vagaries of Dominican utilities: Consuelo had its own power plant. A generation earlier, this had been the leading San Pedro mill, and once the zafra began, there could be no stopping, night or day, for eight months. But now the company struggled to stay running for four months.
At a small street bar, just a shed by the side of the road, two men were having coffee—good strong Dominican coffee that tasted as though half the sugar of Consuelo had been dumped in it. People in sugar towns eat sugar. They start sucking on cane stalks as children and develop a sugar-craving palate.
The man behind the bar spoke Creole because his father had come to Consuelo to cut cane from Haiti. The only other customer spoke English because his father had come to Consuelo to cut cane from Saint Kitts. He had been a sugar maker, sometimes called a chemist: the man who supervised the actual boiling and making.
Did that job pay well?
“No, the only job in a sugar mill that pays well is owner.”
Despite their different languages, they understood each other and asked a question that was still frequently asked in San Pedro: Why wasn’t sugar profitable anymore? “I don’t know what happened,” said the one who spoke Creole.
“I know,” said the other in English. “There used to be money in sugar.”
There was not much money in sugar anymore, and so there were not many jobs in it, although Consuelo now had 45,000 residents—which was more than all of San Pedro had when there was a lot of money in sugar. Much of Consuelo was still a village of small one-story pastel houses set close to each other, gardened with tropical plants and shrubs. Some of the few paved streets even had sidewalks. It was a tidy, orderly town where people took pride in their homes despite the fact that there really wasn’t any work. They had not been living any better when there was.
One of the leading economic activities in this neighborhood, a short distance from the main town, was to drive a motoconcho and charge passengers to cling precariously behind as the scooter sped over and around potholes. The noisy two-wheelers swarmed around Consuelo like flies on old meat.
Fortunately, most families in Consuelo had relatives outside of the country who shipped them money. This was not unusual. It was estimated that more than ten percent of the Dominican population lived in the United States. Large-scale immigration began in 1966, when Balaguer, with the help of U.S. troops, got back into power and began killing supporters of Juan Bosch and the left. It continued at a rate of about 150,000 a year. Dominicans often speak disparagingly of these Dom Yors, sometimes calling them encadenados (people in chains) because of the New York street fashion of wearing gaudy gold chains. But communities like Consuelo could not survive without them. In New York and around the United States, establishments whose only business was wiring money to relatives in the Dominican Republic sent several million dollars every day.
One of the important mills of the Dominican Republic’s sugar-based economy had been Santa Fe, which was now closed, although people still lived in the surrounding shacks, where sugar workers had been housed. Narrow dirt alleys separated the shacks, and garbage heaps were everywhere. Children played on them. Bit by bit, the mill was vanishing. The unemployed sugar workers who still lived in Santa Fe, George Bell’s old neighborhood