The Eastern Stars - Mark Kurlansky [57]
A Macorisano who had been away for only a decade would immediately notice the difference on returning to his hometown. He would drive in from the capital on a wide, well-paved four-lane highway built in 2006 to enable tourists to get from the airport to the beach resorts of Guayacanes and Juan Dolio. The coastline leading into San Pedro offered a Caribbean Sea like blue agate, sheltered by coral reefs that made fine-sand beaches. Juan Dolio and especially Guayacanes were originally fishing communities where the fishermen launched their open boats from the beach—some under oar power, others with outboard engines.
Typical of Dominican history, there are two competing versions of the origin of the name Juan Dolio. It is at least agreed that no such person ever existed. It either is a bastardization of the term juego de lengua, tongue twister, or—the more logical and therefore less preferred version—comes from juando, or conch, one of the many pastel shells in a variety of intriguing forms that wash up on the beach.
In the 1980s, when there were not many Dominican resorts, weekend recreation spots were built here for affluent people from the capital. A ferry ran between Santo Domingo, San Pedro, and Puerto Rico. A highway wasn’t needed until the resorts began to attract better-paying foreigners. It has been Dominican policy to develop beach resorts with fast access to and from a nearby airport so that visitors see as little of the country as possible. The Santo Domingo airport, located halfway between the capital and San Pedro, would be close enough. To get to the hotels, the visitor had only to turn off the highway and travel for a brief stretch through a pretty, wooded zone via a washed-out narrow two-lane road that Dominicans used to drive on to get to the hotels. The road became full of such enormous potholes that the speed bumps placed before each hotel entrance seemed unnecessary.
While the streets of San Pedro were choked in traffic, the new four-lane highway leading to it was usually lightly traveled because it was designed for more traffic than tourism created. Most of the tourists did not even rent cars. Those who did steered around slow, lumbering buses and buzzing motor scooters, the primary methods of transportation for most Dominicans. The scooters were so underpowered that they often used the wide shoulders of the highway. Only a few affluent Dominicans, many of them baseball players, sped by in their SUVs.
When it was zafra time, that became evident by the cane trucks swaying down the highway, flatulent with black smoke, and by the smoke clouds puffing out of the two tall stacks of Ingenio Cristóbal Colón just outside of town. Some things never change. But upon exiting the highway and climbing the pockmarked pavement of the bridge over the Río Higuamo—still wide and muddy, with thickly grown tropical banks, the white steeple of the cathedral visible in the distance—the traveler encountered something surprising at the entrance to town.
Here was a poor and crumbling neighborhood known as Placer Bonita that had produced numerous major-league players, including the pitcher Josias Manzanillo, infielder Juan Castillo, and pitcher Salomón Torres. In the middle of this dilapidated old barrio was what appeared to be a huge stage announced by high steel arches. It was a sculpture commissioned by the city from artist José Ignacio Morales for almost seven million pesos—which, thanks to a bad exchange rate, was only slightly more than $200,000 but was nevertheless a serious expenditure for a Dominican town.
In this work—erected in 2006, the same year the highway into town was built—the artist seemed to exhibit a documentarian