The Eastern Stars - Mark Kurlansky [62]
Nevertheless, Sammy Sosa was the first player in San Pedro to have a shopping mall named after his statistics. There was little doubt about whose shopping mall it was, since in the center, where the bougainvilleas grew, was a fountain and in the fountain stood a full-color statue of Sosa at bat. The statue wasn’t recognizable as Sammy, but it wore a number 21 Chicago Cubs uniform. Also in the mall was a discotheque named the Sammy Club Disco.
Many of the streets of San Pedro were unpaved, or the pavement was so badly crumbling that they were in the process of unpaving. Like all Caribbean towns, San Pedro smelled of overripe fruit and burning charcoal. More English language—the language of both cocolos and baseball—was heard here than in other Dominican towns. Many of the stores had English names, such as the downtown salon called the Hair Gallery.
San Pedro’s commerce spilled onto the street from the kind of one-story Latin American concrete architecture that tried to avoid drabness by being painted in the industrial color palette used in the making of Popsicles. In the end, most of these newer buildings resembled dirty bubble gum. The metal grating on every door and window made the houses look like smiling teenagers with their braces showing. The gratings were to lock out criminals. Street crime, robberies, break-ins, and muggings in this century became an unprecedented problem everywhere in the Dominican Republic. It was worse in Santo Domingo, but it had become serious enough in San Pedro for Mayor Echavaría to consider it his leading problem.
Young people were not finding a way to earn a living. The problem shifted from unemployment to underemployment. In recent years, inflation soared and the currency plunged, and most of those who found work still did not have enough money to meet their needs. It used to be, in this area of agriculture, cattle ranching, ubiquitous small-scale farming, and fishing, that even a poor person ate because food was cheap. Now, for the first time, people were struggling to buy enough to eat.
The Dominican government provides few safety nets for the poor. Juan Bosch and José Francisco Peña Gómez had called for such programs but never had a chance to implement them. Once in power, Leonel Fernández, Juan Bosch’s protégé, abandoned such ideas and instead developed an infrastructure for foreign investment, declaring that he was making the Dominican Republic “the Singapore of the Caribbean.” He garnered some popularity by stabilizing the economy. Because Fernández was barred by law from a second term, the opposition under Hipólito Mejía came to power on the promise of social programs and did manage to increase spending on education and social services, including the country’s first government-financed retirement program. Wanting to do more, he used his legislative majority to end the term limit, and this allowed Fernández to come back and defeat him, using his next presidency to build still more infrastructure, such as new highways, but without the growth in social programs or the economic stability he had achieved in his first term. A poor Dominican still had to live by his wits to survive.
Traffic moved slowly around potholes, past tigres and uncertain traffic lights from the statue at the entrance to town past the Tetelo Vargas Stadium, which, like the Catholic churches of old, was never closed. The almost gridlocked street curved past all the low-ceilinged chicken restaurants, their large-screen televisions showing baseball games. Plastic chairs scattered on the street with the smell of fried chicken, plantains, yucca, and rum. The street then wound by a sprawling fenced-off landscaped area. It was the campus of the Universidad Central del Este, which, since its founding in 1970, had become one of the biggest changes in San Pedro.
For only 9,000 pesos a semester, a little less than $300, a student could become a teacher. To become a doctor