The Eastern Stars - Mark Kurlansky [63]
It would take most of a year just to earn one semester’s tuition working near the university in the “free zone.” The original 774,000-square-yard zone, established in 1971 under the same Balaguer development program as the university, soon filled, and a second zone was built. The plan was to allow foreign manufacturers, mostly of clothing but also some jewelry, shoes, and low-technology industrial products, to bring in parts duty-free, have them assembled by inexpensive Dominican labor, and ship them out. The Dominicans didn’t get much for this, but it didn’t cost them much, either. The Dominican government spent little more than $50,000 to build the zone. The companies have been mainly American. Anyone who breathed a word about unions or organizing for better wages would be quickly locked out, and so American manufacturers were provided with very cheap labor and Macorisanos were offered jobs that paid barely a subsistence salary. Once the Dominican peso went into free fall against the dollar in the 1990s, Dominican labor cost Americans less than fifty cents an hour. In the first four years of the twenty-first century, the peso fell again, losing about half its value. In dollar terms it made Dominican workers a bargain, but they had to put in ten- and eleven-hour days to earn enough to survive. It didn’t even create a significant increase in San Pedro port traffic.
The free zone and tourism were cited by Echavaría as “the two main pillars of the San Pedro economy.” Tourism jobs also meant long hours and low wages. A man named José was born in 1959 in a small farming town in the interior of the eastern region. His father owned a very small plot of land on which he grew bananas and a few other crops. They worked hard, but life was cheap and they had enough to eat. In 1980, José left the town and came to San Pedro because he had heard that jobs were available in the free zone. He got a job with an American shoe manufacturer. After twenty years he had worked his way up to supervisor and was earning 800 pesos a week, about $100 a month, which was a high salary for the free zone. “It was very bad pay,” José remembered. “But it was so cheap to live then.”
However, prices started to go up and José’s salary didn’t, and by the year 2000 he was finding it very hard to live on his income as a supervisor for the American shoe company. So, despite the fact that he had only a grade-school education, he taught himself how to speak English in order to get a job in that other pillar of the San Pedro economy: tourism. He got a job as a porter in a beach resort hotel and earned 1,400 pesos a week. But that 1,400 pesos did not go as far as the 800 pesos at the free zone had ten years earlier.
José shrugged. “What could I do?” he said. “I came from a very small town. There was no baseball. I never had the chance to play it.”
Ángel Valera de los Santos, an octogenarian, had been working in City Hall since 1948, when it was a much smaller city with only a few thousand people and few cars.
“Sixty years ago, San Pedro was much more prosperous but there were far fewer opportunities,” he said. “Sugar was the economy. There was no tourism or free zone. There was César Iglesias. But now the wealthy families have all moved to Santo Domingo, where there are more investment opportunities. They all moved when sugar died.”
Many new jobs had been created in San Pedro: driving a motosconcho, working in one of the big stores, such as Jumbo or Iberia, or in the free zone, or in tourism. Politicians liked to boast of the jobs they had brought in and the economic development they had fostered, but in truth most economic development in San Pedro de Macorís meant only the creation of underemployment.
But