The Eastern Stars Read Free

be tied to the cage and not the bottle. They tried it his way and the pigeons returned, but they were now too cautious to chance going under the cage.
    The three men joked about eating the pigeons they caught. But they weren’t eating them, just keeping them in a large cage as pets. It was just for fun. Manny Alexander laughed. “That’s why the Dominican Republic is so good: we’re free here,” he said.
     
    B ack in the Consuelo cane field, Dionicio Morales, known to cane cutters as Bienvenido, which means Welcome, strolled sleepily over to the wagon for his lunch. He was not as lean as Elio and the others resting under the trees. A slight paunch indicated a somewhat better position in life. The son of a Haitian father and Dominican mother, he was the exact same age as Elio but had six more years’ experience. He had started in the cane fields when he was ten years old. “I’ve done every job,” he said, but it sounded more like a complaint than a boast. “I cut, I planted, I cleaned fields.”
    Now Dionicio was a field supervisor, on this day in charge of the handful of weary cutters resting in this field. He earned 8,000 pesos a month, about $250, which worked out to about a dollar more a day than a cutter who averaged two tons. But he had the luxury of a stable salary, at least during the four-month zafra . In the mid-twentieth century his father crossed the island from Haiti to cut cane for three cents a ton. Dionicio remembers those even harder days when only a dirt trail led from Consuelo into town, and sugar people never left the fields. The sugar companies provided housing in the fields in little villages called bateys , a word that before the Spanish came to this country was the name of a ball game. Field workers and their families lived there and bought supplies and food from the company store, which gave them credit. These purchases ended up consuming most or all of their meager pay. If the cane workers wanted their children to go to school, the children had to walk for miles, but this was a considerable improvement over earlier times when there was simply no school. The major difference was that with the paved road, the baseball stadium in the center of San Pedro was only fifteen minutes away. The cutters still owned no transportation. But for the amount of money they earned cutting a few hundred pounds of cane—a few pesos—they could get a ride into the center of town on the back of a motor scooter. This was the leading form of transportation in San Pedro, known as a motoconcho .
    Dionicio and Elio both lived, along with a few hundred other families of field workers, near this field in the Batey Experimental. The workers there did not live in barracks, as in some of the worst bateys , but in separate tin-roofed concrete houses with one to three small rooms. From time to time running water and electricity functioned. Families grew some of their own food in the bateys , especially plántanos , cassava root, which was known here as yucca, and pigeon peas—all Caribbean staples that were easy to grow. Some made extra money by buying oranges and selling them along the unpaved streets of the batey .
    “It’s not so bad if you earn good money,” Dionicio said of the batey he called home. “If you don’t earn much money, it’s hard.” Many of the people in Batey Experimental—especially between zafras , the period known as the “dead time”—didn’t earn anything.
    There were not a lot of choices for work in San Pedro de Macorís. Asked how he liked his work, Elio Martínez shook his head emphatically in the negative as though he had just tasted something bitter. Then he quickly added, “But I have to earn money.”
    Not everyone in San Pedro cut cane. Some worked in the sugar mills. Some were fishermen. Some sold oranges and some drove motoconchos . Some played baseball, which was increasingly what San Pedro was known for, now that the sugar industry was dying.
    Sugar and baseball had