The Eastern Stars (18 page)

The cathedral was perfectly maintained, and so fresh and bedecked with bobbles and swirls that it looked as though it would melt in the tropical heat. It was the tallest, whitest thing around, the steeple looking almost electric in the hard sun with a black afternoon storm sky in the background. And the yellow City Hall still looked as decorated as the gooey piped cakes displayed under glass at the pastry shops.

And there was modern concrete, the innovation San Pedro is proud to have introduced to the Dominican Republic. Since that first concrete structure went up, many more followed, including four big chain department stores, office buildings, apartment buildings, and, inexplicably, numerous shoe stores—none more than a few stories high.

The port, where seaplanes once landed and sugar once was shipped but was now barely used, filled a long swath of riverfront with abandoned hangars and warehouses. The Parque Central, or Central Park, on the other hand, was still the social center it was intended to be. Between street vendors, sidewalk musicians, people taking a break and those with simply nothing to do, this square of palms and local tropical trees and plants was never empty.

Across from the park was a popular restaurant, Amable, which specialized in
pasteles en hojas
and
batidas de lechosa.
With its plastic chairs and tables, it looked like a fast-food restaurant except that it was decorated with San Pedro paintings and sculptures. Macorisanos would tell you with their local pride that the
pasteles
were a local specialty. They were either mashed cassava root or ground bananas filled with meat and steamed in banana leaves. In fact they were tamales, a food invented in central and southern Mexico by an indigenous people—anthropologists disagree about which one—long before the arrival of the Spanish. After the Cubans got tamales, they brought them—as well as sugar and baseball—to San Pedro, where they became part of local life.
Batidas de lechosa
, papaya milk shakes with lots of sugar, probably did not originate locally, either, although the word
lechosa
for papaya is authentically and uniquely Dominican.

The clearest expression of a unique San Pedro culture is the
cocolos
, who are sometimes heard singing their Afro-Caribbean music in the Parque Central. The
cocolos
also maintained a dance troupe, which was what was being honored by the statue of the man with the feather headdress on the crab-infested platform at the entrance to town.

The troupe was led by Donald Warner Henderson, nicknamed Linda, a mischievous little seventy-six-year-old man with glasses, a West Indian lilt to his English, and a wry sense of humor. His father was from Antigua and his mother Saint Kitts. Both came to San Pedro for work in the cane fields at age twenty-four. Linda’s father cut cane on various estates, but Linda himself was a tinsmith by trade and noticeably proud that he had never worked in the cane fields.

The
cocolo
dances of San Pedro came from Antigua, Nevis, and Tortola and were passed down through families. Linda’s father had danced traditional dances in Antigua. In the British West Indies they would dance on Christmas Day. “Christmas belongs to us and Christmas eve belongs to Dominicans,” he explained. “On Christmas eve we serenade and Dominicans eat and drink.”

The
cocolos
also perform their dances on February 27, the national holiday—which, interestingly, celebrates independence not from Spain but from Haiti, which withdrew its occupation forces on February 27, 1844.

The most colorful and famous dance costume, the Guloya, featured in the sculpture at the entrance to town, is misunderstood by the non-
cocolos
of San Pedro. Guloyas are Goliaths who combat Davids in a different
cocolo
dance. The dancers with feather headdresses are Indians for a dance called Los Indios Salvajes in which
cocolos
dress like Indians and dance around waving tomahawks—just one of many aspects of Caribbean culture that Americans would find politically incorrect. But the Spanish didn’t leave any Indians to protest. The wild Indians seem to wear as many colors as they can find, with their beaded masks with long black pigtails, beaded costumes with capes, tall peacock feather headdresses, and painted tomahawks.

Many other dances are in their repertoire, including one, believed to be of English origin, in which a man goes out to gather wood for a fire, then comes home to find his wife with another man, whom he chases with a stick. Traditionally, none of the dancers are supposed to be identified until evening, when the masks are taken off. But in reality many of the
cocolo
dancers sit around in their beads without masks, getting so drunk before the dance begins—traditionally on guavaberry, but shots of rum work well, too—that they are well exposed before they ever get their masks on.

Cocolo
music is African and is performed using a snare drum, a larger drum, a wooden flute, and triangles. The dances are clearly African as well.
Cocolos
, who have such a distinctive presence in San Pedro culture, are always the stars of these fiestas; but the other Dominicans also celebrate, often wearing bull masks and chasing people in the crowds. Women do wild things with toothpicks spiking out of their hair, and some men wear fetching gowns. In fact, if you look closely in the bars, which spill out onto the streets, many of the women could use closer shaves. Macorisanos of Haitian origin crowd close together in the street for African slow dancing. No one gets more out of a small, slow movement than a Haitian dancer. There is always a Fidel Castro or two and a few Zorros on horseback. Young people come in from the
bateys
on horseback. It’s surprising that the fast and loud, buzzing motorbikes and merengue blasting from trucks don’t panic the horses, but Dominican horses, like Dominican people, are used to noise.

Cocolo
food is Eastern Caribbean, which is also a bit African and has had a huge influence on San Pedro. They eat salted fish—not the imported salt cod of their English islands but cured local fish—as well as pigeon peas, which come from Africa; calaloo, the broad leaves of a tuber, which are cooked like a spinach soup; and
fungi
, the Eastern Caribbean corn dish. Although corn is one of the few indigenous pre-Columbian Caribbean foods, the name for the dish is African. On some islands it is
funchi
, and if okra—which is also African—is added, it is called
coo-coo
. Rincón Cocolo, a restaurant of a few tables in a small room painted green in downtown San Pedro, specialized in these dishes, most of which are unknown in the Dominican Republic outside of San Pedro.

Gladys María José was born in San Pedro in 1923. Her father was Haitian and her mother was from Dominica. Her mother died when she was very young. Her father came to cut cane and stayed illegally, making up the name José for her because he was afraid that with his foreign family name she might be deported. She was the cook at Rincón Cocolo and she gave this recipe for
fungi
:

Cocolo
cooking, like drinking guavaberry and playing
plaquita
, has become a part of San Pedro life adopted by the rest of the population. Almost every housewife in San Pedro makes
pescado y domplin
. The
domplin
, or
dumplin
, pronounced “doompleen,” is the typical British Caribbean dumpling served from Jamaica to Saint Kitts: a heavy little ball made from flour and water. If a town can have its own dish, this would be San Pedro’s. Most Macorisanos do not know that
domplin
is from an English-language word.

 

L
inda was born in a neighborhood called Miramar, meaning “see the sea,” which is literally true. Because San Pedro’s waterfront was on the river, the side facing the Caribbean Sea was an undeveloped back barrio where poor people, many of them sugar workers, lived. Miramar has produced a number of major-league players in recent years, including catcher Ángel Peña, infielder Fernando Tatis, pitcher Lorenzo Barceló, and outfielder Luis Mercedes. They played on the streets. Tatis described tearing up blankets to make balls: “We tore blankets in strips and rolled them tight and sewed them together. We loved baseball so much, we would play with anything.” Miramar is no longer poor. In the 1960s, in the push to make San Pedro more tourist friendly, a broad boulevard was built by the oceanfront where a rocky coral coast leads to a perfect, bright Caribbean Sea, blue for miles on a good day. Like the longer seaside boulevard in Santo Domingo and the one in Havana, it is called the Malecón.

A whole other town grew by the Malecón. There was a huge and sumptuous school of hotel management, clean and well-presented private schools, government buildings, well-kept modern apartment buildings, and gardened, one-story, California-style ranch houses. It became an expensive neighborhood. Even water and electricity cost more, and few could afford to live there. Much of this neighborhood was oddly deserted. The clean and well-paved streets were empty. In an otherwise bustling town, this center was devoid of cars: even the ubiquitous scooters and motorcycles of the rest of the town, and the rest of the Dominican Republic, were absent. There were not even pedestrians.

Tourism settled into the beaches outside of town. Only a few tourists came in for a brief walk around the park and a look at the cathedral. The Malecón was for locals: a quiet stretch of oceanfront by day with a few coconut or sugarcane vendors. Past the coral rocks and the palm trees was a postcard-perfect vista of a turquoise and cobalt-blue Caribbean Sea interrupted only by a few local touches, such as the rusting carcasses of ships wrecked in storms and, perched dramatically on a rock above the sea, an outhouse, because a lot of Presidente beer was consumed at night along the Malecón. After dark it was
the
place, with merengue exploding from phenomenally powerful speakers that rattled the windows in the nearby hotel, the only attempt at a business- or tourist-class hotel in town. The music came from many clubs, one of the most popular of which, the Café Caribe, was owned by Alfredo Griffin. The sad
bachata
ballads were for earlier hours. At night, merengue was still the music.

Macorisanos came every night until late, on foot, on scooters, by car—whatever they had—and cruised the Malecón, the women dressed in tight, sparkling fantastic clothes contrasting with a lot of exposed skin of every color, the men drinking and looking. If you had a car, you could do the “Malecón crawl,” driving five or ten miles an hour, checking everything and everyone out.

 

T
raveling north from downtown most hours of the day, the traffic was crammed into unmarked lanes—as many lanes as would fit. Mixed in with ailing buses coughing black smoke, trucks, and cars were carts pulled by those lean and fearless Dominican horses.

There were traffic lights, but they didn’t always work. The rule was to drive up to them and see if anything happened, then the bravest started through first. The system worked so well it made you wonder if towns really need traffic lights.

Anyone with a car who stopped at a traffic light was quickly swarmed by
tigres
—local boys who washed windshields and demanded pay. They were a little gentler than the
tigres
of Santa Domingo, and they tried to do a good job on the windshields before the light changed. They were hardworking, enterprising youths earning pennies on a hot afternoon, looking for some way to survive other than crime. Another possibility was to work the Parque Central or the Malecón with a shoeshine kit, as Sammy Sosa did as a boy. But with the popularity of canvas sports shoes, that was getting to be an even tougher business. Another possibility was to go to the rural outskirts and get some cane, oranges, plantains, or other produce to sell on the street.

On Calle 27 in San Pedro, the neighborhood Rico Carty brought electricity to when he built his own house, a row of mansions sprang up. A large Mediterranean-style house that somehow ended up looking more like a Pizza Hut was the home of George Bell. Alfredo Griffin’s house was there. Joaquín Andújar also had a large house, but either out of modesty or for reasons of security, it was hidden behind a wall. The neighborhood used to be known as a baseball player’s ghetto, but Bell and Andújar lost their houses in divorces. Still, the houses stood as a reminder to young
tigres
of what a major-league career could do for them.

Nearby, on Calle Duverge, was a sprawling two-story building with balconies, an ornate gate, and seemingly the largest satellite dish in San Pedro—the house Sammy Sosa built for his mother. Also nearby was Plaza 30/30, a small, three-story, horseshoe-shaped, turquoise-colored shopping center with pricey shops built by Sammy Sosa in 1996. Actually it said PLA 30/30, because the sign had lost its ZA. The name referred to Sosa’s 1993 season, in which he hit thirty-three home runs and stole thirty-six bases. Two years later he hit thirty-six home runs and stole thirty-four bases in the same season. As of 2009, there had been fifty-two “30/30” players—those who have hit at least thirty home runs and stolen at least thirty bases in a single season—starting with Ken Williams’s thirty-nine home runs and thirty-seven stolen bases in 1922. Despite the arbitrariness of the figures, it is considered a distinction to be a 30/30 player, because home runs are the ultimate baseball test of strength, usually hit by large, burly men, and base stealing is the ultimate test of speed, usually performed by smaller, lithe men. Few players have both the speed to steal bases and the strength to hit home runs. But Sosa’s record of having done it twice does not even stand in San Pedro, since Alfonso Soriano, born in the sugar-mill barrio of Quisqueya, debuting in 2002 for the Yankees, did it four consecutive seasons. In 2006, Soriano hit forty-six home runs and stole forty-one bases, becoming one of only four 40/40 players. In fact, the same year he hit more than forty doubles, so he became the first 40/40/40 player in major-league history. This statistic, which is cited more often in San Pedro than anywhere else, demonstrates nothing as much as baseball’s unending thirst for statistics and records.