On the 11th and 12th, we went down to Santo Domingo for the weekend. Santo Domingo is about two and a half hours south of Santiago on the Caribbean. It is the oldest colonial city in the New World. We also visited some plantations.
In the morning on Friday, we went to the Vicini Sugar Company, which is the second largest sugar company in the DR. The guy in charge of community relations showed us around the Bateys and plantations and showed us the improvements they have been making in worker welfare. Bateys are the small communities that are owned by the company where the Haitian workers live. Most of the workers are Haitian, because they will work for lower wages (about a dollar or two a day) and most Dominicans consider sugar can cutting beneath them. This is actually a huge controversy in the DR and has been going on for over a hundred years.
The plantations are massive, and they cover a good portion of the eastern side of the Island. The Bateys are located pretty far apart from each other. I believe we drove about an hour to get to the first one. The rest were about 30 minutes apart from each other. Most of the Bateys have about 10-20 families that live there. Most of them are company workers, but some are squatters. So when people move out, they demolish the house as soon as they leave. Otherwise, a new family would be living their within hours.
The company is working on building schools and medical clinics to improve the lives of its workers. They are in the first stages of building retirement homes for the older workers, but most of them won't want to move there because they have lived in the Batey their whole life. Another thing is that most of the people in the Bateys don't legally exist. Alot of the Haitian workers are undocumented or had their papers torn up when they came to the DR. Most of the children don't have birth certificates because their parents don't have papers, or it is too expensive and too big of a hassle to get one when they are born. This makes it hard for people to ever leave the Bateys for work or return to Haiti.
One of the cool things we saw was the first ever "mega-batey" in the world. The company is building a batey for 130 families. They are doing this because its cheaper to offer education and medical services when all the workers live in the same area. The roads were actually paved and had street lights. There was also a large school and two churches (one catholic and one protestant). This company is getting alot of grief from other companies because they are investing so much into the welfare of the workers.
Because the US limits its imports of sugar from the DR, the company has started to diversify to fruit. One of the plantations we went to grew pineapple, or piñas. Amazingly pineapples are grown on plants, not trees. It was on the weirdest things I've seen. I really thought they grew on trees, but they don't.
We got to try some fresh pineapples right off the plant. They were so good. Way better than what we get in the US. We also had fermented pineapple that was riper than what they sell in the US. It was so much sweeter than regular pine apple. It also had a really dark golden color to it.
In the morning on Friday, we went to the Vicini Sugar Company, which is the second largest sugar company in the DR. The guy in charge of community relations showed us around the Bateys and plantations and showed us the improvements they have been making in worker welfare. Bateys are the small communities that are owned by the company where the Haitian workers live. Most of the workers are Haitian, because they will work for lower wages (about a dollar or two a day) and most Dominicans consider sugar can cutting beneath them. This is actually a huge controversy in the DR and has been going on for over a hundred years.
The plantations are massive, and they cover a good portion of the eastern side of the Island. The Bateys are located pretty far apart from each other. I believe we drove about an hour to get to the first one. The rest were about 30 minutes apart from each other. Most of the Bateys have about 10-20 families that live there. Most of them are company workers, but some are squatters. So when people move out, they demolish the house as soon as they leave. Otherwise, a new family would be living their within hours.
The company is working on building schools and medical clinics to improve the lives of its workers. They are in the first stages of building retirement homes for the older workers, but most of them won't want to move there because they have lived in the Batey their whole life. Another thing is that most of the people in the Bateys don't legally exist. Alot of the Haitian workers are undocumented or had their papers torn up when they came to the DR. Most of the children don't have birth certificates because their parents don't have papers, or it is too expensive and too big of a hassle to get one when they are born. This makes it hard for people to ever leave the Bateys for work or return to Haiti.
One of the cool things we saw was the first ever "mega-batey" in the world. The company is building a batey for 130 families. They are doing this because its cheaper to offer education and medical services when all the workers live in the same area. The roads were actually paved and had street lights. There was also a large school and two churches (one catholic and one protestant). This company is getting alot of grief from other companies because they are investing so much into the welfare of the workers.
We got to try some fresh pineapples right off the plant. They were so good. Way better than what we get in the US. We also had fermented pineapple that was riper than what they sell in the US. It was so much sweeter than regular pine apple. It also had a really dark golden color to it.
We got back to Santo Domingo at about 5 o'clock in the afternoon. We stayed in a little hostel in the colonial zone in the city. It was a couple of blocks away from all of the major historical sites in the city. We just went out for dinner and hung out around the Plaza España on Friday night.
If you look closely you will see the Dominican flag next to the alter. A huge majority of Dominicans are Catholic and the Church has a huge amount of power in the country. The Cardinal and the Archbishop are two of the most powerful men in the country. They both have huge mansions right across the street from the cathedral.
The ruins of the first monastery.
The Dominican Pantheon
Formally a Jesuit Church, but it has also been used as a cigar warehouse, arsenal, and other things.
The ruins of the first hospital
The former Spanish royal palace in Santo Domingo, now a museum.
Although Christopher Columbus (Zafa!) discovered the New World and was the first governor of Santo Domingo. He was ultimately sent back in chains to Spain, died in poverty, and deemed a failure. Not exactly the story they teach you in grade school. The Dominicans are very superstitious. They believe that there is a curse associated with Columbus, and you must say Zafa! to prevent the curse. The government even has a medal of honor named after the Admiral that they give to political enemies. It is basically the kiss of death in the DR (one guy actually died shortly after receiving it, because the pin poked his chest and gave him blood poisoning). They usually refer to him as the Admiral, but rarely even that.
In 1992 they finished construction of a giant light house in honor, but everything that could go wrong with the project did. Needless to say, we didn't visit there. Even if we wanted to our driver wouldn't take us there. I saw it from a distance, but I value my camera too much to take a picture of it. You can google it if you want to see it. We also saw the house where his family lived for three generations after he was shipped back to Europe.
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