The Eastern Stars by Mark Kurlansky Read Free Book Online Page B

fact that sugar companies, especially the American ones, took possession of far more land than they planted—more than half the land owned by sugar companies was never used—is evidence that they wanted the farmers more than the farms. But this never really worked. The various schemes by which the sugar companies and the Marines tricked or forced peasants off their land during U.S. occupation did not mobilize them to work for the sugar companies but instead incited them to organize an armed guerrilla movement against the occupation that was active in the east from 1917 to 1922.
    The sugar producers’ next idea was to bring in temporary workers from the Canary Islands and Puerto Rico. But then they realized that sugar workers from the British Caribbean were available. After slavery was abolished in the British Caribbean in 1838, the sugar industry on those islands went into decline and their mills did not take advantage of the improved technology of the Industrial Revolution. English-speaking black workers began to migrate seasonally for sugar harvests in Cuba, the banana harvest in Central America, dock construction in Bermuda, and, later, construction work on the Panama Canal. Just as the Dominican sugar industry was developing in the 1870s, steamships were replacing sail-powered transportation in the Caribbean, and workers were becoming more mobile.
    At the same time, the sugar companies in San Pedro were beginning to appreciate the advantages of recruiting a more desperate foreign workforce, especially after a strike by Dominican workers in 1884 forced the companies to back off from a wage reduction. Starting in 1893, the sugar companies in San Pedro started recruiting workers from Saint Thomas, Saint John, Saint Kitts, Nevis, Anguilla, Antigua, and Saint Martin. On some islands, such as Anguilla, almost the entire male workforce would leave for the Dominican Republic at harvesttime. Every year about 4,500 workers would arrive at San Pedro just as the zafra , the cane harvest, was about to start. One result was that wages in sugar fields steadily declined. The migrants in San Pedro would work for twenty-five cents a day, half of the salary of a Dominican agricultural worker. The migrants had no negotiating power. Dominicans could threaten to go back to the land, but the immigrants had to accept wages and conditions or face deportation. Furthermore, once the companies discovered this source of labor, they had an endless supply of replacements for disgruntled workers.
    In San Pedro they called the migrant workers cocolos . There is great debate on the origin and meaning of the word and whether or not it is pejorative. Regardless of its original tone and meaning, today in San Pedro, descendants of Eastern Caribbean sugar workers proudly call themselves cocolos . Some have speculated that the word is of Bantu origin. The usual explanation is that it was a mispronunciation by the Spanish-speaking people of San Pedro of the name of the British Virgin Island of Tortola, from where some cocolos came. But some nineteenth-century writers referred to Haitians as cocolos, and a late-nineteenth-century poem by José Joaquín Pérez of Santo Domingo referred to a Taino boy as a cocolo .
    The big issue that Dominicans had with the cocolos was not their language or nationality but their skin color, which in most cases was black. It has made San Pedro, even today, one of the blackest areas of the Dominican Republic. Because this is a mulatto country, there has always been a sense that it could change, gradually becoming blacker or whiter: just as the Haitian occupiers had wanted to blacken it, Dominicans who developed a historic resentment and fear of Haitians wanted to whiten it.
    And here were the cocolos coming to San Pedro and blackening the population. Dominicans in other parts of the country were growing concerned not only about the blackening of San Pedro but about foreign labor working for foreign-owned sugar companies: the