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National Geographic : 1977 Oct
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Deft despite her years, Dolores Estrella cleans rice (above) near Sosuia, where her family raises cattle and coffee on a 150-acre farm. Most Dominican farms are of less than 12 acres and underproductive. Two-thirds of the nation's arable land awaits exploitation, mostly for lack of irrigation. Silhouetted by a shaft of reflected sun light, a fisherman casts into Samana Bay (facing page), a bountiful area that yields mackerel, red snapper, kingfish, and shrimp. With large-scale fishing still in the future, most of the nation's 8,000-ton annual catch goes to domestic tables. capital, turned down a narrow street-and thereby had our most forcible collision with a nonproblem. A car ahead had drawn to the curb to let an oncoming truck pass. We pulled in behind. I noticed a building ten feet to starboard, with tall smoking stacks. After that I don't remember. But when I looked in my notebook later, this story was scrawled there: "Here something BLOW UP! Great BOOM and WHOOSH! Great clouds white black smoke like A-bomb mushroom. Black woman babe in arms both crying. Husband in there. It is Haina power plant. Burning, Burning! Man says 'Many dead.'" I followed developments in the newspapers. The reported casualties dropped to one dead, 16 seriously injured. Widespread blackouts continued for days. The power workers' union stated: "This demonstrates that, in the Cor poracion Dominicana de Electricidad, not even a minimal program of maintenance exists." In eight years the unit that exploded had never been shut down for overhaul. The Tyranny of Maintenance is a pervasive nonproblem, because the Dominican spirit cannot abide it. Why maintain when it is so much more romantic to build something new? Cane Fields Not for Everybody Since the explosion knocked out the Haina refinery that day, I never did get to see it. But later I visited Palabe, a government-owned batey that feeds Haina's huge cane crushers. A batey is a barrackslike community of cut ters and their families fenced in by miles thick walls of cane (pages 548-9). Dominicans shun cane cutting, calling it "slave labor"; a man must cut three tons a day to make $4.50. Donald J. Reid Cabral, who was president from 1963 to 1965, told me that "225 percent of sugar labor is Haitian." The Haitians don't like being called slaves, and they are not comfortable about being black slaves either. In Palabe, Idaria Leek, a gaunt old Haitian woman who had lived in the batey 20 years, said, "I'm black, but I'm clean. Come see my house." It was one small room-and it was clean, a contrast to the street outside her door with its rivulets of sewage meandering to an open drain. But something more than poverty troubled me. "Black but clean." A black was telling me black is not beautiful. National Geographic,October 1977 546
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