Sugar mill in Ingenio Consuelo, Dominican Republic
In Cuba and the Dominican Republic, the basic conglomerate unit of a sugar production is usually called an ingenio. An ingenio consists of a central administrative office, a sugar cane mill, a sugar refinery, the town around the office and refinery, sugar fields (campos de caña), and miscellaneous production equipment like trucks, trains, tractors, weighing scales, and housing for workers, usually in what is called a batey.
Canefields beside a batey near Ingenio Consuelo, Dominican Republic
A batey is a company town consisting of barracks and a few houses. Bateyes vary in size considerably. They are located close to cane fields so that groups of workers can live nearby their labor site.
Every year since 1933, seasonal immigrants from Haiti have arrived to work the sugar harvest in the Dominican Republic. The migrants are lodged in rooms at the batey, sometimes with no facilities, and expected to work cropping sugar cane in long days with hard hours.
These days, individual ingenios and land owners (colonos) pay headhunters (buscones), a fee for each cane cutter (picador) the headhunter provides. A headhunter may entice the prospective labourer with promises of a work permit, and often requires a large fee from the prospective immigrant. When immigrants arrive, they may find that they are not free to leave the batey until they finish the labor.
Over time, some of these migrants have stayed through the six months that follow the cane harvest (zafra), called "dead time" (tiempo muerto), and have started families with Haitian women that have migrated as well. Bateys are unique in culture and language in their mix of which is Haitian and which is Dominican.
Kitchen facilities in a dwelling on a batey
The Dominican government has historically provided fewer public services to bateys than to similarly sized communities in the rest of the country mainly due to Bateyes being seen as illegal settlements. The bateys were regarded as exceptions to the country's governance system. It was often left to the State Sugar Council (CEA: Consejo Estatal de Azúcar) or private companies to provide basic services, a responsibility that all too often they did not fulfill. Bateys were often still regarded as places where only Haitians (non-citizens) live.
Since the Haitians who originally filled the bateys were not legal immigrants, their children have often been denied citizenship papers because they are considered to have been born while in transit. Without citizenship papers from Haiti either, these children of Haitian immigrants cannot go to school nor can they receive the benefits of other public services; however, a number of non-governmental organizations have attempted to address this problem by operating primary schools on bateys trying to get them Dominican citizenship.
School established on a batey near Consuelo, Dominican Republic
In the past, sugar was a profitable industry. However, the Dominican sugar industry is no longer competitive, and when combined with the historical lack of educational and health services to these communities, the low wages have tended to make bateys some of the poorest communities in the country.
The current trend in the Dominican Republic is for the ingenios to stop production, and thus the only source of income for the community and for the bateys to very slowly transform themselves into new sorts of communities. Los Alcarrizos in the Santo Domingo province is a good example of something that used to be a batey but now is a municipality which survives through jobs in the area and in Santo Domingo. The Batey is a modern form of slavery where Haitians are paid less than $2.00 American dollars for 12–14 hours of labor. They are forced to sleep on foam boards and live without electricity or running water.
The Dominican Republic is a country located on the island of Hispaniola in the Greater Antilles archipelago of the Caribbean region. It occupies the eastern five-eighths of the island, which it shares with Haiti, making Hispaniola one of only two Caribbean islands, along with Saint Martin, that is shared by two sovereign states. The Dominican Republic is the second-largest nation in the Antilles by area at 48,671 square kilometers (18,792 sq mi), and third-largest by population, with approximately 10.8 million people, of whom approximately 3.3 million live in the metropolitan area of Santo Domingo, the capital city. The official language of the country is Spanish.
The recorded history of the Dominican Republic began in 1492 when the Genoa-born navigator Christopher Columbus, working for the Crown of Castile, happened upon a large island in the region of the western Atlantic Ocean that later came to be known as the Caribbean. It was inhabited by the Taíno, an Arawakan people, who called the eastern part of the island Quisqueya (Kiskeya), meaning "mother of all lands." Columbus promptly claimed the island for the Spanish Crown, naming it La Isla Española, later Latinized to Hispaniola. The Taínos were nearly wiped out due to European infectious diseases. Other causes were abuse, suicide, the breakup of family, famine, the encomienda system, which resembled a feudal system in Medieval Europe, war with the Castilians, changes in lifestyle, and mixing with other peoples. Laws passed for the Indians' protection were never truly enforced.
Transport in the Dominican Republic utilizes a system of roads, airports, ports, harbours, and an urban railway.
Hispaniola is an island in the Caribbean that is part of the Greater Antilles. Hispaniola is the most populous island in the West Indies, and the region's second largest in area, after the island of Cuba.
Saint-Domingue was a West Indian French colony from 1659 to 1804 on the Caribbean island of Hispaniola; the island that now hosts two countries, the Dominican Republic and Haiti. The name was also used, at times, for the island of Hispaniola as a whole, all of it, nominally, being at times a French colony. The Spanish form of the name, Santo Domingo, also was used at times for the island as a whole. The border between the French-speaking Haiti and the Spanish-speaking Dominican Republic was not established until after the Dominican Republic's declaration of independence in 1844.
La Romana is a province of the Dominican Republic. The capital is also named La Romana, and is the third-largest city in the country. La Romana was elevated to the category of province in 1944. File:Catalina Island, La Romana, Dominican Republic. A cruise liner in coast waters of Catalina Isl, approaching the rocky shore. .jpg La Romana is also home to Casa de Campo, one of the world's largest resorts and top golfing destinations, including the Teeth of the Dog golf course. Many international and local artists perform at "Altos de Chavón", an artistic community and university.
San Pedro de Macorís is a province of the Dominican Republic, also the name of its capital city. The city is fairly active due to its proximity to the national capital of Santo Domingo and also its role in the sugar industry. The province is informally known as San Pedro, SPM or Serie 23 for the first two numbers of their Dominican identification or Cedula.
Afro-Dominicans are Dominicans of predominant West and Central African ancestry. They represent 15.8% of the Dominican Republic's population according to 2014 estimates. The Afro-Dominican population is present in the entire geography of the country, from the coastal areas such as San Cristobal and San Pedro de Macoris to deep inland areas such as Cotui and Monteplata. However, the southeast portion of the country and the border region have the highest concentrations of Black people in the country.
Engenho is a colonial-era Portuguese term for a sugar cane mill and the associated facilities. In Spanish-speaking countries such as Cuba and Puerto Rico, they are called ingenios. Both words mean engine. The word engenho usually only referred to the mill, but it could also describe the area as a whole including land, a mill, the people who farmed and who had a knowledge of sugar production, and a crop of sugar cane. A large estate was required because of the massive amount of labor needed to yield refined sugar, molasses, or rum from raw sugar cane. These estates were prevalent in Brazil, Cuba, Dominican Republic, and other countries in the Caribbean. Today, Brazil is still one of the world's major producers of sugar.
Christianity is the most widely professed religion in the Dominican Republic. Historically, Catholicism dominated the religious practices of the country, and as the official religion of the state it receives financial support from the government. In modern times Protestant and non-Christian groups, such as Muslims and Jews, have experienced a population boom.
Solange Pierre, known as Sonia Pierre, was a human rights advocate in the Dominican Republic who worked to end antihaitianismo, which is discrimination against individuals of Haitian origin either born in Haiti or in the Dominican Republic. For this work, she won the 2006 Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Award.
The Fanjul brothers—Cuban born Alfonso "Alfy" Fanjul Jr., José "Pepe" Fanjul, Alexander Fanjul, and Andres Fanjul—are owners of Fanjul Corp., a vast sugar and real estate conglomerate in the United States and the Dominican Republic. It comprises the subsidiaries Domino Sugar, Florida Crystals, C&H Sugar, Redpath Sugar, former Tate & Lyle sugar companies, American Sugar Refining, La Romana International Airport, and resorts surrounding La Romana, Dominican Republic.
The Price of Sugar is a 2007 Uncommon Productions film directed by Bill Haney and produced by Haney and Eric Grunebaum about exploitation of Haitian immigrants in the Dominican Republic involved with production of sugar, and the efforts of Spanish priest Father Christopher Hartley to ameliorate their situation. It is narrated by actor Paul Newman. The documentary shows the poor working conditions in the sugar cane plantations, and political control exerted by the Vicini family to stifle efforts to change the situation.
Christopher Hartley is a British-Spanish Catholic missionary priest who worked from 1997 to 2006 to improve the working and living conditions of the Haitian sugar cane workers in San José de los Llanos in the province of San Pedro de Macorís, Dominican Republic. His work there was the subject of the documentary film The Price of Sugar (2007), produced and directed by Bill Haney.
The Dominican Republic has a 0.7 percent prevalence rate of HIV/AIDS, among the lowest percentage-wise in the Caribbean region. However, it has the second most cases in the Caribbean region in total, with an estimated 46,000 HIV/AIDS-positive Dominicans as of 2013.
The Chinese community in the Dominican Republic forms one of the largest Chinese communities in Latin America. As of 2012, there are over 3,600 recorded Chinese-born Dominican residents. Although no official census has been made, there are estimates of approximately 60,000 people of Chinese origin living in the country. Chinese descendants living in the Dominican Republic may be referred as Chinese Dominicans.
Haitian Cubans are Cuban citizens of full or partial Haitian ancestry.
White Dominicans are Dominicans of predominant European descent. They were 16.1% of the Dominican Republic's population, according to the last population census (1960) in which race was queried. The majority of white Dominicans are descendants from the first European settlers to arrive in Hispaniola and have ancestry of the Spanish and French who settled in the island during colonial times, as well as the Portuguese who settled in the 17th and 18th centuries. Many others also descend from Italians, Dutchmen, Germans, Hungarians, Scandinavians, Americans and other nationalities who have migrated between the 19th and 20th centuries. Similar to the rest of the Hispanic Caribbean, the majority of Spaniards who settled the Dominican Republic came from southern Spain, Andalusia and the Canary Islands, the latter of whom are of partial North African Guanche descent.
The Haitian minority of the Dominican Republic is the largest ethnic minority in the Dominican Republic since the early 20th century.
Samuel Martinez is a Cuban-born American ethnologist, ethnographer, cultural anthropologist, and professor at the University of Connecticut. He has published extensively on the struggle for human rights for Haitian immigrants in the Dominican Republic and their Dominican-born offspring. He has also done research on north–south knowledge exchange in human rights and on the rhetoric and visual culture of activism against modern slavery.
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