Most nights, I can see big clouds of smoke billowing up out of a distant red glow. We’re in the midst of zafra, the sugar can harvest that lasts from December to June each year. The sugar can company burns the cane before cutting it, making it easier to hack into little bits before it gets shipped to the ingenio (factory) in Barahona (the nearest city).
Zafra is a big deal. For six months of the year, people have jobs. The ingenio hires thousands of people and moves them all over three provinces in big yellow school buses. They run their big eighteen wheel trucks up and down our main road and ship trainloads of sugar cane into the ingenio. It’s the exact opposite of tiempo muerto (dead season) when thousands of people spend six months unemployed.
So, big deal. Now, as a rich, foreigner who doesn’t depend on the ingenio to eat, I don’t really like zafra. The smoke from the burning cane spews tons of particulate matter into the air, which makes my eyes itch and my nose run and my lungs burn. The green seas of sugar cane give way to scared charred fields when the cane is cut, looking like dead alien landscapes. And the 18 wheelers rumbling by sound sinister and can do as much damage as their growling suggests.
But I have a pretty unusual perspective. I have an extremely privileged perspective. I don’t depend on the ingenio for my job or for the indirect contribution to my income (like the folks who sell fruits and vegetables or cooked food. Tons of little businesses have just sprung up to give cane cutters a place to spend their salaries).
When I was out walking with Ligia the other day, she looked out at a charred and blackened field and remarked that it looked so much better that way. And she has a point. Along with environmental destruction, exploitative working conditions, and drastic changes to the landscape, those charred fields look like people getting paid. And in a place as poor as Batey #8, a little less poverty can be a pretty beautiful thing.
