Santo Domingo: A Country with a Future

by Otto Schoenrich

"In it (la Española) there are many havens on the sea, coast, incomparable with any others I know in Christendom—and plenty of rivers, so good and great that it is a marvel. The lands there are high, and in it there are very many ranges of hills and most lofty mountains, incomparably beyond the Island of Cetrefrey (Teneriffe); all most beautiful in a thousand shapes and all accessible, and full of trees of a thousand kinds, so lofty that they seem to reach the sky. And I am assured that they never lose their foliage, as may be imagined, since I saw them as green and as beautiful as they are in Spain in May, and some of them were in flower, some in fruit, some in another stage, according to their kind. And the nightingale was singing, and other birds of a thousand sorts, in the month of November, round about the way I was going. There are palm trees of six or eight species, wondrous to see for their beautiful variety; but so are the other trees and fruits and plants therein. There are wonderful pine groves and very large plains of verdure, and there is honey and many kinds of birds and great diversity of fruits. There are many mines of metals in the earth, and the population is of inestimable number. Española is a marvel; the mountains and hills, and plains, and fields, and the soil so beautiful and rich for planting and sowing, for breeding cattle of all sorts, for building towns and villages. There could be no believing, without seeing, such harbors as are here, as well as the many and great rivers and excellent waters, most of which contain gold. In the trees and fruits and plants there is great diversity from those of Juana (Cuba). In this island there are many species and great mines of gold and other metals."

Columbus' panegyric on the beauty, fertility and resources of the Island has been echoed by every writer and traveler who has since visited the country. The United States Commission of Inquiry to Santo Domingo reported in 1871: "The resources of the country are vast and various, and its products may be increased with scarcely any other limit than the labor expended upon them…. Taken as a whole, this Republic is one of the most fertile regions on the face of the earth. The evidence of men well acquainted with the other West India Islands declares this to be naturally the richest of them all." Yet the country's wonderful resources are to-day in almost virgin condition; in the greater part of the Republic's extent they remain absolutely untouched; in the remainder the beginning of development has scarcely been made.

In the first days of the colony it appeared that agricultural prosperity would quickly be attained. Great plantations were set out and the remains of palaces and convents in Santo Domingo City testify to the wealth they produced. But the prosperity was founded on the basis of slavery. The laughing aborigines soon succumbed under forced labor, the importation of negroes was found expensive, and hopes of better fortune attracted the colonists to the American continent. While the country languished under restrictive trade regulations, stock raising became almost the sole pursuit of the Spanish section of the island. In the meantime the French settled the western coast, and the name of their colony, also founded on slavery, became a synonym for wealth and luxury. The development of the Spanish section had scarcely begun at the end of the eighteenth century when it was blocked by wars, the Haitian occupation, and later by the civil disturbances. The native had no incentive to accumulate property, which would only attract revolutionists, and the foreigner was chary of investing his money in so turbulent a community. What progress has been made is due to the short periods of peace, principally the period of Heureaux's ascendancy, from 1880 to 1899, and the periods from 1905 to date. The rapid and gratifying strides made since the Dominican-American fiscal treaty increased the probabilities of peace are an indication of what the country may and will in time attain. As an English-speaking resident put it, paraphrasing a familiar saying in the United States, "If the people will only raise more cacao and less Hades, the country will soon be a paradise." At the present time the most serious obstacle to rural development is the lack of adequate means of communication—roads and railroads. It is evident that the interior cannot be developed so long as the cost of transportation is prohibitive or the roads are impassable during a great part of the year.

The condition of land titles leaves much to be desired. All titles are supposed to be derived from original grants by the crown or the government of the Republic. As there is no record extant of such grants and as much land has been acquired by adverse possession, the amount of land remaining to the state cannot even be the subject of an intelligent guess. The greater part of such land passed to the Republic as successor to the Spanish crown, another portion was added in 1844 by the confiscation of property belonging to Haitians, but no attempt has ever been made to survey or even to list state lands. According to some estimates the state owns as much as one or even two-fifths the area of the Republic, but it is probable that these estimates are exaggerated and almost the only tracts remaining to the government are situated in the inaccessible mountain region of the interior and along the Haitian border. The income of the Republic is still insufficient to leave money for the investigation of public lands, and every year's delay will permit more of such lands to be absorbed by private persons.

A large portion of the rural land is held in common. Tracts originally belonging to one owner descended undivided among his heirs for generations, individual heirs sometimes sold their shares, and the result is that often the tract belongs in common to many persons, some of them holding very small shares. The shares of the co-owners are known as "pesos de posesión," "dollars of possession," corresponding to the value given them at some remote period. The owner of any undivided portion of such "comunero" property, though he hold only one or two shares or "pesos de posesión," may enter upon and cultivate any part of the land he finds unoccupied by other co-owners, and use anything growing or existing thereon, except certain timber or unless it be the result of the labor of other co-owners. That this peculiar mode of enjoying the comunero property has not resulted in friction and conflicts may be ascribed to the smallness of the cultivated fields, the small population and the enormous expanse of vacant land. For the prospective purchaser the doubts surrounding the title to comunero lands are enhanced by the existence of fraudulent "peso" titles and by the destruction of public offices where title transfers should have been recorded. In recent years much division of comunero land among the co-owners has been going on and such action is facilitated by a law of 1911, but the importance of the matter merits additional laws to cheapen and hasten the division.

All the planting of small crops by the poorer countryman is done in what are called "conucos," cleared spaces fenced by sticks laid tightly against each other in order to keep out the wild pigs which infest the country. The construction of the fences is a laborious task, yet after one or two years they require extensive repairs, and when the repairs are such as to amount to a practical rebuilding, the "conuco" is commonly abandoned, and a new one located elsewhere. This method is wasteful of fence-material and land. The planting is done in the most primitive way, commonly by making a hole in the ground with a machete or by using a forked stick as a plow. There are few hoes, and among the natives no modern steel plows.

A "conuco" is usually about one acre in extent, or to be precise twenty-five varas conuqueras square. Though the metric system is the official system of measurement and is gradually coming into use, many of the older standards still prevail. A common measure of length is the Castilian vara, about equivalent to an English yard; the vara conuquera, about two and a half yards; the tarea, used for measuring fences, twenty-five varas conuqueras in length, and the league, something over three miles. The common units of surface measurement are the tarea, of about one-sixth acre, and the caballeria of 1200 tareas or about 200 acres.

Generally speaking, a line drawn from Cape Isabela on the north coast, through Santiago, to the mouth of the Nizao River in the south, divides the country into two regions of which the eastern one has abundant rainfall and luxuriant tropical vegetation, while in the western one there is little rain, and cactus plants and thorny bushes betoken the aridity of the soil. The two ends of the Cibao Valley seem like different countries, the eastern end covered with palm-trees, ferns and other flora of the torrid zone, and the western portion dry and dotted with giant cacti of fantastic shape. In the country near Azua and Monte Cristi I have imagined myself on the plains of New Mexico, with their scorching heat, their cactus, mesquite bushes and distant violet mountains fading into the azure sky. While arid, these western regions of Santo Domingo are as fertile as the rest of the country and when irrigated give remarkable crops. One of the Dominican government's projects is an extensive irrigation scheme for the Monte Cristi district. The most productive portion of the Republic is undoubtedly the Royal Plain in the Cibao Valley, which is of almost incredible fertility. It is covered with a rich black loam from three to fifteen feet deep, as can be seen wherever brooks have cut ravines into the earth, and is referred to as the Mississippi Valley of the Dominican Republic.

The greater or less elevation of the land has likewise produced different agricultural zones: the lower plains of the southern coast are favored for sugar planting; the slightly higher lands are given over to cacao and coffee, and the highest part of the country, the mountain region, is covered with timber. Broad savannas are a feature of the southern portion of the Republic; on the plains to the east of Santo Domingo City, all the way to the ocean, there are great seas of grass, like the prairies of the United States, with large islands of trees, while to the west they constitute lakes in a continent of forest.

All tropical fruits grow in profusion and many vegetables, fruits and cereals indigenous to countries of the temperate zone are successfully grown. Practically all the vegetables and fruits, as well as the grains and staples of the Middle States of the American Union may be produced, especially in the higher portion of the island. The fact that raspberries and delicious grapes grow wild in the highland indicates the possibilities of fruit culture. With a view to encouraging agriculture the various provinces for years had "boards of development" paid from national funds, but the positions on these boards were regarded as political plums, and while the members drew their salaries, no other result of their activities was apparent. The government has also made spasmodic attempts to establish an agricultural experiment station, but with its limited resources nothing tangible has been accomplished. The establishment and extension of large sugar estates was stimulated by a law of agricultural franchises, enacted in 1911, granting excessively broad privileges and exemptions to sugar, cacao and coffee plantations which registered under that law.