by Tony Horwitz
If the debate over the Admiral’s bones seemed silly to the ambassador, honoring Columbus on October 12 did not. “It is a reminder of the connection between Spain and America, and we are very proud of this part of our story.” She acknowledged that crimes were committed against natives, but felt Spain received more blame than it deserved. “I defend our colonization. We weren’t the worst. Normally we melded with the cultures in America, we stayed here, we spread our language and culture and religion.”
This was true, to a degree. Other European colonizers were brutal, too, and the English were far less inclined than the Spanish to live among Indians, or to make them a part of colonial society. Still, as I listened to this regal Iberian, her business card embossed with Spain’s crown-topped coat of arms and the words “plus ultra” (“further beyond,” a reference to Spain’s once-vast empire), I was struck by the prideful echo of bygone imperialism. “Columbus is a symbol of what Spain has been and still is,” she said. “A symbol of our influence in the world.”
Fixated for days on Columbus’s bones, I’d lost sight of the navigator’s larger legacy in Santo Domingo. His voyages launched an empire that burst out from this very city, across the Americas, until Spain’s domain reached from Canada to southern Chile. I was sitting near ground zero of one of the greatest colonial explosions in history, with aftershocks that resounded to this day.
“You know, there are now more Spanish-speaking people in the United States than in Spain,” the ambassador observed, seeing me to the door. “The future of all the Americas is Spain, and that story begins in 1492. It is your story, too.”
CHAPTER 4
DOMINICAN REPUBLIC
YOU THINK THERE ARE STILL INDIANS?
Aborigines, n.: Persons of little worth found cumbering the soil of a newly discovered country. They soon cease to cumber; they fertilize.
—Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary
THE FUCU FINALLY lifted the afternoon after my fiasco at the lighthouse. Wandering back from the embassy, I stopped to buy a newspaper and see whether the local press had covered the Columbus ceremony. If not, deciphering the news with my pocket Spanish dictionary would pass the time while I waited out the heat. When I asked the shopkeeper, “¿Cuanto es esto?” he gestured at the newspaper and said, “Brother, don’t bother with that. It’s all bullshit.”
The merchant’s slang and American-accented English startled me. So did his appearance. A wiry, mocha-colored man of about forty, with short frizzy hair, he wore baggy blue jean shorts and a loose T-shirt—more American street than Dominican chic. I stuck out my hand and asked his name.
“Caonabo,” he said, proffering the name of the great Taino cacique who had slaughtered the first Spanish settlers at La Navidad. I figured he was pulling my leg.
“And I’m Christopher Columbus,” I said.
The shopkeeper smiled and slapped my shoulder. “Brother, it’s about time. I’ve been waiting five hundred years to kill you, too.”
Caonabo explained that his father had been a bohemio, a rebel and jazz musician who named all his children after Taino chiefs. Caonabo had taken his own name to heart. “I feel Taino inside,” he said. “It’s a way to deny the Spanish part of me.”
An architect by training, he’d worked for many years in New York and Miami; hence his colloquial English. Now, in addition to selling newspapers, he designed handbags adorned with swirling Taino motifs like those I’d seen in Santo Domingo museums. Women sewed the bags in a room behind his airless shop.
The attic above served as Caonabo’s painting studio. Following him up a rickety ladder, I was greeted by a huge, brightly colored canvas of Spanish ships arriving in Hispaniola. The foreground showed a Christ-like figure nailed to a palm tree.
“The painting represents the martyrdom of the Taino,” Caonabo said. It had been inspired by a Pablo Neruda poem. “Basically, it says natives were sons of God before 1492, but the Spanish used the cross to beat them into dead Indians.”
We were interrupted by a bill collector. Caonabo had inherited an enormous water bill from the shop’s previous owner. Each month, he had to give the collector a hundred-peso bribe to go away. He also had to contend with electricity prices, which had just spiked by 25 percent. “A technician is coming over to ‘fix’ my electricity meter so I can do some cheating,” Caonabo said. “Free enterprise, brother.”
I told him about my chase after the Admiral, and the vague plan I’d formed to get out of Santo Domingo and visit Columbus-related sites elsewhere on the island.
“You must see the Hoyo Santo,” he said.
“What’s that?”
“The Holy Hole. I’ll close the shop on Wednesday and we’ll go.”
THAT NIGHT, I reread the Spanish accounts telling of the original Caonabo. He was first mentioned in 1493, when Columbus returned to Hispaniola to find that the settlers he’d left at La Navidad had perished. The cacique was said to have attacked them with a small portion of the fifty thousand warriors he commanded in gold-rich Cibao. The Spanish described Caonabo as “lord of the mountains” and a chief who “outdid all others in strength, majesty of bearing and court ceremonial.”
In 1495, after many small attacks on colonists, Columbus marched from his base at La Isabela with two hundred soldiers to subdue the Taino of Cibao. Five centuries before, when Europeans and Americans first met in open battle, native weaponry had rivaled that of the outmanned Norse. In late-fifteenth-century Hispaniola, natives still had the advantage of numbers, but European weapons radically shifted the balance of power.
The Taino, carrying clubs and bows, faced off against soldiers armed with crossbows, swords, lances, and a newly invented firearm, the harquebus. Though the guns were clumsy and inaccurate, their detonations caused Indians to panic and break ranks. Then the Spanish assaulted with cavalry, an unfamiliar and terrifying force to Indians, “who imagined that man and horse were one animal.” The Spanish also deployed attack dogs, another strange sight to the Taino, whose own dogs were so mild that they didn’t even bark. The battle became a bloody rout, the first of many lopsided victories by small Spanish armies in America.
Caonabo, however, continued to elude and threaten the Spanish. So Columbus sent his ruthless lieutenant Alonso de Hojeda to capture him. Hojeda lured Caonabo to La Isabela with the promise that the chief would be given a brass church bell. En route, Hojeda produced manacles and claimed they were bracelets of the sort worn by the Spanish king during royal processions. Caonabo fell for the ruse and was taken to La Isabela with his feet and hands shackled.
Columbus took Caonabo and thirty other captives with him when he sailed home in 1496. The cacique perished during the ocean crossing; one account says he died from grief, another that he hanged himself. His brother survived and was paraded across Spain wearing a heavy gold collar.
Caonabo’s widow, Anacaona, later became Hispaniola’s leading chief. She tried to accommodate the Spanish and was famed for her beauty, once meeting colonists clad only in a garland of flowers. In 1503, Anacaona called together eighty of her principal subjects to entertain Hispaniola’s Spanish governor. After three days of dancing, feasting, and games, he ordered his men to surround a building where the Taino leaders had gathered. The governor had heard rumors of an impending revolt, and was determined to crush Taino resistance once and for all. The Spanish set fire to the place, burning alive everyone inside.
Caonabo’s comely widow was spared the inferno. “As a mark of respect and out of deference to her rank,” Bartolomé de Las Casas wrote, “Queen Anacaona was hanged.”
THOUGH THE LAST Taino perished in the sixteenth century, they had a long half-life in the Dominican imagination. With the importation of African slaves, blacks quickly came to outnumber Europeans on Hispaniola. This was particularly so in the island’s western third, which was better suited to plantation agriculture; in 1804, following a slave rebellion against French rule, it became the black nation of Haiti. The rest of Hispaniola slowly emerged as the Do
minican Republic, following a long struggle against both Haitian and Spanish control that lasted into the 1860s.
While the D.R. was overwhelmingly mulatto, lingering hostility toward Haiti, and old hierarchies linked to skin tone, led many Dominicans to deny the African part of their heritage. The tenth or so of the population that appeared Caucasian identified itself as Hispanic, while Dominicans of color considered themselves Indian, even though no such population had existed for centuries and native blood constituted, at most, an infinitesimal remnant of the gene pool.
This racial reinvention reached its apogee under the D.R.’s twentieth-century dictator Rafael Trujillo, who styled himself generalissimo and “Father of the New Fatherland,” renamed Santo Domingo after himself, and entered the Guinness Book of World Records as the world leader with the most monuments erected in his own honor. In the 1930s, he launched an ethnic cleansing campaign that led to the massacre of tens of thousands of Haitians living in the D.R.
The dark-hued Trujillo, whose own grandmother was Haitian, wore makeup to lighten his skin. He also tried to purge the country’s African heritage from textbooks and official memory, and cast himself as the savior of Spanish and Catholic Hispaniola. Elevating Columbus, the first bearer of European culture and religion, was a natural part of this enterprise.
Assassins gunned down Trujillo in 1961, as he drove along a coastal road in Santo Domingo. The spot is now marked with a memorial to the victims of his brutal rule, and he and his henchmen are execrated in today’s D.R. But the racism and antihaitianismo of his long reign endures.
At El Conde café one night, the Scot engineer, George Houston, introduced me to a Dominican who worked in his office, a young woman named Alba Hernández. She explained that Dominicans refer to pelo bueno (“good hair”) and pelo malo (“bad hair”) depending on how kinky it is. Someone with body odor is said to “smell like a Haitian.” Alba showed me her national identity card, on which the government identified Dominicans as “B,” for Blanco; “N,” for Negro; or “I,” for Indio. Alba, a brown-skinned beauty, was Indio.
“Unless someone is black as night they won’t put an ‘N’ next to their name,” she said. Dominicans also described one another according to a complex scale of skin tones, such as moreno (brunet), Indio claro (light Indian), and Indio canela (cinnamon-colored Indian). “If you care about a person,” Alba said, “you call them any shade but black.”
CAONABO’S CAR WASN’T fit for long drives, so I reserved one at a rental agency for seven A.M., in hopes of an early start. After ten days in the D.R., I should have known better. We spent an hour filling out rental forms, and another doing the “damage report” on a Hyundai that looked as though it had just run the Paris-to-Dakar rally. Finally, at nine A.M., Caonabo climbed in and turned the key. The engine barely turned over. The air conditioner wheezed once and died.
“Welcome to the D.R., brother,” he sighed. “The only attitude you can have is ‘I don’t fucking care.’ ” He slumped back in the driver’s seat. “But I do care about air-conditioning. Without it we will die.”
The rental agency claimed it had another car on the way, so we began the paperwork all over again. An hour and a half passed. No car appeared. Caonabo asked the agent when he thought it would arrive.
“Ahorita,” he said. Between now and never.
“Estamos jodidos,” Caonabo replied. We’re fucked.
It was late morning: the familiar heat and apathy had set in. Caonabo suggested we try again tomorrow. But I couldn’t face another day of defeat in Santo Domingo. So I asked the agent whether he knew of any other place we could rent a car. He pointed us down the street to a tiny storefront with an unreassuring logo: “STOP Rent a Car,” enclosed within an octagonal stop sign.
After another hour of paperwork, we climbed inside an ultra-compact model called a Daihatsu Move. “We’ll see if it does,” Caonabo said, turning the key. The engine and air conditioner worked, though little else did. I signed the last of a dozen forms and we pulled out of the parking lot and straight into a tapón, a traffic jam. It was noon, we were sweaty and exhausted, and hadn’t yet traversed one block of our long drive.
“Believe me,” Caonabo said, “we are making good time.”
As we crawled out of Santo Domingo, Caonabo briefed me on the driving rules for the Dominican Republic—or, as he put it, the d.r. for the D.R. “Rule number one, defensive driving,” he said, accelerating as we approached a busy intersection. “Never stop at a red light, because the guy behind you won’t, and he’ll rear-end you.”
“What about drivers coming the other way?” I asked.
“Their light’s green, so they know to stop and then go very cautiously. Yellow’s the easiest. You step on the gas.” He paused. “Of course, a lot of the time the stoplights aren’t working. Then the rule doesn’t apply.”
Caonabo leaned on the horn and accelerator, darting between lanes as we passed through the cinturones de miseria, the “misery belt” of barrios ringing Santo Domingo. Most of the people who dwelled there were recent migrants from the countryside and many drove unlicensed motorbike taxis, called motorconchos, adding to the traffic chaos. “They have no respect for the rules,” Caonabo said, dodging around a motorbike, plunging through a red light, and going the wrong way up an exit ramp to enter the main highway connecting Santo Domingo to the island’s interior.
Reaching the hilly countryside beyond the capital, we encountered another hazard. Vendors crowded both sides of the road, creating a Dominican strip mall of sweet-potato stands, rabbit cages, children dangling crabs from strings, and women holding signs offering goat vivo y matado—alive or killed. It was impossible to focus on the road, which was even more critical now, because drivers kept veering across lanes at high speed to stop and make purchases. Run-over dogs littered the roadside.
Before long, we had to fill up with gas; STOP had given us only enough to get out of town. As soon as we left the station, the Move started sputtering. Caonabo said that gas in the D.R. is often diluted with heating oil, which is cheaper than petroleum. This led him to driving rule number two.
“See that cop?” he asked, pointing at an officer standing by his patrol car, aiming a radar gun at oncoming traffic. “That means speed up.” Caonabo hit the pedal, pushing the Move to its limit of seventy miles per hour. Cars to either side of us did the same.
“Are you mad?” I shouted, glancing over my shoulder for a red light and siren. At El Conde, I’d been warned by expatriates to avoid run-ins with Dominican police, who were famously corrupt. This was precisely why Caonabo sped up.
“The police are very badly paid,” he said, “so they’re only given one gallon of gas at a time. Otherwise, they’ll siphon it off for themselves. That cop won’t waste his gallon chasing us, as long as we have a head start. Even if he does, we have a full tank and can probably outlast him.”
A few miles past the speed trap, Caonabo eased back to fifty-five. “It’s when you’re going too slowly that the police grab you.” No infraction was required, and tickets were rarely issued. A hundred pesos was the standard bribe. “After that, they’re very polite and say, ‘Have a nice trip, Doctor.’ Cops always give you an advanced degree once you’ve tipped them.”
I stopped monitoring Caonabo’s driving and tried to distract myself by gazing out at hazy fields and ramshackle towns and villages. At the edge of every settlement appeared a curious sign saying, in English, “Disco Car Wash.” Caonabo said the name came from Dominicans who had lived in New York City in the 1970s, returned to the D.R., and opened car washes. Gradually, these businesses evolved into roadside taverns offering cold beer, sports TV, and bar girls, who rented rooms in cheap motels nearby. “The main thing they wash clean is your wallet,” he said.
Casual sex, paid for or not, came with the territory in the D.R. Since arriving in the country, I’d been struck by women’s revealing attire, and by the flirtation that accompanied almost all contact between the sexes. Viagra was advertised at every pharm
acy, and markets hawked a drink called Mama Juana, a mix of roots, coffee beans, and turtle penis alleged to increase potency.
“Most Dominicans live day by day,” Caonabo said. “It’s hard to feel great about the future. So you don’t believe in anything, and try not to care. The attitude is ‘Have a fuck whenever you can. Live for today.’ ”
At least, men lived that way, married or single. Wives who played around were asking for trouble. “It’s the machismo culture, men are from the street and can do what they want, ladies are for the house,” Caonabo said. “It’s unfair, but that’s how we’re raised.” AIDS, I later learned, was the leading cause of death for Dominican women of childbearing age.
Two hours from Santo Domingo, we reached La Vega, a rice-growing center choked with motorbikes and fumes. Caonabo skirted the town and climbed a steep, winding road lined with religious statues. It ended at a village called Santo Cerro, or Holy Hill. “Now you are going to hear about a virgin, a very rare thing in the D.R.,” Caonabo said.
He parked beside a pale yellow church crowning the hilltop. Beneath us spread the broad, fertile valley of Cibao, which Columbus had named the Vega Real, or Royal Plain. At a shop selling religious trinkets we bought a booklet on Santo Cerro, and Caonabo translated its contents while we rested in the shade and munched on roqueta, a ring-shaped snack made of corn and cassava that tasted like well-salted sawdust.
The booklet told of the great battle in 1495 that I’d read about the night before. But this version didn’t say much about the role played by guns and horses. According to the booklet, Columbus positioned part of his army on this hill and erected a cross at its center. Then, in the valley, he saw an Indian army that stretched to the horizon and numbered in the tens of thousands. “The Spaniards were so small in number that a miracle was needed to stop the force of such a crowd.”