Just before snow swept the northeastern seaboard this winter, closing roads and airports, I had to regretfully forgo the opportunity to go skiing on Fifth Avenue and make my way to the Caribbean. I normally never send postcards when on a working trip – and any IRS people who have smuggled themselves in among the IR people, please note that I never make any other kind. But this time I broke with my normal churlish habits and sent lots of postcards, all featuring palm trees and sunny beaches, to everybody I could think of in the snowbound slushy North.
After all, what’s the point of traveling if you can’t indulge in wholesale sadism toward those left behind? What do they care for your perils as an intrepid traveler? The bees that sting, the hustlers that hassle, the rum that flows and the Dominican chicas that flaunt?
Now for the geography lesson. The sun-kissed island of Hispaniola is shared by the Dominican Republic and the Republic of Haiti, both of which demonstrate that too little government is not necessarily a good thing, not least in having the worst-maintained roads outside Manhattan.
I couldn’t help thinking that this is what the US would look like a few decades after Malcolm Forbes had been elected president for life. The Dominican Republic is just trying to get government up and running again after many decades of underpaying the cops and the military so they would have an incentive to arrest people. Those who could pay would be let out again immediately.
The Dominican economy is booming, growing at twice the rate of Alan Greenspan’s sluggish snowbound success story. But one can’t help but wonder at the role female labor plays in this. Students of the industrial revolution will remember that well before the lacquered hairdos of aspirant female executives first crunched into the glass ceiling, textile mills and factories in the States and Britain were worked mostly by young women.
Their contemporary Dominican counterparts don’t have to toil in dark and dank factories to do their bit for the country’s balance of payments. Their work is much less onerous, but perhaps occasionally somewhat odious. The chicas, as they are known locally, work the bars in hotels and resorts, and in return for accepting the offer of dinner and drinks and a night’s company at the visitors’ hotels, expect a gift that seems to be not much more than the cost of a taxi ride from Manhattan to JFK.
At the beach side hotel where I was based, every morning as I sat in the sunlight hammering away at my word processor, the boys from Boston and similar points north would emerge with their companions of the night. It all seemed quite civilized: there would be a hesitation at the bedroom door until a sufficient gift was offered, and then the couple would walk arm-in-arm, like a pair of love birds, to the waiting breakfast table. The conversation often appeared somewhat strained, as rudimentary Spanish met broken English. On the whole, I don’t think that they had spent the night discussing the problems of developing economies except perhaps in the most rudimentary sense.
In all fairness, it has to be said that Dominican women are among the most beautiful I have seen anywhere in the world. Even my spouse thought so, which is perhaps why my rib cage was black and blue where her elbow kept hitting me to stop me from being distracted from my computer screen.
Before outraged feminism raises its angry head, I should also point out an encouraging sign: a small but noticeable number of pale, fish belly white northern women who had picked up the local male equivalent. Equality comes in the strangest guises.
Prostitution is illegal in the Dominican Republic, but with a fine sense of equity that over-rides the letter of the law, the local police will sometimes pay a visit to a tourist who has been exceptionally ungenerous in his gift. I did not hear of any police being called in to hassle female tourists who were insufficiently kind, but the inexorable march of progress makes it increasingly likely.
And they may be even fairer in future, since the Republic’s police chief told me the cops’ salaries had just been doubled to $200 a month to wean them off the bribery on which they traditionally depended. That puts the chicas’ choice of lifestyle in perspective. One night can pay the rent for a whole month.
With the almost complete disappearance of US overseas aid from the federal budget, there is an element of irony in wealthy people from Massachusetts and the like spending the money they no longer pay in direct taxes to help fuel the economic growth of one of the poorest countries in the Caribbean.
And then I returned to New York to learn that Germany’s biggest sex company, Beate Uhse, with sales of $100 mn, has gone public in Frankfurt and is thinking of expanding to the US. Could it be that the chicas and the Dominican economy will be yet another victim of globalization and the transnational company? And then I thought of all those pallid Rhine maidens on the beach in the Caribbean, eyeing up the sun-bronzed locals. No, this particular cottage industry has a serious comparative advantage.
The Speculator
