Regarding the homeland, I will say I feel native to every Latin American country. Although, in the Caribbean I feel more at home.
(Gabriel García Márquez)
Personal stories always have the annoyance of having the writer come across as a show off. To be fair, the writer must also live through the annoyance of making their lives public. Anyhow, as much as I dislike first person narratives, personal stories ask for it. The following is an impression after three weeks in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic.
To offer some backstory, I joined a global media company as an editor. The company covers emerging markets and editors must spend many months a year researching, interviewing, and writing in situ. New hires must spend one month in a given country training under a team before being sent to their first assignment somewhere else. There was an opening in the Dominican Republic, and it was mine if I wanted it. I don’t recall ever saying “yes” so fast in my life.
Almost Dominican
I have been to the two other large Spanish antilles, Cuba and Puerto Rico. I have also visited Jamaica and the Dutch ABCs but, oddly enough, I hadn’t been to the Dominican Republic before. My parents had come here for both business and tourism and loved it. While I attended college in New York, I lived and worked with many Dominicans. I had also studied Dominican history and the political scene as well as watched their baseball and listened to their music. Therefore, I felt like I knew the country, but in reality I didn't.
The flight from my native Cartagena to Santo Domingo is a very convenient two hours. On arrival, I thought I had flown through some space time vortex that took me back home. The similarities started popping up. Just like back home, travelers must walk from the plane through the airstrip and into the airport because there are no gates. This, despite being the main airport of a capital city. The abrasive heat also provides a warm welcome that hit me in the face after being on the cold plane. Finally, the impossibly slow lines at passport control and baggage claim made me look twice at my boarding pass to make sure I was where I was supposed to be and not in some tiny town, like mine.
Enough with those minuscule observations. The feelings of teletransportation came from looking at the bigger picture. As I explored the city during my first few days, the deja-vu got stronger. In an Uber, I asked the name of a long avenue and the answer was as I expected: “El Malecón”. This seafront avenue is a direct copy of the more famous Malecón in Havana which was the inspiration for Cartagena’s own Malecón.
The colonial architecture (actually Viceregal or Imperial, but whatever) was awfully home-sickening. The Spanish fortresses and city walls proved that Santo Domingo was very valuable and worth defending. The republican style of the late 19th and early 20th gave me the same feeling of awe that neoclassical arches and marble columns give everyone, everywhere. And the Modernist style from the 30s onward reminded me that this city too, had once tried to distance itself from its past.
I grinned like an idiot and took pictures of buildings people normally ignore for being so “local” and “basic”. Precisely this normality made them so appealing to me. It felt correct for the buildings to seem so mundane and average. A sense of brotherhood and belonging was rapidly growing inside of me. Each building seemed more known to me, and I felt less and less like a foreigner.
In the neighborhood of Gazcue, I felt like I was in Cartagena's Manga. But it could have easily been Havana’s El Vedado. The “Zona Colonial” is nothing more than the Dominican version of Puerto Rico’s Old San Juan or Cuba’s Old Havana, and, of course, Cartagena’s Old City. This is a great spot in the text to give credit where credit is due to our cousins from across the sea as they look at us from the cobbled streets of Cádiz. Hmm, perhaps Hispanic countries are not so different after all, and our rivalries are all in our heads.
This string theory of Caribbean cities intertwining feels more possible when taking into consideration other cultural contexts. Let’s take Anglo-Saxon cities for example. People can say living in New York or London are the same thing. Yet no one thinks Canary Wharf is the same as the Financial District in Manhattan. The same logic can be applied to the Francophone world where Eurocrats inside the Brussels bubble would feel lost if suddenly being dropped in Paris’La Défense. Funny enough, Zurich bankers visiting Frankfurt would complain it is not even the same language. In the Caribbean, the cradle of magical realism, parallel realities of different cities having the same feel are possible.
Truly a metropolis and truly Caribbean
Santo Domingo is the original city (or is it sin?) of the Caribbean. It is the oldest continuously inhabited Spanish settlement in the Americas (1496). It has the oldest Cathedral of the Americas (1541) and the oldest university (1538). Santo Domingo is the mother city of the Caribbean, and possibly, the only one that can reach the status of metropolis.
But in a sense it is also the most pure. Havana has been falling apart since January 1st 1959, and Puerto Rico is a U.S. territory with all the good and the bad things that has meant for them. Miami, definitely Caribbean, retains the status of capital of Latin America but it is too much. Too much Spanglish, too much infrastructure, and too many shopping malls.
Santo Domingo has maintained its essence as the country developed. It is worth highlighting that the Dominican economy has been growing steadily and quietly for the past 30 years. It remains the country of choice for tourism in the Caribbean with over 10 million visitors each year. This statistic not only humbles all of its neighbors, but nearly matches the actual population of the whole country.
Yes, people continue to travel to DR captivated by its beaches and nightlife. Yes, businessmen continue making profitable deals. Yes, there are a bazillion government buildings. Yes, there is awful traffic and not a lot of public spaces. Despite all of these wonders of modernity, the Dominican culture has not been diminished at all. Unlike elsewhere, where the fetish is to emulate Europe or the U.S. and forego the local, Dominicans look inward to grow.
Santo Domingo holds on to its roots and identity of the Spanish Caribbean like its most cherished treasure. The one where baseball has preference over soccer. The one that echoes bolero, merengue, and salsa. Although more often than not bachata and dembow. The one where people play dominoes into the night and their voices and laughter are heard all the way up in my apartment. The one where cars and motorbikes sell all sorts of stuff with megaphones. The one where motorbikes do their own dangerous thing without regard for others.
The city is a testament to the culture and way of life that developed by generation after generation being born with nothing other than the sea in front of them. That which was destroyed in Cuba by the force of itself. That which was forgotten in Puerto Rico because of emigration and American acculturation. That which Venezuela lost to over twenty years of lack of self-love. That which barely lives on in the few cities of the Colombian Caribbean.
No, I am not romanticising what is largely seen as a backwards region in need of imported ideas of what development looks like. I am grateful for the development that has not erased the cultural identity and a local sense of self. I am grateful there is a city in the Caribbean which truly made it and can be an example for those that want to make it.
If Christopher Columbus landed here in 1492 and thought he reached Asia, for my part, I will live here thinking I have reached home.