El Siglo news correspondent in Taiwan, Victor Manuel Tejada reports that President Leonel Fernández obtained another objective of his three-day visit to Taiwan, securing the commitment of the Taiwanese government to invest US$10 million in the construction of the cyberpark the government plans to start building in October in Punta Caucedo. The park will go up between the Las Americas International Airport and the Punta Caucedo Multimodal Megaport. Moreover, the government of Taiwan promised a donation of high tech equipment to be installed in the Instituto Tecnológico de las Americas, a high tech teaching center that will welcome students from all Latin America, and whose construction is slated to begin this year as part of the Santo Domingo cyberpark. This donation is in addition to the US$48 million in donation commitments and US$10 million in loans secured earlier by President Fernández in Taipei (see yesterday’s news at www.dr1.com/daily/news092999.shtml). The Santo Domingo cyberpark, Islecom, will be a joint venture between the Dominican government, local investors and foreign investors from Asia and the US. The Dominican government is contributing the land and the infrastructure, as well as the construction of the Instituto Tecnológico de las Americas. The government says the high tech institute will have the support of the High Tech Industrial Park of Hsinchu in Taipei and the Massachussetts Institute of Technology, as well as the Instituto Technológico de Monterrey (Mexico). The plan is to open the first cyberpark in Santo Domingo, but a second park is slated for construction in Santiago. President Fernández invited leading Santiago free zone entrepreneur Fernando Capellán on the trip so he could see with his own eyes what can be done. "What we would like is to become the Taiwan of the Caribbean, in the sense of having the vitality and the economic dynamism that the economy of that small nation has that has brought it to occupy a leading position in the world," said President Fernández. President Fernández says that the success in the development of free zone manufacturing plants has turned these into the backbone of the Dominican economy, but these are models based on large work forces, which represents a first phase of industrial development in the DR. "We Dominicans are proud that we have developed our free zones as we have up to now, and I believe that this should be consolidated and expanded. We have to look outwards to the world and what we perceive is that countries like Taiwan that initiated with labor intensive models, have advanced to capital intensive models, without abandoning the first model, but creating new paradigms. "In the DR we need to consolidate what we have and explore new opportunities. I believe that is having a vision of where the future of the country lies, said President Fernández."
