Samuel Conde, spokesman for the Puerto Multimodal de Punta Caucedo, announced construction of the transshipment port will start in January. The US$200 million port will primarily handle container freight cargo. The port will be built to attract trade coming through by way of Latin America and headed for North America or Europe. The construction of the port is timely because of the steady growth of Latin American cargo, which is expected to grow 50% in the next five years," said Alfredo Duro, another of the leading spokesmen for the new port. The new port will compete for traffic with the Freeport, Bahamas terminal, that of Colón Free Zone in Panama and the Kingston, Jamaica transshipment port. The promoters are capitalizing on the deep waters, the proximity to Las Americas International Airport, and easy access to the three million inhabitants that live in Santo Domingo, the capital city of the Dominican Republic. The port complex construction should be completed in a year and a half and the port should be fully operational by mid 2002. In addition to Samuel Conde and Alfredo Duro, other leading partners are Manuel Enrique Tavares (of Itabo Free Zone) and Jaak Rannik (Baez & Rannik shipping agency). The new port will have an extension of 820,000 square meters, and 1,100 meters of coastal frontage facing the Caribbean Sea. In addition to the dock, the port will feature 500,000 square meters for transshipment operations and a 300,000 square meter warehouse and distribution area. Manuel Enrique Tavares said that following the completion of the port, the DR could truly become "the Taiwan of the Caribbean." The project is going up in association with the CSX World Terminals.
