Economist, diplomat and writer Bernardo Vega was in the United States carrying out some speaking engagements in Washington and New York. He watched the exit of Father Ruquoy and the priest’s interrogation by the Minister of the Interior and the Police, Franklin Almeyda. According to Vega, it has been over 40 years since the Dominican Republic received such bad publicity, especially relating to priests and their treatment. Back then, the Trujillo regime was targeting bishops Panal and Thomas Reilly. Now, according to Vega, the sin committed by Ruquoy and Hartley, also both foreigners, is to have denounced what Dominicans know is happening, but don’t want to admit: that the Migration Department, with the support of the Dominican armed forces and the Ministry of Labor, still authorize the importation of Haitians to cut sugar care at a time when all Dominicans are complaining of the excess presence of Haitians in the country. Vega asks “How is it possible, at this place and time, to continue the importation, with official sanction, of cane cutters, who, once in the country, can opt to go and work wherever they choose?” In the past, there was a dictatorship and the field bosses impeded any Haitian from leaving the “batey” (a migrant worker’s housing unit, generally very basic and without any normal public services such as water, electricity or sanitation). Under these circumstances, the repatriation of cane cutters was possible, but today it is impossible.
President Fernandez’s popularity would increase if he were to announce a ban on importing cane cutters, and at the same time demand that sugar growers and mill owners recruit cane cutters from the thousands of Haitians already in the country. They do not do this now because it would cost them more money. Because of this, they prefer to pay Haitians from Haiti who are willing to accept lower pay and worse conditions than their countrymen already living in the Dominican Republic would.
Another sin that both of the priests committed was to denounce the abysmal conditions in which the cane cutters are forced to live. Nonetheless, the main employer of Haitian cane cutters in the DR is Central Romana, and Vega says that he has not heard of any outcries of mistreatment from their employees, not because the priests can’t visit their fields, but because apparently the working conditions there are different. In consequence, the problem is limited to certain sugar growers, and state and private mill owners or administrators. Vega asks, “How must a military or migration officer feel when one day he is deporting a Haitian from the northwest across the border at Dajabon, and the next month he is ordered to bring him back across at Pedernales? ” This totally incongruous situation is obvious. In the southern United States, the blacks cut sugar cane until they became soldiers in the Second World War. The result was the mechanization of cane cutting. In Cuba, since 1933 only Cubans can cut sugar cane, with no regard to race, since the Jamaicans and Haitians were deported. Vega suggests that if we prohibit the importation of Haitians under official sanctions, the options are to either employ local Haitians or mechanize. Both alternatives will increase costs, but to remedy this there is the privilege granted to our sugar growers that allows for extraordinarily high local prices for sugar. Vega says that if we pay so dearly for sugar, the least we can demand is that the sugar industry cease the practice of importing cane cutters.