I search the sugar maple for a perfect orange leaf - I think I’ll press the leaf between two sheets of waxed paper like I did when I was a kid – but I can’t find a perfect orange leaf. Did you know the oldest maple is five hundred years old? They call it the Comfort Tree. I love ‘em even more, now, Dad and trees. It was Dad that taught me to appreciate trees before he hung himself from one. A sixteen-year-old boy calling a sugar maple pretty. I like the wordlessness of the walk.Ī pretty sugar maple dressed in vivid orange frills beckons me off the path. Especially on autumn days, when the air is cool, and the flies and mosquitos are gone, and basketball practice hasn’t begun. She never picks me up from school, and two miles is too close for a bus pickup, which is fine by me because I like cutting through the woods. He worries that once the pressure is off the Vicini Group (the country’s second-largest sugar producer), his reforms will be rescinded and the previous labor conditions will resume.This story contains themes or mentions of suicide or self harm. Once the immigrant laborers were permitted to travel outside the bateyes, they flooded the town of San José de los Llanos, and simmering ethnic hatred of Haitians among Dominicans came to a boil, fanned by bribery and propaganda from the sugar barons.įather Hartley was reassigned to Ethiopia in August. The film does show how Father Hartley’s efforts backfired in sad, unforeseen ways. Like most documentary polemics, it simplifies the issues it confronts and selects facts that bolster its black-and-white, heroes-and-villains view of raw economic power. “The Price of Sugar” is narrated in calm, gravelly tones by Paul Newman. The United States, which imports much of the Dominican sugar, is partly culpable, the movie says, because of political contributions from the barons that have helped maintain the price of imported Dominican sugar at close to double the world price. Many of the plantations shown are owned by the Vicini family, a dynasty of sugar barons who refused to be interviewed for the film and sent the filmmakers a cease-and-desist letter in an attempt to block its release. Since children born in the bateyee are not recognized as Dominican citizens, they grow up stateless. Since they can afford only one meal a day, most of the calories they consume come from chewing sugar cane. Instead of cash, they are paid in vouchers that can be redeemed for overpriced food at company-owned stores. Once harvesting begins, the film explains, they work 14 hours a day, seven days a week, earning less than $1 a day with minimal-to-nonexistent health care. Estimates of the population of undocumented Haitians living in the camps range from 650,000 to one million. With the complicity of military and immigration authorities, the movie says, these destitute immigrants are loaded onto trucks, stripped of their identification papers and transported in the middle of the night to the bateyes, where many are housed in concentration-camp-like barracks. The conditions he found on the plantations, he says, were tantamount to slavery.Įach year, as the sugar harvest approaches, as many as 20,000 Haitian workers are recruited with the promise of steady work at higher pay than they can earn in Haiti, the poorer of the two countries. His sojourn in the Dominican Republic began in 1997 when he volunteered as a missionary in the diocese of San Pedro de Macoris, a 600-square-mile parish based in the town of San José de los Llanos. Born in 1959 to an aristrocratic Spanish-British family, he dropped out of an elite private school at 15, joined a seminary and for much of 20 years, beginning in 1977, worked with her in poor communities around the world. Through his organizing and relentless pressuring of the plantation owners in the face of death threats, some bateyes in his parish now have improved living and working conditions and have been visited by American doctors.Ī robust, charismatic organizer, Father Hartley is a disciple of Mother Teresa. The movie visits the workers’ shantytowns, known as bateyes, which, according to the film, resembled forced labor camps patrolled by armed guards before Father Hartley’s reform movement. Christopher Hartley, a courageous and stubborn Spanish priest who devoted 10 years to bettering their desperate plight. “The Price of Sugar,” Bill Haney’s muckraking documentary about Haitians lured into a form of indentured servitude on sugar plantations across the border in the Dominican Republic, focuses on the Rev.
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