Saturday of Exploration

Yesterday was the first day I've spent here where I didn't spend the majority of the day in an office. I decided to take a stroll to the Colonial Zone, which is about a half hour walking distance from where I'm living. Santo Domingo was one of the earliest settlements in the New World, founded by Columbus's brother Bartolomé, and there are a lot of colonial firsts (though I have to admit, I am often bored by colonial history so I wasn't paying as much attention to that as I should have). Most of the colonial buildings are all along the water, so it's a pretty place to walk around. On that walk are located the first fortress in the New World, the house of Diego Columbus (Christopher's son), and a Cathedral, among other things.

Within a few minutes I had hired a fake tour guide named Pablo. He wasn't a professional, but he seemed like a nice guy and he was charging less than half as much as the official guides. He didn't really tell me much about the landmarks that I couldn't have easily read out of Lonely Planet, but I felt like I was essentially paying for someone to hang out with me for a few hours. It turned out to be worth it even though he was hitting on me, because afterwards he took me to a Peruvian restaurant for lunch. I ordered ají de gallina, and it wasn't that good, but I've been missing Peru so much since I got here that I didn't really care how it tasted. Afterwards I went with Pablo to a little bar where a bunch of guys were sitting around watching a DVD of a Mark Anthony concert. It cracked me up.

On the walk home I stopped to look at some used books from a little vendor. I was looking for "In the Time of the Butterflies" by Julia Alvarez (I thought before that I had read it, but considering I have no memory of it I've decided that I never actually did). He didn't have that, but I got a novel by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. The guy at the stand told me I spoke Spanish like a Dominican, which was probably a lie, but it made me happy because I've been trying really hard since I got here to mimic the Dominicans, speaking faster and never pronouncing an 's' or a 'd'.

Also on the walk back, I noticed a skinny, shriveled old woman (she might have been Haitian) who was walking along repeating the same two sentences to everyone she saw. I couldn't quite decipher her exact words, but she was saying something like, "I only ate a little bowl of soup today because I can't afford anything more. I just want everyone to realize that." She was walking behind me, and I'm pretty sure at one point she started talking about how well-fed I must be because I'm white, and how well-fed everyone is in the United States while people here starve. Guilty as charged.

On the way back I also looked at an photography exhibit that's displayed at an intersection of a couple of the main streets by the colonial zone. They were photos from the repressive Trujillo dictatorship, mostly pretty disturbing. One that stands out in my mind is a photo of one of Trujillo's opponents being put to death in the electric chair, his eyes wide open in pain from the electric shock. Even though the dictatorship ended decades ago, it still seems to be very much a part of the collective memory here, and certainly a traumatic one. People still talk about Trujillo all the time, even people who weren't alive while he was in power. After Trujillo's death, a leftist president was elected democratically, but was overthrown a few months later and a puppet dictator allied with Trujillo came into power. A year or so later in 1965, U.S. marines came in to "restore order", in other words to put down a revolt in support of the democratically elected president. This resulted in Trujillo's successor, Balaguer, remaining in power for another 12 years. There are some tanks and other military equipment displayed inside the Fortaleza, and my fake tour guide, Pablo, told me that some of them were U.S. tanks. It surprised me when he explained that the U.S. invaded because "they don't like dictatorships". "But Trujillo wasn't in power anymore by that time, was he?" I asked. "No," said Pablo, "but the United States still thought it was a dictatorship." OK, so maybe it was a complex situation and the historic details are still a little blurry in my mind, but it strikes me as ironic that U.S. involvement resulted in an "election" that put Trujillo's successor in power for another 12 years.

The hungry woman in the street has every right to feel bitter about my country.