Sunday, August 22, 2004
The Playa Vista Bar, we presume among others in the country, is awash with upbeat news this weekend. Visitors from our big city neighbor, Santo Domingo, are making it clear that just one week into the new administration of Leonel Fernández the recent bane of their lives, that of failing electricity supply, has drastically changed. Even in Boca Chica we have noticed an improvement. Over the last few years we Boca Chicans have for several reasons generally been in a good position, but even we had begun to notice an increase in power cuts through the last few weeks of the previous administration… so much so that people were beginning to prepare for the worst and buy more batteries for their inverters or even small generators to tide them through the increasing frequency of power outs. One wry old regular at the bar is now complaining that he hasn’t been able to test his newly acquired inverter because we haven’t had a power cut of longer than five minutes or so since the day he installed it earlier this week!
This morning we can look over to the Caleta peninsula and see a Trinidadian tanker tied up alongside offloading its cargo of fuel for the first time in an unknown number of months thereby guaranteeing a further injection of generating capacity to the national grid.
We have seen the peso strengthen against the dollar all through the week. In the exchange bureaus in Boca Chica the rate began last week above 40 pesos to the dollar and currently stands at 37 boding well for keeping a lid on consumer prices.
Apart from the speculation of what President Fernández may have in store, it was seen very positively by our bar commentators that he has already taken active measures to reduce the number of public paid employees including quite a few generals and by all accounts a load of central bank staff thereby helping to ease part of the state’s excessive expenditure.
As the debate came near to an end a second wry regular asked, “If the new guy can make such a big change in such a short space of time what on earth was his predecessor doing?”
A genuine answer to this would throw the debate wide open again but meanwhile most of us are happy to see the new administration well out of the starting blocks.
Posted by Playa Vista @ 05:05 PM CST
Sunday, August 15, 2004
Last time around we referred to some of the events behind the DomRep’s independence. In order to fill out the history plot a little more we have to point out that the first hiccup to the country’s independence arrived in 1861 when Spain, clearly not being able to break with an old habit, decided on re-annexing the country. Power swayed to and fro between the Spanish rulers and the supporters of independence for four years before full independence was restored and it is the anniversary of this restoration which is celebrated each year on August 16th as ‘Restoration Day’. It is a national celebration and a national holiday usually bringing a great number of people out on to the streets even in the form of carnivals. This year’s ‘Restoration Day’ on Monday will be a particularly auspicious day, for it is also the day when Leonel Fernández begins his four year term of office as the new president carrying many hopes for a return to the steady progress that we witnessed up until 2000 in his previous term.
After a very brief flirt with the outermost effects of hurricane Charley earlier in the week the weather is currently at its very best with almost constant sunshine and light winds drifting along the beach every day. A festive hopeful mood of renewal is in the air and we expect there to be a very big crowd at Playa Vista celebrating in happy good-humored fashion on our “double whammy” Restoration Day!
Posted by Playa Vista @ 04:30 PM CST
Friday, August 6, 2004
The island of Hispaniola, on which we live, is about three times bigger than the state of Massachusetts, and we on the DomRep side share it with Haiti… another independent republic. Roughly one third of the land mass is Haitian and two thirds Dominican. Squeezing the recent historical story of the island into a single sentence it can be said that the two countries finally went their own ways in 1844 when the Spanish-speaking Dominican side fought for and gained independence from their Haitian neighbors, who incidentally had gained their own independence from France a little further back in 1804.
In Haiti they use two languages namely French and Creole. Although far more widely spoken Creole was only finally made official as recently as 1987. We hear quite a lot of it in and around Boca Chica because there are many who come to settle here from the extremely impoverished Haitian side to improve their lot on this “better” side of the border.
On our side the official language is exclusively Spanish and although it differs from the land of Don Quixote, it is arguable that in general no more than the difference between British and American English.
So Spanish it exclusively is - apart from recent small incoming gatherings such as our own little Playa Vista enclave with our own strange, dare we say entertaining, mix of international English accents - or so we thought, until we talked to a bar guest from San Pedro de Macorís the other day. San Pedro is a sizeable city in itself half an hour to the east of Boca Chica and famed for its quality baseball players notably the super Chicago Cubs slugger Sammy Sosa. Our visitor told us of a genuine English speaking enclave in that city. He told us of the Cocolo Community where descendants of sugar plantation laborers brought in from the British Antilles still speak English. Apparently from the turn of the 20th century and even as recently as the 1940s people were brought in from St Kitts, Nevis, Montserrat, and other English-speaking Caribbean islands. It is said that the Spanish language is making steady inroads in the USA – well, with the growing Playa Vista enclave, the Cocolo Community and the new President Fernández’s plans for more English teaching in the schools to keep up with the internet explosion, we are quite sure that the reverse is the case here in the Latin DomRep!
Posted by Playa Vista @ 11:04 AM CST
