In Crisis, Ties With Neighbor Improve

Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic—President Leonel Fernández paid an unannounced visit to his Haitian counterpart, René Préval, less than 48 hours after last month's earthquake devastated the Haitian capital of Port-au-Prince. Mr. Préval had regrouped with surviving members of the Haitian government in a grimy one-story police station near the airport. "I found him alone in a darkened office," says Mr. Fernández in an interview in an ornate gilded hall of the presidential palace here. "We quickly began to make plans to see what immediate measures we could take" to help.

For two centuries, Haiti and the Dominican Republic have been the most uneasy of neighbors. The two countries share the small island of Hispaniola, but speak different languages, and their bloody and confrontational histories have made each distrust, fear and resent the other. In the aftermath of the Jan. 12 quake, people on both sides of the border see an opportunity to improve relations.

In addition to millions of dollars in government and private aid, the Dominican Republic has sent 15 bus-size field kitchens to Haiti that each serve more than 60,000 hot meals a day, as well as dozens of generators and teams of electrical workers to help turn on the lights in Port-au-Prince. Dominican doctors turned a planned clinic on the border into a hospital where thousands of injured Haitians have been treated.

"The Dominicans were the first to arrive with help, with doctors, food and aid," says Alice Blanchet, a special adviser to Haitian Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive. "They were stellar."


"I think the tragedy has had the blessing of bringing our countries closer," says Mr. Fernández. Still, he warns, if a mass of Haitians cross the border, it would pressure strained public services, potentially threaten the Dominican government—and could turn into a regional security problem for the U.S. "We could turn into failed states," he says, referring to the possibility of Haitian collapse.


Race has been an important factor in the island's history. Haiti's black slave revolutionaries, who wrung independence for their nation from Napoleon's grenadiers in 1804, quickly overran the eastern, Spanish part of the island. It was only in 1844 that the Dominican Republic won independence from Haiti. Spanish-speaking and relatively light-skinned, Dominicans simultaneously looked down and feared their Creole-speaking, predominantly black neighbors.

Did not know that history.

Generations of Dominicans were brought up on the national narrative of how Haitian troops slaughtered Dominicans during the country's war of independence. In 1937, Dominican dictator Rafael Leónidas Trujillo ordered the massacre of an estimated 30,000 Haitian migrants, most of whom worked in cane fields.


The Dominican Republic has made steady progress since it began to emerge from the shadow of the 31-year Trujjillo dictatorship in 1961, but Haiti has plunged into chaos again and again after 29 years of dictatorship by the Duvalier family ended in 1986. Haiti's gross domestic product is less than $6 billion. The Dominican Republic has a GDP of $45 billion.


Mr. Fernández says he hopes the international community will invest the billions needed to "re-found" Haiti. But he and others here fear international attention will wane, and the pressure of a failed Haiti will spur migration. The quake has spurred an outpouring of support from individuals as well as businesses.


"We see in this tragedy an opportunity for development on the island," said Fernando Capellan, a Dominican businessman who is president of Grupo M, which operates a free-trade zone on the Haitian side of the border where some 4,000 workers assemble items of clothing.


Lisandro Macarulla, spokesman for Conep, a Dominican chamber of commerce, says there are opportunities for Dominican companies. But he echoed Mr. Fernández's worry that the international community will lose interest. "The situation presents both an opportunity and a danger," he says.


Printed in The Wall Street Journal, page A14

Americas News
February 18, 2010

• Page One
• August 15, 2009

Foreign Talent Loads the Bases in Minor Leagues

More Visas Spur Deals From Haiti to India; Korean Teen Scores Big

By JOEL MILLMAN

BOISE, Idaho -- Like many teenagers spending this summer abroad, Hak-Ju Lee is immersing himself in a foreign culture, making friends and tasting exotic food like moose stew. Unlike most teens, however, he's getting paid three-quarters of a million dollars to do it.

Mr. Lee, 18 years old, is a shortstop, and the culture he is experiencing is American minor-league baseball, where major-league teams develop their talent in small towns across the country.

For decades, minor-league rosters seemed the essence of America's heartland. But thanks to growing numbers of foreign players like Mr. Lee, the minors are fast turning into a veritable United Nations.

The Boise Hawks' Imported Talent

View Slideshow

Sean Flanigan for the Wall Street Journal

Hak-Ju Lee is one of 18 international players on the Boise baseball roster.

The gangly infielder is one of three South Koreans playing this summer for the Boise Hawks, an affiliate of the Chicago Cubs. The Hawks' opening-day roster boasted 18 of 25 players from abroad -- mostly Venezuela and the Dominican Republic -- making it one of the most "imported" of all minor-league teams.

Recent changes in U.S. immigration law and growing competition in baseball for raw talent have allowed the minor-league farm system to flourish with imported players. It has been a home run for globalization, but bad news for U.S.-born players, who suddenly have much more competition. Across the minor and major leagues, the total number of foreign-born players is growing fast, to almost 3,500 of the 8,532 players under contract this summer, from 2,964 three years ago.

Boise Hawks' hitting instructor, Ricardo Medina, a native of Panama who translates at team meetings in what has become almost a bilingual program, notes that Mr. Lee and his Korean teammates are getting something else from their summer in Idaho. "I think they may be learning more Spanish than English," he jokes.

The three South Koreans on the Hawks' roster matches the total number playing at the major-league level. Today, 19 Koreans play in the minor leagues, compared with just seven five years ago.

This summer's crop of foreign players in the minors includes baseball's first-ever pros from India, two of them on the Pittsburgh Pirates' Gulf Coast league team. That league's rosters include players from Honduras, Haiti, Russia and the Czech Republic.

Minor League Baseball Becomes Melting Pot

2:33

As a result of unlimited work visas, minor league baseball is seeing a new influx of international players. Joel Millman reports from Boise, Idaho.

Eight teams have minor leaguers from Brazil, including Fábio Murakami, an outfielder for the Philadelphia Phillies' Williamsport, Pa., minor-league team, the Crosscutters. Mr. Murakami is one of several South Americans of Japanese descent in the minors, a list that includes Claudio Fukunaga and Lucas Nakandakare, both from Argentina and under contract to Tampa Bay.

One Red Sox farm team boasts an even more exotic tandem: the brothers Crew Tipene Moanaroa, called "Boss," and Hohua Moanaroa, called "Moko." Born in New South Wales, Australia, the Moanaroas are believed to be the first members of New Zealand's Maori tribe to play baseball professionally in the U.S. "Boss" is a first baseman. "Moko" plays outfield.

New Zealand's representative in the minors is Scott Campbell. He plays third base for the Blue Jays' Eastern League affiliate, the New Hampshire Fisher Cats.

The surge of young foreign players into the U.S. minor leagues began in 2007, a few months after then-president and former major-league team owner George W. Bush signed the Creating Opportunities for Minor League Professionals, Entertainers and Teams Act, known as the Compete Act. It freed the farm systems of major-league teams from having to compete with all U.S. employers seeking H2B work visas for foreign employees, the supply of which usually was exhausted each year by February. Now, teams can import as many prospects as they want.

"There is no longer a limit on work visas," explains Oneri Fleita, the Florida-born director of minor-league development for the Cubs. "So, yeah, you might see more foreign players getting an opportunity."

The Cubs, who signed Korea's Hak-Ju Lee right out of high school, have become one of the most aggressive signers of foreign players. In 2006, 86 players in the Cubs' major and minor-league system were foreign-born. This year, 142 Cubs are imports.

The changes pose a challenge to American teens hoping to make the big leagues. Instead of signing hundreds of U.S. amateurs out of high school -- the traditional business model for stocking minor-league rosters -- teams are drafting fewer U.S. kids and signing more so-called nondraft free agents, the vast majority of them teenagers from Latin America.

Foreign Exchange

See the statistics of the players mentioned in this story:

Hak-Ju Lee (South Korea), Boise Hawks

Fabio Murakami (Brazil), Williamsport Crosscutters

Claudio Fukunaga (Argentina), Gulf Coast League Rays

Lucas Nakandakare (Argentina), Gulf Coast League Rays

Crew Tipene Moanaroa (Australia), Gulf Coast League Red Sox

Hohua Moanaroa (Australia), Gulf Coast League Red Sox

Scott Campbell (New Zealand), New Hampshire Fisher Cats

Eduardo Figueroa (Venezuela), Boise Hawks

George Matheus (Venezuela), Boise Hawks

Eric Gonzalez (Canary Islands), Lake Elsinore Storm

This summer, major-league teams spent over $70 million signing nondraft free agents from outside the country. That is up from $54 million last year, and just under $30 million in 2006, the last year before the Compete Act.

Economics plays a huge role. U.S.-born players drafted out of high school rarely sign a contract to turn pro without a cash bonus, most in excess of $100,000. This summer, the Cubs have forked out more than $6 million in signing bonuses to 26 U.S. prospects, an average of nearly a quarter million apiece.

While some foreign players like Mr. Lee got hefty signing bonuses, the majority do not. Latin players in particular can be had for a lot less -- just $10,000 in the case of Venezuelan pitcher Eduardo Figueroa, one of Mr. Lee's teammates. Third baseman George Matheus, another Hawk from Venezuela, received $15,000 for signing.

Lifting visa limits creates an opportunity for players like Eric Gonzalez, a 22-year-old Spaniard in the San Diego Padres' farm system. Mr. Gonzalez was the last player drafted by the Atlanta Braves in 2005, when he was a 17-year-old high-schooler in the Canary Islands. But under the work-visa cap then prevailing in baseball, the Braves would have had to release another foreign prospect to sign him, Mr. Gonzalez explains, "or else send me somewhere overseas to play, probably Australia."

So Mr. Gonzalez didn't get a shot, and instead polished his skills at the University of South Alabama. Signed by the Padres after graduating last year, he has already whipped through one level of minor-league competition, winning a promotion from the Fort Wayne TinCaps to the Lake Elsinore Storm in July. But the cash rewards will have to wait. "I signed for $1,000, before taxes," laughs Mr. Gonzales, one of two Spaniards in the minors this year. "Basically, I signed in exchange for a plane ticket and a work visa."

In the past, visa restrictions meant many foreign prospects were sent to play for sister teams in places like the Dominican Republic and Australia, where they tried to get enough visibility to fill a coveted visa spot. Nowadays, teams figure they can train foreign talent personally, and give youngsters a chance to learn English and assimilate with U.S.-born teammates.

On both counts, South Korea's Mr. Lee is an enthusiastic student. "Stolen base! Slider! Fastball! Right down the middle!" the teenager recently shouted with a smile, demonstrating the English terms he's mastered since arriving in Idaho.

Much like in an exchange-student program, local families host foreign ballplayers, getting season tickets in return. Mr. Lee lives in a suburban home festooned with heads of antelope and deer and other hunting trophies. He has learned to play Rock Band with his 17-year-old host-family "brother," a ballplayer who is entering his senior year in high school.

His typical teenage observation about life in America: lack of sleep. "Bus ride after game from Vancouver?" he groans, feigning fatigue. "Thirteen hours! Oh, my God. Tired!"

The Cult of the Caudillo

To understand what is happening in Honduras today, it helps to know a bit more about Latin America’s long love affair with caudillos, how these larger-than-life but power-hungry men damaged their countries, and why so many people are terrified that they are making a comeback.

Acceptable statement, though rather general and sweeping. There is, of course, no denying the reality of the caudillo in Latin American history. Yet it is important to carefully analyze history, and resist the temptation of making shallow analysis.

Caudillismo is so deeply rooted it has spawned its own literary genre. Discerning readers see Fidel Castro as the model for the aging, cow-obsessed strongman in Gabriel García Márquez’s “The Autumn of the Patriarch,” who wanders alone dragging his outsize testicles over the floors of his presidential palace. Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa, in his novel “The Feast of the Goat,” portrayed the precariousness of life in the Dominican Republic under the rule of the predatory and brutal right-wing caudillo, Rafael Leonidas Trujillo.

My reading of the recent García Márquez biography byGerald Martin informs me differently; the Patriarch may well have been a composite, and in part based on Trujillo. I shall have to clear that up.

In Latin America, the strength of the caudillo weakened the region’s institutions. Political parties centered on caudillos often collapsed after the caudillo’s death and never professionalized. As a result, Latin Americans seem perennially ready to trust their fate to a providential “man on horseback” who comes to their nation’s rescue, rather than on the ability of the nation’s institutions to provide security and prosperity.

My reading of John Lynch's biography of Bolívar left me with the impression that caudillismo prevented the emergence of robust institutions. Rather than a result, people's trust in strongmen was concurrent with weak institutions, corruption, and social divisions.

Caudillos come in all ideological stripes. Mr. Pinochet, whose famous photograph in sinister dark glasses was taken soon after his coup, became the iconic image of the right-wing Latin American military dictator. These days, most caudillos are leftist. Mr. Castro, el Comandante or el Caballo (the Horse), has the dubious distinction of being the longest-lived caudillo in Latin American history, owing his record-breaking stretch in power more to caudillismo than Marxismo. He’s passed on the torch to Hugo Chávez, the populist caudillo from Caracas, Venezuela.

Interestingly, the article is not accompanied by the famed photograph of Pinochet looking thuggish in his dark glasses, but, rather, a more innocuous one of the general as a sort of elder statesman.
In the 20th century, few had bigger egos than Rafael Trujillo, who ruled the Dominican Republic from 1930 to 1961. Known as El Jefe, Mr. Trujillo took power at age 38, wearing a sash with the motto Dios y Trujillo, or “God and Trujillo.” Even churches were forced to emblazon the motto. A few years later, the capital, Santo Domingo, was renamed Ciudad Trujillo. Fond of wearing comic-opera military uniforms with 18th-century-style plumed hats, Mr. Trujillo was as brutal as he was outlandish, murdering thousands of Haitian immigrants as well as torturing and killing political opponents; he fed some of them to the sharks.

Trujillo was the US's man in the Caribbean, a bulwark against communism. His cruelty and brutality is undeniable, yet to omit mention of his being favored by Washington leaves an incomplete, and thus an inaccurate, picture.
While arms made the man in the 19th century, in the 20th, most caudillos have been careful to present themselves as champions of the people, wrapped either in the mantle of revolution—like Fidel Castro—or in that of democracy. Argentina’s Juan Domingo Perón used populism to endear himself to the nation’s poor, known as descamisados, or “shirtless ones.”

Perón returned in the 1970s and held power again, and after his deatch, his new wife held power for a while. Perónismo is the dominant ideological construct, but a vapid skeleton that simply has the label, and little substance. Its meaning is manipulated, so that Menem and the Kirchners can both be labeled Peronists.

The legacy of Mr. Perón’s free-spending populist philosophy has led Argentina into periodic economic crises. When prices for Argentine exports like beef are high, for instance, Perónist governments have spent the windfall like a drunken sailor, leading to a cash crunch when prices eventually head south.

Rather poor choice of metaphor: Argentina is in the South.

As far as the U.S. was concerned, the cause of democracy in Latin America often took a back seat to fighting Communism during the Cold War. For years, the U.S. either looked the other way or supported coups with the aim of preventing the spread of Communism in the hemisphere. Military coups became almost ritual. In the 1970s, Honduras endured so many coups that the capital was jokingly called Tegucigolpe, for the Spanish word golpe, or coup.
Well, the point is raised; I would quibble with the word often. But, the point is made, and is accurate.

While democracy has spread throughout Latin America, caudillos never vanish, they just adapt to changing times. Gone is the old-fashioned military coup, replaced with a new strategy for power that could be called “coup by stealth,” or “coup by democratic means.”


The primary architect of this new blueprint is Mr. Chávez, a strongman with one foot grounded in the past and the other firmly placed in the future of caudillismo. In 1992, Mr. Chávez, then a lieutenant colonel with a mish-mash of leftist, nationalist and fascist ideas, led an old-fashioned coup in an attempt to overthrow the government of Carlos Andrés Pérez. It failed, and Mr. Chávez was jailed.

Clinton Scores Points

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton spoke during a press conference in Santo Domingo, on Friday.







SANTO DOMINGO, Dominican Republic — It has become a recurring theme of Hillary Rodham Clinton’s early travels as the chief diplomat of the United States: she says that American policy on a given issue has failed, and her foreign listeners fall all over themselves in gratitude.

On Friday, Mrs. Clinton said here that the uncompromising policy of the Bush administration toward Cuba had not worked. That, she said, is why President Obama decided earlier this week to lift restrictions on travel and financial transfers for United States residents with relatives in Cuba.

Like other leaders around the world, Mrs. Clinton’s host, the president of the Dominican Republic, Leonel Fernández, responded effusively on Friday, hailing the secretary and her boss, Mr. Obama, for their view on Cuban policy, which he said took “great courage” and could utterly transform the political landscape of Latin America.

A new diplomacy, a new diplomat, a new administration.

“President Obama is paving a new road,” he said. “It is recognition of the fact that previous policies have failed. Fifty years of a policy that has not generated the originally sought purposes can be called a failure.”

Nice metaphor: paving a new road.

For a senior American official — someone who almost became president — to declare that the United States had erred, makes a major impact on foreign audiences.

There are holdouts, of course: North Korea has greeted the Obama administration by testing a missile, ratcheting up its language and threatening to pull out of multiparty talks on its nuclear program. Mrs. Clinton, in turn, has had few warm words for North Korea’s reclusive leader, Kim Jong-il.

But in many countries, her statements have elicited an almost palpable sense of relief. And she suggested that the Obama administration’s drive for warmer relations with old foes was just getting started.

Asked whether the United States would build bridges to hostile Latin American leaders, like Hugo Chávez of Venezuela, Mrs. Clinton said, “Let’s put ideology aside; that is so yesterday.”

Latin Presidents at Summit

Los presidentes (i-d) de México, Felipe Calderón; El Salvador, Antonio Saca; Colombia, Álvaro Uribe; República Dominicana, Leonel Fernández; Guatemala, Álvaro Colom, y Panamá, Martín Torrijos, durante su llegada a la Cumbre Regional Ampliada sobre el Problema Mundial de las Drogas

Presidents at the Expanded Regional Summit of the World Drug Problem, taking place in Cartagena, Colombia.

Cellphone Data Track Our Migration Patterns

Fascinating story highlighting the efficacy and ease of using available data, as well as its dangers and potential abuses. I particularly enjoy that the focal point is Flushing.

The one stat that jumps out at me is how significant the percentage of calls to Porto, Portugal is: 9% of calls from Flushing.

Cellphone users are spiders of the electromagnetic spectrum, spinning intricate, invisible threads of data about themselves as they walk and talk throughout the day.

Physicists, urban planners and social scientists are eagerly weaving millions of these electronic threads into patterns of people on the move, through studies that until now were all but impossible.

What makes things possible is that all calls are in the phone companies records: number dialing, number called, minutes spoken. The phone company also knows who owns the calling number, and might known the called number, too.

More than 3.3 billion wireless-phone subscribers world-wide have, in effect, voluntarily adopted devices that record their daily movements in the same way satellite sensors monitor migrating birds, whales, bears and other wildlife. Such precise positioning data, automatically collected by cellphone companies, makes privacy advocates queasy but has social scientists dazzled by the research possibilities.


3.3 billion people voluntarily, perhaps unknowingly or oblivious or indifferent to the consequences of their calling habits being known, allow their privacy to be available. It does, surely, also provide intriguing possibilities.

Dominican Republic: Jewish Refugee haven

One of the joys of being a librarian is working with patrons who are intellectually curious and vibrant, interested and interesting, and who bring me news ideas and concepts.

This is such a case: a woman came in this Saturday, around 10.30, and told me about an exhibit she had recently seen at the Jewish Heritage Museum. It was about Sosúa: A Refuge for Jews in the Dominican Republic - Sosúa: Un Refugio de Judíos en la República Dominicana.

I have never heard of this piece of history. I learned something. After telling me of this, and elucidating on the exhibit, the meaning of it, the historical details of Jews escaping Nazism and being given a haven (one they did not find in the US), we discussed the issue. I told her of the book I'm reading, Burnt bread and chutney: growing up between cultures -- a memoir of an Indian Jewish girl. She told me about her own family being in the jewelry business and doing business with Indians.

As we talked I noticed she was an attractive woman. Her face was made up, her lipstick perfectly drawn. her hair a weird shade of orange. In her sixties, surely. Her neck and hands said so. Yet clearly when younger she must have been quite pretty, even beautiful.

I see people all day long, many seniors, some teens, and all ages in between. Many people look sloppy in their dress, almost dirty. Some are dirty, and some reach the point of being disgusting. People cough and sneeze without covering their face -- and some that do then put those hands on the computer keyboard or the newspapers they are reading and that we in the staff will have to handle.

Triunfo diplomático del presidente Fernández y RD en Cumbre del Grupo de Río

A diplomatic triumph for the President of the Dominican Republic, Leonel Fernández. Nice picture.