Zafra

It's harvest season. La zafra. Sugar cane fields throughout the eastern region of the DR are being set ablaze and backbreaking manual labor is all the rage.

For the past few months I’ve been able to look across the endless, llano plains covered in cane and see orange glows in the distance. Faraway cane fields being burned. The glow is actually quite breathtaking. The deeper into harvest season we get, the more glows that can be seen each night. I am staring at one right now that is at least one mile away but seems to be engulfing the entire batey. The ash falls like a light snow and leaves everything covered in a layer of cachispa that the children catch like snowflakes and shove into their mouth (claiming it tastes like boiled eggs).

The cane is lit on fire to burn away any dead or excess leaves and to scare away any critters, vermin or snakes calling the cane fields home. After being burned, the cane is manually cut by able-bodied men (primarily Haitian immigrants) wielding machetes, collected into large trucks and driven to the nearest processing plant.

In the past week I’ve gotten to see the cane cutting first hand. The sugar cane around Cachena was burned and the picadores got to work. The cutters often work shifts of 12+ hours (in the baking Caribbean sun) and are able to cut between 3-4 tons each day. At the moment, they are paid approximately 150 pesos ($3.80) per ton. Somewhere around 13 dollars a day for impossibly difficult physical labor. Meanwhile the sugar cane companies make bank by exploiting people living in abject poverty. A large number of bateyes are owned by the sugar cane companies themselves and only cane cutters and their families are allowed to live there. It is the closest example to indentured servitude I know of.

The landscape looks much different when not covered by seas of 10-foot tall sugar cane. Nearby communities are visible for the first time in a year and mountains can be seen in the distance. It’s an interesting time to be in the batey.

Already, new sugar cane is growing like a weed where it was harvested just weeks ago. The cycles begin again. One of the growing and harvesting of a crop. One of human rights violations. Both of which will continue long into the foreseeable future.

Flames rising over rooftops.

Taking in the show.