Last Sunday [late, I know] our program took us to visit the ruins of a sugar mill from the seventeenth or eighteenth century. The ruins are actually gorgeous, even sugar plantations in the Dominican Republic had tons of slaves and were in general horrible. The slaves had to sleep in shifts because they needed slaves to turn huge wheels to extract the juice from the cane in the middle of the night. They slept in tiny rooms like this and were allowed to have sex but not marry:
This particular plantation had about 200 slaves and half of the land was devoted to growing the cane and the other half was for sugar production. Germany was one of the biggest importers of Dominican sugar.
More photos:
NB:The "official history" of the Dominican Republic denies the existence of slavery. This particular plantation is being restored based on what the Cuban plantations of the time looked like. So now, having the confront the fact that plantations mean slaves, they explain it as being paternalistic and good for the slaves and not necessarily that rigorous. They also say that the slaves were Taino Indians, which explains the, um, darkness of the population. A lot of this happened under Trujillo, who made it one of his big projects to bleach the population. He murdered Haitians and offered Jews who were victims of the Holocaust.
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