Puerto Plata

 

Puerto Plata was the tourist hot spot for Canadians and Europeans in the 70's and 80's. It is located on the Atlantic exposure north coast of the DR. Now, it's the also ran. Americans used to go to the Virgin Islands and the Bahamas because the Dom Rep was "poor and dirty". Now they have discovered that the DR has great beauty and is a great vacation value. The tourist mix currently is about 1/3 each with the American share growing all the time, but the hot spot has moved to Punta Cana in the southeast. Measured in terms of discrete visits, Punta Cana's airport is the busiest tourist destination in the Caribbean. Most of the major airports for European cities like London, Frankfort, Paris, Rome, and Madrid fly daily non-stops to Punta Cana.

Tourism accounts for roughly 70% of the Dominican economy. The Dominican government maintains a separate policing entity, the National Tourist Police, to make sure the tourists are safe. Dominican law allows the police to hold any individual without due process for 48 hours. Dominicans know if they begin to cause significant problems in a tourist area any policeman can make them disappear for a day or two while they think it over. Net result - it pretty much doesn't happen the first place. (It's a good idea to keep in mind it's their country and the same goes for you too. They are tolerant with tourists but if you mess with them enough, remember. The amount of probable cause necessary to throw you in jail is nada. Some time before the 48 hours are up it's just "Oops, looks like we don't have enough evidence to charge you." Call the embassy? "Well, the processing takes a little time." Putting some teeth in keeping the peace is actually practical. And they appear very even-handed, compared to say the US IRS.) 

As a foreigner, it is way inadvisable to go there to do drugs as they have little tolerance knowing the damage it could do to family appeal at the resorts. They're careful not to let it get a toehold, very different than Mexico. On the other hand, if you want to get ****faced drunk and fall face down in the street, they will help you up while thanking you for your tourist dollars supporting their domestic beer and rum. Presidente, virtually the national beer, is actually a light lager with just a bit of citrus that is perfect ice cold in the heat and humidity. Their three largest Dominican rum distilleries, known as the three "B's", all have very long colorful histories and good to excellent flavor.  (If you're into rum, and if you like spirits and are in the DR you should be, the premium rums compete with the best in the world.)  Brugal, by far the biggest and the favorite of working class Dominicans, is based in Puerto Plata. They do offer tours of their facility. Don Andres Brugal, a Spaniard who absorbed expertise in rum making in Cuba, settled in Puerto Plata and introduced his first rum in 1888. A Scottish company (Cutty Sark Scotch and other brands) bought up a controlling majority of the stock in 2008. Estimates of the cost are all over the place, but most say it was well north of one billion USD. They intend to leave current management in place, family descendants of the founder, and maintain integrity of the brand. Their desire is to seriously expand market penetration in the Euro Zone, already popular in Spain and Italy. It is virtually impossible to go anywhere in the DR, from big super stores to tiny markets to most any home, and not see Brugal ("a" pronounced "ah", accent on second syllable) on the shelf.

In case you don't know the history, the American colonies did not have Jack Daniels at the start. They didn't even have the whole state of Tennessee back then. No beer either. Everybody drank rum. But it didn't come from the Caribbean. They way it worked was this. Rum's the mainstay, no Coca-Cola or even bottled water. Rum comes from sugar cane. The sugar cane grows like weeds on the tropical islands of the Caribbean. The rum distilleries are all actually in the colonies. To transport the cane effectively you have to cook it down to a kind of more or less molasses and put it in barrels. The work to cut the cane in the fields and cook it down in incredibly hot brick vats is just terrible, and in those days dangerous work. Many got severely burned handling the molten sugar. And all the time there is the tropical heat and humidity and mosquitoes. This is what the African slaves came for initially. Ships would take the barrels of molasses to the colonies to supply the distilleries. The ship heads for Africa and gets a load of slaves. The slaves are brought to harvest the cane in the Caribbean. Repeat. Jack Daniel's sour mash Tennessee whiskey, the largest selling American whiskey today, wasn't founded until 1875. Charleston was already the richest city in the South while South Carolina was still a British colony. Slaves came to farm "Carolina Gold" rice. (The ironic thing is it was the Africans who originally brought the knowledge of how to use the rise and fall of fresh water in the tidelands to irrigate.) Tariffs imposed by the more populous industrial North's political power that would destroy the agricultural economy of the South is really what was at the heart of the Civil War. At one point, more rice left the port of Charleston than anywhere else in the world. When the ships returned they carried goods from Europe far superior to the fledgling American manufacturing in the North. And the Carolinians had the money to pay for them. Telling of both the fear of Charleston's civic leaders, and of the desire of the North to crush the spirit of the aristocracy, the citizens of the city got up every day to Union policed marshal law for fully ten years after the end of the war. King Cotton, what most Americans associate with American slavery, was the Johnny-come-lately to the real story. President Abraham Lincoln made the war pointedly about the abolition of slavery after the war had already started, with a stroke of the Presidential pen. (The Emancipation Proclamation.)

 

Queen Anne's Revenge, Blackbeard's very real pirate ship now sitting on the ocean bottom off North Carolina, probably dropped anchor here in Puerto Plata.  In real life Blackbead was so bold his ships once blockaded the the port of Charleston, South Carolina all on their own.  When Captain Barbarossa of the Pirates of the Caribbean movies said he was off the north coast of Hispaniola when his ship turned against him, this is the place.  It is said sailors named Puerto Plata (Spanish for Silver Harbor) because of the clould cap that so often hangs over the tall peak that looks over the town, Mount Isabel.

In April of 1563 this is also the place where the first load of 400 slaves captured in Sierra Leone were sold to the Spanish colonialists, and thus began the long-time British involvement in the slave trade. The reality is that none of us can change anything that's already happened. And without the Spaniards and the Africans being put in a genetic mixing bowl on Hispaniola in the Caribbean for a few hundred years, we would have no Dominicanos. And that... would be a shame.

 

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