Whore Nation

Dave, two of his friends and I took off from Santo Domingo to Cabarete. We took a Caribe Tours bus to Sosua and then a guagua to Cabarete. Man, Cabarete. What can I say? The place is paradise. It has the white sand beaches, warm water and clear, sunny skies that the folks who created those annoying "Bahamavention" ads in the New York subways are trying to conjure. The place is truly beautiful. I hate it. Why? Because it presents global inequalities of nation, race, gender and sexuality in all of their sunny splendor. The whole place is run by and for rich white Europeans and North Americans. All of the hotels and bars are seemingly owned by expatriates (i hate that word by the way, cause it reminds me that in this world some of us get to be expats and others have to be immigrants). All of the inhabitants of the built-for-tourism-"development" town are either wealthier Westerners or Dominican and Haitian prostitutes. Cabarete is the kind of place where you see old white tourist men with deep tans and bear bellies having dinner or drinks with beautiful, young black women. Pretty much any woman of color that you see is a prostitute.

Dave´s friends were trying to meet women, and we realized soon that would be impossible in Cabarete. All of the local women were only too happy to approach us and "hang" out, but for a price of course. And most of the white female tourists we encountered apparently thought that we were male prostitutes. Dave and I met a group of five Norweigian women in Cabarete to learn kite-surfing, and they had the nerve to question us on our nationalities after we insisted that we really were Americans. I even showed one of them a copy of my passport, but she insisted that I spoke with an "accent." This from a woman from Norway, for whom English was clearly a second or third language. I was incredibly insulted. Once again, the color of my skin, my "background" deemed me less than. As a person of color, as a Dominican, I could not have been anything but a "sanky-panky," a male Dominican prositute. Later that night we did meet a cool group of American women, black and white, and discussed some of these issues, but I was still bitter about the experience. It reminded me that in this world there are countries that whore themselves to others. These Norweigian women could come here and make their racist assumptions and there was nothing I could do to stop them. There was no way for Dominican women to go to Norway and stereotype Norweigian men as hustlers and prostitutes. The Dominican Republic needs euros and dollars, and now that sugar is worthless the only thing left to sell is ourselves. Either way we have to get that foreign exchange, be it by exporting people (emigration) or through tourism, and either way we remain dependent on the economies of the core countries for our "development." If they have money then we get some of the crumbs, and if they don´t then they pass more restrictive immigration laws and the resorts remain empty.