It's One For Fun In Tomorrow's Sun

Puerto Rico boomed, and the Virgin Islands bloomed, and Jamaica and Bermuda and the Bahamas have grown fat with the crowds disgorged from plump jets and posh cruise ships. But the Dominican Republic has lain fallow, bypassed by wary tourists as if it were a kingdom of cannibals, its citizenry remaining dependent for a thin subsistence on God's fine climate and the oxcart to bring in a good sugarcane crop. This happened to the Dominican Republic largely because of the violence of its politics and the stigma of its many years under a dictatorship not noted for encouraging tourism. The settings have not changed. But the outlook is now quite different.

Now, for reasons political and economic, there is hope among Dominicans that the time is nigh when their country will emerge and claim a place in the sun of Caribbean tourism: an Island Paradise, or A Dream Vacation Destination, or perhaps even A Low-Priced Action Package of Fun, Sun and Sea. It should be hastily noted that the time is nigh—not now; maybe five years from now. For now, there is a curiously unpolished and finely imperfect quality to a vacation in the Dominican Republic. There is massive potential, and it is a beautiful, charming, exciting and good-natured place. But it is probably not the ideal trip for the average pampered buyer of Low-Priced Action Packages. Not yet.

Many things, of course, are fully finished. There is the stunning airport terminal at Santo Domingo and the excellent airline service—everyone from Iberia to Viasa and Pan Am is constantly flying in. There is the Embajador Hotel in Santo Domingo, which is strictly of the Miami Beach baroque school of design. It has no access to the sea, its bellmen wear gold swallowtail uniforms with stripes on the pants and spats on the shoes, its bar specializes in—what else?—banana daiquiris. And there is an unforgettable nightspot called Mes�n de la Cava. Here one enters a door at the foot of a fantastically tall fig tree and descends a long spiral staircase to the floor level 50 feet below. Looking up, one sees the roots of the tree twisting down the walls; this is a grand underground cavern, now replete with bar and barmaids and a gentle rock band, and occasionally as one sips a Ron Tav�rez on ice a drop of moisture may fall from the high stone ceiling where perhaps it has been gathering itself together since the time Columbus first landed on this island of Hispaniola. Recently negotiations were undertaken to turn the Mes�n de la Cava into a Playboy Club. The negotiations failed, but it was a close call.

Soon enough the world of plastic hedonism will make its mark on the Dominican Republic—but not yet. Jes�s Alou, one of the Dominican ballplaying brothers who has made it in the U.S. major leagues, sums it up well when he says: "My country is 30 years behind, but that is why tourists should want to come. We have not been exploited. We have not given away the things that other islands have already lost. We are unspoiled."

True. There are miles of gleaming white sand beaches, and on most of them the surf crashes in as it has for quite a few million years—unheard, unseen by human beings. Occasionally there is a lone thatched hut set back amid deep green groves of coconut palms. Occasionally a coupie of tiny brown children will appear to splash in the azure surf, then tumble in the white sand until they seem to be rolled in flour. But such pristine spots can be reached only by boat or by soul-jolting jeep rides over horrible roads or by wafting in above it all in a helicopter. They are unspoiled but they also are unused and all but unreachable.

There have been no major hotel complexes built outside the towns so far. However, there are plans for a $50 million three-hotel layout at Puerto Plata on the north coast, and there is talk of a $17 million project at Macao on the east. There is gossip that Howard Hughes has secretly bought land.

Even if the most promising of all dreams came true tomorrow, the Dominican Republic would not immediately become a tourist mecca. An expert who is involved in the Puerto Plata plan spoke with ruthless cool about the realities of the tourism game: "There is no authentic tourist boom—not a boom—until tens of thousands of people want to visit a place. Secretaries from Trenton and shoe clerks from Norfolk must want desperately to come. For that to happen they must be sold—sold by the travel wholesalers. The big wholesalers like American Express and Diners Club and Thomas Cook and the airlines must promote a country. They must have something to merchandise—package tours and options on the packages, a full range of prices and accommodations. The day will very likely come when the Dominican Republic can be merchandised by the wholesalers and at least begin to boom, but not for a while yet. The country is too far behind."

On May 30 it will be exactly 10 years since Dictator Rafael Trujillo was ambushed in his limousine on Santo Domingo's lovely seaside boulevard, Avenida George Washington. For 30 years he had ruled by terror, and the people celebrated his death; they renamed the street at the point where he died The 30th of May. A long and painful period of chaos and bloodshed followed, culminating in 1965 with a wild street rebellion in Santo Domingo, an uprising that was finally snuffed out through the intervention of U.S. Marines. Since then the Dominican people have seemed quite drained of the desire for civil war. Twice in the last five years they have cast overwhelming majorities to elect Dr. Joaquin Balaguer as president. It is true that there have been a number of flagrantly political murders committed by terrorists, and that there are menacing mumbles from fierce splinter groups on the left, and that scowling army men in rumpled khaki with submachine guns are everywhere in evidence. But it also is true that there are new Sinclair gas stations, new Coca-Cola billboards, new shopping centers and new North American capital investments worth hundreds of millions since Balaguer's administration began. There is broad agreement that he has brought at least the image of stability and dignity that his country sorely needed.

Balaguer is a tiny, gray sparrow of a man, a former law professor and a bachelor who still lives with his mother, who is 89 years old. When he comes to work in the ornate velvet-draped presidential chambers of the magnificent Italian Renaissance pink marble palace Trujillo built, he habitually wears shiny black shoes, a neat blue suit and an austere necktie. No medals, ribbons, pins or decorations of any kind adorn him. During an interview he will sit, nearly lost, in the corner of a brocaded French provincial couch and will speak in a soft, almost shy, schoolteacher's voice. He is a politician, so he does not speak frequently in specifics or quotable promises. He says, "We will do all that we can to encourage tourism in our country. We hope to install roads and landing strips and the systems to allow expansion of our tourist potential."

But it is Balaguer's aura of confidence and tranquillity, more than any grand commitment of government pesos, that will encourage grand investments in the new tourism of his land. The Dominican Republic is ripe, but for what?