Railroads of Puerto Rico

This brief documentary examines the history of railroads in Puerto Rico. Although every documentary has its own set of problems, this one features charming local music about the trains of the island. It also includes some historic video footage and photographs of railroads on the island up until the last train for public use, in the 1950s. Georges Michel briefly mentions the railroads of Puerto Rico, too, although certainly not anywhere near the same level of detail as this video. Sadly, there doesn't appear to be a single book solely on the railroads of the island, although articles can be found. 

Some Thoughts on Railroads in the Dominican Republic

Railroads and projected lines in the DR, 1925

Since the Dominican Republic shares an island with Haiti, a quick overview into the history of trains in the eastern portion of the island may be useful to shed light on some commonalities and possibly important deviations in the development of both nations. Unfortunately, with only the use of two books, it is difficult to tell the story in great detail or perhaps address larger themes, but the main purpose of the post is really a comparative look at Haiti and the Dominican Republic. Georges Michel's text includes a useful chapter on the Dominican Republic's railroads, suggesting such a framework may be useful to see the interconnected underdevelopment of the island. Michiel Baud's focuses on the railroads of the Cibao, offering context on their construction and their relation to social and economic change in the region.

The story of the railroads of the Dominican Republic is intimately linked with views of modernization, expansion of the export economy, and the Cibao's agricultural potention and expansion. According to Baud, the population of the province was only 90,000 in 1875, but a few decades later it was over 200,000. The Dominican Republic of the 19th century, much like Haiti, lacked reliable and comprehensive roads. In order to reduce costs of transport of tobacco and, later on, cacao and coffee, local elites and the Dominican state endeavored to construct railroads through concessions to European and North American capitalists (they lacked sufficient capital to launch these projects on their own).

These concessions had dangerous consequences, particularly with regards to the role of the San Domingo Improvement Co. and the completion of the line connecting Santiago, Moca, and Puerto Plata. Much like the MacDonald Contract in Haiti, the railway ensured growing dependence on the US. The railways of both nations also share a parallel in their lack of a line connecting their capitals with the major cities in their northern provinces, Cap-Haitien and Santiago. The further centralization in Port-au-Prince and Santo Domingo, plus the concentration of US capital in the sugar industries in the DR and the Cul-de-Sac and Leogane plains in the West province of Haiti, weakened the regional economy and autonomy of the Cibao and the Nord of Haiti.

Much like the case of Haiti, the Cibao did eventually develop railroads in the late 19th century and early 20th century, connecting Santiago to Puerto Plata (Ferrocarril Central Dominicana) and La Vega to Sanchez, in the Samana peninsula. Despite numerous financial and construction problems along the way, the trains did have an impact on the burgeoning economy of the Cibao and the movement of people and goods. Like Haiti, the railroads of the Cibao played a role in the expansion of tropical commodities for the global market, although the case of northern Haiti was a less extensive railroad network servicing banana, sisal, bois de campêche, and coffee transport. Haiti was less impacted by immigration and the penetration of foreign capital, thus by the 1940s, only having 297 kilometers of railroads versus 1,247 kilometers of common-carrier and industrial use tracks in the Dominican Republic. Haiti had more kilometers of common-carrier lines, however, but it was less extensive across the country.

According to P.E. Bloom, the DR's industrial lines were mainly servicing the sugar industry in the south and east of the nation, but these were nearly all privately operated before nationalization of the sugar industry. About 815 km of the industrial railroads were owned by American capital, which speaks to the degree of American penetration of the Dominican sugar industry in the early decades of the 20th century. Bloom, like Georges Michel, also indicated the decline of passenger service in the Cibao's two railroads by the 1930s, with the Cibao lines eventually being dismantled by Trujillo and transferred to the sugar plantations in the south and the east. In the Haitian case, we have common-carrier lines like the PCS purchased by HASCO and used solely for the transfer of cane in 1932, plus a series of problems for the national train company after nationalization and a decline in services, quality, and investment.

By the 1930s and 1940s, the railways of Haiti and DR were definitely not the most commonly used form of transit, and mostly served to illustrate the dependent nature of the island on US capital with a bleak future. However, today the DR still retains some of the industrial lines, plus a Metro system in Santo Domingo. Haiti, needless to say, still lacks adequate roads and there are no functioning railroads in the country. Perhaps building one to connect Santiago to Santo Domingo would be useful for congested roads, or, if there was political will, connecting Port-au-Prince and Santo Domingo, but the latter seems particularly unlikely.

Michel's work indicates that the 1874 treaty between Haiti and the Dominican Republic included a planned railroad between the two capitals, but neither country's railways ever properly reached the border. The PCS line ended at Manneville, by Lake Azuey, but the Dominican Republic's concession in 1913 for a line to the Haitian border connecting Neiba, Barahona, and the Haitian frontier (going around Lake Enriquillo) never materialized. Thus, the main connection between Haitian and Dominican railroads was probably the significant numbers of Haitian laborers working on the the Dominican sugar plantations whose labor cut the cane transported by 1032 kilometers of private railroads. However, the number of parallels between the two nations and their incorporation into the American-dominated Caribbean of the 20th century, in addition to their impact on labor, migration, and economic relations reveal a mutual dependence if the island is viewed through the lens of a single, fragmented economic system.

Works Consulted

Baud, Michiel. Historia De Un Sueño: Los Ferrocarriles Públicos En La República Dominicana, 1880-1930. Santo Domingo, República Dominicana: Fundación Cultural Dominicana, 1993.

Hoetink, H. The Dominican People, 1850-1900: Notes for a Historical Sociology. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982.

Long, W. Rodney. Railways of Central America and the West Indies. Washington: Government printing Office, 1925.

Michel, Georges. Les chemins de fer de l'île d'Haïti. Jamaica, N.Y.: Haitiana Publications, 1989.

Les chemins de fer de l'île d'Haïti

Haitian Railroads ca. 1925

Although it is difficult not to sympathize with the wise words of Delorme, who warned us of the need to have proper roads before thinking of railroads, Georges Michel's Les chemins de fer de l'île d'Haïti is an excellent introduction to the history of trains in Haiti and what could have been. Although it is somewhat hard to think a truly national railway system would have been completed had it not been for the US Occupation (and its improvement of the roads and promotion of automobiles), Michel's text analyzes the development of industrial, freight, and passenger lines in Haiti since the late 19th century and gives a richly detailed breakdown on the speed, construction, and relationship with local economies of the various railroads on the island.

For example, the PCS line, stretching from Port-au-Prince to the Dominican border, with another extension to Leogane and the tramway system within Port-au-Prince, predated the US Occupation (founded with German capital). It was explicitly tied to the passenger needs for local markets, trade on the Dominican border (the company even built a wharf on Lake Azuey), and transporting sugar and other products produced on the Cul de Sac and Leogane plains. The PCS line was eventually purchased by HASCO, which ceased passenger service, solely focusing on transporting cane to their central mill near Port-au-Prince. Thus, the fate of the PCS railway was diverted away from the various economic and market interests of the populations living from Leogane to the Cul de Sac plain, to serve the needs of HASCO, which ruined small-scale sugar plantations or absorbed them, while also dominating the local rum market. Perhaps Michel was on to something when he criticized the US for disrupting the development of the Haitian railway.

Other railroads examined by Michel include a Gonaives to Ennery line, 33 km long, whose service was terminated under President Borno in the 1920s. By 1919, a Port-au-Prince to St. Marc line and Cap-Haitien to Grand Riviere du Nord (with extension to Bahon) were completed. These lines carried various tropical commodities to the major port cities, as well as passengers. Standard Fruit for the banana trade, SHADA, and other agro-industrial firms used these lines to transport their products, and these aforementioned lines fell under the purview of the national railway company. Unfortunately, it never developed into a national railway system, connecting Cap-Haitien to Port-au-Prince, nor Leogane to Cayes. Falling under the remit of the MacDonald Contract, which infamously triggered rural discontent in Haiti as a concession that would forcibly dispossess farmers off their land to allow MacDonald to develop banana plantations, the Compagnie Nationale des Chemins de Fer was eventually nationalized by  Estimé after refusing to raise wages of striking workers in the 1940s. It persisted for a few decades, but by the 1960s and 1970s, these trains were eventually discontinued, scrapped, or only used by a few industrial concerns. 

Michel's book contains a chapter on a few plans to reestablish and expand train lines in Haiti, including two involving French and Canadian capital, but nothing came to fruit under the Duvalier dictatorship. Despite the fond memories of older generations of Haitians and, as the chapter on the Dominican Republic reveals, Dominicans, the chances of a renewed railroad system in Haiti appear grim. However, Michel's study of the history of the train system does persuasively illustrate how US imperialism and Haitian political failure and corruption ruined the chances for Haiti to ever establish a truly national network. The main areas to receive a line were intimately tied to export commodities, and the HASCO takeover of the PCS line reinforce the region's dependence on sugar, to the detriment of a varied export economy. One expects the development of railroads to focus on cities and the transportation of goods, but the truncated nature of their development in Haiti is an excellent illustration of the numerous shortcomings of the Haitian economy, disarticulated, 'underdeveloped,' and in a state of dependency. 

For those searching for additional information on Haitian railroads, Le Nouvelliste and Le Matin, digitized at the Digital Library of the Caribbean, provide rich details on the construction of trains, the tramway service, workers, and the social impact of a regular train service on the people of Haiti. Travelers accounts also provide some perspective, as they describe the tramway system in Port-au-Prince, the use of smaller railroads by some of the usines established in other regions of Haiti, or the various establishments that used the PCS railroad or national lines. 

Greene's Orient Express

Although Graham Greene is one of my favorite novelists, Orient Express is so far my least favorite novel of is. As an "entertainment" with a similar title as one of Agatha Christie's classics, I expected something more exciting, granted there are some moments which are written as action film scenes. But I suppose my major problem with the novel is the caricatured main characters and the pervasive anti-Semitism where one is not sure if the author agrees.

The middle-aged lesbian who hates men, the virgin chorus girl, the self-conscious Jew, the thief on the run, and the novelist, Savory, are not as interesting as one would like, in spite of the "exotic" settings on a train bound for Istanbul. However, where the novel does approach the more typical 'Catholic' Greene territory, is in the lapsed Catholic Communist, Dr. Czinner (the name is a clue), who seeks redemption after the failure of an attempted Communist uprising. 

His character and his end, in his search for redemption, bring to mind a point made by a favorite intellectual historian of mine about the similarities between Marxism and Christianity. Furthermore, as Christiopher Hitchens's introduction to the edition I read indicates, Greene was likely drawing on his own sympathies for the Left and Catholicism in the character of Czinner, juxtaposing his fate with the ongoing social inequalities and exploitation of interwar Europe.

In that sense, the train, with its various classed cars and compartments, and the numerous references to the peasants, soldiers, clerks, and porters at the various sites along the way, is a portrait of the world in all its vicious social inequities, the passengers forced to engage with those in a setting in which the class, gender, sexual, and national borders are in flux. As one might expect, it doesn't end well for Czinner, Coral's fate is uncertain, but there are glimpses into which the characters' intersecting lives have unforgettably changed each other.