Meaning to Life | Exotic Caribbean

Sunday, August 22, 2004
The Playa Vista Bar, we presume among others in the country, is awash with upbeat news this weekend. Visitors from our big city neighbor, Santo Domingo, are making it clear that just one week into the new administration of Leonel Fernandez, the recent bane of their lives, that of failing electricity supply, has drastically changed. Even in Boca Chica we have noticed an improvement. Over the last few years we Boca Chicans have for several reasons generally been in a good position, but even we had begun to notice an increase in power cuts through the last few weeks of the previous administration… so much so that people were beginning to prepare for the worst and buy more batteries for their inverters or even small generators to tide them through the increasing frequency of power outs. One wry old regular at the bar is now complaining that he hasn’t been able to test his newly acquired inverter because we haven’t had a power cut of longer than five minutes or so since the day he installed it earlier this week!
This morning we can look over to the Caleta peninsula and see a Trinidadian tanker tied up alongside offloading its cargo of fuel for the first time in an unknown number of months thereby guaranteeing a further injection of generating capacity to the national grid.
We have seen the peso strengthen against the dollar all through the week. In the exchange bureaus in Boca Chica the rate began last week above 40 pesos to the dollar and currently stands at 37 boding well for keeping a lid on consumer prices.
Apart from the speculation of what President Fernandez may have in store, it was seen very positively by our bar commentators that he has already taken active measures to reduce the number of public paid employees including quite a few generals and by all accounts a load of central bank staff thereby helping to ease part of the state’s excessive expenditure.
As the debate came near to an end a second wry regular asked, “If the new guy can make such a big change in such a short space of time what on earth was his predecessor doing?”
A genuine answer to this would throw the debate wide open again but meanwhile most of us are happy to see the new administration well out of the starting blocks.

Meanwhile seven years later:
Unfortunately that illumination at the entrance never extended to the end of the tunnel for even after a second re-election and a full seven years on the job Mr Fernandez’s government still sits with the same old widespread and frequent blackout problem. The one bright spot is that the peso has been held pretty constantly in the 37 to 38 to the dollar range. However, almost as a testament to the Dominican Republic’s occasional blind loyalty to tradition the man in charge of the very mess that Fernandez inherited in 2000 will be again the chief challenger at next year’s election to Fernandez’s PLD party.