A batey (plural: bateyes) is a settlement around a sugar mill. They can be found in

Cuba Cuba ( , ), officially the Republic of Cuba ( es, República de Cuba, links=no ), is an island country comprising the island of Cuba, as well as Isla de la Juventud and several minor archipelagos. Cuba is located where the northern Caribbea ...

the Dominican Republic The Dominican Republic ( ; es, República Dominicana, ) is a country located on the island of Hispaniola in the Greater Antilles archipelago of the Caribbean region. It occupies the eastern five-eighths of the island, which it shares with ...

and

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. In

and the

Dominican Republic The Dominican Republic ( ; es, República Dominicana, ) is a country located on the island of Hispaniola in the Greater Antilles archipelago of the Caribbean region. It occupies the eastern five-eighths of the island, which it shares with ...

, the basic conglomerate unit of a sugar production is usually called an ''ingenio.'' An ingenio consists of a central administrative office, a

sugar cane mill A sugar cane mill is a factory that processes sugar cane to produce raw or white sugar. The term is also used to refer to the equipment that crushes the sticks of sugar cane to extract the juice. Processing There are a number of steps in pro ...

, a

sugar refinery A sugar refinery is a refinery which processes raw sugar from cane or beets into white refined sugar. Many cane sugar mills produce raw sugar, which is sugar that still contains molasses, giving it more colour (and impurities) than the w ...

, the town around the office and refinery, sugar fields (''campos de caña''), and miscellaneous production equipment like

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train In rail transport, a train (from Old French , from Latin , "to pull, to draw") is a series of connected vehicles that run along a railway track and transport people or freight. Trains are typically pulled or pushed by locomotives (often ...

tractor A tractor is an engineering vehicle specifically designed to deliver a high tractive effort (or torque) at slow speeds, for the purposes of hauling a trailer or machinery such as that used in agriculture, mining or construction. Most commo ...

s, weighing scales, and housing for workers, usually in what is called a ''batey.'' A batey is a company town consisting of barracks and a few houses. Bateyes vary in size considerably. They are located close to

cane Cane or caning may refer to: *Walking stick or walking cane, a device used primarily to aid walking * Assistive cane, a walking stick used as a mobility aid for better balance *White cane, a mobility or safety device used by many people who are ...

fields so that groups of workers can live nearby their labor site.

Dominican Republic

Every year since 1933, seasonal immigrants from Haiti have arrived to work the sugar harvest in the

. The migrants are lodged in rooms at the batey, sometimes with no facilities, and expected to work cropping sugar cane in long days with hard hours. These days, individual ingenios and land owners (''colonos'') pay headhunters (''buscones''), a fee for each cane cutter (''picador'') the headhunter provides. A headhunter may entice the prospective labourer with promises of a work permit, and often requires a large fee from the prospective immigrant. When immigrants arrive, they may find that they are not free to leave the batey until they finish the labor. Over time, some of these migrants have stayed through the six months that follow the cane harvest (''zafra''), called "dead time" (''tiempo muerto''), and have started families with Haitian women that have migrated as well. Bateys are unique in culture and language in their mix of which is Haitian and which is Dominican. The Dominican government has historically provided fewer public services to bateys than to similarly sized communities in the rest of the country mainly due to Bateyes being seen as illegal settlements. The bateys were regarded as exceptions to the country's governance system. It was often left to the State Sugar Council (CEA: Consejo Estatal de Azúcar) or private companies to provide basic services, a responsibility that all too often they did not fulfill. Bateys were often still regarded as places where only Haitians (non-citizens) live. Since the Haitians who originally filled the bateys were not legal immigrants, their children have often been denied

citizenship Citizenship is a "relationship between an individual and a state to which the individual owes allegiance and in turn is entitled to its protection". Each state determines the conditions under which it will recognize persons as its citizens, and ...

papers because they are considered to have been born while in transit. Without citizenship papers from Haiti either, these children of Haitian immigrants cannot go to school nor can they receive the benefits of other

public services A public service is any service intended to address specific needs pertaining to the aggregate members of a community. Public services are available to people within a government jurisdiction as provided directly through public sector agencies ...

; however, a number of non-governmental organizations have attempted to address this problem by operating

primary schools A primary school (in Ireland, the United Kingdom, Australia, Trinidad and Tobago, Jamaica, and South Africa), junior school (in Australia), elementary school or grade school (in North America and the Philippines) is a school for primary ed ...

on bateys trying to get them Dominican citizenship. In the past, sugar was a profitable industry. However, the Dominican sugar industry is no longer competitive, and when combined with the historical lack of educational and health services to these communities, the low wages have tended to make bateys some of the poorest communities in the country. The current trend in the Dominican Republic is for the ingenios to stop production, and thus the only source of income for the community and for the bateys to very slowly transform themselves into new sorts of communities. Los Alcarrizos in the

Santo Domingo province Santo Domingo () is a province of the Dominican Republic. It was split from the Distrito Nacional on October 16, 2001. Municipalities and municipal districts As of June 20, 2006, the province is divided into the following municipalities (''m ...

is a good example of something that used to be a batey but now is a

municipality A municipality is usually a single administrative division having corporate status and powers of self-government or jurisdiction as granted by national and regional laws to which it is subordinate. The term ''municipality'' may also mean the go ...

which survives through jobs in the area and in Santo Domingo. The Batey is a modern form of slavery where Haitians are paid less than $2.00 American dollars for 12–14 hours of labor. They are forced to sleep on foam boards and live without electricity or running water.

External links

Beyond the Bateyes
a 1996 report by th
National Coalition for Haitian RightsBatey Relief AllianceThe Batey Foundation
{{Sugar Economy of the Dominican Republic Economy of Cuba Company towns Agricultural labor Sugar Unfree labour Labor in the Dominican Republic Labor in Cuba