Haitian Sugar Cane Field Worker in the Dominican Republic

Here is a photo of a Haitian sugar cane field worker in the Dominican Republic.

Every year for seventy years or more, male seasonal immigrants from Haiti have arrived to work the sugar harvest in the Dominican Republic. 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. In the past, Dominican heads of state paid Haitian heads of state a finder's fee to round up large numbers of Haitians.

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, and that the conditions are absolutely deplorable, even when they can get paid many times more than what they had previously received in Haiti.

Read more @ Wikipedia

Photo clipped from an original photo from Dominican Team 1 on Flickr

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