LETTER 2: Part 2 of the letter from Bradford resident Paul P. Lyon, who was working in the Dominican Republican in December of 1923. We left off with the letter describing the beautiful weather and successful growing seasons, with tropical fruits and foods seen in gardens back home.
“On the same plantation are found oranges, bananas, cocoa, corn, beans, lettuce, radishes, tomatoes, rice. Cotton will one day be grown in a big way. Sugar cane is now the most highly developed industry having many plantations, notably two large ones, either big enough to encompass any two in Cuba.
“Speaking of industries, the industry most evident in the cities is shoe shining; a close second is selling lottery tickets carried on by women and sometimes full grown men. The impression I get in the cities is that everyone is engaged in selling something to everyone else. The stores are well stocked with American and European manufactured goods and any old kind of a store in the cities and every store at any crossroads in the country has prominently displayed long shelves full of rum and other liquor. You know that my prohibition proclivities will call it heresy to hear me say there is, with all the flood of liquor available, little drunkenness of the staggering obvious kind. But wait.
“The universal poverty and stagnant enterprise of this whole island is heartbreaking to the outside observer; notwithstanding the big mountains and broad valleys are plastered full of almost every natural resource conceivable in the minds of men. In my opinion the ever-present rum bottle must bear a share of the blame.”
Still more to come.
