Editor’s note: This story first appeared on palabra, the digital news site by the National Association of Hispanic Journalists.
By Valerie Trapp
Downtown Cabarete on the northern edge of the Dominican Republic, resembles Silicon Valley superimposed on the Caribbean, with its health food restaurant, waffle café, and spinning studio. But long before the Bitcoin & Crypto Shop moved in on the corner of Paseo Don Chiche and Highway 5, the land it now occupies belonged to a Afro-Dominican woman, the daughter of a mother born in the United States, likely into enslavement.
Carolina Sims’ house stood in a citrus grove adjoining a two-lane highway. Sims’ great-grandchildren will tell you that on nights they visited, they’d lie flat on the road to watch the stars and listen to the waves. They’ll tell you she lived past 100. And they’ll tell you she knew.
More than half a century before the kite surfers and transplants and digital nomads descended on Cabarete, the bilingual daughter of parents who migrated from Florida to Ayiti (one of the Taíno names for Hispaniola) said, “One day, strange people from other countries are going to come here.”
Now 61 years old, Lisandro Corniel Juma’s eyes widen at his great-grandmother’s foresight. “I don’t know what vision she had,” he says.
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The story of outsiders descending on and shapeshifting Cabarete is one that’s been rehearsed. When Carolina Sims’ parents arrived on a boat chartered by British-American slaveholder Zephaniah Kingsley – likely in the late 1830s – the area was still a part of Haiti, which had only decades before overthrown the French government. Kingsley brought his own Black wives and biracial children, along with dozens of people he had once enslaved but had to free to bring them to Haiti, where the Black majority ruled and slavery was outlawed. These formerly enslaved people worked as indentured servants on Kingsley’s plantation before eventually being granted real freedom and…
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