Slaves in Paradise: A Priest Stands Up for Exploited Sugarcane Workers

Slaves in Paradise: A Priest Stands Up for Exploited Sugarcane Workers.  By Jesús García, Ignatius Press, 2017.

 

Slaves in Paradise is the story of a priest who was compelled to follow his calling to care for some of the poorest and most exploited people in the world.  This overview of the career and outreach of Father Christopher Hartley is at times a grueling read due to the often-heartbreaking subject matter, but it is always compelling and serves as a reminder of the need for preaching the Gospel all over the world, and for the need for justice to help people who are being exploited by powerful forces.  

 

In the Foreword to the English Edition, Seán Patrick Cardinal O’Malley writes:

 

“Father Christopher Hartley and I first met many years ago when he was working in New York City, and what impressed me most about him was his missionary zeal and his priestly spirit.  I was acquainted with a little bit of his history, namely his desire to be helpful to Mother Teresa in her ministry, his generosity in serving the Hispanic population of the United States, and his desire to become a missionary to those on the peripheries, those who are often forgotten and neglected.

 

This desire to become a missionary led him to accept the Lord’s invitation to bring God’s love and salvation to the Haitian and Dominican people in the Dominican Republic.  His experience in the Dominican Republic with the exploitation of Haitian workers hard a very profound effect on Father Hartley, and his witness to the world helped to raise consciousness about the suffering and the injustices they endured on the sugarcane plantations of San José de los Llanos.  Like so many migrants in this century, the Haitians who left their country in search of paradise were actually fleeing extreme poverty, and they found themselves living in a new land, in search of a better life, as cutters of sugarcane.  The pages that follow are a witness to Father Hartley’s experiences as a missionary working among these poorest of the poor.  

 

Unfortunately his prophetic voice did not elicit the supportive response that we would have hoped for within the Church in Santo Domingo, and so Father Hartley had to leave his beloved ministry there.  But following the gospel injunction, he shook the dust from his sandals and went to another mission to continue to announce the joy and the liberation of Christ.  He is now in a very remote part of Ethiopia, ministering to God’s people and witnessing to the presence of the gospel in a heavily Muslim population.”

 

This history of Father Hartley’s work in the Dominican Republic is a scathing exposé of the abuses of the sugarcane industry, an unnerving social portrait of a society that is wracked with poverty and abuse yet still hungers for spiritual nourishment.  Father Hartley’s missionary work led him to discover people who had been compelled to flee their native Haiti to the bordering Dominican Republic.  Across the border, they found racism, squalid conditions, and the continuing oppression of wealthy and influential forces against the people who struggled in the cane fields.

 

In the Foreword to the Spanish Edition, Antonio Cardinal Cañizares Llovera writes:

 

“Unquestionably, the principal figure in this story is not Father Christopher Hartley so much as it is God.  In effect, this account is akin to the Acts of the Apostles: the protagonist is God, who has vouchsafed for the benefit of all mankind his mercy, his immense love, and the grace he has poured out and spread all over the world through the apostles, which we see in what God has done through this priest, this missionary, in the sugarcane plantations of the Dominican Republic.

 

Anyone who reads this book will not find a superhero here in Christopher, my good and dear friend and brother.  He will find no more than a man of God– a faithful and reliable subject and servant of the Lord– who with deep sincerity seeks nothing more than to fulfill the Lord’s will: to affirm that the neediest of men, poor and suffering, share in his infinite loving-kindness, his eternal mercy, his extreme closeness, that they may share in his salvation, which is of the whole person and resides only in that union with the Lord.  Every page of this book attests to God’s love for and his salvation of the Dominicans and the Haitians in the bateyes [small villages populated by Haitian migrant laborers] of the sugarcane plantations of San José de los Llanos (Saint Joseph of the Plains).”

 

What separates Slaves in Paradise from other books that reveal horrific social injustices is its constant stress on the spiritual lives of its subjects.  Father Hartley is shocked by the paucity of venues for Catholics in some areas of the Dominican Republic.  Father Hartley found it necessary to build little chapels, and was amazed at the distances some people would travel in order to attend Mass.  The exuberance with which many people pursue their religious faith is inspiring, especially when compared with the fact that so many of these people have so little in the way of material possessions.  A secular book would have stressed that the sugarcane workers needed better pay and housing and care.  Father Hartley insists that all of those things are absolutely necessary and that the laborers deserve them, but also points out that Jesus provides an additional form of sustenance that cannot be replicated elsewhere. Father Hartley is disgusted by many people, including missionaries from other denominations that give out food only if the recipients attend their religious services.

 

Father Hartley was extremely outspoken in his attacks on the wealthy and powerful who profited from the horrific conditions in the sugarcane fields, and not surprisingly it earned him enemies.  After continued pressure and threats, Father Hartley was compelled to leave the Dominican Republic and attempt to save souls elsewhere in the world.

 

At the end of the book, Jesús García notes that despite Father Hartley’s efforts, very little has changed in the sugar industry. 

 

“I find it odd to think, as I am finishing the book, that there should be a tremendous uproar right now, in the U.S. State and Labor Departments, regarding some sugar plantations in the Dominican Republic.  It moves me deeply that thousands of men should have woken up with machete in hand this morning, and with nothing to wat, to cut tons of sugarcane for which they will receive just pennies while we in the West keep consuming that sugar, in practically every product we buy, unaware that in other parts of the world that sugar is bitter and red, not sweet and white.

 

It surprises me that somewhere in the Ethiopian desert, near the border with Somalia, a hurricane dressed as a missionary stays calm, having made peace with himself and with those who, at times, succeeded in upsetting him.  It is unmistakable proof that God calms everything, as he did the storm in the Gospel, and it is an echo of the gospel of Jesus Christ that this book aspires to be, in the people and circumstances that shape it.

 

To conclude, it is a blessing and a consolation to think that, all in all, those who have faith in God remain undisturbed in the face of the storm, firmly planted on the rock and looking to the future, having experienced so much, but as if nothing had happened.”

 

The conditions in the book are heartwrenching, and the fact that justice seems to be unobtainable is frustrating.  Not everybody is cut out for the kind of missionary work that Father Hartley has devoted his life to, but books like this inspire a need to do something to help the less fortunate around the world.  In the United States, it is disturbingly easy to overlook one’s blessings in a land of plenty, including the freedom of religion.  Chesterton once wrote of certain people who prefer that they milk “come from a nice clean shop and not from a dirty cow.”  After reading Slaves in Paradise, it will be impossible to forget that the sugar that comes in nice clean bags also comes from very dirty cane fields.

 

 

–Chris Chan