Batey (sugar workers' town)

A batey (plural is bateyes) is a settlement around a sugar mill. They can be found in Cuba and the Dominican Republic.

In Cuba and the Dominican Republic, 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 refinery, the town around the office and refinery, sugar fields (campos de caña), and miscellaneous production equipment like trucks, trains, tractors, 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 fields so that groups of workers can live nearby their labor site.

Every year since 1933, 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. However, the Dominican Government has sent police officers to kidnap Haitian men, women, and children, destroyed their documents and have forcibly moved them to the bateys in the Dominican Republic. These Haitians are being held for ransom in this deplorable places.

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.

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