Strangers on the Shore
Alejo Corniel Juma works at his fruit stand in Cabarete, the Dominican Republic. Photo by Valerie Trapp for palabra
Digital “nomads” seeking paradise settled in a beachfront Dominican town, hurting the local economy, while just beyond their view the Dominican government continues its systemic deportation of Haitians
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 an 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 building the town of Cabarete – or running away to start their lives anew on their own terms.
Salar Yazdjerdi, a former Uber software engineer in San Francisco, works from his laptop at Natura Cabana, a boutique hotel and spa. Photo by Valerie Trapp for palabra
Ever since COVID-19 blurred the boundaries of home and work, foreigners, most of whom are white, have flooded Cabarete with their laptops and flip flops. These leisure travelers and digital nomads are often younger than the permanent migrants and snowbirds whose moves are determined by corporate relocations or the desire to extend pension checks. (Exact stats on the foreign population in Cabarete are unclear, as the island census includes the town in the larger Sosúa municipality.) Cabarete Digital Nomads, a Facebook group emphasizing the beach town’s “amazing lifestyle and surf vibe,” has more than 1,300 members. Among them are freelancers and remote workers Zooming into companies thousands of miles away. A few manage their boutique hotels, others teach beachfront yoga.
‘For some people, remote work works. Really, I think what we'll be fighting over for the next decade or so is who does it works for, who doesn't it work for.’
The town is the shape of a caterpillar, squeezed between a mountainous national park and the Atlantic Ocean, with little room to expand. Property closest to the beachfront is being bought up, pushing neighborhoods farther from the beach and toward the mountains. Two neighborhoods inhabited primarily by Dominicans are now crushed against federally protected land as coastal developments spread. On the beachfront side on Carolina Sims’ old street corner, the contemporary panorama is an alternate reality for her descendants.
After Sims died in 1970, her land was sold off bit by bit – first a large chunk to Dominicans, then some to Spaniards and, more recently, to Russians. The part of the property where her grandson Corniel Juma and his family live consists of a railroad-style house formed of several consecutive rooms. In the back under a gray tarp, Corniel Juma and his wife María Victoria Morán sell juices, smoothies and sandwiches from their kitchen. In the front by the road, his brother Alejo slashes coconuts for passing tourists. The country is now the most-visited in the Caribbean.
The arrival of the nomads, some after stints in Southeast Asia, has transformed Cabarete into what Odeth Serna, a Colombian real estate agent living in the town, calls “campo (country) living with a touch of city.” Foreigners are drawn to Cabarete by the lower cost of living, the town’s reputation as a watersports haven, and, not insignificantly, the Dominican government’s policies favoring North Americans and Europeans, most of whom are white.
Multicolor kites soar throughout the day above Cabarete’s beachfront. Photo by Valerie Trapp for palabra
This is just the latest step in the country’s courtship of foreigners. In the 1960s, the Dominican Republic, like many Caribbean nations, began moving toward tourism as a means of economic development that didn’t require intensive investment in manufacturing and technology. Following Rafael Trujillo’s assassination and the subsequent end of his dictatorship in 1961, Dominican politicians marketed the country as democratic, hoping to replace newly communist Cuba as North Americans’ favorite Caribbean vacation spot.
Ángel Miolán, the country’s first director of the National Tourism Bureau in the late 1960s to early 1970s, looked at the island’s pristine beaches and towering mountains — which Columbus once wrote of as “fertile for planting and for pasturage” — and spun the marketing tagline that they were “created by God for tourism.”
“There was also a decline around that time of the price of (sugar) in the global market,” says anthropologist Saudi Garcia, an incoming assistant professor at The New School for Social Research in New York. “The government was really looking to replace a lot of income with tourism.”
Cabarete’s cryptocurrency store opened in December 2021. Photo by Valerie Trapp for palabra
“Tourism today (in the Dominican Republic) represents what sugar was a century ago,” writes Amalia L. Cabezas, a media and cultural studies professor at the University of California, Riverside. It’s “a monocrop controlled by foreigners and a few elites.”
The Cabarete coastline, crammed with foreign-owned hotels, is proof. In developing countries like the Dominican Republic, 25% or less of tourist expenditure stays in the host country.
‘All of us here live off tourism. You see? What can we do?’
And across the Global South, from Mexico to Puerto Rico to Bali, influxes of remote workers have resulted in rising prices and local resistance. As the Los Angeles Times reported, English-language flyers popped up around Mexico City last year that said, “New to the city? Working remotely? You’re a f—ing plague and the locals f—ing hate you. Leave.” The rapper Bad Bunny’s 2022 music video, “El Apagón,” included a documentary-style report on gentrification in Puerto Rico and has garnered more than 14 million views online.
American David Abraham, the co-founder of Outpost, a company with four co-working and co-living communities in Sri Lanka and Bali, has seen firsthand the conflicts that the arrival of digital nomads can cause in communities across the developing world. “For some people, remote work works,” he says. “Really, I think what we'll be fighting over for the next decade or so is who does it works for, who doesn't it work for."
In Cabarete, home to fewer than 15,000 residents, protesters have mobilized against attempts by American and Canadian investors to privatize a public beach. Federal law stipulates that all beaches in the Dominican Republic are public unless the government grants permission to privatize for tourism or public utilities. Protestors are mobilizing across Puerto Plata province, the coastal tourist region encompassing Cabarete, to fight against the privatization of beaches. But in Cabarete resentment is often measured, or not voiced at all.
Alejo Corniel Juma at his fruit stand on his family’s ancestral property in Cabarete. Photo by Valerie Trapp for palabra
“All of us here live off tourism,” says Alejo Corniel Juma, sitting under the tarp of his family’s fruit stand. He points to the friends congregated next to him on plastic chairs and beer crates. “You see? What can we do?”
Cabarete community activist Moraima Capellán Pichardo, who was born in the Dominican Republic and raised in Brooklyn, believes the government intentionally wants its people to be resigned to tourism taking over their resources. “The Dominican population is taught to worship tourism, to aspire for foreign investment above their own people,” she says. “Very little critical thinking is encouraged. So the average person who is affected by mass developments, by the privatization of beaches, they are only seeing short term, not the long-term problems – and that's going to be that they're losing access to their own country.”
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“On a good day, when God grants you luck, you come across a tourist who says, ‘Ah, come, I’ll give you 1,000 pesos to take me to Puerto Plata,’” says motorcycle taxi driver Omar Manuel Olivo. (The fare equals about $18.) Like with any miracle, he asserts, “Things like that don’t show up every day.”
In early 2022, Olivo was living in Callejón de la Loma, one of Cabarete’s largely Dominican neighborhoods. His landlord notified him that she’d be raising the rent by nearly 30%. Although it’s illegal in the country to do this to a current tenant, the landlord told Olivo that she could do whatever she wanted because it was her house. Unable to afford any Cabarete rent, Olivo was forced to move to the next town over, Sabaneta de Yásica.
Unlike the Corniel Juma brothers who inherited their house, Olivo has been renting after moving from Santo Domingo to the north coast seven years ago. He arrived alone, leaving his family in search of the work and safety lacking in the capital.
Omar Manuel Olivo takes a break between motorcycle taxi clients. Photo by Valerie Trapp for palabra
Olivo describes his new place – a wood house that would likely flatten in a hurricane – as “not very suitable,” although all he does there is shower, sleep, and watch some TV. At 4:30 a.m., it’s time to head out to work. He’s in Cabarete before 5, in case he can catch some clients trying to make the early Caribe Tours bus to the Haitian border. He’s out at least 13 1/2 hours a day, finishing around 6 every evening. Olivo doesn’t like to be on the streets when it’s dark out. “Nada bueno se va encontrar,” he said. Nothing good happens then.
But some days he has to stay in Cabarete much later waiting for fares. Business has been slow, and Olivo needs the money. On two consecutive days last summer, he made only about 730 pesos ($13) — a third of what he needs to pay his daily expenses.
This is the conflict for Dominicans in Cabarete: while the number of digital nomads has increased over the past three years, local spending has not. It’s in this new Cabarete, where nomads are happy to pay $28 for a two-hour sound healing class (just a few dollars more than Olivo’s monthly rent payment), that Olivo lost his scooter last September. His business was so slow he couldn't make the biweekly payments. Now he’s renting a moto, trying to get back on his feet to buy his own on credit again someday.
Olivo is focused on day-to-day survival, while privileged foreigners are causing long-term changes to Cabarete. “Everywhere, se vende, se vende, se vende (for sale),” says Taïf van der Haar, a Dutch ex-recruiting manager who, after vacationing in the Dominican Republic, bought land with his wife to open the boutique hotel Kibayo. Speaking little Spanish, they asked themselves, “What does that mean, se vende?”
Taïf van der Haar and Estée Princen moved from the Netherlands to open their boutique hotel, Kibayo, in Cabarete. Photo by Valerie Trapp for palabra
Since the pandemic, “se vende” now translates to skyrocketing prices. “Even in the neighborhoods that were considered low-budget or maybe ‘ghetto’ and ‘dangerous’ for some, now there's younger people — digital nomads, people who work remotely — moving there and hiking up prices,” says Capellán Pichardo, co-founder of Cabarete Sostenible, a grassroots, Dominican-led NGO and community farm. “It’s causing a lot of displacement.”
‘If the prices go up… it's never going to go back down.’
Capellán Pichardo says prices have “doubled in one year with no real reason except (owners) can do it.” (While owners cannot legally raise rents while their properties are occupied, landlords are required to file paperwork for permission to raise rents on empty units, although for the most part anything goes.) When she herself was looking for a house last year, rent was $350 per month. Now, the same place goes for $700.
Dominican-American writer and activist Mechi Annaís Estévez Cruz has been watching and predicting Cabarete’s gentrification since 2016. In an essay published online, Estévez Cruz wrote, “I see the scars of gentrification carved into our neighborhoods: restaurants and properties that block our access to our beaches, the supermarkets stocked with kale and organic free-range eggs…and I wonder where I will go next when my landlord decides tourists can pay more rent than me.”
Sidewalk advertisement for the W resort that is set to open in Cabarete next year. Photo by Valerie Trapp for palabra
Finding housing has become at least a nuisance for Dominicans, if not a nightmare. Some owners, according to Capellán Pichardo, claim they don’t offer long-term rentals, only renting out to visitors willing to pay more — which pushes out Dominican families. Capellán Pichardo has witnessed blatant housing discrimination on Facebook, including a Canadian recommending people not rent to Dominicans.
Yet, even if all the nomads eventually leave, says Capellán Pichardo, the simple fact of them having been in Cabarete forever ruins the rental market for Dominican renters. “If the prices go up,” she says, “it's never going to go back down.”
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Compared to Dominicans in Cabarete – often called “Cab” by nomads – 2022 was much kinder to Joe Troyen, who bought his dream home here that spring, halfway between Playa Encuentro and Kite Beach. “It's really easy to buy a house in the D.R.,” he says with a shrug. “You just have to pay cash.” For Troyen, Cabarete life is “summer camp here for adults.”
Tech startup founder Joe Troyen bought his dream home in Cabarete in the spring of last year. Photo by Valerie Trapp for palabra
Like many new arrivals, boyish ed-tech entrepreneur Troyen keeps extending his stay. He initially planned to stay six months. Then, after falling in love with kitesurfing and joining the foreign migrant community, he chose to stay three more.
“A lot of my friends back home,” Troyen says with the cadence of a New England senator, “if they want to get together with friends, it has to be, like, really planned.” The difference for Troyen is, “Here, I see friends every day, easily, casually, spontaneously.”
Within Cabarete’s small town footprint, digital nomads can replicate a collegiate spontaneity, remapping the town into their own campus centered around foreign-owned restaurants and hotels.
‘Some of them are just straight up stealing local history and culture. And then repackaging it and reselling it within their own social and economic groups.’
If nomads were merely escaping city life for a small-town feel, they could have just gone somewhere in Oklahoma, says Elizabeth Manley, a professor of history at Xavier University in Louisiana. Extended travel to islands in the Global South, she says, is often underpinned by a tropicalized fantasy of reconnecting with nature, spirituality, or a simpler way of life. Yet as more development occurs, some of that imagined paradise increasingly disappears, Manley adds.
Salar Yazdjerdi, an Iranian-American former Uber software engineer, built roam together, an app for travelers who “live a life of adventure — and complexity.” Yazdjerdi lives in what he calls his bases: “San Francisco, Tehran, London and Cabarete. My phone says I’ve been to like 700 cities. But this place is special,” he says of Cabarete. On any given week in Cabarete, foreign residents can join an entrepreneurship group, a new moon sacred sisterhood circle or a face yoga class.
Salar Yazdjerdi logs onto a virtual meeting from boutique hotel Natura Cabana in Cabarete. Photo by Valerie Trapp for palabra
Troyen, a transplant from Vermont, says the town isn’t “a hippie commune.” At Gypsy Bowls, a health food restaurant across from his girlfriend’s new spinning studio and café, Troyen clutches a pendant popular among nomads made of larimar, a rare Dominican stone. After his initial nine months in Cabarete, Troyen traveled to Colombia, Brazil, and back to the United States. “Everywhere I went, it was like, okay, here’s the bar of Cabarete,” he says. “Can you beat Cabarete?” After seven months on the road, he went back.
Troyen now sees Cabarete as his home – though he’ll still likely travel a few months every year. At a New Age-y networking event last summer, Troyen gave a speech about his startup, Go Pangea, and the fellow foreigner MC introduced him as “Dominican Joe”— a play on a slang term for Dominican-descended New Yorkers. Troyen is neither from New York nor of Dominican descent.
This offends Dominicans like Capellán Pichardo. “Some of them are just straight up stealing local history and culture and then repackaging it and reselling it within their own social and economic groups.”
Meanwhile, between January and early November of last year, the Dominican government deported at least 108,436 people to Haiti – including more than 20,000 people in just a nine-day period in November. Among them, according to multiple news sources, were an estimated 1,800 unaccompanied children, pregnant and lactating people, Haitians working legally in the country, mothers separated from their infants, stateless people born in the Dominican Republic to Haitian parents but denied Dominican citizenship, and dark-skinned Black Dominicans the authorities assumed were Haitians. An especially egregious case was a Haitian woman who was detained in a hospital in the Dominican capital while nine months pregnant; she was deported without her three young children. Some of those deported were transported to the Haitian border in cage-like trucks, and many have reported being mistreated and beaten.
Even the United States warned its Black citizens that they could be subjected to detention in the Dominican Republic. UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Turk warned the Dominican government to “step up efforts to prevent xenophobia, discrimination and related forms of intolerance based on national, racial or ethnic origin, or immigration status.” But Dominican President Luis Abinader, whose inauguration was attended by then-U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, is busy preparing for the 2024 election. That includes constructing a 244-mile wall along the border to keep Haitians out, which is also displacing dozens of Dominican families.
In contrast, visiting foreigners face virtually no travel restrictions. Citizens from many countries, particularly in North America and Europe, can enter the Dominican Republic without a visa for up to 30 days. After that, they pay only a modest fee when leaving the country. In terms of buying property, as van der Haar puts it, all you need is “money and a passport.”
‘A company is going to privatize where I was born, so I can’t go into where I was born?’
Once visitors stay longer term, the nonreciprocity of the tourist exchange becomes even more stark. As University of Denver media, film and journalism studies professor Erika Polson writes, what digital nomads’ location independence really means is earning salaries from more expensive countries while living in less expensive nations where they don’t pay local taxes. In the popular book “The 4-Hour Work Week,” Tim Ferriss advocates for the strategy of earning a high salary and moving somewhere with a lower cost of living, calling it “geoarbitrage.”
In this sense, Polson continues in her book chapter titled, “The Aspirational Class ‘Mobility’ of Digital Nomads,” location-independent people can enjoy what she calls “location welcome,” which she says is “the status of having access to every place.” Meanwhile, the local service workers who attend to them often remain perpetually fixed and poor.
For his part, Troyen plans to apply for Dominican residency, “So I don't have to pay every time I leave the country.” But fees for overstayed visas are negligible, starting at $45 for a three-month overstay, almost a quarter of what Dominicans working in tourism make in a month.
***
On any island, the issue with land is its scarcity. This is particularly true in Cabarete.
Patricia Thorndike Suriel, an American who moved to Cabarete in 1993 and is the founder of the nonprofit Mariposa DR Foundation, compares Cabarete to an arm, holding out her own. “Here’s the ocean, and here’s the lagoon.”
The land between is quickly being snatched up by foreign developers. On the town’s eastern edge, as well as in the center of Cabarete, high end real estate firm Ocean Club Group is developing three luxury hotels, including a W and a Ritz-Carlton Reserve, where nightly prices are likely to be over $1,000. The projects are mired in legal battles, having received significant backlash for trying to cut down vital mangrove reserves, violating Dominican law preventing building within 197 feet (60 meters) of the shore, and planning construction of seven-story buildings, where only three stories are allowed by local law.
Playa Cabarete is a tourist hotspot full of bars and restaurants and kitesurf schools. Photo by Valerie Trapp for palabra
Meanwhile, locals spent much of 2021 protesting to keep public access to Playa Encuentro, after having won a court case against several foreign developers who had blocked beach access. “They cut my umbilical cord there,” says taxi driver José Castaño, who was born on the beach in the Encuentro area. “A company is going to privatize where I was born, so I can’t go into where I was born?”
‘They’ve made tourism into the panacea of the Dominican Republic.’
As tourism development progresses, so do calls for increased Dominican land autonomy. Foreign direct investment is a key measure of the country’s success for the Abinader administration. In 2022, foreign investment brought in the highest amount in Dominican history: $4 billion.
What the dollar signs don’t show, says Silvio Torres-Saillant, a Dominican-born English professor at Syracuse University, is that tourism development and foreign investment do not necessarily “contribute to enhancing the quality of social relations.” Jobs created are often in the service sector, paying locals what Cabarete community advocate Capellán Pichardo calls a “Dominican wage” – and keeping towns like Cabarete in systemic poverty. Torres-Saillant advocates for a “public policy that does not commit blindly to anything that is presented to us as advancement.”
Ysanet Batista Vargas, a Dominican-American activist and founder of the binational worker-owned cooperative Woke Foods, organized “The Politics in Our Food” event last summer. In the wooden semi-outdoor restaurant shared with Cabarete Sostenible, a dozen community members gathered for a panel discussion. Afterwards, Batista Vargas would express disappointment that none of Woke Foods’ foreigner customers came.
Flower-filled moka pots brightened the tabletops. Behind a pink hammock, the sun set over the community garden as attendees shared a vegan pastelón, a type of plantain casserole.
Digital nomads attend an event at a cycling studio and café in Cabarete. Photo by Valerie Trapp for palabra
“They’ve made tourism into the panacea of the Dominican Republic,” Santo Domingo youth-led collective Barrio Alante organizer Paola Estévez told the audience. “What’s the saying?” she asked, recalling an expression. “De afuera vendrán, y de tu casa te sacarán.” They’ll come from outside, and kick you out of your house.
Garcia, the New School anthropologist who moderated the discussion, paraphrased Malcolm X’s “Message to the Grass Roots,” energizing the group with, “All revolutions start with land.”
The binational panel of activists, a regenerative farmer and a policy researcher quickly came up with a catchphrase: “Without food sovereignty, there is no autonomy.” Lack of land and food sovereignty are linked to the Cabarete community’s unmet basic needs over the past few years. The combination of the country’s reliance on imports for domestic consumption and the tourism sector, the pandemic, and Russia’s war in Ukraine have plunged the Dominican Republic into a food crisis. According to the World Bank, food prices in the country increased by more than 5% every month between March 2021 and March 2022. For Olivo, the motorcycle taxi driver, eating three meals a day would consume more than 80% of his daily earnings.
Capellán Pichardo created Cabarete Sostenible to help provide food aid to those most in need. According to a survey of 220 homes, the grassroots organization found that as of April 2021 the average Cabarete resident didn’t have more than two to three days’ worth of food at home. In other words, people don’t have enough food – or know how they will be able to afford food – beyond those few days.
For both Capellán Pichardo and Batista Vargas, an ideal Cabarete is characterized first and foremost by Dominicans reclaiming their land and themselves. Batista Vargas imagines a Cabarete in which the beach is not just a place of work but a space to be enjoyed. The town’s legally protected 196 feet of beachfront as Capellán Pichardo sees it, are actually returned to the public. Across the country, she says, she envisions Dominicans commiting to recovering and taking care of their natural resources “instead of being so eager to sell them off to the highest bidder.”
Until then, the shrunken real estate of Carolina Sims’ descendants features a For Sale sign hanging above the bananas, in English to cater to foreign buyers. The store and a section of the back are for sale; the family plans to stay in Cabarete, however Lisandro Corniel Juma specifies, “for the moment.”
Though she can’t know what downtown Cabarete will look like in five years, let alone 50, activist Batista Vargas knows one thing: she hopes that “foreigners understand that they are visitors, that this is not theirs.”
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Valerie Trapp is a writer and journalist from the Dominican Republic and Florida. She is a recent graduate of Stanford University and has received a Steve Steinberg Reporting Award and the California Journalism Awards' First Place in Profile Writing. She has worked with the Council on Foreign Relations, STANFORD Magazine, Argentina's Social Security Administration, and director/filmmaker Jay Roach's production company, Delirious Media.
Lygia Navarro is an award-winning disabled journalist working in narrative audio and print. She has reported from across Latin America, as well as on Latine stories in the United States and Europe. Lygia has reported for The American Prospect, Business Insider, Marketplace, The World, Latino USA, Virginia Quarterly Review, Christian Science Monitor, The Associated Press, and Afar, among other outlets. She has also worked as a podcast producer and her work has been supported by many grants and fellowships, including the Journalism & Women Symposium.