Within a week of presenting his credentials on March 9, the new US ambassador to our country and his wife were invited to dinner at Donny’s home. About a dozen couples attended. The president and his wife, the vice president and his wife, the secretary of Foreign Relations and his wife, two of the heroes of May 30 with their respective wives, and of course, the hosts, the then second vice president, Donald Reid Cabral, Donny for his friends, and his wife.
John Bartlow Martin had been appointed on March 2 by President John F. Kennedy as US ambassador to the Dominican Republic. In those days after the execution of the tyrant, the destinies of our nation were in the hands of the Second Council of State made up of Rafael Bonnelly, representative of the then dominant National Civic Union, who presided over it; Nicolás Pichardo, who served as first vice president; Donald J. Reid Cabral, second vice president; and Luis Amiama Tío, Antonio Imbert Barrera, Monsignor Eliseo Pérez Sánchez and José A. Fernández Caminero, members. All, with the exception of Pérez Sánchez and Fernández Caminero, were present at the dinner offered to the new US ambassador, which was also attended, accompanied by their respective wives, the Secretary of Foreign Relations, José Antonio Bonilla Atiles and the enigmatic US citizen Lorenzo Berry, better known as Wimpy, name of the first air-conditioned supermarket in the country (Wimpys), opened in 1958, right next to the Colegio del Apostolado on Bolívar Avenue.
Last Wednesday, December 21, I invited my friends Magín Díaz and Raúl Ovalle to have lunch at the Fundación, which they classify as the delicacies of Saralina’s Wholesome Kitchen. Over lunch, we talked about the problems that the government of President Abinader has faced in executing public investment projects and sustaining a reasonable level of capital spending. Once again the issue of the Amber Highway, which we have advocated for years, came up. Raúl, endowed with a memory irremediably divorced from the ordinary, reminded me of the following: “Doctor, did you know that the first time that this highway was mentioned was in the book ‘Overtaken by Events: The Dominican crisis from the fall of Trujillo to the civil war’ by John Bartlow Martin, which, surely, you must have here? “Of course we have; even on that shelf is a first edition original dedicated and signed by Martin to George F. Kennan, the father of the policy of containing Soviet expansion during the Cold War.”
Once again, memory did not fail Raúl. Martin narrates that after dinner at small tables on the terrace, the visit to the library of Donny’s house where he showed him one of the pistols used to kill Trujillo and the return to the terrace where they drank cognac and coffee, he They reported that President Bonnelly wanted to talk with him. “I went to an interior room, and found him, as I remember, with Pichardo, Amiama, Imbert, Reid and Bonilla Atiles. It was the Government, advisers and the Minister of Foreign Relations, speaking with the new ambassador of the United States. They talked about money, the Castro-Communists and plans for the future: a highway north from Santiago to Puerto Plata, a TVA (Tennessee Valley Authority) type development of the great Rio Yaque del Norte.”
This is how John Bartlow Martin remembered the dinner that was offered to him in mid-March 1962, 60 years ago. The time has passed. The Dominican Republic has made a lot of progress, but not all that it could have achieved if many of those “plans for the future” had been carried out. The highway from Santiago to Puerto Plata, for example, has already turned 60… on the agenda of infrastructure works to be executed. This highway, initially called the Atlantic Highway and later called the Ámbar Highway, was announced by President Abinader during his inauguration speech. Unfortunately, the project was conceived to be executed under the umbrella of the young General Directorate of Public-Private Alliances, attached to the Ministry of the Presidency. Two years after carrying out analyses, studies, valuations, considerations and clarifications, it was determined that the project, with a cost of around US$400 million, was not viable since, in order to honor the return required by private investors, a considerable shadow toll to compensate for the lack of resources that would not be provided by the collection at the physical toll stations.
On August 29, we published an article in El Caribe in which we showed that in countries today classified as developed, almost all road infrastructure construction projects have been carried out with 100% state resources. In the case of the US, 99.8% of the 161,000 miles of highways in that nation have been built by the State. In Canada, 97.6%. In Italy and Germany, 93% and 89%, respectively. Last week we showed that the problem of low public investment in our country does not have its origin in the absence of resources. At the end of last November, the deposits of the non-financial public sector in the consolidated banking system, measured in dollars, reached the sum of US$7,115 million. The foregoing reveals that the complete execution of the Autopista del Ámbar project would barely consume 5.6% of these deposits.
President Abinader, aware that an effective way to face the recessive invasion that is seen coming from the global geography is to increase public investment, has instructed the ministers and directors of public entities to significantly increase capital spending in 2023. In addition to an ambitious housing construction program, the Government of President Abinader should carry out, with 100% state resources, the construction of the Autopista del Ámbar Highway that the president announced two years and four months ago. If for this you have to send a bill to the National Congress that allows the Ministry of Public Works and Communications to directly contract a consortium made up of the 4 or 5 Dominican contractor companies with the most experience in the area of road infrastructure, let them do so. . The Government should not waste time with complicated and often conflicting schemes of Public Private Partnerships or trying to overcome the absurd walls that Law 340-06 on Purchases and Contracts of Goods, Services, Works and Concessions has erected. We recognize that 20 years is nothing, but the 60 that have passed since John Bartlow Martin heard representatives of the Dominican government speak of “plans for the future” in 1962 are too many.
