New High-Technology Complex Billed as Caribbean’s Gateway to the Future

Just a five-minute drive from this capital’s chaotic airport, past roadside hawkers and tin-roofed shanties, an army of laborers was hard at work one recent afternoon on what could be the cornerstone of the nation’s future.

They laid bricks from rickety wooden scaffolding, strung new power lines by hand and carried mortar baskets on their heads--all behind a 20-foot billboard depicting an ultramodern, steel-and-glass complex and marking the site of the future “Cybernetic Park and Technology Institute of the Americas.”

The split-screen effect was an apt metaphor for the country and the entire Caribbean, as the region’s many small island nations seek to leap into the 21st century after decades of underdevelopment, poverty and dead-end farming, by harnessing a piece of the multibillion-dollar global information-technology boom.

“That is our past,” said electrician Facundo Telleria, pointing to a dusty clump of huts nearby.

Turning toward the 2 1/2-square-mile construction site, he added, “This is our future, the kind of opportunities our young people need to survive in the new, globalized world.”

The Dominican Cyberpark, a joint venture between government and corporate interests ranging from local firms to software giants Microsoft and Oracle, is scheduled to open in August with a high-tech institute and two corporate towers. And when it is inaugurated with a global technology conference set for early that month, it will stand as a centerpiece of the Caribbean’s drive to enter the global informatics market.

Bolstered by a separate government-corporate joint venture to install computers in every Dominican high school this year, the new park “is going to be a gateway to tremendous economic development for the Dominican Republic,” said Susan O’Reilly, investment promotion officer for the government.

The park also will put this nation of 8 million a step ahead of its neighbors, which are all seeking toeholds in an informatics industry that the World Bank values at nearly $1 trillion worldwide.

The high-tech push is rooted in a 1996 World Bank study that estimated that there were between 20,000 and 30,000 potential information-processing jobs in the English-speaking Caribbean alone--provided that those nations improved telecommunications and committed to higher-technology education.

Using India and Israel as examples, the report listed an array of information services that the islands could provide: processing health insurance claims, airfreight bills and airline tickets; transcribing medical and legal records, and entering a wide range of data. The region’s advantage: geography and the same time zones and cultural heritage as potential North American clients.

But the report concluded: “The Caribbean will have to rapidly acquire these technology-led skills and develop a literate labor force to meet the needs of the North American companies.” And the region’s progress will be high on the agenda next week in Washington when the World Bank chairs its biennial Caribbean economic development conference.

Jamaica already has established a Caribbean Institute of Technology in the resort town of Montego Bay. It is a joint venture by the government, an Atlanta-based software company, Furman University in South Carolina, and a group of British and West Indian schools. But the rest of the region is moving with more measured steps.

“We’re not jumping in with both feet, but we are marching solidly forward,” said Donnie Defreitas, who heads a five-nation project to reform the Eastern Caribbean’s telecom industry.

Funded by a World Bank loan, the reform effort has drafted legislation to open the region’s telecommunications monopolies, bring down costs and entice private-sector software investment.

In a part of the world competing for limited tourism and offshore financial dollars after the near-collapse of its banana trade, the new high-tech market is inevitable--”the outgrowth of economic reality,” Defreitas said.

“When you analyze it,” he added, “what else is left?”