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THE ITALIAN LEGACY IN THE DOMINICAN REPUBLIC
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1859 and 1860). He spent the next five years as an apprentice at the company Nicolás Canevaro y Cía., and
he started to work independently at age eighteen when his guardian retired from the business and made him
a partner in the company. When Vicini reached that age, an advertisement was published on June 5, 1865,
in the
Gaceta de Santo Domingo
that read: “We are hereby notifying the public that by mutual agreement, the
company that operated in this area under the company name Nicolás Canevaro & Compañía will continue
its same business under the company name Antonio Canevaro y Cía., as Nicolás Canevaro retired from it and
Juan Bautista Vicini became a new partner. Santo Domingo, June 1, 1865. N. Canevaro y Cía.”
At that time the country had recently emerged from the Dominican RestorationWar, launched by the Do-
minicans to put a stop to Spain’s annexation of the Dominican Republic. The Spanish troops left the country in
July of 1865, and in October the new national government created a committee responsible for supervising the
printing of the first bills for the national currency that would replace Spanish notes, as well as the old Domini-
can currency that was still in circulation. In January of the following year, at just nineteen years of age, Vicini,
along with five other adult citizens, was signing the records for this committee that supervised the printing of
the 40, 20, and 10 Dominican peso banknotes.
Two years later, at age twenty-one, Giobatta appears for the first time in the books of the Treasury as a
personal creditor of the Dominican Government for the amount of one hundred pesos recorded on a sheet for
payments for miscellaneous items. This appears to be the first commercial transaction by Vicini Cánepa as an
individual, not as an employee or representative of the Canevaro companies. In that transaction, his name was
recorded as Juan Bautista Bichini. From that time onward, Vicini Cánepa never ceased to expand his business.
The exportation of timber generated continuous surpluses of hard currency that he learned to use to make
loans to the Dominican Government, as other foreigners were doing in Santo Domingo, and also to meet the
growing demands for loans from the civilian population during an era in which there were no banks.
Gradually, and through his unwavering discipline and incredible sense of organization, Vicini Cánepa was
becoming one of the main moneylenders in the city while never ceasing to work as an exporter and importer,
and also maintaining the original business that sold all types of domestic and imported merchandise. In 1880,
he was also operating as an associate investor at various credit boards, as the unions of organized money-
lenders were referred to in the major cities (Puerto Plata, Santiago and Santo Domingo) to lend funds to the
Government, almost always with the guarantee from customs-related income.
Vicini Cánepa took part in the start of a “sugar revolution” promoted on behalf of the nation by the leaders
of the Partido Azul party, since he acted as an individual lender to multiple foreign investors that wanted to
establish themselves within the country to take advantage of the franchises and tax privileges that the state
was granting to financiers that wanted to invest in the construction of sugar refineries. Vicini Cánepa entered
the sugar industry as a financial backer and sugar broker by around 1880. To facilitate his sugar and honey
shipping operations, Vicini Cánepa acquired a steam-powered ship that year to replace the schooners that his
company was sailing between Santo Domingo and New York.
Excited about the good business results and the boom created by the sugar revolution, in 1883 he decided
to build his own plant called Italia on his property located in the outskirts of Yaguate, the municipality of San
Cristóbal, in the area called Caoba Corcovada. He bought the equipment and machinery for that factory in
France, among them a large still for the production of alcohol, including rum and brandy. On February 28,
1883, Vicini requested authorization to build a railroad from the Italia plant to the Port of Palenque, which
was granted.
When the major crisis hit sugar prices in 1884, many of Vicini Cánepa’s debtors went bankrupt, and they
paid their debts to him by transferring their plants and foreclosing on their mortgages. Consequently, almost
overnight he suddenly became an industrial entrepreneur who owned numerous sugar mills and cane and
herb plantations, among them the refineries named Constancia, Santa Elena, Angelina, Ocoa and Bella Vista,
and the La Encarnación, Santa Elena, Asunción, and Las Damas mills, some of which were later converted
to sugar cane plantations. Vicini Cánepa simultaneously continued expanding his sugar business and financial