HOPELESS IN HAITI
Steif, William
Hopeless in Haiti It is still the country trapped in the pages of 'The Comedians' William Steif It is still the country of The Comedians. The terror has abated. The anarchy has not. Nor has the...
...At first, almost 300 candidates were going to run for the fifty-eight legislative seats, though the legislature's powers are only advisory...
...The climb into the mountains leads past the village of Ennery, where Tous-saint L'Ouverture, leader of the first slaves' revolt in 1791, was born...
...The average Haitian farmer raises just enough to feed his family each year...
...the country has one of the world's densest rural populations...
...like a Mack Sennett comedy' most highly motivated and progressive farm population," says a U.S...
...there may even be a decrease...
...it's believed the tobacco receipts now support the VSN, the Tonton Macoutes' successors...
...when Baby Doc visited the flood-stricken Cap Haitien area at the end of March, he openly embraced le Rouge...
...He was excommunicated, but it was his country and his church...
...Two paragraphs on the back page of a day's issue of the newspaper le Matin capsulize the demographics...
...The official American view is to stress "the U.S...
...Four of five Haitians are rural...
...She said she strangled him to spare him the sufferings of life...
...He rarely grants interviews...
...Mama Simone's title is First Lady of the Republic...
...Hundreds of borlette shops are spread through Port-au-Prince and elsewhere in the country...
...Haitian coffee yields are among the world's lowest...
...Haiti is the last bastion of free enterprise...
...He is considered honest...
...There are upward of 200 assembly industries spread around Port-au-Prince...
...The goal was to stop Rouge le Rouge...
...The civil service would have to be reformed...
...Malformed beggars stare through windows at the Ven-dome, probably Port-au-Prince's best French restaurant, and extend their hands...
...The infant mortality rate, the proportion of new-born children who die in their first year of life, is 149 per 1,000...
...Baby Doc is ignorant of the rest of the world...
...Washington hopes there never will be...
...That is 3.3 per cent of Haiti's gross national product, which economists estimated at about $1.2 billion last year...
...He talks about copper and gold in the mountains, but the copper is low-grade, the gold yet to be discovered...
...The Duvaliers own the sugar factory, the chocolate factory, the essential oils [for perfume] factory...
...The Haitian Government resells the food...
...Missionaries from all major Protestant sects, most minor ones, and some that few Americans have ever heard of, flocked to Haiti...
...When the rural population pressure gets too heavy, Haitians go to the city, which means Port-au-Prince...
...nothing was done about it...
...There are few fat Haitians...
...Catholicism was the religion of the mulatto upper crust, voodoo of the black masses...
...Yet the United States wants to keep the economic options open to American business, too, and the best way to do that is to maintain the regime's stability as a bulwark against some unspeakable radicalism...
...Several leaders of the minuscule Haitian Human Rights League were jailed...
...They stop and give to their less fortunate brethren...
...It is easy to do a hatchet job on Haiti," says an American resident...
...The lower figure is about what is being wiped out now in Haitian pigs, the major vehicle for savings among the country's poor people...
...When he is driven along the streets of Port-au-Prince, he throws money out his car window...
...Until last winter Baby Doc was cautiously solidifying his position...
...The Haitian Government sells the books of numbers to the borlette shops, taking its cut off the top...
...The place is anarchistic, disturbing, like a Mack Sen-nett comedy...
...use of modern farm machinery is impossible because of lack of maintenance parts and service...
...He vetoed a proposal for a racetrack...
...Agriculture is hopeless," he says...
...Nor has the gnawing, physical hunger...
...The last political prisoners were freed in 1977...
...The tobacco monopoly, the "Regie du Tabac," would have to be brought into a unified Haitian budget...
...The chief language is Creole, a quick-step French modified by a heavy admixture of West African tongues...
...the proceeds are supposed to go to "rural development...
...They fought him and had no chance...
...But security still takes precedence above all else...
...A cabbie will charge S15 for what is normally a twenty-cent ride in a tap-tap, the elaborately decorated pickup trucks that ply jitney routes — they're called tap-taps because you "tap-tap" when you want to get off...
...Medical evangelists drift in and out...
...That confidence was shaken at the end of March, when the Haitian government took over the country's French-owned cement plant...
...They distribute AID food and persuade good-hearted Americans to donate food, clothing, and medical supplies In a country almost bereft of governmental institutions, they are a kind of helter-skelter relief network...
...The Haitian Government does not know how much they are...
...The Haitian landscape is ravaged, its soil exhausted...
...lead...
...standards...
...Papa Doc packed them off to exile or prison and brought in docile black priests...
...Only Reynolds Aluminum has found much worth exploiting: 650,000 tons of bauxite yearly from a pit sixty miles west of Port-au-Prince...
...Foreign businessmen naturally want stability as a way to ensure profits they can ship out of the country...
...But there was a hook in the third program: AID demanded fiscal reform, just as the International Monetary Fund has been doing...
...Shady operators sell tickets on the Venezuelan lottery and get the returns by radio, although this is supposed to be illegal...
...and they feel neglected, even though their area was the cradle of the Haitian Revolution at the end of the Eighteenth Century...
...The earth slides into the sea...
...others round up food and clothing...
...Voodoo was part of those lives...
...Haitian life expectancy is fifty-two years...
...Three quarters of the children suffer some degree of malnutrition...
...Their first replacements — at Papa Doc's behest — were mulattoes, who swiftly perceived Papa Doc was imposing his special brand of terror on the country...
...The birds have been trapped in the marshes near the sea...
...Foreign investors, lured to Haiti by low wages and tax forgiveness, use the Haitians to manufacture consumer goods for foreign markets, mainly the United States...
...His state-of-the-nation broadcast last January was redolent with archaic rhetoric: "The substance of the revolutionary ritual...
...At the Haitian Ministry of Industry he finds a newly published Haitian book, Thinking about Development, by a Paris-trained Haitian economist, Rony Durand...
...But when the ballots were counted, le Rouge had about 30,000 votes, Vixamar 3,000...
...Baby Doc talks about planting three million trees, but there's little evidence of them...
...The baby's mutilated body was recovered from the mouth of a dog...
...The Haitian middlemen, who store and ship the coffee, must protect their profits, and do...
...The United States and the international organizations would like that, too...
...Subconsciously, perhaps, there is fear of a new "Emperor Jones" — Christophe was the prototype — arising in Haiti...
...In the United States, it is 13.6 per 1,000...
...It takes ideas, guts, human understanding...
...The Israelis are teaching the Haitians how to raise pigs...
...The dogs are lean in Haiti, too...
...f The U.S...
...Two Polish battalions of Napoleon's 20,000-man army defected to the Haitian freedom-fighters...
...The Tonton Macoutes had been replaced by the much less terrifying VSN, Volunteers for National Security...
...First, there are too many of them...
...But the Haitians have a sweet, sentimental streak...
...Fertilizer and new cultivation practices were introduced...
...There is no radical opposition within Haiti...
...They are painfully poor...
...As an editor," he adds, "I must control myself, must be careful what I write and say...
...The 1915 assassination of President S.D...
...Marc, with Jean-Jacques Dessalines's old fortresses brooding over it, hundreds of people cluster and haggle at the market...
...If the numbers don't pay off, the "lucky" Haitians vanish to another neighborhood and re-sell their dreams...
...The net profit on every dollar's worth of goods the assembly industries ship out of Haiti averages about 38.5 cents...
...In back-country villages it is possible to find a voodoo priest's hut, a Catholic church, and a Protestant meeting house within a stone's throw of one another...
...expert...
...this year he'll get about 42 per cent...
...The scene tells a visitor a great deal about modern Haitian painting: Thin black people in gaily colored dresses and shirts carry heavy burdens on their heads...
...When Papa Doc came to power, the Catholic clergy was largely white...
...Little by little," he says, "we will achieve a certain democratization...
...There would have to be budget audits, now virtually non-existent...
...They lead donkeys...
...fin July 1978, the Haitian legislature's roof collapsed...
...No one seems to try to do much about it...
...The "moderates" want to work within the system (to use the American cliche...
...This year the tab will be $6.2 million...
...So does the economy's other bright spot, the "assembly industry...
...This year coffee exports will be about 180,000 bags at a price of about $1.22 a pound...
...The educated Haitians speak good French and laugh at the hard French of the visiting Quebecois...
...Near the northern end of the road is The Citadel, 3,000 feet up, with walls twenty feet thick...
...Women with babies at their breasts peddle candies, nuts, anything they can sell, along Port-au-Prince's arcaded streets...
...Le Rouge, however, was the only non-Duvalierist to win...
...After the voting, workmen suddenly appeared at the legislature, trying to build a new roof before the April 9 opening...
...The French owners, part of a cartel, insisted they were losing money...
...He sits at his desk in a long, elegant room and says, "We have promulgated a law under which the cultists are to inform us when they arrive...
...After all," he stresses, "we are a Catholic nation...
...They manufacture 90 per cent of U.S...
...Remittances from Haitians overseas help hold the country's economy together...
...And always, they clutch for an extra gourde, an extra centime...
...The cabbies spot easy marks among the tourists...
...Suspicious fires in Port-au-Prince last winter and rumors of coups checked the drift to liberalization...
...the norm accepted for tropical agriculture is 25 per cent, and more for mountainous areas...
...But there are few signs that such structures are being created...
...Ambassador William B. Jones says the figure is $83 million a year...
...It was built by "King" Henri Christophe to repel a Napoleonic invasion that never came...
...their descendants still live in Haiti...
...And Gucci handbags...
...The action reminded some Haitians with long memories of: T1946-47, when Standard Fruit Company's banana monopoly was canceled in Haiti and given to seven Haitian businessmen...
...Further north, women sell pitiful little piles of small, ripe bananas, grapefruits, and papayas...
...We have an inflation of cults here, impelled by the tragic events in Guyana...
...The Artibonite farmers are "Haiti's 'The place is...
...His weekly magazine, printed on cheap newsprint, has the largest circulation of any Haitian publication, 9,000, which tells you about the state of Haitian literacy...
...You buy a chance...
...On February 11, elections were held for the first time in six years to fill the legislature's fifty-eight seats...
...The "moderates" often have received good French or American educations, but they recognize that Western-style parliamentary democracy is about as viable in Haiti today as it is in Chad...
...It is to control the proliferation of the cults...
...He has given a desirable young woman a Volvo for spending a night with him...
...What he needs is sound advisers and the confidence of the business community," the diplomat says...
...A corner funeral parlor proclaims the name "D...
...Onetime Massachusetts Governor Endicott (Chub) Peabody lobbies for Haiti on Capitol Hill...
...That may not be impossible, because the country has a huge mass of illiterate, emotional people and a thin level of educated managers who have a stake in society...
...Yet the Haitians' main cooking fuel is still, incredibly, charcoal...
...Because four-fifths of the Haitian population is rural, AID decided in 1977 to build 940 kilometers of farm-to-market roads over two years...
...Package-tour operators are more interested...
...They are dependent on handouts from the United States, from international organizations heavily funded by American taxpayers, from the 105 church sects which overrun their third of the Caribbean island of Hispaniola...
...f Israel sends technical aid to Haiti...
...That self-renunciation through which one's love for the homeland and the forbears' worship merge into one another...
...they are mostly private, and they are the country's prime source of news...
...Agency for International Development has a major birth-control program in Haiti...
...He is not even sure the Haitian Government wants solutions...
...Lucky" Haitians now sell the numbers in their dreams to borlette players...
...only two-fifths of the optimum amount of fertilizer is used because the farmers can't afford more...
...Sam brought in the U.S...
...There are a few bright spots...
...It still is...
...The banana trade simply vanished without U.S...
...Fardin has been publishing le Petit Samedi Soir seven years...
...Alexandre le Rouge, of Cap Haitien, was not scared off...
...The elections were announced in December and were billed as "free...
...Opposed to the "dinosaurs" are a coterie of youngish, better-educated, and more worldly men known as the "moderates...
...They would like some modernization of Haiti's determinedly old-fashioned regime...
...Hardwood forests covered the slopes of mountains rising to 8,800 feet...
...Nothing is left over, and if the land is stricken by drought or flood the farmer and his family don't have enough to eat...
...The Pope was to come to Haiti on his recent Latin American trip...
...There are no institutions to deal with," says a consultant for the United Nations Industrial Development Organization...
...twelve million Haitians...
...There would have to be less dependence on export taxes, which are 25 per cent on coffee and help explain the drop in coffee exports...
...New buildings speckle the hills around Port-au-Prince and mingle with the city's gingerbread wooden structures...
...Papa Doc saw to that...
...Nothing has happened...
...Jean-Claudism played an important part in the election campaign...
...Haiti is a Roman Catholic country, officially...
...He thinks the country will have 100,000 to 110,000 visitors this '. . .operators sell tickets on the Venezuelan lottery' year, 57 per cent American, and says tourist visits have been rising 8 per cent a year for the last five years...
...American tariffs on such articles "assembled" overseas are extremely low...
...The Vatican has had a concordat with Haiti since 1860...
...Singing evangelists come from places like Alma, Nebraska, expecting to make mass conversions as they travel from village to village in General Motors campers...
...Waiting is not Woodie's style...
...With a little capital almost anyone can open a borlette shop...
...After the February 11 elections, Fardin discovered how different...
...They provide payrolls, but there are almost a million Haitians in the Port-au-Prince area, and fewer than 5 per cent of them work in the assembly industries...
...His workday is 9:30 A.M...
...Sugar cane, indigo, coffee, cotton, and rice grew in the country's virgin soils...
...I would take the money we're throwing away on farming and put it into a half-dozen dams in the mountains to bring electricity to provincial centers...
...The plant produced poorer quality cement at a higher price than builders could buy in and import from the United States...
...to 2:00 P.M...
...Only 9 per cent of Haiti is forested...
...The second boat stopped and there were no bananas...
...approach to Haiti has been completely wrong...
...Fardin is a rather dour man who lives in a modern one-story home in a nice sector of Port-au-Prince...
...During Carnival last February, an AID official stood on the roof of the U.S...
...third prize is ten times...
...That long-ago defection explains why Poland is the only Communist nation with a diplomat in Port-au-Prince...
...The people must live by their wits, always looking for a stroke of good luck...
...Into the mid-1950s, the most exclusive social club in Port-au-Prince would not admit blacks, only mulat-toes...
...There was greater freedom of expression...
...they come alive at the approach of a tourist...
...They didn't make it...
...The slaves' lives were rooted in Africa...
...Everyone thinks it's impossible to do anything constructive in Haiti," says Roger Coster, a French photographer who fled France when it fell in 1940...
...His cabinet has no prime minister and is shuffled about a good deal...
...he vetoed a proposal for an auto racing track" — although Baby Doc's love for fast cars is well known...
...Cost to AID: $8 million...
...The first: "A new-born child was found Sunday in a section of Gonaives...
...Baby Doc lives and works in a whitewashed palace in the middle of Port-au-Prince...
...The borlette is simply a numbers game' Everyone hustles...
...UNIDO is sending ministers of industry of eighteen Third World nations to Port-au-Prince in November to try to give Haiti "a blood transfusion" — that's the term used by the UNIDO expert, a Viennese named Jay Fath...
...small, irregularly shaped parcels of land impede rational grid irrigation...
...The "tiny touts" learn to latch onto tourists early and offer their services as guides, although they may be only eight or ten years old...
...One Haitian who does is Dieudonne Fardin, a thirty-nine-year-old Paris-educated lawyer and teacher who publishes and edits le Petit Samedi Soir...
...Industrially, there is little else — a bauxite pit, the cement plant, a few smallish factories run for and by the Duvalier family or its friends...
...The land is ravished and resourceless...
...Last year AID wanted to give Haiti a third program under which food help would change from "soft" loans to outright grants...
...second prize is fifteen times...
...He, along with the editors of the six daily papers, was called to a meeting with the Ministers of Information, Interior, and Justice, and told to stop reporting on and analyzing the election results...
...With electricity, you could establish an industrial base, using these people's skills...
...The situation was heaven-sent for evangelists in that most evangelistic of Protestant nations, the United States...
...Rice, a Haitian staple, is grown there, but 180,000 farmers cultivate 70,000 acres...
...He was not a Duvalierist when he had lost a legislative election in 1957,and he is not one now...
...In downtown Port-au-Prince today, the visitor can see remnants of the mulatto hierarchy that ran the country for 153 years...
...AID leaned on the Haitian Government to hold off the middlemen...
...they would like to build institutional structures, so that every petty decision would not have to flow up to and down from the palace...
...The closest to a prime minister may be his mother, Mama Simone, the widow of Dr...
...a high-yield Taiwanese hybrid seed is unpopular because the plants' height at maturity requires more stooping and bending than traditional varieties (that is a result of the lassitude caused by chronic underfeeding...
...The missionaries do more good than harm...
...Erosion is forcing millions of cubic yards of clay-covered earth into the sea each year...
...But Fath admits frustration...
...Congress has directed that American money go to agriculture, and the international organizations have followed the U.S...
...Baby Doc contributes to the dole...
...foreign economic policies, the benefits to be derived from foreign private investment, and the fundamental economic interdependence between the United States and Latin America...
...fertilizer and management...
...Six to seven million people are crammed into a land mass the size of Maryland...
...The commercial language is American and the dollar, and American silver, are as widely circulated as the Haitian currency...
...The cru-cible of courage, heroism and sacrifice...
...Publicly, Baby Doc is formal in a stately, Nineteenth Century French manner...
...The international organizations, the United States, and a few other countries, primarily France and Canada, are putting more than $100 million in aid into Haiti this year...
...Second, the largely illiterate rural populace lives by subsistence farming...
...But he is not stupid, he has good intelligence...
...The Haitian Government holds drawings twice a month...
...Behind the Duvalier mystique is a subtle racism...
...After a swift inquiry, the police identified the dead child's mother...
...A mulatto-led revolution wrested independence for Haiti from France in 1804...
...But there's no such leader on the horizon yet...
...Some come straight from the pages of The Comedians, unrealistic do-gooders...
...Along the road leading to the northern mountains, men offer newly captured wild ducks for sale, two at a time...
...Last December 19, swine fever was found in Haiti...
...The official excuse for his not coming to Haiti was that the airport runway was not long enough...
...She explained she had seven children and that it was impossible to care for an eighth...
...The Kennedy-Johnson holdovers who run Edelman International's Washington office had urged me to take a look at Haiti again...
...Consulate and threw 6,000 multi-colored condoms to the crowd swirling in the street below...
...banana boat stopped the following season and there were no bananas...
...The business interests want stability, too...
...Other Americans say the figure is $45 million a year, "tops...
...Cap Haitien, a city of 100,000 about 175 miles north of Port-au-Prince's 800,000 residents, is somewhat like Boston is to New York...
...The mountains are bare, long since stripped of their trees and unable to absorb rain waters...
...baseballs, and the blue jeans and belts sold by J.C...
...Now we have street signs...
...AID has provided almost $50 million worth of food and technical help through "voluntary agencies" like CARE, Church World Service, Catholic Relief Services, and the Seventh Day Adventist World Service...
...Inflect our memory as a people to the uncommon destiny of the great dead...
...The funds generated by the Haitian Government food sales would go into blocked accounts to expand rural development...
...Penney's and Sears Roebuck...
...Rarely is there enough left over for future investment in such luxuries as fertilizer...
...Much of the business is controlled by the "dinosaurs," for Papa Doc ran Haiti as his personal plantation and Mama Simone continues in that path, even when her son turns to "moderates" for advice...
...Yet their "technology is primitive, overall productivity low...
...Here there are some limited opportunities, primarily because of foreign investment in so-called assembly industries...
...Lovinsky...
...The best estimates are that half the country's 1.5 million pigs will die this year, a loss of more than $40 million...
...drying and threshing are done on small concrete slabs, leading to rodent losses...
...The rise of the borlette is a disaster Jot our country," says a Haitian banker...
...Haiti had good reasons for taking over the cement plant — the government insisted it was not "nationalization," but that is hair-splitting...
...From 1975 through 1978, AID provided Haiti with almost $30 million worth of food through "soft" forty-year loans...
...A few others grow rich...
...Theo Duval, in charge of the tourism office, says Haiti has 2,500 hotel rooms today, up 1,500 from seven years ago...
...It analyzes Haiti's well-known problems, offers no solutions, but says: "We don't want to be monkeys for the West...
...Costa Rican coffee farmers get 70 per cent...
...That is a time bomb ticking 700 miles southeast of Miami...
...But he also admits foreign aid grew four times as fast — and is almost identical to tax receipts...
...Virtually all the materials come from the United States, duty-free...
...That is a legacy of the French...
...Tourism and construction operate on the trickle-down theory...
...The borlette is simply a numbers game...
...Five years ago, AID decided to raise the yields and get a larger share of the price for the Haitian farmer...
...It is not...
...There's a mild building boomlet at Cap Haitien...
...An American who knows the country intimately says the U.S...
...They are too obsessed with scrambling for something, whether it be a gourde — the local unit of money, worth twenty cents — or a $ 100,000 business deal...
...There will be no growth in GNP this year...
...No one believes that...
...But the U.S...
...The majority are persons of good will, genuinely moved by the Haitians' plight...
...Every decision comes to him...
...The numbers most widely used are those drawn weekly for the lottery in the neighboring Dominican Republic...
...they tend to be better off than others outside Port-au-Prince...
...It is almost all dole, of one kind or another...
...There are different processes in the United States and Haiti...
...Haitians have little time to wonder...
...Baby Doc boasts, in his state-of-the-nation speech, that tax receipts grew 7 per cent in 1978...
...In the period between 1843 and 1914 the country had twenty-four presidents, only one of whom served his entire term...
...We welcome the ideas expressed by the Pope at Puebla...
...They are right: Haiti remains trapped in the pages of Graham Greene's The Comedians...
...He is not traveled...
...The Cap Haitien citizens are more self-assertive than other Haitians...
...He makes sound decisions...
...Caloric intake averages 85 per cent of minimum daily needs...
...He is not sophisticated," says a diplomat who knows him...
...But the Haitians are descendants, for the most part, of West African slaves brought to work what was then France's richest West Indian colony...
...The first U.S...
...The government rushed a strong candidate to the area, Claude Vixamar, deputy minister of information and longtime "prefect" at Cap Haitien...
...The regime's radical opponents — if they can be called that, for all they really seek is democracy and better economic opportunities for the mass of the people — are centered in New York's Haitian community...
...She is in her mid-sixties, tends to think in terms of what Papa Doc would want, and leads the Duvalierist faction known as the "dinosaurs...
...By mid-January it was apparent "Rouge le Rouge," as he had been dubbed, was the leading candidate for the Cap Haitien legislative seat...
...He will not say that everything is right in Haiti, but he says conditions are improved since 1970...
...No one knows why...
...That is less likely now...
...He has lost his baby fat...
...He visited the Dominican Republic...
...A lot of troops were sent, too...
...His count of Protestant cults — sects — is "nearly 100...
...Thousands of oil paintings, watercolors, and drawings are for sale in the big square between the rue du Quai and the waterfront, and a lithe black woman offers her body for $10 nearby...
...In 1900, Haiti exported 800,000 bags of coffee...
...the legislature cannot change the President-for-Life's budget nor enact laws contrary to his wishes...
...The second: "The police at Jeremie have identified and arrested the mother who abandoned a new-born child in a garden at Rochas...
...Morrison, a dapper black who migrated from his native Texas to Dayton, Ohio, and then Los Angeles, finds the Haitian bureaucracy unresponsive...
...They are more concerned about maintaining stability, so they stick with what they have...
...But it fits into the dream world of Graham Greene...
...But by the year 2000, if the demographers are right, there will be William Steif is a Washington correspondent for the Scripps-Howard newspapers...
...Haitians earning $40 to $50 a month invest heavily in the borlette, often going into debt to money-lenders charging 50 to 100 per cent interest...
...Seven years ago, when I first visited Haiti, I wondered how far the scraps of food I left on my plate would go toward staving off a Haitian's hunger...
...Some candidates were scared off when the Jean-Claudiste loyalists formed CONAJEC, the Conseil National de Jean-Claudisme...
...He has since been freed but has not revived Jeune Presse...
...That's as close as anyone comes to a radical position in Haiti today...
...Little has changed in recent decades...
...Bras and name-brand fishing poles are made in Haiti, along with auto radios, light switches, radar sets for the Federal Aviation Administration, electric motors, wiring harnesses for Army ballistic missiles, trench coats, digital thermometers, connector switches, clothes sold at Korvette's, plug-in circuits, fur coats made from scraps shipped from New York...
...And there is endemic corruption as each Haitian scrambles for enough to eat...
...For more than a century the Haitians scrambled, politically and economically...
...Generally, these are short-term, large-profit industries with little relevance to Haitians' needs...
...flew from California "to see what we can do to assist in the feeding of the poor and to care for the needy...
...The visitor becomes inured...
...One Haitian is reputed to own more than forty in Port-au-Prince alone...
...First prize is fifty times what you paid for your number...
...Coffee is Haiti's biggest export crop...
...In a country town like St...
...11965, when the tracks of a railway running north to the Haitian "breadbasket," the Artibonite Valley, were torn up and sold to a Japanese scrap company...
...But not so disturbing that you can't make a buck...
...So far, AID has spent $8 million on the Haitian coffee project and plans to spend another $2 million...
...The Reverend Woodie Morrison, of the Figueroa Church of Christ, Los Angeles, says he and Elder Tom E. Duncan Sr...
...Fardin decided it was the better part of valor to burn all 9,000 copies of his paper that week, and did...
...But priests do not mix in politics here...
...Gerard Dorcely, the Minister of Foreign Affairs and Worship, wants to control such people...
...But in almost the same breath the State Department speaks of Haitians "understanding U.S...
...Such developing nations as Brazil, Mexico, the Ivory Coast, and Tunisia will be represented at the meeting, with the thought that such Third World countries, moving ahead fast, are in a better position politically to deal with laggards like Haiti...
...But some missionaries come to Haiti, snap Polaroid photos of malnourished children, and return to the United States to use the photos to raise funds which never reach the Haitians...
...Last spring, in Port-au-Prince and Cap Hai-tien, I wondered the same thing...
...The mulattoes had to become Duvalierists or leave...
...They had said you can't judge Third World countries by U.S...
...Infrastructure is not a strong point in Haiti, but it is not only lack of roads, transport, electricity, and communications that keeps the Haitians so poor...
...The Washington office of Edelman International, a public relations firm, is paid $5,000 a month to put the best face on that reality...
...This kind of gibberish lends itself to Jean-Claudism, a minor league Gaull-ism...
...Even where the land is relatively good, as in the Artibonite Valley, one problem compounds another...
...Francois (Papa Doc) Duvalier, who ruled from his election to the presidency in 1957 to his death in 1971...
...Haiti is virgin tourism," Duval says...
...So the 1957 election of Papa Doc — a rural black who had helped eradicate yaws in the back-country — was a profound shock to the mulatto hierarchy...
...This year the agreement is for $11.3 million worth of food...
...About 95 per cent of Haitians are black...
...Third, the land is exhausted and getting worse...
...Catholicism and voodoo coexisted for two centuries...
...More than 80 per cent of the people cannot read and write...
...In short, the United States wants to nudge Haiti toward something approaching Western-style democracy, but very gently, like the "moderates" around Baby Doc...
...In 1976 the Haitian farmer got 50 per cent of the price...
...Our budget is nearly double a few years ago," He gestures expansively...
...If tax money disappears, the government doesn't want it known...
...So far, forty kilometers of these roads have been built...
...Marines...
...Nothing happened...
...The Club Mediterranee is putting up a 600-bed resort "village" along the sea near Montrouis, sixty miles north of Port-au-Prince...
...The biggest growth industry in Haiti is the "borlette," the lottery...
...The borlette has given rise to a spinoff industry...
...An AID official says, "The large bulk of Haitians live no differently than when Baby Doc took over eight years ago...
...Jeune Presse, a weekly that had been the chief competitor of le Petit Samedi Soir, did not have to suffer the indignity of a ministerial warning...
...So the new legislature is composed of fifty-seven Duvalierists and one independent...
...The Haitian government let the food-loan forgiveness offer go by default...
...Tourism brought Haiti $38 million in 1977, more last year...
...It ceased publication when its editor was arrested in December 1977...
...Baby Doc would have to declare a "national population policy...
...commitment to promote human rights and to increase understanding and awareness of the U.S...
...Part of its cost: 20,000 lives...
...Federal system of government, particularly the separation of powers...
...Close to 40,000 Haitians work in the factories, which enjoy tax-free status for ten years...
...Three bundles of rags turn out to be human beings slumbering on the side steps of the Cathedral...
...Virtually all the manufactured goods are shipped back to the United States...
...In mid-1978 African swine fever was discovered in the neighboring Dominican Republic...
...How independent he will remain is a question...
...In the year ending September 1976, Haiti exported 445,000 bags at a price of about $2.80 a pound...
...That is about 9 per cent of GNP...
...Even in the low-lying, fairly fertile Artibonite region, where the Taiwanese are teaching rice-growing techniques, salt-water incursions threaten the rice paddies...
...The directors of Haiti's seventeen radio stations also ^vere cautioned...
...He is a prisoner of history, of his own greed and lust...
...The Haitians — and the United States — had been hoping some investors fleeing Taiwan might want to invest in Haiti...
...Don't look for democracy," they had said...
...he is registered with the Justice Department as a foreign agent, and last year Haiti paid him $31,159...
...The tax structure would have to become less regressive — under the present system the poor pay, the rich escape...
...The trouble is that the system is extremely personal — one-man rule, by accident of birth...
...The Haitian Government supports the church financially...
...Haiti was populous, not far distant, the poorest country in the Americas, half-pagan but with a Christian tradition...
Vol. 43 • October 1979 • No. 10
