Haitians too poor to celebrate 200 years of freedom

By Letta Tayler
Newsday

	THONY BELIZAIRE / AFP/GETTY IMAGES A Haitian man carries plastic containers to be recycled on his head. Haitians do what they can to eke out a living in the hemisphere's poorest country.
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Once the cakes are hardened, Joassaint will eat some. She will sell the rest as food at a local market. At the price of three for a gourde, about 2½ cents, the brittle patties are one of few foods most Haitians can still afford.

Joassaint, 40, figures she will still be eating clay cakes on Jan. 1, the bicentennial of Haiti's independence as the world's first black republic.

"I have no money to celebrate," says Joassaint, a widowed mother of four, as she stirs another batch of gray batter in a plastic vat. "All I can be thankful for is that God hasn't yet allowed me and my children to die of starvation."

Two centuries after a dramatic slave rebellion ended Haiti's status as the pearl of Napoleon's empire, Haiti is the hemisphere's poorest country. And, nine years after the United States sent soldiers here to implement a "regime change," many observers see the country's failure as a cautionary tale for America's interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan.

When Haiti won independence, the United States refused for decades to recognize the black republic for fear it would foment slave mutinies at home. In the past century, it got more involved, invading Haiti twice. But each time, critics say, U.S. troops quickly withdrew to leave the country to its own chaotic devices.

"The U.S. policy is basically to keep Haiti on the back burner," said Dan Erikson, a Haiti expert with Inter-American Dialogue, a U.S. think tank. As in Iraq and Afghanistan, a country as dysfunctional as Haiti won't prosper without "sustained engagement over decades" from the international community, Erikson said.

James Foley, the U.S. ambassador to Haiti, counters that the United States has an "enormous" desire to help its southern neighbor. "But in order to do so," Foley said, "you have to have a modicum of goodwill, you have to have a modicum of stability, you have to have a modicum of confidence in the rule of law" from the Haitian government.

On nearly every potholed street in this nation of 8 million, hordes of people live in conditions nearly as squalid as those of their slave ancestors. Armed thugs terrorize decrepit downtowns and remote hamlets, some seeking to destabilize, others to uphold the government. Drug trafficking, AIDS and illiteracy are rampant.

A growing number of critics denounce Haiti's president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide. A populist former priest, he was widely embraced as Haiti's great hope for democracy after he was first elected in 1990, but he is now seen by many as the latest in a series of greedy dictators.

Aristide, who remains the nation's most popular figure and was re-elected in 2000, counters that his country's woes are the fault of superpowers who want to subjugate the former slave colony.

"Today's misery is the result of a 200-year plot," Aristide told wildly cheering fans Tuesday at Vertieres, the northern coastal battlefield where two centuries ago rebel slaves won their decisive victory against the French. "Whether it's slavery or embargo, it's the same plot. You are victims, I am a victim."

By embargo, Aristide was referring to international donors' freeze on $500 million in aid to Haiti, a sum equal to the government's annual budget.

Donors are blocking some funds until Aristide convinces them the government can hold legislative elections in a safe and fair environment.

Whatever the outside world's role, some Haiti experts believe the psychological legacy of colonialism also has stalled this country's march toward democracy. Since the revolution, they argue, the mulatto elite has assumed the role of slave master over the black majority.

Haiti waited until 1986 to officially recognize Creole, the language of the masses, and to lift sanctions against voodoo, its most widely practiced religion. Only in 1991, under Aristide, did the government abolish a two-tiered system of birth certificates that divided Haitians into "peasants" and "citizens."

"The mental unshackling has yet to come ... and with it the ability to build bridges between the classes," said Louis Henri Mars, descendant of prominent Haitian nationalists, including author Jean Price Mars, who extolled the notion of "noirisme," Haitian black pride.

Copyright © 2003 The Seattle Times Company