Plunging into Haiti: Clinton, Aristide, and the Defeat of Diplomacy

CHAPTER 2. Welcome to Haiti

16 Welcome to Haiti “Haiti is a land of unlimited improbabilities.” —a Haitian proverb The sky outside was a calm, reassuring blue. Special Advisor Lawrence Pezzullo returned to the article in his lap and the words of a prominent Haitian psychiatrist: “You might find us resigned or unrealistic , but that may be because, as people of all social categories will tell you, this is not the real world.” “Not the real world?” he repeated to himself and sat up. He felt uneasy, being a man who prided himself on being rooted in reality. “Not the real world?” It was two days after the meeting between President Clinton and President Aristide at the White House and a week after he had taken on the job. Seated beside him was Charles Redman, a former ambassador to Sweden, who had just been appointed chargé d’affaires in Port-au-Prince. They were on their way to Haiti, a place called “the best nightmare on Earth.” The U.S. embassy there had been without an ambassador since Alvin Adams Jr. was recalled in June 1992, nine months after the coup that had deposed President Aristide. CHAPTER 2 17 WELCOME TO HAITI Their plane passed over the azure waters of the Straits of Florida, where hundreds, maybe thousands of Haitians, had lost their lives since 1990 in rickety, overcrowded boats. Pezzullo had heard that for two thousand dollars one could hitch a ride on a freighter that would leave you off in the Bahamas. From there it was just a hop in a small boat to Miami. For three thousand dollars you could purchase a false passport, visa, and papers. Most Haitians couldn’t afford that kind of money. For some, land, a girlfriend, or the use of a car could be bartered for a trip on a boat crowded with one hundred to two hundred people. “It’s infested with sharks,” said Chuck Redman nodding down at the Windward Passage. According to a fatalistic Haitian proverb: “Every creature in the sea eats people; it is the shark which bears the bad name.” As the American Airlines jet cut through the white, cumulus clouds, Pezzullo once again saw the isle of Hispaniola. This is where Columbus first landed in October 1492. In 1986, after the fall of Jean-Claude Duvalier, a two-ton statue of Christopher Columbus, which presided over the Port-au-Prince harbor, was toppled into the sea. On its empty pedestal was scrawled the message: “Pa de blancs en Hayti!” (No more whites in Haiti!) But the United States was back, once more propelled into this country’s murky history. This time they were invited by Haiti’s democratically elected president to try to deliver it from its own tragic fate. The jet was approaching from the east, passing over a harsh chaos of mountains slashed by deep, white gulches and parched savannas without a scrub in sight. It’s been said that when Queen Isabella of Spain asked Admiral Columbus to describe the newly discovered isle of Hispaniola (Little Spain), he took a sheet of her writing paper, crumpled it, and dropped it on a table. “It looks like that.” Once one of the world’s most productive agricultural regions, Haiti today relies on imports for much of its food. The blue water around the island was clouded with silt, the result of tons of precious topsoil spilling monthly to the bottom of the ocean. Pezzullo had traveled to Haiti before as executive director of the Catholic Relief Services, and he had seen the ecological devastation close up: Miles and miles of arid countryside covered with cactus and parched bushes; deeply eroded gorges sometimes fifty feet deep; and winds blowing dust constantly. “If you want to see an environmental disaster,” wrote Dwight 1 8 WELCOME TO HAITI Worker in August 1994, “go to Haiti. It’s our local worst-possible-case of eco-catastrophe.”1 Experts say that up to 97 percent of the country is deforested and over half of the original ecoplane is eroded. And wood exports ended in 1900. How did it happen? One only has to look at the streets of Port-auPrince where two-wheeled wooden carts (brouetes) distribute charcoal to all parts of the city. You see them sometimes piled with as many as two dozen bags. This is the stuff that fuels tens of thousands of cooking fires and covers the slums...