18638: (Craig) NYTimes.com Article: Haitian Heartbeat (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: Dan Craig <hoosier@att.net>


Haitian Heartbeat
February 15, 2004
By FIELD MALONEY

RICOT DUPUY got the call in the afternoon at his radio
station, Radio Soleil d'Haiti, in Flatbush, Brooklyn. It
was one of his regular listeners, a man whose nephew had
just called from Port-au-Prince. "The rebels have taken
Gonaives," the man told Mr. Dupuy.

Mr. Dupuy, Radio Soleil's 51-year-old manager and signature
voice, soon took to the air. "Mesdames et messieurs," he
intoned in his velvety Creole. "The rebels have taken
Gonaives."

Last week, as opponents of Haiti's president, Jean-Bertrand
Aristide, led uprisings in more than 10 Haitian cities that
led to dozens of deaths, Mr. Dupuy's words resonated in
Manhattan taxicabs, in the Haitian barbershops and
restaurants on Nostrand Avenue in Flatbush and in
mini-mansions in Laurelton, Queens.

In New York's sprawling Haitian community, news travels by
teledyol, Creole for word of mouth. In this city, Mr. Dupuy
is teledyol.

Crises back home and in New York are hardly new to Radio
Soleil and its listeners - Haiti is a country that has had
32 coups since 1804. And in New York, the assault on Abner
Louima by police officers in 1997 and the shooting death of
Patrick Dorismond by a police detective in 2000 shocked and
galvanized the city's Haitian community. But even when
there is no crisis, Radio Soleil, the city's first Haitian
radio station, serves as a lifeline, umbilical cord and
town hall of the air for New York's 200,000 Haitians.

Near midnight last Tuesday, Mr. Dupuy paced back and forth
in Radio Soleil's cramped Nostrand Avenue storefront. His
eyes were red and pouched. From time to time, he collapsed
into one of the armchairs in the front room. Mr. Dupuy had
spent the four days since the capture of Gona?ves at the
station.

His voice, usually as smooth as a good bottle of
25-year-old Haitian rum, seemed worn and ragged. "Gona?ves
is my hometown," he said.

Not all nights at Radio Soleil offer the bitter adrenaline
of rebellion.

One slow, sultry evening last summer, for example, Mr.
Dupuy spent several hours preparing for that night's show,
gathering Internet news items to read and discuss from an
eclectic pool of news media: Agence France-Presse, WINS-AM
(1010), Le Monde, New York 1, The Guardian. Before going on
air, he relaxed in his tiny office, his feet up on his
desk, his face half-hidden behind stacks of papers and
books, trash and bric-a-brac.

The walls were crowded with framed photos of Mr. Dupuy with
luminaries he has met: Mr. Aristide, Magic Johnson, Nelson
Mandela, Muhammad Ali. Every now and then the phone rang.
Mr. Dupuy would perk up, then answer: "Radio Soleil! Bon
soir!"

Mr. Dupuy is no mere conveyor of information; his role in
Brooklyn, and in the city, is a strange mix of 1940's
telephone switchboard operator and the
aging-don-as-neighborhood-fixer of the "Godfather'' movies.
He is also a go-between for his fellow Haitians and the
puzzling, at times hostile institutions of their new home.

"I spend my day answering the phone," said Mr. Dupuy, who
has a courtly island manner and a foxlike grin. "Seventy
percent of the people that call need help with something.
Sometimes young couples have disputes, and they call me to
mediate. People in the community call me if they need help
with city services. I'm there if there are no other doors
to knock. Sometimes I try to find them the right lawyers."

New York and Miami share the distinction of having the
world's largest communities of Haitians outside Haiti, and
since Mr. Dupuy arrived in New York 33 years ago, during
the first big wave of Haitian immigration, the city's
Haitian community has remained fluid but steady.

In the absence of official numbers, exactly how many
Haitians listen to Radio Soleil is hard to determine.
According to the station's Web site, it has "half a million
captive, dedicated listeners,'' a claim that may reveal
less about actual audience size than about marketing goals.

Haitians tend to travel a great deal between Haiti and
America. Many New York Haitians even send their school-age
children back to live with relatives and attend school
there, Mr. Dupuy said, worried by the atmosphere in
inner-city schools. But lately, as conditions in Haiti have
worsened - the average Haitian lives on less than a dollar
a day - movement between the two countries has become
increasingly one-way. In a poll of Haitians last year, more
than 70 percent said they would leave Haiti if they could.

Pockets of the city's sprawling Haitian population are
scattered throughout the five boroughs. But the biggest,
densest and poorest Haitian neighborhood is the section of
Flatbush around Nostrand and Flatbush Avenues, which is
where Haitians usually land when they come to New York.

Some eventually move out to more prosperous and suburban
Haitian enclaves in outer Queens, like Laurelton and
Cambria Heights. (Laurelton, in fact, is home to many of
the Duvalier-era elite. Emmanuel Constant, also called
Toto, an anti-democracy paramilitary leader, was last known
to be living in his mother's brick colonial there.)

But Mr. Dupuy swears by Flatbush. "You've got to be in
Brooklyn,'' he said. "That's where the action is."

And Mr. Dupuy seems to enjoy his stature. "Everybody knows
me here,'' he said. "Once you come here, you've got to know
me." The city has many ethnic radio stations, but it is
probably fair to say that no other immigrants pursue radio
with more intensity than the city's Haitians do.

The Power of the Transistor

In Haiti, radio is king. In
modern times, whenever there is a coup, the first places to
be shut down are the airports and the radio stations.

When the father of Haitian radio, Jean Dominique - after
almost a quarter-century of antagonizing dictators,
inciting popular uprisings, weathering death threats and
bombings, and helping both topple and restore regimes - was
assassinated four years ago outside his Port-au-Prince
radio station, he was given a state funeral in a soccer
stadium. The event was attended by tens of thousands of
Haitians, including Mr. Aristide. That day, the offices of
Radio Soleil were filled with mourners.

In 1971, when Mr. Dupuy left Haiti at 19 with his mother,
radio was emerging as a powerful means of grass-roots
resistance. The previous decade had brought the small,
cheap, battery-operated transistor radio, a godsend in a
country that was then, and still, largely without
electricity. Mr. Dominique had started a station, Radio
Haiti Inter, that reported the news in a frank,
take-no-prisoners style.

For Haitians, who were accustomed to a newspaper and radio
culture that for decades had essentially churned out
French-language press releases for the ruling Duvalier
dictatorship, that approach was a revelation.

And, as it happened, large swaths of the country's citizens
had recently been given transistor radios by American
Protestant missionaries. Tramping through the Haitian
countryside and inner cities in search of converts, those
missionaries had handed out transistor radios to poor
Haitians to let them receive spiritual direction from the
24-hour evangelical programming on Radio Lumi?re.

Despite the missionaries' intentions, Haitians soon spent
more time tuned into Mr. Dominique's Radio Haiti Inter and
the dozen or so small independent Haitian radio stations
that had mushroomed in its wake.

"The vast majority of the Haitian population is illiterate,
but Haitians are very politically astute," said Jonathan
Demme, director of a documentary about Mr. Dominique, "The
Agronomist," that is scheduled to open in New York in
April. "Before Jean Dominique, the airwaves were strictly
French language. It was a way for the Duvaliers and the
upper classes to exclude the Creole-speaking masses from
radio and the national dialogue. Radio became the
literature of an illiterate people."

Mr. Dupuy added: "The transistor radio was a symbol of
resistance. All of a sudden, under the harshest
dictatorship, there was a way for people to say things they
wanted to say." And gradually, he added, "the transistor
brought down Duvalier father and son."

In 1986 a popular uprising toppled Jean-Claude Duvalier,
ending the Duvalier family's 28-year dictatorship. Mr.
Aristide was elected president four years later.

Into the Void, a Voice

When Mr. Dupuy arrived in New
York, there were no radio stations serving the city's
burgeoning Haitian community; today there are also Radio
Tropicale and a few Haitian newspapers to complement Radio
Soleil. Mr. Dupuy, who had dabbled in radio as a student in
Haiti, soon started a show on the radio station of Medgar
Evers College in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. Throughout his
early years in New York - while he worked as a bike
messenger, earned a master's degree in economics and
finance at Pace University in Lower Manhattan, served as
host of a local public access cable show and worked in the
audit department at Chemical Bank - he was always running
some kind of Haitian radio news program at various
community radio stations.

Eleven years ago, Mr. Dupuy was among the group of people
who renovated the humble Nostrand Avenue storefront that is
home to Radio Soleil. Friends gave them their old speakers
and turntables, and they bought additional secondhand
equipment. They soundproofed two back rooms with blue foam
padding, hung up the red and blue Haitian flag and a large
photo of Mr. Dominique, and recruited a few men and women
who had worked in radio back in Haiti, and soon Radio
Soleil was up and running. (Soleil leases a subcarrier
channel from the Spanish station MEGA, effectively
piggy-backing, at a different bandwidth - 97.6 SCA - off
its Manhattan radio tower.)

Jean Monfistou, a cabdriver, is a typical Radio Soleil
listener. For nearly two decades Mr. Monfistou had been
listening to Mr. Dupuy in his taxi, on a radio cobbled
together from used parts. He went by the station to buy a
radio so he could listen at home. (Because Radio Soleil
broadcasts on a subcarrier channel it requires special
receivers, which most of its listeners have rigged up on
their own, but Mr. Dupuy also sells them, and frequently
gives them away, at the station.)

He greeted Mr. Dupuy as if he were a celebrity. After the
cabbie left, radio in hand, Mr. Dupuy said: "The community
is first. I'll drop whatever I'm doing to go out and shake
their hands and talk to them. Some people get happy just to
see me."

Fittingly, Radio Soleil was the first radio station to
broadcast Mr. Dominique in the United States. And, in a
sense, Mr. Dupuy, politics obsessed, a born showman and
talker, emerged as Mr. Dominique's New York heir.

Mr. Dupuy is a dogged supporter of Aristide, who he says
has been undermined by a Haitian press in the lap of a
dirty-handed opposition and by the antipathy of the
international community.

But for some New York Haitians, Mr. Aristide's presidency
is a subject of debate. Down the street from Radio Soleil,
a straw poll of a group of Haitian men hanging out in a
laundry indicated that Mr. Aristide must go. When told of
this, Mr. Dupuy sniffed that they had been found in what
was probably "an anti-Aristide Laundromat."

He added: "Millions of Haitians support Aristide. Forcing
him to leave goes against every notion of democratic
fairness. The guy was elected. The Haitian Constitution has
to be the arbiter."

'Talking Is a Drug'

As the offices of Radio Soleil are a shrine to teledyol, it
seems appropriate that they also function as a community
hangout and social club, a place where radio is piped into
the rooms and pours out onto the sidewalk through funky
little speakers. Impromptu groups of Haitian men, and a few
women, are always gathered in the front room, lounging on
two worn sofas under the Haitian flag and chatting away in
Creole.

On long summer nights - the closest Brooklyn ever comes to
Haiti, when the streets of Flatbush become most alive - the
crowd spills out onto the street in front of the
storefront, the men leaning on parked cars, the women
rocking baby strollers along the curb.

On one such evening, Mr. Dupuy sat in his office,
shirtsleeves rolled up, fanning himself with a newspaper.
He complained of fatigue, of all the people who needed to
see him. He had only 10 minutes to talk, he said, but soon
close to an hour had passed, and he was reminiscing about
his days in amateur theater in Haiti.

"I love Ionesco,'' he said. "I love the theater of the
absurd. Life is absurd. We talk because we are afraid of
silence. Talking is a drug."

Later, there was a knock on his door, and a clean-cut young
man in a leather jacket and khakis entered. Each day, short
obituaries of community members are read over the air,
accompanied by traditional music of mourning. The young
man, speaking perfect English, told Mr. Dupuy that he was
waiting for his father, and that they had a death
announcement to give him.

Soon, a thin, wrinkled man in a white guayabera came in. He
greeted Mr. Dupuy, grabbing him by the shoulder as he shook
his hand. The country frankness in his manner contrasted
with his son's urban reserve. The son hung back as his
father and Mr. Dupuy spoke in Creole.

Finally, the son spoke up: "The police came to our house on
Tuesday. They had found my older brother's body in the
woods in Prospect Park. He had been strangled. We don't
know when, perhaps Monday night."

Mr. Dupuy took down the obituary as the old man read the
words he wanted from a crumpled piece of notebook paper,
and then escorted the men out.

Back at his desk, he shook his head and let out a low, sad
whistle. "Strangled at 28 in the bushes in Prospect Park,''
he said. "There were all kinds of questions the journalist
in me wanted to ask back there." But, he added, his job is
to serve the community, and please the family of the
deceased. "So I just listened, and made sure I got the
spellings and the facts right."

With his homeland in free fall, Ricot Dupuy is grappling
with how to live up to Mr. Dominique's ideal that "radio
could hold a mirror up to the Haitian people, so they could
bring about social change in their own country."

For Mr. Dupuy, for all Haitians, nothing they can see in
that mirror seems clear, or hopeful. Last Thursday night,
after finishing his show, Mr. Dupuy shook his head and
considered the day's news:

In Saint-Marc, the police had shot their way through a slum
where rebels were holed up, providing cover for burning and
looting by Aristide loyalists. In Cap Haitien, pro-Aristide
militants torched the house of a reporter for the
opposition Radio Maxima. In Gona?ves, rebels killed a man
suspected of being an Aristide hit man by "necklacing" him
- putting a tire around his neck, dousing him in kerosene
and setting him on fire.

"Thirty years of military brutality in Haiti under the
Duvaliers is something no one can comprehend if you have
not lived through it," a weary Mr. Dupuy said. "It left
deep scars on every Haitian. With Aristide, we thought,
'Never again. That would never happen in my country again.'"

Field Maloney is on the editorial staff of The New Yorker.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/15/nyregion/15feat.html?ex=1077852278&ei=1&en=a72824316750ac04
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