20986: Holmstead: Atlanta Journal Constitution article: Haiti rich and poor are at war (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: John Holmstead <cyberkismet4@yahoo.com>


Haiti rich and poor are at war

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti -- The orange peel was removed
with the utmost care, in one long, thin strip, and not
one speck of savory fruit was wasted. Even the peel
will be used : It hangs from a rusty nail under the
tin roof of the one-room shack where Fanfan Cherie
lives, and it says everything about his life and the
life of Haiti’s impoverished masses.


"We must save that to start our charcoal fire for
cooking," said Cherie, a muscular but far too thin man
of 33. He is a plumber and welder who has not worked
steadily in years, despite his best efforts to find a
job. "But today there is no food anyway, so there is
no fire in the kitchen. It will be another day of
hunger."


Five miles away, on the outskirts of a slum called
Cité Soleil, Marie Louise Baker chokes back tears as
she surveys the gutted ruins of her family’s textile
assembly factory, which was destroyed by marauders
Feb. 28, the day before President Jean-Bertrand
Aristide fled into exile.


"When I look at this, it is a feeling of destruction,"
she said. "They broke all the machines and then burned
everything. My family has lost all that we built in 30
years of work. We invested everything here. None of
our money left Haiti. And now our 800 employees have
lost their jobs. Each job here supports about 10
people. That’s 8,000 people now with no income."


Cherie and Baker : Their two faces, just like their
backgrounds, couldn’t be more distinct. Cherie is dark
and handsome, with piercing eyes, while Baker is
light-skinned and striking, possessed of a grace and
beauty that belie her 59 years.


They are the two faces of Haiti, and their lives speak
much about the country’s divided past, as well as its
hope for a future of unity and progress, breaking a
cycle of 200 years of violence and failed governments.



>From its founding in 1804 as the world’s first
independent black republic, Haiti has been riven by
resentments, suspicion and exploitation, pitting its
overwhelming black majority against a tiny elite,
probably less than 1 percent of the population, that
owns most of the wealth.


When black slaves overthrew their French colonial
masters, they went on a rampage that prompted whites
to flee. But staying behind was a tiny class of
mixed-race people, called mulattos, who moved quickly
to take over the plantations.


The black generals who led the rebellion set up
Haiti’s government. The mulattos slipped into a role
as the country’s class of business and plantation
owners. Over the next two centuries, the two coexisted
uneasily, at times joining in quiet alliances, at
other times resigned to stand-offs edged with
resentment.


Haiti’s governments were rarely successful. It became
one of those countries that exemplified the term
kleptocracy - its governments were run primarily for
the purpose of stealing from the public coffers.
Haitian dictators were typically brutal, many ousted
by violent coups d’état, which have struck the
beleaguered country 33 times in 200 years, an average
of once every six years.


In the midst of such corruption, the elite, for the
most part, did not develop a sense of civic duty.
Often forced to pay bribes to conduct business, many
took the easy way out, building lives of luxury on the
backs of poor workers paid pennies for their labor.


The sad history created a contrast in geography :
Port-au-Prince is a sprawling city of 2 million, with
the poor living jumbled in ramshackle shantytowns
along the hot lowlands while the rich reside in
opulent walled compounds on the cooler slopes of the
mountain range that rises abruptly from the city’s
heart.


Fifteen years ago, there were great hopes that Haiti
might finally be shaking off its past. Aristide, a
fiery-tongued slum priest, burst onto the scene,
winning Haiti’s first free and fair elections on a
promise to serve and lift up the poor.


Removed once in a military coup, then restored in 1994
through U.S. intervention, Aristide betrayed his
populist promises, his critics say, instead building a
corrupt government of cronies who looted the national
treasury in the worst Haitian tradition, even as they
enforced their will through the use of armed gangs.


Baker does not know who burned her family’s factory,
but there seems little doubt the destruction came at
the hands of Aristide loyalists. The Bakers were part
of the opposition, a nonviolent group that demanded
Aristide’s resignation.


A hallmark of Aristide’s oratory was his excoriation
of Haiti’s rich, whom he likened to rocks in a stream
washed by cool waters. He often called on his
followers to help the rich learn about the life of the
poor, whom he likened to rocks baking in the hot
Caribbean sun.


Cherie, from the same small town in southern Haiti
where Aristide was born, was a strong Aristide
supporter.


"Haiti’s whole problem is the elites," he said. "When
Aristide tried to do anything to help the poor, the
elites would block him."


But Baker says her family built its factory near one
of Haiti’s most dangerous, hopeless slums because she
cares about the poor.


"I will not leave Cité Soleil," she said, vowing to
rebuild, even if it takes generations. "We are working
the best way we know how to change Haiti, by creating
jobs, by paying taxes to the state. We are not here to
step on the poor. We’re trying to provide jobs to help
them improve their lives."


Some of Baker’s employees have worked for the family
for decades. They earned the equivalent of about $4
per day, roughly four times Haiti’s minimum wage.


Cherie has never been touched in his life by any such
concern on the part of Haiti’s rich.


"The only work I find is small jobs for the elite," he
said. "They offer me a job that I know should cost
5,000 gourdes [about $125], and they say they will
only pay me 500 gourdes [about $12]. If I refuse, they
will find someone else, because there are too many
here who will do anything to feed their families."


"I finished high school," Cherie said. "I wanted to
become an engineer or a doctor. But those jobs are
only for the elite in Haiti. No poor person like me
has money to go to the university for such an
education."


Baker’s grandfather was an Episcopal missionary from
England, her grandfather a trader and her father an
agronomist. She and some of her siblings opened a tiny
sewing operation in 1970, making it grow through hard
work and steady reinvestment of the profits.


Her brother, Charles, is one of the most outspoken
leaders of the Group of 184, a coalition of business,
civic and peasant groups that sprang up in the past 18
months in an effort to resolve Haiti’s political
crisis.


"Haiti has always been divided between rich and poor,"
Baker said. "That’s why the Group of 184 was started.
We are all one nation, and we spent months going
around the country holding meetings, telling the
leaders of peasant groups that we are all brothers and
sisters. . . . We are finally working toward the same
objective and not looking at each other across a
divide."


Whether such an appeal will break down the suspicions
of the poor is the question that may dictate Haiti’s
future.


For now, Cherie seems almost too broken by his poverty
to muster much trust or hope.


His 15-year-old daughter, Linda, a pretty girl with
colorful plastic beads in her braided hair, is
soft-spoken and polite.


"I am studying hard in school," she declares. "I want
to be a doctor - or an engineer."

  MIKE WILLIAMS

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